Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene (Studies in Renaissance Literature)

Studies in Renaissance Literature Volume 18

SELF-INTERPRETATION IN THE FAERIE QUEENE

Recent Spenser criticism has thrown much new light, and much doubt, on the nature of The Faerie Queene’s involvement in contemporary political and religious controversies. Material to these developments has been wide recognition of the unreliability of the poem’s narrating voice and its often parodic relation to generic conventions. Nonetheless, some longstanding misconceptions about allegory still limit understanding of Spenser’s approach to topical issues. This book re-examines The Faerie Queene’s allegorical method, showing what is gained by recognising that the poem’s main locus of allegorical self-interpretation, as in the medieval Quest of the Holy Grail, is within rather than extrinsic to the story world. Like the knights of the Quest, Spenser’s heroes are poised between rival codes of moral interpretation, in a way that illuminates the relative value of those codes as guides to action. But unlike its predecessor, Spenser’s poem addresses an era violently divided as to which constitutes the true code of right and wrong. Amongst the oppositions it grapples with are the ideological conflict in England and Ireland between emergent monarchic absolutism and residual feudalism, the doctrinal division between the Elizabethan and Roman churches, and the Machiavellian challenge to received ideas about political and religious legitimacy. Dr PAUL SUTTIE is a Senior Member of Robinson College, Cambridge.

Studies in Renaissance Literature ISSN 1465–6310 General Editors David Colclough Raphael Lyne

Studies in Renaissance Literature offers investigations of topics in English literature focussed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; its scope extends from early Tudor writing, including works reflecting medieval concerns, to the Restoration period. Studies exploring the interplay between the literature of the English Renaissance and its cultural history are particularly welcomed. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the editors, or to the publisher, at the addresses given below; all submissions receive prompt and informed consideration. Dr David Colclough, School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS Dr Raphael Lyne, New Hall, Cambridge, CB3 0DF Boydell & Brewer Ltd, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of this volume

SELF-INTERPRETATION IN THE FAERIE QUEENE

Paul Suttie

D. S. BREWER

© Paul Suttie 2006 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Paul Suttie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998

First published 2006 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge

ISBN 1 84384 087 1

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Typeset by Pru Harrison, Hacheston, Suffolk

Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

CONTENTS Preface

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PART I: ‘ALLEGORICAL DEVICES’ 1. 2. 3.

‘To direct your understanding’: Allegory, or ‘Authoritative’ Commentary ‘This and That’: The Experience of Allegory Allegorical Characters

3 15 39

PART II: SELF-INTERPRETATION IN THE LEGEND OF HOLINESS 4. 5. 6. 7.

Introduction The Locus of Self-Interpretation Specious and Valid Paradigms of Self-Interpretation The Rhetoric of Self-Interpretation The Mythology of Self-Interpretation

57 61 74 93 123

PART III: THE PROBLEM OF SELF-INTERPRETATION IN LATER BOOKS Introduction 8. The Legend of Temperance: Self-Interpretation from the Ground Up 9. Self-Interpretation and Self-Assertion in Books Three and Four 10. Self-Interpretation Beyond the Pale in Books Five and Six

149 151

Conclusion: The Mutability Cantos and the Limits of Self-Interpretation

207

Bibliography

213

Index

223

164 183

In memory of my grandfather, Thomas R. Suttie, who taught me the power of well-chosen words

PREFACE My subject is self-interpretation in The Faerie Queene, both in the sense in which the poem, qua allegory, interprets itself to readers, and in the sense in which its principal characters are represented as continually engaged in interpreting their own deeds. Those senses may seem quite distinct; but amongst my main contentions is that they are inextricably involved in one another, by virtue of the type of allegory Spenser chose to write – one in which the main locus of allegorical interpretation is within rather than extrinsic to the story world, such that the characters’ self-interpretative activity does not merely echo but largely constitutes the way in which the book interprets itself to readers. In writing that type of allegory, Spenser had numerous precedents, both Scriptural and literary; perhaps the most broadly analogous to The Faerie Queene, I will suggest, is the anonymous thirteenth-century prose Quest of the Holy Grail. That is not to say that the two works function allegorically in quite the same way (Spenser’s allegory is much the more complex), but the Quest does exemplify in an especially clear and relevant way a type of allegory whose role in The Faerie Queene has historically been underestimated, indeed whose existence therein has often been ignored or actively denied. A related concern is the authority of self-interpretation in The Faerie Queene: to what extent should we take either the poem or its characters as authoritative guides to the story’s moral significance? The former part of this question is one Spenser critics are now familiar with asking: we are no longer liable to see it assumed that The Faerie Queene (or by extension any allegorical work), where it explicitly states what one of its own episodes means, must be regarded as an unimpugnable authority. The equal importance of the latter part of the question, and its direct bearing on the former, has I think seldom been recognised. That omission is of some consequence, not least because on what we make of such acts of self-interpretation depends the large matter of what, finally, we take to be the poem’s actual relation to the Elizabethan regime whose political, moral, and religious authority it claims to endorse. That matter is itself one that is now far from seeming, as it once did, a closed book. Partly in reaction to Stephen Greenblatt’s reinvigoration of an old view of Spenser as a fervent panegyrist of Elizabeth’s absolutist and imperial ambitions, the critical trend of late has been towards proposing ‘alternative Spensers’, possible poets that have included Spenser the neo-feudalist, Spenser the religious radical, even Spenser the “republican” and Spenser the antivii

Preface establishment “subversive”.1 I take it to be a good thing that the debate has thus been blown open on the question of whether The Faerie Queene not only might mean in practice something more or other than it was intended to mean, but beyond that, might actually be intended to convey ‘between the lines’ of its official message something more or other than it claims to be intended to convey.2 However, it is one thing to bring a number of possibilities into consideration, another to try to determine which are historically and textually the most probable. It is on the latter task that I hope to make some progress here. The book comprises three parts. The first is a close study of allegory as a literary device, and of the critical misunderstandings of allegory that have become entrenched in the history of Spenser studies in particular. In the second part, the model thus developed is applied to a case study of key aspects in The Faerie Queene, Book One, and brought into dialogue with what we know about the writer’s historical situation, in such a way as firstly to build an understanding of the book’s workings as an allegory, and secondly to draw probable conclusions regarding its intended and unintended relationship to Elizabethan religious and political orthodoxy. The third part pursues the issues raised in the second through the remaining books of the poem, showing how my arguments vis-à-vis Book One pertain to and must in turn be modified by later developments. The reason for the extended focus in the central part on a single book of The Faerie Queene will I hope be fairly plain, namely that my reading could only be developed adequately in the first instance through such close attention as would not have been feasible except in a case study of one of the poem’s parts. My choice of Book One as the subject of that study stems from a sense that the most far-reaching challenges posed in recent years to Spenser’s self-portrait as an ardently royalist poet are not those that have focused mainly on the second instalment of The Faerie Queene (for they leave at least potentially intact the traditional notion of a Spenser still optimistic and idealistic in 1590 but disillusioned or brutalised by 1596) but those that have taken the challenge to the early books, in such a way as to show how much must be accounted for even there. For if we read with a sufficiently sceptical eye, the entire poem, even the 1

2

For Stephen Greenblatt’s argument, see Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), cap. 4. For the examples mentioned of ‘alternative Spensers’, see respectively Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), Anthea Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), Andrew Hadfield, “Was Spenser a Republican?”, English 47 (1998): 169–82, and Harry Berger, Jr., “Narrative as Rhetoric in The Faerie Queene”, English Literary Renaissance 21 (1991): 3–48. “Alternative Spensers” was the title of an MLA session organised by the Spenser Society in 1997. For the terms used here, as well as a further notable example of the kind of reading in question, see Annabel Patterson, Reading Between the Lines (London: Routledge, 1993).

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Preface seldom-suspected first book, can seem to call in question the very basis of the Elizabethan state.3 Not that I want ultimately to argue, as a few recent critics have come close to doing, that shaking the pillars of orthodoxy was Spenser’s real “whole intention in the course of this worke”. On the contrary, I shall argue on a combination of textual and historical grounds that it is more probable that the poem is really meant, albeit not quite so unconditionally as it claims, to promote the authority of the monarch to whose fortunes the poet’s own entitlement both to his worldly goods and to his religious creed were tied. What I think is new in this is the degree to which I test such a relatively conventional view against some of the more plausible cases that have been made for a more radical, ‘alternative’ Spenser, acknowledging their insight that Spenser had real political choices to make as a writer. For though to some extent, I shall maintain, those cases have depended on erroneous critical methodologies, to a substantial degree they arise from, and so can teach us something about, the poem’s propensity not simply to advocate the views it explicitly claims to advocate, but itself to test those views against the most plausible challenges that can be put to them. So my taking seriously those critics who have radically doubted the poem’s declarations of political intent is, amongst other things, a way of taking seriously the radical extent to which The Faerie Queene treats its conclusions as things that have to be argued for and defended rather than simply assumed. Indeed in so doing, it opens up some extraordinarily lively cans of worms: thus even in Book One, the part of the poem still most widely seen as adopting a religiously and politically loyalist position, Spenser already raises questions so intractable, in going back to first principles in defence of the Elizabethan church and state, that the whole of the remainder of the poem will not be sufficient to lay them to rest. In grappling with those questions the poem is drawn progressively towards expressing a political and moral vision which, if still looking to the state for validation, is nonetheless not truly conservative but radical – a vision from the threshold of the century of Oliver Cromwell and Thomas Hobbes. Parts of the following argument have appeared in somewhat different form in the following articles: “Edmund Spenser’s Political Pragmatism”, Studies in Philology 95 (1998), 56–76 (used with permission of the University of North Carolina Press); “Exemplary Behaviour in The Faerie Queene”, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 99 (2000), 313–33 (copyright 2000 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois; used with permission of the 3

See especially Harry Berger, Jr., “Displacing Autophobia in Faerie Queene I: Ethics, Gender, and Oppositional Reading in the Spenserian Text”, English Literary Renaissance 28 (1998): 163–82, but also e.g. Thomas P. Nelan, Catholic Doctrines in Spenser’s Poetry (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1943; published in a heavily abridged version by New York University Press, 1946).

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Preface University of Illinois Press); “Moral Ambivalence in the Legend of Temperance”, Spenser Studies 19 (2004), 125–33 (used with permission of AMS Press, inc.). In addition, an article containing some material from Chapter Nine is due to appear under the title “The Lost Cause of Platonism in The Faerie Queene” in Spenser Studies 23 (2008). My debts to other travellers in this spacious land of Faery are too wide either to itemise here or to acknowledge fully in the footnotes that follow; but I would like to thank collectively the courteous community of Spenser scholars for the supportive interaction I have had with them over the years during which these ideas have developed. I would also like to thank by name Ian Donaldson, Gordon Teskey, Robert Cummings, and Colin Burrow, who have all given valuable encouragement and assistance during the long gestation of this project, as well as Caroline Palmer, the editorial director of Boydell & Brewer, and the Press’s readers, for their consistent and generous patronage of the book. I gratefully acknowledge the substantial support my research received from the British Academy’s Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Programme and from Robinson College, Cambridge. But my greatest thanks are to my family and friends both near and far, and above all to my parents, and to Helen; their support has been beyond price.

x

Part One

‘Allegorical Devices’

Chapter 1

‘To direct your understanding’: Allegory, or ‘Authoritative’ Commentary

Sir knowing how doubtfully all Allegories may be construed, and this booke of mine, which I haue entituled the Faery Queene, being a continued Allegory, or darke conceit, I haue thought good aswell for auoyding of gealous opinions and misconstructions, as also for your better light in reading therof . . . to discouer vnto you the general intention and meaning, which in the whole course thereof I haue fashioned . . . . Edmund Spenser, “A letter of the Authors expounding his whole intention in the course of this worke” (Letter to Raleigh)1

A. C. Hamilton, in The Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene, writes that “All discussion of Spenser’s allegory must begin with his letter to Ralegh.”2 In a sense, I would agree. Not because, with Hamilton, I accept at face value the letter’s claim to give an authoritative exposition of the “whole” of the poem’s allegorical meaning;3 but because it seems to me that the letter’s claim to interpret The Faerie Queene in an authoritative and comprehensive manner gives it a uniquely important place within the allegory’s workings. What the letter purports to do is merely to tell us what the poem already means; but that purport itself is the first thing that needs scrutinising if the real workings of Spenser’s allegory are to be understood. More widely, it is the real nature of the relation between texts and those ostensibly authoritative commentaries that claim merely to make explicit what is already implicit in them, that a theoretical understanding of allegory most needs to come to grips with. 1 2

3

For all citations of the letter to Raleigh, see Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London and New York: Longman, 1977), 737–38. A. C. Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 50. Cf. the remark of A. S. P. Woodhouse, in “Nature and Grace in The Faerie Queene”, ELH 16 (1949): 194–228, that, “Though it sometimes seems to raise as many problems as it solves, every re-examination of the Faerie Queene must commence with the Letter to Raleigh. For whatever its relation to the composition of the poem, the Letter is clearly Spenser’s introduction to a reading of it” (200). Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene, 50–54.

3

Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene Allegorical literature, as Northrop Frye and others have observed, is in essence a form of writing that anticipates being interpreted allegorically, and that tries to govern the direction interpretations take by giving would-be commentators a framework of self-interpretation on which to build.4 The question is with what authority that self-interpretation is made. Prima facie, an author’s own gloss would seem prescriptive and hence “unimpugnable”.5 Yet often (as is notoriously the case in Spenser’s letter to Raleigh6) the interpretation offered palpably misrepresents its text in various respects, in a manner reminiscent of the distortions wrought by such imposed allegorical readings as those that retroactively Christianised Ovid and Neoplatonised Homer.7 Indeed on closer inspection the putative dichotomy between authorised and imposed allegory starts to break down. For example, Dante’s Convivio, whose texts and commentaries are both written by Dante, presents itself as the authoritative exposition of a series of odes, at least one composed years earlier with a meaning very different from the only reading the Convivio commentary allows to be “true”: what before had been offered as an account of another woman who comforted Dante after Beatrice’s death, is re-imagined by the Convivio commentary as an allegorical account in Boethius’s manner of philosophy’s comforts.8 The Convivio is, in that respect, very like the Ovide Moralisé, in that it flagrantly imposes a new meaning on an existing text. Something similar has often been supposed to happen in Tasso’s allegorising preface to his Gerusalemme Liberata.9 Likewise, it is easy to imagine (as some 4

5

6

7 8

9

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 89–90. Cf. Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1979), 31, 53–54, 61, and 224–25, Maureen Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983), 26–27, and Gordon Teskey, “Allegory”, in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press; and London: Routledge, 1990), 16. Quoting Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery: Some Mediaeval Books and their Posterity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 53. Cf. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 90, for whom “allegory prescribes the direction of . . . commentary, and so restricts its freedom”. See Wayne Erickson, “Spenser’s Letter to Ralegh and the Literary Politics of The Faerie Queene’s 1590 Publication”, Spenser Studies 10 (1989), 167–68, for “a selective bibliography of the problem of inconsistencies between the Letter and The Faerie Queene”. For the concept of “imposed allegory”, see Tuve, Allegorical Imagery, cap. 4, and Quilligan, The Language of Allegory, 30. Dante, Convivio, trans. Philip Wicksteed (London: Dent, 1903), 110ff; see also 63–64 and 431ff. Cf. Cecil Grayson, “Dante’s Theory and Practice of Poetry”, in The World of Dante: Essays on Dante and his Times, ed. Grayson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 153, and A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c.1100–c.1375: The Commentary Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 379 and 382. Kathleen M. Lea and T. M. Gang, eds., Godfrey of Bulloigne: A critical edition of Edward Fairfax’s translation of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, together with Fairfax’s Original Poems (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), “The Allegorie of the Poem”, 88–93. The eighteenth-century Spenser editor John Hughes writes of Tasso’s preface that “I can’t help thinking that the Allegory, as it is call’d, which he has printed with it, looks as if it were invented after the Poem was

4

Allegory, or ‘Authoritative’ Commentary critics have done) that a similar overwriting of the intention that really governed the poem’s composition occurs in the exposition of the meaning of The Faerie Queene found in the letter to Raleigh.10 In such cases, unity of authorship there may be, but unity of purpose over time seems lacking, such that the text gives the impression of being stratified into successive layers of intention, no one of which can tell the whole story of what the work means. In other cases, an opposite process occurs, whereby unity of purpose is attributed to a work despite evident multiplicity of authorship, and what began as temporally separate textual strata come to be seen as the orderly parts of an incrementally revealed whole. In the Christian Bible in particular, what started as notably ‘free’ allegorical commentaries on the Hebrew Scriptures came in time to be regarded by co-religionists as integral parts of a single sacred Book, and so afforded the status of self-commentary, unimpugnably authoritative because intrinsic to the work itself. Such expansion of what is understood to be integral to a book occurs in secular contexts too, the fate of the letter to Raleigh being a notable example: what Spenser treated as an inessential appendage to his poem (including it in 1590 but omitting it in 1596) has since his death come to be regarded as an entrenched part of The Faerie Queene, in the telling practical sense that only a very radical modern editor of the poem would seriously contemplate leaving it out. Such fluidity in both directions of the putative boundaries of a work and the authorship of its meaning is characteristic of allegory, which as a semantic structure straddling in the first place the division between text and commentary has an especial tendency to resist being adequately described in terms that treat those categories as distinct in kind and mutually impermeable. Hence for

10

finish’d” – Hughes, “An Essay on Allegorical Poetry, etc.”, in Critical Essays of the Eighteenth Century: 1700–1725, ed. Willard Higley Durham (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961) – a view emphatically seconded by S. T. Coleridge, in Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (London: Constable, 1936), 31. For a sample of the modern critical debate, compare C. P. Brand, who in Torquato Tasso: A Study of the Poet and of his Contribution to English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 99–100, gives further evidence for regarding the “formal Allegory” given in the preface as “an afterthought”, with Mindele Anne Treip, Allegorical Poetics and the Epic: The Renaissance Tradition to Paradise Lost (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1994), who argues that the Gerusalemme was allegorical in its original design (91, 257, and cap. 7 passim). Thus Josephine Waters Bennett, The Evolution of The Faerie Queene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), 245, and W. J. B. Owen, “In These XII Books Severally Handled and Discoursed”, ELH 19 (1952), 171. Indeed it is clear that Tasso’s allegorising preface was a direct influence on the letter to Raleigh: see Brand, Torquato Tasso, 228–33, and Treip, Allegorical Poetics, 96–97. Cf. Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), ed. Edith Morley (London: Henry Frowde, 1911), who while not explicitly citing the letter to Raleigh, does treat Spenser’s having given his own stories an allegorical reading as an obfuscation of his actual intention, meant to fend off critics – “A contrivance which he had learned indeed from his Italian masters: For Tasso had condescended to allegorize his own work; and the commentators of Ariosto had even converted the extravagances of the Orlando Furioso, into moral lessons” (151).

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene example it is untenable, with Maureen Quilligan, to draw a line between two distinct uses of the term ‘allegory’, one referring to a type of literature and the other to a type of criticism, and to associate only with the latter “a freedom to produce an interpretation that goes against the text’s manifest intentions”.11 Rather a single model of allegory is needed, which can account on the one hand for the freedoms authors appear to take with their own texts, and on the other for the way a work’s “manifest intentions” often come to be regarded as having been revealed only belatedly by its allegorical readers. Another way of saying this is that there is neither a difference in kind, nor in particular cases a necessary discontinuity, between the interpretative work performed on a text by criticism (in allegorically rewriting it according to some assumed “master code”) and the interpretative work a text performs on itself.12 Even in physical terms, there is a close resemblance between a work whose original design involves self-commentary and any of those books, common in the Elizabethan period, that incorporate critical commentaries supplementary to the original work. Spenser’s own Shepheardes Calender seems a borderline case between the two ‘kinds’: one whose incorporated commentary appears on the one hand to be an integral part of the literary work, as in Dante’s Convivio, but on the other hand represents itself as an added, non-authorial (and thus, in Quilligan’s scheme, ‘literary-critical’) commentary, comparable to those included in sixteenth-century editions of both classical works and some modern ones such as Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.13 Hence the commentary of “E.K.” on the poems of the Calender is suspended, perhaps undecidably (and perhaps deliberately so), between conflicting implications as to its authorial or non-authorial status.14 But it is not just that authorial and critical allegory resemble each other sometimes to the point of indistinguishability: rather, they are often found grafted one on the other, in such a way as to produce hybrid fruit. Examples are seen in the annotated Geneva Bible, where, for instance, the Scriptural text 11

12 13

14

Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser, 26; cf. Quilligan, Language of Allegory, 31. On the untenability of any distinction between literary allegory and critical allegoresis, including Quilligan’s in particular, see also Rita Copeland and Stephen Melville, “Allegory and Allegoresis, Rhetoric and Hermeneutics”, Exemplaria 3 (1991): 159–87, esp. 160–62, 178, 180–82. See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981), 28 and 34. As noted in William A. Oram et al., eds., The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 6, “One reason for the physical phenomenon of the gloss . . . was to make the eclogues of the New Poet look like those of the ancient and some Renaissance pastoralists: Virgil’s eclogues had a venerable gloss by Servius, Petrarch’s by Benevenuto da Imola, Mantuan’s by Badius Ascensius.” For Ariosto, see the allegorically-glossed Elizabethan translation by Sir John Harington (1591), reprinted as Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso translated into English Heroical Verse, ed. Robert McNulty (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972). Oram et al., eds., Spenser, The Shorter Poems, 6–9, are representative of modern criticism in suspecting, but with reservations, Spenser’s own authorship of the glosses.

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Allegory, or ‘Authoritative’ Commentary itself glosses “the woman . . . araied in purple & skarlat” (Revelation 17:4) as “the great citie, which reigneth ouer [th]e Kings of the earth” (17:18), and the translators’ annotation adds that the woman “signifieth . . . Rome which is the Papistrie, whose crueltie and blood sheding is declared by skarlat” (17:3, gloss).15 The marginal gloss, which imposes a Reformation reading on a late-antique text (much as medieval commentators imposed ‘prophetic’ Christian meanings on Ovid), could be cited as an instance of the allegorising critic’s “freedom to produce an interpretation that goes against the text’s manifest intentions”; but here that freedom is exercised not in defiance, but within the very bounds, indeed on the instigation, of the text’s prescriptive self-commentary, which supplies the grounds for reading the woman as Rome.16 Authorial and critical allegory, then, are not nearly as unsuited to working together as Quilligan argues, nor is keeping within the ambit of the one anything like a guarantee of expounding without distortion a text’s intended meaning.17 In other cases of such grafting, a still earlier stock asserts itself. For example, when in Matthew 12:40 Jesus says, “as Ionas was thre dayes, and thre nights in the whales bellie: so shal the Sonne of man be thre dayes and thre nights in the heart of the earth”, what the Geneva translators register in their marginal gloss – “He taketh parte of the day for the whole day” (12:40, gloss) – is the uncomfortable fact that the statement in Matthew is, literally, wrong: the period between Christ’s death and resurrection is to be only half what he predicts. Their solution is that he speaks figuratively, employing the reputable trope synecdoche.18 But the need to find that solution risks calling awkward attention to the question why the internal gloss has to be wrong (or figurative) in the first place, or in other words to the underlying problem that Jonah’s ordeal of “thre daies, and thre nights” (Jonah 1:17) does not correspond in duration to the New Testament event of which God was supposed to have designed it specifically to be the prophetic harbinger. The rhetorical adjustment needed to make the stories fit one another threatens to expose behind the orthodox typological account of Scripture a quite different relation between the books of

15

16

17 18

The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 edition, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison, WN and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). Biblical passages are quoted from this translation unless otherwise indicated. The modern critical consensus that the text actually refers to the Rome of the early Christian martyrs, incidentally represents a return to early readings by the likes of Ambrose and Tertullian, who were cited against the Reformers even by their contemporary Roman Catholic opponents: see the annotations to the seventeenth chapter of The Apocalypse, in The New Testament of Jesus Christ (Rheims, 1582), facsimile ed. D. M. Rogers (London: The Scolar Press, 1975), 730–32. See esp. Quilligan, The Language of Allegory, 31–32 and 224–25. See for example, Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (1560), ed. G. H. Mair (Oxford: Clarendon, 1909), 174: “Synecdoche, is a Trope, when we gather or iudge the whole by the part, or the part by the whole.”

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene Jonah and of Matthew, in which the writing of the former was as free of Christian intent as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Matthew’s gloss on Jonah, in alleging a closer parallel between the two stories than the stories themselves support, massages the Biblical history as a whole into an appearance of greater structural coherence than it has in fact, much as Spenser’s letter to Raleigh massages the various parts of The Faerie Queene into an appearance of more regular narrative structure than is found in the poem. The Geneva translators, faced with the Bible’s failure to give an accurate account of itself in its unimpugnably authoritative internal selfcommentary, in the event only carry further, by means of their added commentary, the process that self-commentary had begun – of pressing the text, however forcibly, towards an appearance of total coherence. Something comparable is done by readers of The Faerie Queene who insist on its making total sense of the kind advertised by the letter to Raleigh.19 Like the Bible, The Faerie Queene, far from possessing an integral meaning that its internal self-commentaries can transparently reveal, takes on the appearance, in the first place, of being one “whole” work, permeated by an undivided intention, only through a process of allegorical redescription that it begins itself, then devolves to its allegorical readers. That those readers “produce an interpretation that goes against the text’s manifest intentions”, far from being a wilful mistreatment of the text on their part, paradoxically continues the text’s own ‘internal’ work, of manifestly misreading the intentions of its own constituent parts.20 The allegorical redescription of The Faerie Queene that The Faerie Queene itself initiates gains considerable critical impetus from the letter to Raleigh, not least from its notoriously inaccurate account of the very story. Such retelling of the literal story may not seem to constitute an allegorical commentary on the poem, as such. But giving a different version of (for example) the circumstances in which Guyon undertakes his quest,21 may, together with other, comparable gestures at regularising the plot, produce the impression of a greater coherence in the poem than could be found in it without the letter’s systematic deforming of the story. The letter, that is, not only indicates that the poem is a “continued Allegory” (that there is one total meaning to which the entire narrative is subordinate) but itself undertakes, in a consequential manner, the task of producing that total meaning – which is to say, the task of 19

20

21

Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene, 50ff, gestures towards such a reading, but perhaps its most single-minded pursuer is Jan Karel Kouwenhoven, in Apparent Narrative as Thematic Metaphor: The Organization of The Faerie Queene (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 8–10, 28ff, and passim. Cf. Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), 2–3 and passim, on allegory’s exertions forcibly to impose a unifying structure of meaning on its inescapably fractious self. C. S. Lewis, Spenser’s Images of Life, ed. Alastair Fowler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 138, summarises the discrepancy.

8

Allegory, or ‘Authoritative’ Commentary allegorical interpretation that its readers must take up if they aim to discover that “whole”.22 A plausible reason for the letter’s systematic misrepresentation of the poem’s plot may be simply (as Wayne Erickson argues of the letter’s poetic theory) that it was never intended to describe accurately Spenser’s actual practice in the poem, but rather only to represent it as acceptably as possible to “reactionary” state authorities.23 The plot, that is, may have been regularised in the letter, and made a more obvious “whole”, precisely so that its more powerful readers “may as in a handfull gripe al the discourse” – a poem on which one can get a good firm “gripe” being less potentially elusive (less “doubtfully” to “be construed”) and thus less liable to appear threatening to the authorities. In that case, the “Allegoricall deuises” at work in the letter would be means, not so much of revealing (as is claimed), as of putting a politic slant on Spenser’s intentions in writing: the sort of thing Spenser’s elder contemporary George Puttenham had in mind, in lauding allegory as “the Courtier or figure of faire semblant”.24 In the face of such ‘internal’ misreadings as I have been discussing, there can be, even in theory, no one ‘right’ reading of an allegorical work. Rather than (as Frye has it) providing for a consensus of interpretation, at least amongst responsibly deferential readers,25 the self-interpreting work actually divides itself against itself in such a way as to render its meaning impossible to totalise. Thus, for example, an interpreter who attempts to give a full account of Dante’s Convivio must say both what ‘the Lady of the Window’ seems to have meant prior to her being read allegorically, and that the allegorical reading impinges on the text to disallow that meaning. (What is offered on the one

22

23

24

25

Teskey, “Allegory”, is noteworthy here, both for his characterisation of allegory as “a fiction . . . presented . . . as being secondary to a meaning that the reader must try to recover by engaging the text in interpretative play” (16), and for his emphasis on the way in which “complex allegories, notably those of Dante and Spenser”, posit an illusory totality of meaning, “one complex, synchronic design”, within which “it seems . . . every part of the work can eventually be coordinated with every other” (16–18). Erickson, “Spenser’s Letter to Ralegh”, 133–35. Cf. the similar case made by Harold Stein, in Studies in Spenser’s Complaints (New York: Oxford University Press, 1934), 13–14, as to the politically self-protecting and “plainly disingenuous” nature of the preface to Spenser’s poetic follow-up to the 1590 Faerie Queene, the 1591 Complaints volume. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 299. See also 186, where Puttenham more ambivalently describes this politic “figure of faire semblant” as the “figure of false semblant or dissimulation”. On the importance of the ethos exemplified by Puttenham to Elizabethan political aspirants like Spenser, see Louis Adrian Montrose, “Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form”, ELH 50 (1983), 433–52. On the politic nature of the letter to Raleigh’s account of the poem, see also Berger, “Narrative as Rhetoric in The Faerie Queene”, 48, who describes that account as bringing the poem “tied up like Acrasia to the well-head of Tudor ideology”. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 90.

9

Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene hand as the authorised code for interpretation, on the other hand meets manifest resistance in the text’s residual coding according to a rival system of meaning: the usurpation of the text by a putative “master code” is itself visible as an event in the text, as is the recalcitrance of its ancien regime.) Similarly, a full account of The Faerie Queene, or of any of its internally interpreted episodes, would have to say both what meaning is induced by incorporated self-commentary, and what it would have meant in that commentary’s absence. My view is to that extent akin to that of Paul de Man, for whom allegory faces the reader with “the irrecoverable occurrence of at least two mutually exclusive readings and asserts the impossibility of a true understanding”.26 But I would emphasise with Gordon Teskey that it is not characteristic of an allegorical work that it openly “acknowledges incommensurable registers in itself”, as de Man implies, but “the opposite” – that it endeavours to suppress them.27 If an allegorical work may be regarded as deconstructing its own claim to embody a single, ‘whole’ meaning, then that self-exposé typically results from its trying but failing to marshal itself into a seamless order.28 Clearly, treating the letter to Raleigh as an authoritative reading of The Faerie Queene can produce readings of the poem different from any that would have been produced in the letter’s absence. An instructively extreme demonstration is provided by Jan Karel Kouwenhoven, for whom the poem’s failure to correspond to the letter’s version of events compels us to treat the poem’s own version as unreal, “an insubstantial pageant, a mosaic of vehicles for metaphors skilfully contrived and arranged so as to create the illusion of narrative, but in reality disconnected”.29 Such an uncompromising statement of deference to the letter, and in particular the phrase “the illusion of narrative”, amounts to a contradiction in terms, as if one were to say that a poem “gives the false impression of vivid imagery”: for narrative like imagery is a textual effect, which a reader does or does not but cannot only seem to experience; a story may be self-contradictory or fragmentary, but cannot only seem to exist.30 But what Kouwenhoven’s approach effectively shows is the sheer relentlessness with which the allegorical work of misreading can proceed, once it gets a foothold in the text by virtue of an allegorical poet’s devolution of interpretative authority to the reader – a relentlessness that may not balk even at aspiring retroactively to cancel the entire experience of reading the poem. 26 27 28 29 30

Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), 72. Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 3–4. Cf. Jesse Gellrich, “Deconstructing Allegory”, Genre 18 (1985), 200, 205. Kouwenhoven, Apparent Narrative, 10. On the importance of narrative in The Faerie Queene despite the poem’s notorious narrative inconsistencies, see also Jacqueline T. Miller, “The Omission in Red Cross Knight’s Story: Narrative Inconsistencies in The Faerie Queene”, ELH 53 (1986): 284–88, responding to the position of Paul Alpers in The Poetry of The Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967).

10

Allegory, or ‘Authoritative’ Commentary It is not, however, solely or principally in such extreme ways that the assumption that the letter has a special authority in describing the poem has shaped Spenser criticism. A more typical instance may be found in the critical history of Arthur’s pursuit of Florimell. It has been widely agreed that the pursuit is virtuous so far as its aim is “To reskew her from shame, and to reuenge her wrong” (III.iv.45).31 But that is not Arthur’s only motive: from the start he also wishes to catch Florimell for himself (III.i.18). Indeed the rescue motive is in effect left aside, when at a fork in the path the foster goes one way and Florimell another. From that point, only desire spurs on Arthur’s pursuit of her – thus isolating the question whether the Prince is virtuous in feeling, and in acting on, such desire. A traditional answer was that he is virtuous in so doing, because his is a Platonic love of the “true beauty” that “has its source in a beautiful soul” and that “arouses noble desires in noble minds”.32 A corollary was that Florimell is mistaken to fear him and to continue fleeing from him: it is only “because of her fright” that “she is unable to recognize [his] noble intent”.33 Such readings dominated into the 1970s.34 But dissenters have since argued that Arthur’s desire, and his continued pursuit of Florimell after “Timias has long since diverted the forester”, indicate a moral lapse, not only because the episode shows him mentally unfaithful to Gloriana, but because his desire for Florimell itself seems to contain “a trace of the predatory”.35 From the latter perspective, Florimell’s fearful response to his pursuit looks potentially more sound. The divergence in views depends, at bottom, on whether the episode is read through the filter of the letter to Raleigh. The older interpretation grows from the assumptions that the letter is authoritative in pronouncing Arthur to be a figure of exemplary virtue, and that consequently anything the poem says about the virtuous in general can be applied to Arthur. A critic making those assumptions easily surmises that Arthur, in pursuing Florimell, exemplifies the “braue sprite” in whom love “kindles goodly fire”, as against the foster, a 31 32 33 34

35

All references to the poem are to Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London and New York: Longman, 1977). Charles G. Smith, “The Ethical Allegory of the Two Florimells”, Studies in Philology 31 (1934), 140 and passim. Smith, “The Ethical Allegory of the Two Florimells”, 143. See, e.g., Thomas Roche, The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 161; James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of The Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 573–74; John Erskine Hankins, Source and Meaning in Spenser’s Allegory: A Study of The Faerie Queene (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 233; Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene, 149; Lewis, Spenser’s Images of Life, 120. Kathleen Williams, Spenser’s Faerie Queene: The World of Glass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 83; Carolynn Van Dyke, The Fiction of Truth: Structures of Meaning in Narrative and Dramatic Allegory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 266–67, quoting Williams. See also Mihoko Suzuki, Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 174–75.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene “baser wit” whom “It stirreth vp to sensuall desire” (III.v.1). Nowhere, however, does the poem indicate that Arthur’s pursuit of Florimell exemplifies virtuous desire. His desire for Gloriana is clearly identified (III.v.2) with the virtuous love of the “braue sprite”, but that is quite another matter. Only if we assume from the outset that everything Arthur does must either be virtuous or represent something virtuous does such a clear distinction suggest itself between Arthur’s and the foster’s versions of “beauties chace”. A contrary perspective which despite the letter’s claims does not assume a priori that all Arthur’s actions must be entirely virtuous, finds ample evidence in the poem suggesting that he is less than morally exemplary in desiring and pursuing Florimell. For the chase begins with the strong implication that Arthur and Guyon, pursuing Florimell “in hope to win thereby / . . . the fairest Dame aliue”, share a common goal with the “griesly Foster”, from whom they mean, certainly, “To reskew her”, but of whom, at the same time, they are “Full of great enuie and fell gealosy” (III.i.17–18); and lest the implication be lost on us, our attention returns straight away to Britomart, “whose constant mind, / Would not so lightly follow beauties chace” (III.i.19). On such a reckoning, Arthur looks like less than the “perfected” knight that the letter to Raleigh promises, at least with respect to the virtue of chastity.36 A proponent of the traditional reading might well argue that finding Arthur in any way blameable is to ignore the prescriptions for interpreting the poem laid down by the letter to Raleigh, and that if the literal narrative does not seem to yield a virtuous Arthur, we must interpret it allegorically so that it does: of course a virtuous man does not actually chase fleeing women on horseback, but he may in a more refined sense pursue beauty. However, a comparable objection could be made to the traditional reading itself, namely that it too must ignore significant features of what Spenser wrote in order to establish its coherence. Those features include but are not limited to the details I have mentioned from the chase scene itself; for reading Arthur’s pursuit of Florimell as a virtuous expression of virtuous love has ramifications that spread like ripples through the more general interpretation of the poem. In particular, since a corollary to the assumed virtuousness of Arthur’s chase is that Florimell is mistaken to fear him and to continue fleeing from him, the apparent fact that “all she does is to experience terror” is to be blamed not on something common to all her pursuers – for even if in some instances her terror is “well-grounded”, at other times it is “groundless” – but rather on her propensity for reacting to every situation in the same way: “always terror, 36

Williams, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 83. There may also be a joke here, in that readers might be expected to suppose that what is attributed to Britomart’s chastity actually has more to do with her not sharing the male knights’ erotic interest in women; but even if so, to end the scene from Britomart’s viewpoint is to provide a critical perspective on it – perhaps even on the masculinity, generically, that Arthur and Guyon have in common with a “griesly Foster”. Cf. Van Dyke, The Fiction of Truth, 263.

12

Allegory, or ‘Authoritative’ Commentary always gallop gallop gallop away”.37 Her defining characteristic, one might actually conclude, is her “being unable to interpret the world”, her being “(as we say) ‘all at sea’ ”.38 But that seems too slight an assessment of a character who, when the sea-god Proteus pulls her from the clutches of a rapacious fisherman, rightly surmises what a reader who trusts appearances or the narrator will not yet find any grounds for believing, namely that she is “not saued yet from daunger dred / . . . but chaung’d from one to other feare” (III.viii.33). Here, at least, Florimell proves a better judge of her situation than most first-time readers of the poem, in concluding that a character the narrator has hailed as her heaven-sent rescuer (III.viii.29) is no more than another would-be predator on her chastity. So it seems dubious, with C. S. Lewis, to be sanguine about Arthur, whose intentions she likewise fears, treating him as “a knight, who (as we know) meant her nothing but good – who was, in fact, the Rescuer par excellence”.39 In fact she flees Arthur not because she confuses him with the forester (III.iv.50), nor because she cannot perceive his intentions, but just because “he her followd still with courage keene” (III.iv.51) – “courage” making sense here only in a libidinous sense, as with the “courage” of the fisherman who later tries to rape her (III.viii.23). If “fast she from him fled, no lesse affrayd, / Then of wilde beastes if she had chased beene” (III.iv.51), that hardly seems a senseless response to one who pursues her as a “goodly pray” (III.iv.46). Indeed if every would-be rescuer is intent on claiming the one he rescues as the reward for his pains – and we are told clearly enough that Arthur is to be put, along with Proteus, in that category – then the very idea of ‘rescue’ becomes suspect in an erotic context. Rather than allow even that Arthur remains virtuous at least in his intention to rescue her from the forester, we are pressed in the course of Book Three to ever-increasing suspicion of the motive of the rescuer, qua rescuer. And it is Florimell’s perspective on events that raises the issue: far from her “being unable to interpret the world”, her point of view constitutes an important handle for our own interpretation of it. But such a handle goes not only ungrasped but unseen wherever the letter to Raleigh is presumed to be intrinsically authoritative in declaring Arthur to be a figure of exemplary virtue, and more broadly wherever ‘authorial’ perspectives like the letter’s are taken automatically to trump those of characters, however credible the latter’s interpretations of their experiences may sometimes seem to be. In saying that if the letter to Raleigh had not come down to us along with The Faerie Queene, our interpretation of the poem would have been quite different, I am not arguing that we should turn our backs on the letter, as if it were nothing but an interference to understanding the poem. On the contrary, 37 38 39

Lewis, Spenser’s Images of Life, 120. Cf. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), 184. Lewis, Spenser’s Images of Life, 124. Lewis, Spenser’s Images of Life, 120.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene the letter is as much a part of the Spenserian allegory as is the poem itself. What is more, a move to reject the letter because what it tells us about the poem jars in significant ways with what the poem tells us about itself would be self-defeating, because the problematic relation between the letter to Raleigh and The Faerie Queene is no more than an intimation of the problematic relation The Faerie Queene has with itself. A policy of rejecting any commentary that clashes with the text on which it comments would swiftly destroy the very fabric of the poem. But while we should not in that sense reject the letter, neither should we privilege it unduly on account of its general scope and its overt claim to reveal the poet’s method. Rather we need to see the letter as just one layer in the strata of texts and commentaries that constitute Spenser’s allegory, and to observe its influence on the poem’s interpretation not least in the sense of registering what the poem would have been in that influence’s absence.

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Chapter Two

‘This and That’: The Experience of Allegory

Allegorical Violence

A

NY “INTERPRETATION that goes against the text’s manifest intenttions”,1 be it a critic’s or the author’s own, could be said to ‘do violence’ to the text it comments on. Ovid’s medieval allegoriser Pierre Bersuire confesses that violence, in likening his extraction of Christian meaning from the pagan poet to squeezing oil from a stone.2 Coleridge, objecting to the imposition of an allegorical design on any good narrative, goes so far as to speak of it as a criminal offence, “the most decisive verdict against” it being “Tasso’s own account of what he would have the reader understand by the persons and events of his Jerusalem”, since, “Apollo be praised! not a thought like it would ever enter of its own accord into any mortal mind”.3 And modern Dante critic Charles Singleton similarly employs the language of criminal violence, in holding that the effect of the allegorical scheme in the Convivio is “to rob the ‘donna pietosa’ of the Vita Nuova of all real existence.”4 It would be easy, too, to put the foregoing discussion of the letter to Raleigh into such terms, saying for example that its simplistic rendering of The Faerie Queene’s plot, and of its heroes’ moral standing, ‘robs’ the story and its chief characters of the complexity they have in the poem itself. But it is one thing to say that allegorical readings can often, in such a metaphorical sense, ‘do violence’ to their texts; another to observe, as do several recent studies, that the effect on a narrative of an author’s reading it allegorically can be the occurrence of literal violence within the narrative itself.5 Thus 1 2 3 4

5

Quoting Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser, 26. Pierre Bersuire, “The Moral Reduction, Book XV: Ovid Moralized”, trans. Minnis and Scott, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, 367. Coleridge, Miscellaneous Criticism, 31. Charles S. Singleton, “Dante’s Allegory”, American Critical Essays on The Divine Comedy, ed. Robert J. Clements (New York and London: New York University Press and University of London Press, 1967), 98. The article first appeared in Speculum 25 (1950): 78–83. See esp. Thomas H. Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in

15

Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene Thomas Luxon points out how those characters in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress who are made to serve as allegorical signs of the Pauline “old man” tend to be expelled from the story world in a most openly violent manner: to be “brutally hanged” and/or bodily “thrown into Hell”.6 And Gordon Teskey notes that something similar is even more manifestly true in Dante’s Inferno: that being consigned to Hell, there to suffer eternal torture, is part and parcel of the process whereby the souls the narrator meets in his journey are made to display the allegorical meanings the poet assigns them through the imaginary agency of his God.7 There is, however, a strong link between those two apparently very different senses in which we may speak of ‘allegorical violence’. As Teskey emphasises in his discussion of the Inferno, the divine violence by which Dante’s damned are made to express their allotted meanings can itself be of the nature of a flagrant imposition, comparable to the kind seen in the Ovide Moralisé and Dante’s own Convivio. It is not merely, in other words, that Dante’s God, in reordering the cosmos into allegorically legible terms, is imagined as using force (itself hardly surprising, for who ever supposed the damned would take up their places willingly?); but that he seems, in a moral as well as a physical sense, to commit an act of violence in so doing. It is an act comparable, in that respect, to the kind of injustice Tasso is accused of doing to his own story in the preface to Gerusalemme Liberata, or that we might accuse Spenser of doing to The Faerie Queene when in the letter to Raleigh he rides roughshod over the poem’s actual storyline. Teskey focuses, in particular, on Francesca da Rimini in the fifth canto of the Inferno, whose seeming undeservingness of her punishment, which is to say her apparent unsuitability for being made to serve as an exemplar of vice, has troubled many readers.8 One might of course say that Francesca, as an unrepentant adulteress, gets only what Dante’s Christianity requires she should receive. But what is at issue is the poem’s forcefully drawing to our attention the moral violence inherent in such a model of divine ‘justice’, inasmuch as it regularly puts on display just the kind of case it seems most

6 7

8

Representation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), and Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 18–19, 23–29 – though note that my use of the term ‘literal’ here differs from Teskey’s (23). See also Susanne Lindgren Wofford, The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in Epic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 370–71. Luxon, Literal Figures, 200. Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 25–29. For the equating of the figurative meaning of each character in the Comedy with the “complete and ultimate form” God bestows on that character in the afterlife, see Erich Auerbach, “Typological Symbolism in Medieval Literature”, American Critical Essays on The Divine Comedy, ed. Robert J. Clements (New York and London: New York University Press and University of London Press, 1967), 110 and passim; reprinted from Yale French Studies 9 (1952). Cf. Erich Auerbach, “Figura”, trans. Ralph Manheim, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays (New York: Meridian, 1959), 64–76. Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 25–29.

16

The Experience of Allegory inequitable and reductive to ‘make an example of’.9 Erich Auerbach makes a related point in broader terms when he describes the Comedy’s characters, especially “the noble souls among the damned” like Francesca, as too strongly drawn in respect of their historical lives finally to subserve the figurative roles given them in the poet’s Christian schema.10 But if for Auerbach such an observation indicates the ultimate defeat of Dante’s figurative project, for Teskey it only measures the force the poem must exert – the colossal, systematic violence that it needs (and is willing) to inflict on its human characters – in order to raise its allegorical design on such an unyielding foundation.11 Now, what is found to be so genuinely troubling about Francesca’s situation as a character (as compared with that of, say, the Convivio’s ‘Lady of the Window’, albeit the latter has equally been regarded as subject to a reductive reading, denying her existence on her own terms) is, I think, that Francesca is depicted as being in a position actually to experience the effects of being read reductively, in that the reading takes place within the imaginary world she is conceived of as inhabiting. Where the overarching allegorical scheme of the Convivio may be said, in purely abstract terms, to ‘do violence’ to the poetic character known as ‘the Lady of the Window’, the corresponding scheme in the Comedy does to the character Francesca the actual, concrete violence – the narratively experienced violence – of her seemingly undeserved punishment, a punishment she herself calls a “mal perverso” (Inferno v.93). The difference between the two cases illustrates a key distinction between two kinds of allegory, or more precisely between two ways in which an allegorical interpretation can be attached to the structure of imagery it interprets. The importance of that distinction in understanding allegory has been recognised by a number of schools of interpretation over the ages, and the two kinds of allegory have accordingly been given a potentially confusing variety of names. But of central importance to the Western tradition is that they were regularly distinguished by interpreters of the Bible from Augustine through to Thomas Aquinas and beyond; and the difference between them, it seems to me, can be most clearly set out by reference to the uses to which those Biblical exegetes put them. On the one hand, the theologians use allegorical interpretation as a means for dispensing with Scripture’s literal meaning wherever it is inconsistent with 9

10

11

Erich Auerbach, in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 200, observes that Francesca is one of a number of such cases, a company which also includes “Farinata, Brunetto Latini, [and] Pier della Vigna”. On ‘making an example of’ as a species of allegorical reading, see my discussion of exemplification in Chapter 3. Auerbach, Mimesis, 200–202 (quoting 200). Auerbach rightly argues, loc. cit., that the tension between literal and figurative meaning is not confined to Dante’s depiction of the damned. See especially his reading in “Typological Symbolism”, 104–06 and 108–10, of the characters Rahab (Paradiso ix) and Cato (Purgatorio i–ii). Auerbach, Mimesis, 202; Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 26.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene Church doctrine: as Augustine writes, “Whatever there is in the word of God that cannot, when taken literally, be referred either to purity of life or soundness of doctrine you may set down as figurative.”12 Hence for example allegorical readings are sought for Scriptural references to God which taken literally would imply that he has a physical body: “When Scripture speaks of the arm of God”, writes Aquinas, what is meant “is not that he has a physical limb, but that he has what it signifies, namely the power of doing and making.”13 As the language makes clear, the whole point in this sort of allegorical exegesis is that the interpreter’s figurative reading be understood to give the one true meaning of the text, and the literal reading only its apparent or superficial meaning: God has “not . . . a physical limb, but . . . what it signifies”. On the other hand, the same exegetes read allegorically very many passages in Scripture whose literal truth they emphatically defend, even as they read them allegorically. Thus Augustine writes, “although there is an eternal Jerusalem in heaven, a city has been built on earth by which the heavenly Jerusalem is signified. Moreover, Sarah and Hagar signify the two testaments, yet they were two women who actually existed . . . . All these . . . signified something other than what they were, but none the less they themselves existed in the world of material reality.”14 From Augustine onwards, the whole typology of Old Testament history (whereby the deeds of Noah, Moses, Jonah, and so on, were taken to prefigure the deeds of Christ) was seen as belonging to the latter category of allegorical reading.15 Whereas in the case of God’s arm and the like, the very reason for reading the image allegorically is to discredit the literal interpretation, in these instances it is emphasised that the allegorical reading of the text does not invalidate the corresponding literal reading: Jonah is both a real man whose life historically precedes Christ’s, and a signifier of Christ in virtue of his real-life adventures. Since the former type of allegorical reading designedly denies the validity of the literal meaning of the text being read allegorically, while the latter designedly postulates a world big enough for both meanings, it is hardly surprising that the former has been seen as the inherently violent form of 12 13

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Augustine, “On Christian Doctrine”, trans. J. F. Shaw, III.x.14, in City of God and Christian Doctrine, ed. Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1973), 560. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae [Latin and English], ed. and trans. Samuel Parsons and Albert Pinheiro (London and New York: Blackfriars, 1964–76), Ia.i.10. For clarity’s sake, my use of the terms ‘allegorical’ and ‘literal’ follows Augustine’s usage throughout, which differs considerably from Aquinas’s; this does not, I think, result in a misrepresentation of Aquinas, as the differences between the two authors’ schemes, on the points in question, are essentially terminological rather than substantive. Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. John Hammond Taylor, 2 vols (New York: Newman, 1982), VIII.iv.8; cf. Galatians 4:24–26. Such an emphasis can be found as early as Tertullian, but was only secured in the West with Augustine’s powerful criticism of its opponents’ positions – see Auerbach, “Figura”, 30–33 and 36–39.

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The Experience of Allegory allegory (the kind liable to present us with an “interpretation that goes against the text’s manifest intentions”) and the latter as allegory’s more accommodating and conciliatory form. Thus Auerbach speaks of the fact that the latter type became the norm for Christian interpretation of Old Testament history as a victory over “those who . . . tried to despoil it of its meaning”, and refers, in contrast, to the victorious Augustinian way of reading that history as one that “preserves its literal . . . meaning”.16 And having observed that Dante in the Comedy imitates chiefly the latter kind of allegory in which “both entities in the figurative relationship are equally real and equally concrete”, he characterises the resultant relationship between the poem’s literal and figurative senses as one in which “the figurative sense does not destroy the literal” – the implication being that the alternative kind of allegory is one wherein the figurative meaning does “destroy” the literal.17 Similarly, Charles Singleton favourably contrasts the Comedy’s “this and that” allegory with the Convivio’s “this for that” allegory, whose nature it is (he says) “to rob” characters postulated at the poetry’s literal level “of all real existence”.18 As I have already suggested, however, the actual situation is not so straightforward. To return to my earlier example, it is just because Dante, in contrast to his practice in the Convivio, creates in the Comedy a world inclusive enough to contain both the literal and the figurative meanings of his characters, that the violence done to the literal by the figurative is also included within the Comedy’s imaginary world, as a concrete part of its characters’ experience. Thus there arises, for instance, a contradiction in Auerbach’s account: in the type of allegory he defines by the fact that its “literal meaning . . . is not annulled, but confirmed and fulfilled by the deeper meaning”, he must elsewhere acknowledge an important sense in which the event signified “both fulfils and annuls” the event that signifies it (my emphases).19 So it seems some 16

17 18

19

Quoting Auerbach, “Figura”, 52, and Mimesis, 196. In another of the potentially confusing but merely terminological differences amongst our authors, Auerbach speaks not (like Augustine, whose usage I still follow) of two kinds of allegory, but of “allegory” versus “figurism” (“Figura”, 30ff, Mimesis, 195ff, “Typological Symbolism”, 107–08). The peculiarity of Auerbach’s usage – in particular its anachronism in describing medieval practices – is addressed by Richard Hamilton Green, in “Dante’s ‘Allegory of Poets’ and the Mediaeval Theory of Poetic Fiction”, Comparative Literature 9 (1957), 119n. To give Auerbach his due, he is conscious of the terminological difficulty (“Figura”, 237 [note 51]), and acknowledges that figurism is a kind of “allegory”, in the broadest sense (“Figura”, 54). Auerbach, “Typological Symbolism”, 106. Cf. Auerbach, “Figura”, 73. Singleton, “Dante’s Allegory”, 95 and 98. Singleton’s more usual terms for what he here calls “this and that” and “this for that” allegory are, respectively, “allegory of theologians” and “allegory of poets”, terms used originally by Dante himself in the Convivio. I have chosen not to use those terms myself because they suggest a false criterion for distinguishing the two types: in fact, not only do theologians use both kinds (as Singleton acknowledges in a later article written in defence of his distinction – “The Irreducible Dove”, Comparative Literature 9 [1957], 130), but so do poets (as the instance of the Comedy is sufficient to demonstrate). Quoting Auerbach, “Figura”, 73 and 51. Cf. Auerbach’s turn in Mimesis from asserting the

19

Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene clearer account is needed of the practical difference between allegory’s two kinds. Whenever any story is interpreted allegorically, we are called on to imagine two sets of things and/or events, and to suppose that one in some sense signifies the other. But only in what Singleton calls a “this and that” allegory are we asked to imagine that both the signifying and the signified events occur in the same world. For instance, when the Jesus of Matthew’s Gospel says that “as Ionas was thre dayes, and thre nights in the whales bellie: so shal the Sonne of man be thre dayes and thre nights in the heart of the earth” (12:40), he indicates two things: firstly, that one set of events involving Jonah signifies another involving himself; secondly, that the one set concretely precedes the other in time. That is, Matthew not only represents Jonah’s story as signifying Jesus’s, but represents the two stories as parts of a single larger story (or history, if we prefer) that encompasses both their lives.20 In contrast, there is no comparable sharing of a single world by the signifying and the signified events in a “this for that” allegory. Take, for instance, Augustine’s declaration that the apparently corporeal God of the Garden of Eden story – described as “walking in the garden in the coole of the day” (Genesis 3:8) and as having “breathed . . . life” into man’s nostrils (Genesis 2:7) – is to be taken, not literally, but only figuratively, with reference to the incorporeal Christian Deity.21 Here too (as in any allegory) we are asked to imagine two distinct scenarios: one in which an embodied God walks, breathes, and so forth; another in which an intangible God performs corresponding actions (of enjoying his creation, animating the human he has made, and so on) without himself really having a bodily form. But the two sets of events cannot sensibly be thought of as taking place in the same world: God is either corporeal or incorporeal, must either literally have gone “walking in the garden”, or not. Other instances of such “this for that” allegory include (as Singleton correctly observes) Christ’s parables.22 When Matthew’s Jesus speaks of Jonah, he attributes allegorical meaning to a man who has, for him, a real existence in

20 21 22

hierarchical compatibility of “figure” and “fulfilment” in Dante’s Comedy (195–98), to acknowledging a powerful tension between the two (199–202). Auerbach’s self-contradiction in “Figura” is the basis of extensive critique by Luxon in Literal Figures, 51–62. Luxon’s emphasis on the violent displacement of the literal even in what (with Singleton) I shall call “this and that” allegory leads him to treat the very existence of two types as illusory: all allegory is, for him, emphatically “this for that”. But while I agree that in no kind of allegory is the literal meaning exempt from violence, I think it important still to differentiate on other grounds the two kinds recognised by the Augustinian exegetical tradition. Compare Auerbach, “Figura”, 58. The Literal Meaning of Genesis, VI.xii.20 and VII.i.2. Singleton, “The Irreducible Dove”, 132. That the kind of allegory in the parables is the same as that seen in Scriptural references to a corporeal God and the like is also implied by Aquinas, in his naming “parabolic” (i.e., having the nature of a parable) the passages in the Bible that speak, for example, of God’s arm (Summa Theologiae Ia.i.10).

20

The Experience of Allegory his own past, whereas when he says that “the kingdome of heauen is like vnto a certeine house holder, which we[n]t out . . . to hier laborers into his vineyarde” (Matt. 20:1), he attributes allegorical meaning to people who are, from his point of view, mere fictional characters. Just as we distinguish our own world from the world depicted by any given fiction (from the world of The Hobbit, say), so we distinguish the world evoked by the primary narrative of Matthew from the world of the parable of the labourers in the vineyard, and understand that a reader’s believing in the complete truth of the Gospel story would not commit that reader to thinking of Jesus’s parables as true stories. As Augustine puts it vis-à-vis the parable of the prodigal son, when we are told “of the fatted calf which was killed for the feast in honor of the younger son on his return home . . . it is not a matter of . . . events that really happened”; rather “the narration told by our Lord was a parable, and in this kind of narrative one is never expected to demonstrate that events told in the story literally happened.”23 A point worth making at this stage, in order to be perfectly clear about what distinguishes the two kinds of allegory, is that it makes no difference, for the purposes in hand, whether we believe that any of the stories in question is true. Regardless of whether we believe that either Jonah or Jesus actually lived or, if they did, that they did all the things attributed to them in the Bible, the allegory in Matthew that links them is a “this and that” allegory, in that it asks us to imagine not only that one signifies the other but that both inhabit a single world. And regardless of whether we think the Garden of Eden story is literally true, Augustine’s account of God’s role in that story is a “this for that” allegory, because it calls on us to imagine a second world distinct from the world evoked by a literal reading, a world wherein God is not an embodied being who goes out for walks. Finally, regardless of whether we believe the gospels’ report of Jesus, his parables are “this for that” allegories, because he indicates to his audience that they are to be applied allegorically to a world (their own) distinct from the worlds of the characters within the parables themselves. Dante critics, foremost amongst them Auerbach and Singleton, have rightly argued that the allegory of the Comedy imitates the “this and that” allegory which the New Testament and its exegetes had built on the Old Testament histories such as Genesis and Jonah. The nature of Dante’s imitation has, however, been somewhat obscured by Singleton’s incorrect supposition that the Comedy’s allegory is like that Scriptural allegory in virtue of requiring that “the reader, in the act of reading, take the literal sense to be real”, where the reader of a “this for that” allegory would “in the act of reading, view the literal sense as ‘fable’, ‘fiction’ ”.24 In fact, what Singleton appears to be saying of the Comedy – that the act of reading it involves us in a conditional suspension of

23 24

The Literal Meaning of Genesis, VIII.iv.8. Singleton, “The Irreducible Dove”, 131.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene our disbelief – is true of every fiction whatsoever, including those (like the parables, or Dante’s Convivio) offered as “this for that” allegories. Singleton’s error consists in conceiving wrongly how to apply, to Dante’s confessedly fictional story,25 a distinction that did exist, apropos the Bible, for pious exegetes such as Augustine and Aquinas. For the theologians, Scripture’s “this and that” allegories were indeed those whose literal meanings they believed (not just “in the act of reading”, but in earnest) to be true; conversely, Scripture’s “this for that” allegories were those whose literal meanings they regarded as mere fables, fictions. For they read the Bible allegorically, in the first place, precisely in the service of defining a history to whose truth they were committed – using “this and that” allegory where they accepted the literal meaning as part of that ‘true’ history, “this for that” allegory where, conversely, they wished to hive off a piece of the literal meaning into a distinct imaginary world which could be treated as a mere fiction. But as I have tried to show, the question of belief or disbelief in the truth of the literal meaning is not, finally, the essential one in distinguishing the two sorts of allegory, not even as regards the Bible, much less in the case of an acknowledged fiction. A sounder basis for applying the theologians’ distinction to an avowedly fictional work is the one I have suggested: Dante’s Comedy is a “this and that” allegory in that the characters therein who have allegorical significance are presented to our imaginations as coexisting with what they signify inside a single imaginary world. Now, such coexistence (as I have indicated) is not always peaceable. What we might call the classic illustration of this, in the Biblical allegory which Dante’s Comedy imitates, is the allegorical relation between the ‘Old Law’ and the ‘New’. That relation clearly fulfils the two criteria of “this and that” allegory. For the description of the Old Law as “hauing the shadowe of good things to come” (Hebrews 10:1) establishes not only, in Aquinas’s words, that “The Old Law is the figure of the New”26 (that is, that the Old allegorically signifies the New), but in addition, that the two share a single timeline: Moses’ declaring the former to be God’s law for the Israelites is conceived of as having occurred in the same world in which Jesus would later declare the latter to be God’s law for all. But though the two are in that sense imagined to ‘coexist’ – to be parts, like the characters Jonah and Jesus, of a single story or history that includes them both – they do not exist peaceably alongside one another inside the single world they are thereby imagined to share. On the contrary, the Old Law, at least in its ceremonial and judicial aspects, is incompatible with the new Christian code, to the extent that the one must be annulled for the other to be put in place (Hebrews 10:9). The abrogation of the Old by the New 25

26

That Dante, in the letter to Can Grande, describes his own poem as “fictive”, is a point made by Green, “Dante’s ‘Allegory of Poets’ ”, 122, and emphatically acknowledged by Singleton, “The Irreducible Dove”, 129. See Dantis Alagherii Epistolae; The Letters of Dante, ed. and trans. Paget Toynbee, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), X.9. Summa Theologiae, Ia.i.10.

22

The Experience of Allegory furthermore involves clashes, in the world they uneasily share, between Jesus and his Apostles on the one hand, and those on the other who see it as God’s will that they uphold the existing code (Mark 2:23ff, Colossians 2:16–17, etc.). So the Old Law, while not written off (like the corporeal God of Genesis) as never having been a real part of the world wherein its allegorical significance resides, nonetheless is subjected to a certain kind of overwriting within the world it shares with those signified things. “Both entities in the figurative relationship are equally real and equally concrete”, and yet (reversing Auerbach’s statement) “the figurative sense” in an important sense does “destroy the literal”. Indeed, precisely because a world is evoked that is big enough to contain both literal and figurative meanings, the violence done to the one by the other also happens within that world, as something that affects the lives of the characters imagined as inhabiting it. A more subtle, and in a sense a deeper violence which the Old Law suffers, as a result of sharing a world with what it signifies, is that its very status as a sign is also construed as part of that world, and hence as something that belongs to it originally and essentially – in much the way that road signs are intrinsically signifiers, even when we know nothing of the places they name or when those places have yet to be built. Thus for Augustine, not only those who refused to accept the annulment of the Old Law at the time of Christ, but equally those who lived under the Law prior to his coming, may be said to have “paid attention to the signs of spiritual realities in place of the realities themselves”, and so (because the signs were in their own nature not spiritual but material) to have been “in bondage to temporal things”.27 Either such people are seen as excluded from the justification their own actions signified, or, no less remarkably, if they are regarded as capable of justification through the Law, then it is in virtue of the properly Christian significance which their actions bore in God’s design, but of which they themselves were not cognisant.28 Something like the latter possibility is true of the characters in the Comedy given a place amongst the saved solely in virtue of their allegorical meanings. As Auerbach shows, Dante’s God includes the pagan suicide Cato amongst the 27

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“On Christian Doctrine”, III.vi.10. Even under a more positive view than Augustine’s of Old Testament man’s spirituality, such as Calvin’s, “the ceremonies would have provided the people of the Old Covenant with an empty show, if the power of Christ’s death and resurrection had not been displayed therein” – (Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. MacNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols [Philadelphia and London: The Library of Christian Classics, 1960], II.vii.16). See also J. S. Preus, From Shadow to Promise: Old Testament Interpretation from Augustine to the Young Luther (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1969), 15–21. The former conclusion is one from which certain medieval theologians did not shy: see e.g. Preus’s account, in From Shadow to Promise, 42, of the position of Bonaventura that “the Old Testament man did not achieve justification.” The latter is, e.g., Calvin’s position (Institutes, IV.xiv.21).

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene saved in Purgatory, and installs the heathen harlot Rahab as the prime “splendour” of the third heaven, not because the stories of their lives would in a literal reading justify those places in the afterlife, but because he has lent to their deeds allegorical meanings of which Rahab and Cato themselves, in life, must have been unaware.29 The interpretations he makes of those characters’ lives are, in fact, just such flagrant impositions of Christian meaning onto non-Christian material as occur in medieval readings of Christian meaning into Ovid’s Metamorphoses. They differ chiefly in that, in the Comedy, “both entities in the figurative relationship are equally real and equally concrete”: both literal and allegorical meanings exist within the same imaginary world. But that difference makes all the difference to their fates as characters. For the allegorical meaning imposed on them, being a part of their own world, can become a shaping part of their own experience. Being meant allegorically by God is (quite literally) their salvation. And just as they are saved by imposed allegorical meaning, so Dante’s Francesca is damned by it: we find her in Hell, not because her actions in life justify her place in the afterlife, but because she has the misfortune to live in the same universe as a God who has the power flagrantly to impose on her life an unflattering significance which, after death, she herself must bear.

Allegorical Chivalry The Comedy has regularly been regarded by Dante critics as unique amongst allegorical works of fiction in making use primarily of what I have been calling “this and that” allegory; other works, earlier and later, from Psychomachia to The Romance of the Rose to The Faerie Queene itself and The Pilgrim’s Progress, they have tended to consign, with Dante’s Convivio, to the lesser category of “this for that” allegories.30 And indeed, those who have described the workings of allegory in those other texts, not least Spenser critics, have very often written as if the relegation were deserved. For they have tended to regard the allegorical significance of those works as wholly extrinsic to the story world, and not (as Auerbach and Singleton have argued to be the case of the Comedy) as part of the same world as the literal story, and a shaping feature of the imaginary experience of its characters. Thus C. S. Lewis, in Spenser’s Images of Life, describes “our own experience while we read an allegory” as “divided between sharing

29 30

Auerbach, “Typological Symbolism”, 104–06 and 108–10. See especially Auerbach, “Figura”, 54 and 67, Singleton, “The Irreducible Dove”, 130, and Robert Hollander, Allegory in Dante’s Commedia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 6, 19, 54, and 63–64. See also Robert Worth Frank, Jr., “The Art of Reading Medieval Personification Allegory”, ELH 20 (1953): 237–50. Hollander adopts Singleton’s distinction between two kinds of allegory; Frank’s distinction between two kinds of allegory is comparable, but not as well worked out.

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The Experience of Allegory the experiences of the characters in the story and looking at their life from somewhere outside it, seeing all the time meanings that are opaque from within.”31 Harry Berger Jr., similarly generalising from a reading of The Faerie Queene, likewise regards characters in allegories as generically ignorant of the meanings attributed to their world – whose significance, he says, is conveyed “over the head of the hero to the reader”, producing “a kind of tension between what the hero knows and what the reader knows”.32 More recently, Susanne Lindgren Wofford writes in a similar vein that “The premise from which I begin – one of the fundamental ‘rules’ of The Faerie Queene – is that the characters do not know that they are in an allegory, and cannot and do not ‘read’ the signs of their world as figurative pointers to another arena of understanding.”33 How different, if such accounts were true, from the “this and that” world of the Comedy, into which “Dante introduces a character ‘Dante’, who . . . both experiences the vision of the Other World and comments [allegorically] upon it, as he comes to understand it”, and within which, in fact, “Virgil and Beatrice”, and “minor characters throughout the poem”, are allowed to “understand” and “to explain” what “the vision means” and to “guide the analysis of intention just as they guide ‘Dante’ ”.34 But in fact the Comedy is far from unique amongst allegorical fictions in evoking a single world within which its literal and figurative meanings coexist in the experience of its characters, as a few critics have recognised despite all pronouncements to the contrary. Angus Fletcher, from whom I borrow the above description of the Comedy, rightly describes that way of integrating allegorical commentary into a work as not peculiar to Dante but a “method . . . used by Spenser and Dante, and perhaps by most allegorists”.35 And Carolynn Van Dyke, in a book-length study of allegorical fictions, shows in detail – not only of the Comedy and The Faerie Queene, but of a whole range of works, from the Psychomachia to The Pilgrim’s Progress – that such dicta as C. S. Lewis’s concerning allegory are very widely untrue.36 To take just the instance of The Faerie Queene, it is manifest that Spenser’s characters do, in any number of places, become aware of the allegorical significance of their experience. For example, Sir Guyon is told directly by the hostess 31 32 33 34 35

36

Lewis, Spenser’s Images of Life, 28–29. Harry Berger, The Allegorical Temper: Vision and Reality in Book II of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 35–37. Wofford, The Choice of Achilles, 220. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1964), 318. Fletcher, Allegory, 318. See also Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene, 32–33, who suggests that the revolution in the understanding of Dante’s allegory needs to be emulated in Spenser criticism, but does not himself go on to articulate a real “this and that” understanding of Spenser’s allegory. Van Dyke, The Fiction of Truth; Van Dyke’s response to Lewis, 129.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene of the House of Temperance that the reticent lady he addresses in her parlour “is” none other than his governing passion, “Shamefastnesse it selfe” – a revelation that makes him feel embarrassed for having just counselled her not to behave so shamefacedly (II.ix.43–44). The lady’s allegorical significance, far from being conveyed ‘over Guyon’s head’, is made known to us as readers only by virtue of being made known to Guyon himself within the story world.37 Similarly, two figures to whom Guyon initially responds as if they were merely “a wicked Hag” and “A mad man” (II.iv.3–4) turn out to signify “Occasion” and “Furor”, a fact we learn only through the Palmer’s interrupting Guyon’s attack on Furor to explain the allegory to him (II.iv.10–11). A comparable, if belated, education of the hero in the significance of his actions occurs in Book One, when Redcross, already having felt the consequences of straying along the heavily-travelled “broad high way” leading to the House of Pride (I.iv.2), is taught (in time at least to ensure he will not repeat his mistake) that one’s choice of roads in Fairyland means allegorically a choice of moral direction. The import of the Biblical text that structures the Fairy road system, allusions to which have long since warned a reader competent in Scripture where Redcross was heading, at last becomes available to the knight himself, when the patroness of the House of Holiness explains that to “chose the narrow path” is to be among the “few” who “seeke the right”, while to “keepe the broad high way” is “With many rather for to go astray” (I.x.10). To place such instances from Spenser’s poem in a broader context, The Faerie Queene, as an allegorical romance, partakes of a long tradition in Western literature, whereby the armoured warrior – in medieval terms, the knight – is made to signify figuratively the morally and/or spiritually striving man.38 In any such chivalric allegory, a potential contrast exists between two degrees of “understanding of the action”: some characters, some readers, may be able (as Wofford thinks to be the case of Spenser’s knights) to understand the story only literally, “according to the chivalric idiom”; others (a status Wofford reserves for the poem’s readers), may also be able to understand what the chivalric action signifies allegorically.39 Certainly it is possible for a work to assign those respective degrees of 37 38

39

Cf. Isabel MacCaffrey, Spenser’s Allegory: The Anatomy of Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 84–85, and Quilligan, The Language of Allegory, 230. The allegorical significance of the knight in medieval literature is a major theme of Tuve’s Allegorical Imagery, and I owe much in what follows to her treatment of the topic, not least in my emphasis on The Epistle of Othea and The Quest of the Holy Grail. Our analyses, however, are somewhat different. Where Tuve is at pains to distinguish two ways of reading the knight allegorically, the moral and the spiritual (Tuve, 35–55), I wish to distinguish knighthood read allegorically from knighthood understood literally. The tradition of reading knighthood allegorically in what Tuve calls the spiritual sense is of course founded on the Biblical conceit of the “miles Christi” or “souldier of Iesus Christ” (2 Timothy 2:3, in the Vulgate and Geneva translations respectively); cf. Ephesians 6:11ff, to which Spenser refers in the letter to Raleigh. Wofford, The Choice of Achilles, 220.

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The Experience of Allegory comprehension in the way Wofford supposes them to be apportioned in The Faerie Queene. For example, in Christine de Pisan’s Epistle of Othea, it is made clear that the exemplary knight Hector, the epistle’s imaginary recipient, can understand its advice only (in Wofford’s terms) “according to the chivalric idiom”; whereas the author, stepping back from her fiction to write an allegorical commentary on it, can attribute, to the things said in the letter, figurative meanings referring to that spiritual striving or “goostli knyghthood” that is “mankyndli lif” – meanings available only to readers of the complete, annotated text.40 Thus, for instance, the letter explains to Hector the importance “Of alle maner soortes of armure / For to arme the with, bothe wel and sure”, but provides him no basis on which he could infer what the author declares in her commentary: that by the “good armoures . . . delyuered to the good knyghte . . . we may vnderstande the vertu of feith” granted to “the good spirite”.41 The meaning is conveyed “over the head of the hero to the reader”, producing a “tension between what the hero knows and what the reader knows”. For Hector is not present, as the reader is, at the scene of interpretation; he and his world are left behind in the process of saying what they mean allegorically. It is a case of “this for that”, of substituting one set of meanings for another. But not every chivalric allegory works that way. In the anonymous thirteenth-century Quest of the Holy Grail, no voice speaks to us from outside the story world to offer allegorical commentary on the chivalric action. Instead, such commentary is put into the mouths of characters (typically pious hermits or monks) who inhabit the story world alongside the questing knights. Nonetheless the distinction between understanding the story only literally (“according to the chivalric idiom”), and grasping what the chivalric action signifies allegorically, is central to the shape and significance of the work. It distinguishes, not the characters in the story from the story’s readers, as in the Epistle of Othea, but one character from another within the story world. Best informed, needless to say, are the holy men who expound the significance of the action: both the questing knights, and we ourselves (who in effect listen in on the explanations the knights receive), depend on them as guides to the allegorical meanings of events. Amongst the knights themselves, construing their own experience allegorically is rather an ideal than a given, something they are continually enjoined to strive towards, but of which they fall short precisely insofar as they persist in thinking it sufficient to interpret their knightly adventures literally, according to Camelot’s worldly chivalric code.42 40 41 42

Christine de Pisan, The Epistle of Othea, trans. Stephen Scrope (c.1440), ed. C. F. Bühler (London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1970), 6–8. Epistle of Othea, 23–24. Deborah L. Madsen, Rereading Allegory: A Narrative Approach to Genre (London: MacMillan, 1995), 89, writes of The Quest of the Holy Grail that “the quest is an exercise in reading, a process of learning accurately to read the sacred significance of signs, for which the reward is

27

Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene Thus Sir Melias, coming to a fork in the road where stands a cross inscribed with a warning of grave danger to anyone who follows the left-hand way, decides to “take the left-hand path, for there I may prove my strength and find out whether there lie in me such seeds of prowess and valour as shall win me repute as a knight”.43 Only after that decision results in his being very nearly slain by a knight who attacks him as he travels in that direction is the spiritual significance of the choice, which he had failed to consider, drawn to his attention. As the monk who tends his wound explains, “For the right-hand road you must read the way of Jesus Christ”, and “In the left-hand road . . . the way of sinners, which holds dire perils for those who choose it.” Like Redcross blithely following the “broad high way” that leads to the House of Pride, Melias has ignored at his peril the allegorical nature of his quest and of the roads he travels in pursuit of it. Turning left in the hope that his “prowess would see [him] through” was certainly in accord with the worldly chivalric code; but by the heavenly standards of the test posed allegorically by the choice of roads, such self-reliance is mortally sinful “pride”. So his adherence to the worldly code in choosing the left-hand path was, ironically, itself the transgression that made him fit for “the way of sinners”, and for his near-fatal encounter, as he went by that route, with a knight now expounded as “representing” his own sin. As the monk puts it, “you were deceived by your reasoning, for the words referred to heavenly chivalry, but you took them to refer to the worldly, so that you entered into pride; and thus you fell into mortal sin”.44 In a work like The Quest of the Holy Grail, unlike in The Epistle of Othea, the protagonists and their world are not left behind in the process of our being told what the chivalric action means allegorically; for the very activity of reading the story allegorically, though readers observe it, takes place in the story world. It is a case of “this and that”, of a world big enough to include both the signifier (the choice of roads), and what it signifies (the choice between Christ and sin). The figurative chivalry of the miles Christi still, in a certain sense, supplants the literal chivalry of the knight of Camelot, but it does so

43

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eternal bliss and the punishment damnation. Incompetent readers at first, the knights seek the hermeneutic aid of series of hermits and monks to correct their misguided interpretations.” Madsen in general places a salutary emphasis on allegory’s presence in narrative fictions largely as a matter of right or wrong interpretative choices for their characters; but her supporting analysis of allegory into two kinds does not tally with mine. This and the following quotations, The Quest of the Holy Grail, trans. M. Matarasso (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 66–71. See also Tuve, Allegorical Imagery, 52–53 and 417–36. My translation. “Et einsi fus tu deceuz par entendement; car li escriz parloit de la chevalerie celestiel, et tu entendoies de la seculer, par coi tu entras en orgueil; et por ce chaïs tu en pechié mortel.” – La Queste del Saint Graal, ed. Albert Pauphilet (Paris, 1923), 45. (Matarasso, whose translation I quote elsewhere, is too free here to bring out clearly the key distinction between heavenly and worldly codes of chivalry.)

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The Experience of Allegory even as the New Law supplants the Old: within the world the story calls on us to imagine, within the realm of its characters’ experience. The knights of The Quest must themselves cope (or fail to cope) with the abolition of a worldly set of values by higher values their chivalric experience has unexpectedly begun to signify allegorically. For the valiant but adulterous Launcelot, who “had been until now the true hero of the romance”, that means being “dashed at one blow from top to bottom of the ladder of excellence”, and having to pursue the quest from that humbled position; for one like Gawain, “so rooted in the creed of his caste, so embedded in the secular that the sacred passes him by unnoticed”, it means uncomprehending failure as, instead of making progress in the quest, he goes about heaping new sin on his head by the blind worldliness with which he courteously attacks and murders his fellow knights.45 Such is the price, in this story world, of reading only literally, only “according to the chivalric idiom”. It seems to me (as I have indicated) that The Faerie Queene, as chivalric allegories go, is much more like The Quest of the Holy Grail than like The Epistle of Othea, in that the allegorical meanings of its chivalric action are regularly revealed within the story world. That is not to say that Spenser’s knights themselves always know, or even always learn, the figurative meanings of their own encounters. But when they fail to read their world allegorically, that failure itself often has a narrative meaning, as it typically does for knights of The Quest. For example, the Redcross knight’s missing the significance of the “broad high way” leading to the House of Pride indicates much the same of him as missing the significance of the left-hand path indicates of Melias: namely that in his worldly pride he is mistakenly attending to his literal status as a knight, when what he ought to be attending to is what his knighthood signifies allegorically.

Allegorical Criticism Despite The Faerie Queene’s resemblance to The Quest,46 however, Spenser’s allegory proves more complex in various respects than his predecessor’s. For as well as such “this and that” allegorical episodes as I have adduced, there are places where Spenser interprets his own chivalric narrative in the “this for that” manner of the Epistle of Othea, or (to take the more likely proximate sources)

45 46

Quoting Matarasso, introduction, in The Quest of the Holy Grail, 18–19. Re Launcelot, see Quest, 91–92 and cap. 7 passim; re Gawain, Quest, 166–75, and Tuve, Allegorical Imagery, 434. On The Faerie Queene’s probably direct debt to the French Queste del Saint Graal (not merely to Malory’s condensed and partially de-allegorised version in the Morte D’Arthur) see Tuve, Allegorical Imagery, 52–54, 418–23, and Paul R. Rovang, Refashioning ‘Knights and Ladies Gentle Deeds’: The Intertextuality of Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Malory’s Morte Darthur (London: Associated University Presses, 1996), 28.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene of Tasso and the editors of Ariosto. Hence it is possible to go too far in jettisoning the old assumption that in interpreting The Faerie Queene “we must read by translating”, extracting the “moral precept and historical example” in such a way as to leave the story behind. A. C. Hamilton, for example, gives such traditional “this for that” criticism less than its due, in maintaining that it is “not by Spenser” that such a reading method is prescribed.47 For on the contrary, the two categories of meaning Hamilton identifies as the conventional goals of such reading, “moral precept and historical example”, are clearly those licensed by the letter to Raleigh; moreover, Spenser, both in the letter and in parts of the poem itself (notably its proems and canto arguments) does himself sometimes perform the kind of ‘reading by translation’ to which Hamilton objects. Hamilton’s example of the kind of moral gloss he rejects (“in . . . the Wandering Wood, the knight is Holiness, Una is Truth, Error is obvious Error: ergo, the episode means that Holiness defeats Error with the aid of Truth”) actually reads like quite a minor extrapolation from the identifications explicitly given by the book’s full title and the arguments to its first two cantos.48 Likewise, the “this for that” translation of the poem’s action into a parallel historical narrative, which Hamilton justly criticises as “all too easy” to produce, and in any number of incompatible versions, “if only . . . one will abandon the poem to it”, nonetheless has precedents in the poem’s own invitations to the queen to find in it representations of herself and her realms (see esp. II.Proem and III.Proem).49 And while the authorial precedents for that kind of reading are relatively few (as C. S. Lewis once reminded enthusiasts of “what is called the ‘historical allegory’ in Spenser”, “the identification of Gloriana and Belphoebe are the only two in the poem that have Spenser’s authority”50), they claim prominence in the work, not only by their conspicuous prefatory positions, but through the very fact that, as translations of the story into extrinsic terms, they stand outside the narrative, where they can seem conveniently to sum up the overall meanings of whole cantos or books, or of individual characters whose significance is otherwise dispersed over stretches of the story. Unsurprisingly, then, for long periods commentary tended to take its bearings from those parts of the poem, especially when performing its traditional task of describing the work’s overall structure or design. In fact the trend in Spenser criticism towards treating the story of The Faerie Queene as something to be ‘translated’ into terms extrinsic to it, which Hamilton dates to the Victorian revival of interest in the poem’s allegory,51 is 47 48 49 50 51

Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene, 7 and 32. Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene, 32. Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene, 8–10. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954), 384. Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene, 5.

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The Experience of Allegory seen already in much earlier interpreters, where in turn it is indebted to Spenser’s own lead. Both moral and historical translations, the former notably indebted to the poem’s canto arguments, are regular features of the Elizabethan marginalia attributed to John Dixon.52 John Dryden, apparently working from Spenser’s explicit identifications of Gloriana and Belphoebe with the queen, together with more indefinite invitations to Elizabeth and others to find themselves, their lands, and their ancestors depicted in the poem,53 sketches a more systematic picture of the poet’s allegorical design comprising extrinsic reference both moral and topical: “The Original of every Knight, was then living in the Court of Queen Elizabeth: And he attributed to each of them that Virtue, which he thought was most conspicuous in them”.54 More broadly still, John Hughes makes the letter to Raleigh his point of departure in offering “some Remarks on Allegorical Poetry in general”, and thereupon gives a definition of allegory both clearly influenced by the letter’s division of the poem’s allegorical meaning into historical and moral categories, and entirely “this for that” in its terms: “An Allegory is a Fable or Story, in which, under imaginary Persons or Things, is shadow’d some real Action or instructive Moral.”55 His definition neatly partitions the story (which is fabulous) from its allegorical meaning (presumed to be true), and portrays the task of interpretation essentially as a process of decoding, one that leaves the literal action behind in favour of the “real Action or instructive Moral” that it figures.56 Such a universalising of the “this for that” model of allegory, while it had not before expressly occurred in Spenser criticism, was nothing new in the history of allegorical exegesis: it was against such a reductive paradigm for reading the Bible that Augustine painstakingly differentiated the two kinds of allegory that Hughes fails to distinguish. The Romantic Spenserians, for their part, in making their famous stand on behalf of The Faerie Queene’s literal story, rebelled not so much against a neoclassical understanding of the poem’s allegory, as within the terms set by neoclassical writers. For the kind of reading they were at pains to allow, which ignores the poem’s allegorical meaning in favour of the story qua story (particularly well known is William Hazlitt’s advice to readers that “If they do not meddle with the allegory, the allegory will not meddle with them”57), pre52 53 54

55 56 57

See Graham Hough, ed., The First Commentary on The Faerie Queene (privately published, 1964). See especially the Dedicatory Sonnet to the Earl of Oxford (in Hamilton, ed., The Faerie Queene, 741). John Dryden, Dedication to The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis. Translated into English Verse (1693), quoted in Robert Cummings, ed., Spenser: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), 203. Hughes, “An Essay on Allegorical Poetry, etc.”, 87–88. Hughes, “An Essay on Allegorical Poetry, etc.”, 88. Lectures on the English Poets (London, 1818), 74; in Edmund Spenser: A Critical Anthology, ed. Paul J. Alpers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 133. Cf. James Russell Lowell’s contention

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene supposes the separateness of allegorical meaning from story which their predecessors had made seem inevitable. Hence the Victorians who revived interest in the poem’s allegory did so on the terms of a theory of allegory which had never been displaced; and that theory remained alive and well, not only for those like Padelford who are criticised by Hamilton, but likewise for Hamilton himself, who essentially repeats the Romantics’ gesture of insisting on the integrity of “the fiction in its own right” without actually proposing “any new understanding of the nature of allegory”.58 That theory also survives (and exerts an ongoing influence) in the likes of C. S. Lewis and Harry Berger, who like Hughes set out as a basis for Spenser criticism a sweeping “this for that” definition of allegory which only canonises a faulty presumption that just that one kind of allegory is at work in The Faerie Queene. Amongst those who have dissented from such an understanding of Spenser’s allegory, Maureen Quilligan comes closest to articulating the role the poem itself has had in the history of its own misreading, when she identifies the canto arguments and the letter to Raleigh as instances of a different kind of allegory from that at work in the narrative at large. In those places, she says, it is as if Spenser ceases to write as an allegorical poet and, attempting “to satisfy editorial as opposed to poetic demands”, becomes for the moment a mere “allegorical critic of his own poem”.59 I would not dispute Quilligan’s sense of the inadequacy of Spenser’s own allegorical readings in those places to the poem they claim to interpret, only her move to sideline them as “not part of the work his work of art is doing”, as artistically “unimportant”.60 For not only have those readings done if anything a disproportionately large part of the work in shaping the poem’s reception over the centuries, but their apparent authority needs to be called more radically into doubt than Quilligan does in merely deeming them inartistic – as though, if they were allowed to be parts of the poem proper, we would then simply have to concede that they told us the right way to understand it. Rather those glosses do need to be recognised as intrinsic parts of The Faerie Queene’s complex self-interpretative structure (for as I have observed, a policy of rejecting any commentary that clashes with the text it comments on would destroy the very fabric of the poem); but we ought to treat them not as transparently revealing what the poem would have meant in their absence, but as points of intervention, where the poem initiates a

58 59 60

that, in reading The Faerie Queene, “we may fairly leave the allegory on one side” – Among My Books (Boston: Fields, 1876), vol. 2, 177. Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance, is a forerunner of the Romantics with his emphasis on the coherence of story qua romance story (138) and his audacious dismissal of the centrality of its allegorical meaning (Spenser, he says, only “pretended that his stories of knights and giants were . . . the cover to abundance of profound wisdom” [151]). Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene, 12–13. Quilligan, The Language of Allegory, 232–33. Quilligan, The Language of Allegory, 232.

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The Experience of Allegory process of self-redescription which is then devolved on those readers who treat them as authoritative and paradigmatic. Such readers operate within a highly reductive notion of how The Faerie Queene ‘works’ allegorically, but not one they arbitrarily impose on it: rather, one the poem imposes on itself, and which they merely pursue, pressing the text however forcibly towards an appearance of total coherence on the offered terms. In pointing out, in contrast, the extent to which literal and allegorical meaning tend to coexist in a “this and that” manner in The Faerie Queene’s narrative, I draw attention to something that not only the critical tradition, but to some extent the poem itself, tends to obscure. It may seem, however, that thus acknowledging The Faerie Queene’s own initiation of the critical tendency to read it in a “this for that” manner vitiates my attempt to group Spenser’s poem with Dante’s Comedy, as an allegorical work which reads its own narrative detail predominantly in a “this and that” manner. But the Comedy too, to be read as the “this and that” allegory that Auerbach and Singleton have made it out to be, has had to be unearthed from a comparable tradition of reductive “this for that” reading – a mode of reading which, in places, that work also solicits. Thus Robert Hollander, while affirming that Auerbach and Singleton have recovered a true understanding of the poem’s essential allegorical mode, observes a different kind of allegory operating in certain places: notably, in “the scenes of the first two cantos which take place ‘nowhere’ ” except in “the totally unreal world of Dante’s psychomachia”.61 What is touched on in describing the setting of the “selva selvaggia” (Inferno i.5) as ‘nowhere’ and ‘unreal’, is not only that it has no definable geographical location, but that unlike most of the poem’s scenes it does not even seem continuous with the world of things it signifies allegorically, as if it were no more, in the first place, than a dream-depiction of something in the protagonist’s waking world. Whereas the subsequent journey through Hell, whatever it may also signify allegorically, is represented as a literal incident in the narrator’s life (to put it lightly, as what happened to him one Easter), the journey mentioned in its opening verse is not comparably presented as an event in his life, but as a figurative image of his earthly life as a whole, as “the journey of our life” (i.1). And the poem’s first episode, if taken as a paradigmatic instance of Dante’s method, can prompt similar ‘decoding’ of all the poem’s events, even at the expense of “the experiential nature of the journey on which Dante insists” elsewhere.62 61 62

Hollander, Allegory in Dante’s Commedia, 48–49, 253–54. On the commentary tradition which, since the fourteenth century, has proposed a second story parallel to the literal one, in which for Virgil is substituted reason, for Beatrice theology or grace, and so on, see Michael Caesar, Dante: The Critical Heritage: 1314(?)–1870 (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 8–9; we may note with Caesar that consensus has at no point existed as to what, exactly, the extrinsic terms are into which even the main features of the story should be translated (7–8). For the seminal rejection of “this for that” readings of Virgil and Beatrice, see Auerbach, “Figura”, 70 & 74. See also Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 24.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene Like traditional “this for that” readings of the Comedy, traditional allegorical interpretation of The Faerie Queene has its roots in the poem, but in parts of the poem that misrepresent its usual mode of signification. When we move on from Spenser’s proems and arguments, and attempt to make sense of the way allegorical self-interpretation is put to work in the detail of his story, we may begin to recognise the “this and that” allegorical mode, or allegorical narrative texture, characteristic not only by and large of the Comedy, but, by a stronger family resemblance, of Spenser’s great precedent in the genre of allegorical chivalric romance, The Quest of the Holy Grail. Whatever the differences between the works, The Quest seems to me an invaluable precedent to have in mind in approaching Spenser, because it offers a clear alternative to the venerable, persistent and obstructive assumption that The Faerie Queene’s allegorical meaning is ordinarily, or even necessarily, extrinsic to its story world.

Incidental Allegory Another respect in which The Faerie Queene is allegorically more complex than The Quest of the Holy Grail, and perhaps than any of its literary predecessors, rests in its use of what J. A. Burrow calls “incidental metaphor”.63 What that term means can be illustrated as follows. In The Faerie Queene, Book One, what happens ‘literally’ (in very broad terms) is that “a tall clownishe younge man” dons a certain suit of armour and goes on a quest to slay a dragon.64 All that, of course, has further, ‘allegorical’ significance; but the literal story, or its elements (the armour, quest, dragon, and so on) are the ground on which any allegorical reading must be built. What Burrow points out is that the things that form that “literal level” of an allegory are themselves sometimes referred to metaphorically.65 Here, for example, is how Una’s father sums up, in retrospect, the difficulties and the ultimate success of the knight’s quest: . . . neuer liuing man, I weene, so sore In sea of deadly daungers was distrest; But . . . now safe ye seised haue the shore . . . .

(I.xii.17).

It scarcely needs to be pointed out that Redcross has not literally been to sea. Una’s father speaks only figuratively when he describes the quest in nautical terms. But while it is necessary to our fully understanding the poem to gather that ‘the difficult sea voyage’ means ‘the knight’s quest’, the figurative

63 64 65

J. A. Burrow, “Allegory: The Literal Level”, Essays on Medieval Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 194. Quoting the letter to Raleigh. Burrow, “Allegory: The Literal Level”, 194.

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The Experience of Allegory interpretation required of us here is merely “incidental”, or preparatory, to our main task of reading figuratively ‘the quest’ itself. For in gathering the figurative meaning of the “incidental metaphor”, we arrive only at what happens literally in the story; it still remains for us to gather the figurative meaning of the main story itself – of what T. S. Eliot called the “one vast metaphor” that is the allegorical narrative as a whole.66 As Burrow puts it, “the figurative . . . sense of the incidental metaphor . . . will belong to the literal level of the allegory”.67 When we read such incidental metaphors, we read “this for that” – in the case in hand, a quest on horseback for a journey at sea. We are not to suppose, in other words, that the sea voyage and the journey by land are both parts of a single larger story that encompasses both episodes; rather, the hard sea passage is a mere fiction from the point of view of the knight himself, who has actually undergone all his trials on dry land. Burrow himself makes a comparable observation about another of the poem’s metaphors. At the close of the 1590 edition, Spenser writes: But now my teme begins to faint and fayle, All woxen weary of their iournall toyle: Therefore I will their sweatie yokes assoyle At this same furrowes end, till a new day . . . .

(III.xii.47 [1590]).

Burrow comments: “The plough is, in a quite simple and unpregnant sense, just not there at the end of the Third Book of The Faerie Queene.”68 In fact the whole scene, the miniature story of a ploughman unyoking his horses at day’s end, is “not there”: “not there”, that is, in the main story world of Britomart, Amoret, and the rest. Rather, it represents their story in “this for that” manner: for the half-ploughed field we read Britomart’s unfinished quest; for the ploughman’s rest, the poet’s pause before telling the rest of her tale. (This way of expressing the sense wherein “the plough is . . . not there” seems to me clearer than Burrow’s. For what he says is that the plough has not the “fictional solidity” of the things in the main story,69 whereas it appears to me that the ploughing scene is as carefully evoked and self-consistent a fiction as is the story to which it refers, albeit it is obviously much briefer; it simply happens

66

67 68 69

T. S. Eliot, “Dante” (1929), in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1975), 210; quoted by Burrow, “Allegory: The Literal Level”, 194. But Burrow, in observing the commonness of “incidental metaphor” in allegories, is actually refuting the position of Eliot, who thinks incidental metaphor is less liable to appear in allegorical than non-allegorical works: “allegory and metaphor do not get on well together”, says Eliot, for if “the whole poem . . . is, if you like, one vast metaphor, there is hardly any place for metaphor in the detail of it”. Burrow, “Allegory: The Literal Level”, 194. Burrow, “Allegory: The Literal Level”, 195. Burrow, “Allegory: The Literal Level”, 195.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene not to be part of the same fiction, and so is “not there” in the main fiction’s imaginary world.70) The cases of “incidental metaphor” cited so far are straightforward; we read them figuratively as a matter of course, without their complicating our sense of how the main story itself constitutes “one vast metaphor”, or as Spenser puts it, one “continued Allegory, or darke conceit”. But there are other cases in which the “incidental metaphor” and the “continued Allegory” are more closely entwined with each other. To take one example: in the same way that Una’s father speaks, metaphorically, of the Redcross knight’s having travelled by sea, so at a certain point Prince Arthur declares, metaphorically, that he is suffering from a “fresh bleeding wound, which day and night / Whilome doth rancle in my riuen brest” (I.ix.7). Both we ourselves, and Redcross and Una (to whom the statement is addressed), understand readily enough that Arthur means what he says here, only figuratively: neither we nor they expect to see blood seeping between the plates of his armour, nor does the question arise whether they might try to staunch the bleeding or treat the infection. Arthur’s “wound” means, simply, his suffering from unrequited love. As with any incidental metaphor, we read the image figuratively in a “this for that” manner to arrive at what is literally happening in the main story. We may contrast that with the “wound” inflicted, later in the poem, on Arthur’s squire Timias, by one of a trio of wicked foresters (III.v.20), a wound real enough, for the squire himself, to leave him lying “With bloud deformed . . . in deadly swownd”, and in critical need of the real medical attention which fortunately arrives in the person of Belphoebe (III.v.29ff). In this case, the wounding emphatically is no mere “incidental metaphor”, not an image we must take figuratively just to grasp what literally takes place in the main story; if it has a figurative meaning at all, it is in the sense in which events of the main story itself, as “a continued Allegory”, are meant figuratively. (That, for comparison’s sake, was the sense in which the wound suffered in The Quest of the Holy Grail by Melias had a figurative meaning: caused by a real lance, threatening real death and requiring real medical attention, it nonetheless signified something beyond itself, namely the danger into which he had put his soul through pride.) Now, between our two cases – between Timias’s “wound”, which clearly is literally a wound, and Arthur’s “wound”, which clearly is not – lie a number of cases harder to decide. For example, Belphoebe heals Timias of the injury the forester has inflicted in his thigh, only to injure him herself “Through an vnwary dart, which did rebound / From her faire eyes and gracious

70

Cf. James J. Paxson, The Poetics of Personification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 35, who classifies allegorical images according to whether the “characters, objects, or places . . . occupy the material space-time of the fabular, or ‘story’ level of a narrative text.”

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The Experience of Allegory countenaunce” (III.v.42). This second “wound” might be thought (on analogy with Arthur’s love “wound”) to be merely an incidental metaphor. We might conclude, that is, that what has literally happened in the story, is simply that Timias has fallen in love with his doctor. But though clearly that is what Timias’s second wounding means, it is not at all clear that the wound which bears that meaning is a piece of mere figurative language relative to the world of Timias’s experience. On the contrary, just as Melias suffers literally from a physical wound, even though its true cause and its most profound significance for the knight himself lie in what it figuratively represents, so too Timias is sufficiently incapacitated physically by the “wound” from Belphoebe’s eyes that she herself mistakes his symptoms for a relapse in his condition vis-à-vis the earlier, indubitably real wound from the forester’s arrow (III.v.48–49). The episode is far from unique; a comparable account could be given, for instance, of the successive injuries Marinell receives at the hands of Britomart and Florimell respectively (III.iv, IV.xii). Unlike the ploughing team, which (as Burrow says) is “just not there” in the main story, and equally unlike, say, the dragon that Redcross must slay, which whatever else it means is certainly “there” in the story, the often repeated image of the erotic wound has in The Faerie Queene an unclear, neither-here-nor-there status relative to the main narrative. The same is true of the rest of the imagery of violence used conventionally to signify the experience of love. Are Cupid and his arrows mere figures of speech, mere incidental metaphors, in describing Britomart’s experience of unrequited love? It seems so in the early cantos of Book Three (III.ii.26ff); but what then to make of her later face-to-face encounter with “the winged God himselfe”, riding literally in triumph over a literally heart-wounded Amoret (III.xii.21–22)? And what (once more) to make of Arthur’s “chace” of the beautiful Florimell (III.i.19): should we, or he, be perturbed that the sonneteer’s generally only figurative ‘hunting’ of his beloved, here is something in which the lover engages in a quite literal fashion?71 Such incidents are challenging to interpret allegorically because it is challenging even to be clear what is happening in them at the “literal level” – and as medieval exegetes understood, before we can hope to gather what a text means figuratively, we must first clearly grasp its literal meaning.72 The reason for the difficulty is that Spenser mixes, not only in our experience as readers but in the experience of his characters, different ways of using the same figuratively resonant images – deploying them, in one case as literal description of

71

72

Cf. Spenser, “Lyke as a huntsman” (Amoretti lxvii), and its Petrarchan model, Rime Sparse 190. See also Colin Burrow’s account, in Edmund Spenser (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1996), 44–47, of the borderline status vis-à-vis the story world of many of The Faerie Queene’s figures. See for example Nicholas of Lyre, Literal Postill on the Bible, in Minnis and Scott, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, 268.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene what takes place in his main story world, in another as “incidental metaphor” describing that story world only figuratively. The conclusion to which this analysis leads is one to which I have returned throughout the chapter: that only by attending closely to the (sometimes vexed) question of what ‘really’ happens in the experience of The Faerie Queene’s characters can we understand the way the poem works as allegory.

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Chapter Three

Allegorical Characters

Personification

T

WENTIETH-CENTURY criticism of allegorical literature placed extraordinary emphasis on the discussion of allegorical characters, and more particularly on a kind of character called the ‘personification’. Very frequently, personification was treated as the defining device, if not of the whole of allegorical literature, at least of its most common species; and that species, often called “personification allegory”, was presumed (like the “this for that” allegory with which it was effectively identified) to comprise all but a few truly exceptional allegorical works, notably Dante’s Comedy.1 But such preeminence of personification in the conception of allegorical literature is, analytically as well as historically, something of a peculiarity. In analytical terms, it is not obvious why the figurative use of characters, let alone a particular kind of figurative use of characters, should be seen as a more essential

1

On the near-identification of allegory with personification in much twentieth-century criticism, see Paxson, The Poetics of Personification, 1. For “personification allegory” as a species distinguishable from that which especially characterises Dante’s Comedy, see H. Flanders Dunbar, Symbolism in Medieval Thought and its Consummation in the Divine Comedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929), 278–81, Frank, “The Art of Reading Medieval Personification-Allegory”, 237–39, Morton W. Bloomfield, “A Grammatical Approach to Personification Allegory”, Modern Philology 60 (1963), 161, and Hollander, Allegory in Dante’s Commedia, 3. Hollander, 253, essentially identifies “personification allegory” with what (following Charles Singleton) I have been calling the “this for that” kind of allegory, when he directly contrasts it with “figuralism” – i.e., with Erich Auerbach’s term for “this and that” allegory; moreover, that alignment is at least suggested by Auerbach himself, e.g. in “Figura”, 54. Cf. the place of personification in C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1936 [1938 with corrections]), 45ff. Note too the still-predominant place of personification in such recuperative readings of works previously dismissed as ‘mere’ personification allegories as Stephen A. Barney, Allegories of History, Allegories of Love (Hamden: Archon, 1979), 20ff, Van Dyke, The Fiction of Truth, 30 and 39ff, Jon Whitman, Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 4–6, and Theresa M. Kelley, Reinventing Allegory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 5 and passim.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene feature of allegorical composition than, for example, that of places (Vanity Fair, the Bower of Bliss) or objects (the shield of faith, the burden on Christian’s back).2 Historically, meanwhile, almost all the works typically cited as evident cases of “personification allegory” (amongst them Psychomachia, The Romance of the Rose, Piers Plowman, Everyman, and at least in some episodes The Faerie Queene) predate by centuries the emergence of personification as the predominant concern in discussions of allegory. The singling out of personification occurs, in English criticism, only in the eighteenth century, in the wake of Joseph Addison’s Spectator articles (1711–12) on the allegorical characters in Paradise Lost; and it reaches its culmination only with Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism (1762), wherein “personification” is given the pride of place amongst rhetorical figures that two centuries earlier George Puttenham had given to “allegory” itself.3 Part of the problem, at least, is that personification has been very widely conflated with the representation of the abstract or intangible by means of the concrete and sensuous – and that that, too, has been widely regarded as the essence, either of all allegory, or at least of so-called “personification allegory”.4 In the first place, though, such ‘concretisation’ of the abstract is not allegory’s only possible function: for example, where Sir Galahad is made allegorically to signify Jesus Christ, or Ovid’s Diana the Virgin Mary, the signified figure is as concrete an individual as is the figure that does the signifying.5 (Note that my two examples are instances, respectively, of “this and that” and “this for that” allegory; so it is not true even of the latter kind that the things signified are always abstractions – despite some critics’ suggestions to that effect.6) Indeed concretising the abstract is not the only function even of personification per se: for it is possible, as well, under an ordinary modern understanding of the term, to ‘personify’ things concrete and tangible in themselves, such as wine or the river Thames. Conversely, not every concrete representative of the abstract or intangible would ordinarily be called a 2

3

4

5

6

A point acknowledged by Paxson, The Poetics of Personification (see esp. 42–43), and to a degree by Barney, Allegories of History, Allegories of Love, 34–35, and by Whitman, Allegory, 6–7. Joseph Addison, Criticism on Milton’s Paradise Lost, From ‘The Spectator’: 31 Dec., 1711 – 3 May, 1712, ed. Edward Arber (London: Alex Murray and Son, 1868); Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 2 vols (London: Routledge, 1993 [facs. of 6th edn, Edinburgh, 1785]), vol. 2, 227; Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 186. Thus for example Lewis, The Allegory of Love, 44–45, Bloomfield, “A Grammatical Approach to Personification Allegory”, 163–69, Barney, Allegories of History, Allegories of Love, 20, Quilligan, The Language of Allegory, 31, Van Dyke, The Fiction of Truth, 39–40, Whitman, Allegory, 271, and Kelley, Reinventing Allegory, 7–11. Cf. Paxson, The Poetics of Personification, 14 and 42. See The Quest of the Holy Grail, trans. Matarasso, 64, and Bersuire, “The Moral Reduction, Book XV: Ovid Moralized”, trans. Minnis and Scott, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, 371. See, e.g., Auerbach, “Figura”, 54.

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Allegorical Characters personification: witness such ‘personless’ concretisations as ‘the river of time’ and ‘the fortress of reason’. A better definition of terms is needed to restore personification to a clear and proportionate place in the investigation of allegory at large. Personification is the representation by means of an imaginary person of something impersonal in kind.7 By a ‘person’ in literature I mean simply what we would, at the barest level, call a literary ‘character’, or a member of the class which together with ‘places’ and ‘things’ makes up the inventory of concrete entities. (The limits of personhood have always been difficult to define, but for our purposes the attribution of voice, rationality, or anthropomorphic living body will be sufficient qualification.8) By ‘impersonal in kind’ I mean that which is itself neither a person nor a kind of person. Thus an imaginary person signifying corn, hope, October, or Ireland, would normally be said to ‘personify’ the thing in question; but we would not ordinarily speak of Spenser’s pastoral character Hobbinol as ‘personifying’ Gabriel Harvey, nor of an imaginary virtuous person who represents the virtuous in general as ‘personifying’ – but rather as ‘exemplifying’ – the class of the virtuous. In schematic terms, personification constitutes one of four classes into which allegory is divided by the binary pair [personal/impersonal]. That is, personification is the personal signifying the impersonal (e.g., an old man representing winter), as distinct from any of the following: the personal signifying the personal (Belphœbe representing Queen Elizabeth), the impersonal signifying the impersonal (the House of Pride), or the impersonal signifying the personal (the rock that was Christ). Of course the criterion of classification is arbitrary. We might equally, for example, categorise allegory with respect to one of these pairs: concrete/abstract, or tangible/intangible. Under either of those schemes, the four instances adduced above would be distributed quite differently. With respect to the criterion of tangibility, for example, ‘Old Man Winter’ and ‘the House of Pride’ would fall together into the single category of 7

8

Classical rhetoric defined the trope personification or prosopopoeia more broadly, to include virtually all feigned speech – e.g., the putting of words into the mouths of one’s ancestors, or one’s legal clients. A recognisably modern definition emerges in the Middle Ages, through such works as Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, which defines personification (II.xiii.1) as “the fashioning of a character and speech for inanimate things” (trans. in Whitman, Allegory, 269–70). Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 238–39, illustrates the full establishment of the term’s modern sense, in giving to the cases of speaking for the dead or absent the name “prosopographia” and reserving “prosopopeia” (or ‘personification’) for the trope whereby we “attribute any humane quality, as reason or speech to do[m]be creates or other insensible things, [and] do study . . . to giue the[m] a humane person”. Cf. Paxson, The Poetics of Personification, 8–34. Cf. Paxson, The Poetics of Personification, 14 and 42. Bloomfield’s “A Grammatical Approach to Personification Allegory”, as its title suggests, describes the figure rather differently, in relation to grammatical forms associated with it; on those terms, qualifications for ‘personhood’ might include, for example, the use of proper-name conventions and personal pronouns in relation to the noun being ‘personified’ (165).

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene the tangible signifying the intangible, ‘Belphœbe the figure of Elizabeth’ and ‘the rock that was Christ’ into that of the tangible signifying the tangible. (For the intangible signifying the intangible, we might cite ‘the autumn of life’; an instance of the intangible signifying the tangible might be harder to find.) A serious conceptual muddle arises only when we conflate our categories and speak, for example, of ‘personified intangibles’ or (more commonly) ‘personified abstractions’, as though either named a simple and not – as is actually the case – a complex hybrid category. It is true, of course, that one of the most important literary uses of personification is the one often confusingly treated as though it actually defined the figure – namely the bestowing of an imaginary particularity on something abstract or intangible. The same use, however, is equally made of allegorical places (hence the paysage moralisé) and objects (the breastplate of righteousness, etc.). Lord Kames gets the relationship of personification to the abstract more or less right when he notes that amongst the things “frequently personified” are “abstract terms”, but without allowing that observation to intrude on his basically sound definition of personification as “the bestowing sensibility and voluntary motion upon things inanimate”.9 Allegorical characters will fall into one of two categories on the personal/ impersonal matrix: they will be persons, signifying either things impersonal in kind (in which case they will be ‘personifications’), or things personal in kind, that is, persons or kinds of persons – in which case we shall need other names for them. Persons representing individual persons include ‘types’ (as when Moses is made to signify Christ) and ‘personae’ (as when Colin Clout is made to signify Spenser). Indeed types and personae are not always distinguishable from each other, as in the case of Spenser’s Gloriana, who is made both pseudo-historically to prefigure Elizabeth on the ‘typological’ model, and to serve as a persona or ‘mask’ for her in the manner of The Shepheardes Calender’s “Elisa, Queene of shepheardes”. Persons representing kinds of persons similarly span a continuum, comprising at one extreme characters who represent a class simply in virtue of being notable instances thereof (as when Spenser, in the letter to Raleigh, construes the heroes of the great epics – Odysseus, Aeneas, and the rest – as paradigms of human virtue), and at the other those like Everyman or Christian, who are indeed also instances of what they signify, but whose relationship to the class is not simply the ordinary one of the individual to the category, but rather is usually taken to imply a collective reference to all its members. The latter, in a sense ‘stronger’ way of exemplifying a class, has been compared to the method of signification called “isotyping”, whereby for example each human figure marked on the map of a battlefield represents not one but, say, one hundred soldiers.10 (‘Mere’ exemplars, it should be noted, are often regarded as not being allegorical characters 9 10

Kames, Elements of Criticism, II.236 and 228. Paxson, The Poetics of Personification, 46–47.

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Allegorical Characters at all – although Spenser, along with many of his contemporaries, did treat them as such. That is a problem I shall explore in detail in the latter part of this chapter.) Personifications, too, include characters representing individual things (such as particular cities or rivers), and those representing kinds (the deadly sins, or the elements). But that is a distinction not ordinarily attended to. A sub-classification that answers more closely to the critical interest historically shown in the figure is to distinguish personifications of the concrete from personifications of the abstract. We might thus reclaim the common term, ‘personified abstraction’, taking care not to use it confusingly as a mere synonym for personification, but for one of two kinds of personification, the other being the ‘personified concrete entity’. (An example of a personified abstraction would be a character called Pride; of a personified concrete entity, one called Nile.) The eighteenth-century critical interest that brought the ‘personified abstraction’ to the forefront of thinking about allegory, where it has since remained despite the fading from view of the original context, had to do with the issue of ‘probability’ in poetic action, and at least initially with probability as a criterion of epic specifically. Epic action, Addison argued, ought not to be limited to what is realistic; indeed one of epic’s delights is its evoking in the reader a feeling of the marvellous, as in the episode in which the ship that brings Odysseus to Ithaca is afterwards turned by the gods to stone (Odyssey xiii). But even such marvellous episodes ought to appear ‘probable’, in the sense that an explanation for them may be given on the terms of the imaginary world in which they transpire: “Ulysses’s ship being turned into a Rock, and Aeneas’s Fleet into a Shoal of Water Nymphs, though they are very surprizing Accidents, are nevertheless probable, when we are told that they were the Gods who thus transformed them.”11 But personified abstractions, such as Milton’s Sin and Death, in Addison’s view do not conform even to such a liberal notion of probability. For even allowing that the question is not what we suppose possible in the real world, but what is supposed possible in the imaginary world evoked by the poem, the manifest contradiction involved in asking us to conceive of abstract ideas as concrete ‘characters’, able to interact concretely with the rest of the dramatis personae, must draw us up short. As Addison expresses it, “the Reader cannot so far impose upon himself as to see a Possibility in them; they are the Description of Dreams and Shadows, not of Things or Persons” – not even of such things or persons, that is, as we expect to find in a world replete with miracles and supernatural agents; their improbability is of quite another order beyond that of, say, the Prince of Darkness with whom, in Milton’s story, they are disconcertingly made to interact.12 Such episodes, 11 12

Addison, Criticism of Milton’s Paradise Lost, 71 (no. CCCXV). Addison, Criticism of Milton’s Paradise Lost, 72 (no. CCCXV). Cf. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, 3 vols, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), I.186.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene therefore, though they may be striking in themselves, badly compromise the probability with which the epic poem ought to invest the imaginary world it conjures.13 That is not to say, however, that personified abstractions have, for Addison, no legitimate place whatever in epic poetry. Rather, he argues, such figures may indeed properly be introduced into the epic poem, so long as they are not introduced, qua persons, into the imaginary world of its main narrative. Instead, they must be introduced only as what I have called ‘incidental’ allegories, as figures not regarded as literally existing in the world of the main story, but only as referring figuratively, in a “this for that” manner, to what is supposed literally to exist in that world. It is of such incidental uses of personified abstraction that Addison approves, when he accepts the propriety in epic of all “such short Allegories as are not designed to be taken in the literal Sense”.14 Those include, he says, all allegorical personages in epic who “are just shown, without being engaged in any Series of Action” – who do not act, that is, in the main story world, in such a way as to make that world’s narrative coherence depend on their being supposed literally to exist therein.15 For example, it is acceptable that Homer, “Instead of saying that the Time was come when Apollo ought to have received his Recompence . . . tells us that the Hours brought his Reward”, since we may easily suppose that the latter is simply the poet’s ornamental way of expressing the former, and that only the former need be supposed ‘actually’ to happen in the world of the main epic action.16 It may be seen that such a qualified defence of the use of personified abstractions in epic predisposes the defender to interpret such figures in a “this for that” manner wherever possible, whether the original text clearly calls for such reading or not. It is, for instance, far from clear that Homer’s personified ‘Hours’ ought to be regarded as the mere incidental flourishes of imagery that Addison would like to make of them, rather than as full members, alongside Apollo, of the Homeric pantheon.17 But by reading as ‘incidental’ any allegorical characters that can be so construed without leaving a problematic gap in the main action itself, while criticising as poetic flaws any that cannot (amongst whom Milton’s Sin and Death are only the most notorious 13 14 15

16 17

Addison, Criticism of Milton’s Paradise Lost, 23 (no. CCLXXIII) and 135 (no. CCCLVII). Addison, Criticism of Milton’s Paradise Lost, 135 (no. CCCLVII). Addison, Criticism of Milton’s Paradise Lost, 135 (no. CCCLVII). Cf. Kames, Elements of Criticism, 293–94, who agrees with Addison that “an historical poem admits the embellishment of allegory”, but only on condition that “allegorical beings . . . be confined within their own sphere, and never be admitted to mix in the principal action”. Addison, Criticism of Milton’s Paradise Lost, 134 (no. CCCLVII). For an indication of work that has been done on the relation between personifications and the classical gods, see Whitman, Allegory, 271–72. Cf. Coleridge, Miscellaneous Criticism, 30: “Of a people who raised altars to fever, to sport, to fright, etc., it is impossible to determine how far they meant a personal power or a personification of a power.”

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Allegorical Characters offenders18), Addison and the critics who follow give an air of historical depth to a newly rationalised model of narrative poetry, in which allegory is driven to the margins, having been denied its traditional license to operate within and shape the story world.19 For Addison, it is specifically the epic poem’s imaginary world that is to receive this housecleaning. But subsequent writers carry the project much further. Samuel Johnson recasts Addison’s strictures concerning epic as general principles concerning poetry at large, declaring that, while incidental personification “has always been the right of poetry”, any slipping of allegorical persons into the role of characters in the poem’s main action “always excites conviction of its own absurdity”.20 Kames, meanwhile, takes exception to personified abstractions in pictorial art, on the grounds that a visual artist cannot supply the indications a writer may give that a particular image is intended as merely incidental to the world of his fiction, with the result that a viewer inevitably sees in the painting only a single world, jointly inhabited by a “jumble of real and allegorical personages”.21 Where Kames and Johnson agree is in maintaining that wherever allegory cannot be merely ‘incidental’, it should be avoided. Most importantly of all for our purposes, however, Addison’s method begins to be applied by Spenser’s editor John Hughes specifically to those works, like The Faerie Queene, which he describes as “Writings, the very Frame and Model of which is design’d to be Allegorical”.22 Hughes does carve out a special niche for that kind of work, as a genre unto itself which “has a liberty indulg’d to it beyond any other [s]ort of Writing whatsoever”, permitting it a story consisting “for the most part in fictitious Persons or Beings, Creatures of the Poet’s Brain, and Actions surprising, and without the Bounds of Probability”.23 Thus he accepts as artistically legitimate that such allegory “frequently gives Life to Virtues and Vices, Passions and Diseases, to natural and moral Qualities; and represents them acting as divine, human, or infernal Persons”.24 But crucial to notice is Hughes’s justification for exempting his supposed class of generically allegorical poems from the requirements which (he emphatically agrees with Addison) ought to bind other genres – wherein 18

19 20

21 22 23

24

See Addison’s complaint, Criticism of Milton’s Paradise Lost, 135 (no. CCCLVII), that Sin and Death are presented “as principal Actors” in Paradise Lost, as well as the comparable examples he cites from Homer (134), Aeschylus (135), and Virgil (23 [no. CCLXXII]). Cf. Treip, Allegorical Poetics and the Epic, 110. Johnson, “Milton”, in Lives, I.185, and “Pope”, in Lives, III.233. Johnson’s generalising of Addison’s project is noted by Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985), 63. Kames, Elements of Criticism, II.293. Hughes, “Essay on Allegorical Poetry”, 97. Hughes, “Essay on Allegorical Poetry”, 90, 92. (In the former quotation I correct one obviously incorrect reading in the edition cited.) For Hughes’s treatment of allegory as a genre or “kind” of literature, alongside epic, drama, and so on, see also 97–98. Hughes, “Essay on Allegorical Poetry”, 95.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene “Persons of this imaginary Life are to be excluded from any share of the Action”.25 His justification is that the story as a whole ought to be readily translatable into other terms, having a clear “moral Sense couch’d under its Fictions”26 – or in other words, that the story in its entirety should function as a kind of ‘incidental’ allegory in relation to a parallel moral narrative which can be articulated separately from it. The “this for that” type of allegory that marks the incidental trope of which Addison approves, becomes now the model for reading poems like The Faerie Queene at large. So that, whether the personified abstraction is confined to the sidelines of an epic action, or allowed its place in the thick of a Spenserian fray, it is in either case kept decorously separate from the sphere where its ‘true’ significance is taken to lie, and its otherwise “shocking and monstrous” conflation of categories, its “wild Types and Shadows”, are tamed by being rigorously subordinated to a superimposed rational order in which they participate not directly or literally but only by translation, in the manner of “a Dream or Vision, of which the mystical Sense is the true Meaning or Interpretation”.27 Hughes’s accommodation of works like The Faerie Queene to Addison’s prescriptions for allegory in epic poetry inaugurates a long-lived critical trend towards sorting works containing allegorical characters into two camps. On one side are placed those, including Paradise Lost, in which the goal of allegorical interpretation is to cleanse the main narrative of its allegorical inhabitants by construing them as mere flourishes of ‘incidental’ imagery; on the other, those like The Faerie Queene in which the goal is to construe the main narrative itself as essentially a huge concatenation of such flourishes, to be swept away in its entirety by interpretation, in favour of a direct apprehension of the moral message underlying it. Such a division, of works supposedly only incidentally allegorical from those regarded as essentially or generically so, obscures the deep similarities and historical influences connecting poems placed on either side of the divide – not least in the specific cases of Spenser and Milton, both of whom shamelessly populate their main narratives with what we might, using Kames’s words, call a “jumble of real and allegorical personages”.28 Only very recently has criticism begun to recover the alternate possibility of reading the ‘personified abstractions’ in such works as deliberate cases of “this and that” allegory: that is, as bearing both their literal and their figurative meanings (however ‘improbably’) within the world of the main fiction, so that the poem’s narrative, taken on its own terms, is irreducibly allegorical, and its allegory likewise irreducibly narrative.29 It is manifestly such a “this and that” 25 26 27 28 29

Hughes, “Essay on Allegorical Poetry”, 95–97 (quoting 96). Hughes, “Essay on Allegorical Poetry”, 95, 100. Hughes, “Essay on Allegorical Poetry”, 88, 91–92. Cf. Treip, Allegorical Poetics, 108, and Knapp, Personification and the Sublime, 132. Thus Van Dyke, The Fiction of Truth, 42–44 etc., argues in detail for the possibility of an imaginary world whose narrative agents synthesise in themselves a concrete and an abstract

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Allegorical Characters narrative world that is conjured by a work like The Quest of the Holy Grail – in which knights are regularly told, to their edification, the frequently abstract allegorical significance that has given shape to their own flesh-and-blood adventures. No less so, I have argued, in The Faerie Queene, in which, for example, the strangeness of several of Sir Guyon’s encounters is explained to him by recourse to the fact that the concrete characters he is trying to deal with are actually personifications of one or another pertinent abstraction. But the association in the critical tradition of the ‘personified abstraction’ with “this for that” allegory is so strong, and so deeply rooted, that only by disentangling threads that run back as far as the early eighteenth century can we fully free ourselves from a sense of obligation to it.

Exemplification To return to a point left suspended in the first part of this chapter, it is the dominant view in modern criticism that the kind of story called an “exemplum” is not properly speaking an allegory, or to put it differently, that the “exemplificative” interpretation of a text is not properly speaking allegorical interpretation. Thus J. A. Burrow writes that, while “allegory” and “exemplification” do “often overlap in practice, in theory there is a fundamental distinction between them”, in that “Allegory requires the reader to translate” whereas “exemplification requires him to generalize”.30 Rosemond Tuve goes so far as to say that the merely exemplary tale is something “which even no known misdefinition could admit under the figure of allegory”.31 In that view, anything a story or character exemplifies is part of what the text means literally. So when Robert Henryson glosses the fable in which a wicked frog offers to carry a mouse across a stream only to try to drown the poor rodent in midstream, as an exemplum of the dangers of keeping wicked company, that reading is, for Burrow, “derived from the story without any allegorical translation”, in that the story (he says) “literally illustrates, or exemplifies, the point”.32

30 31 32

significance – a synthesis whose uneasy, even potentially self-destructive, dynamics are made the object of investigation in Kelley, Reinventing Allegory. For work in the same general direction with regard to Milton’s Sin and Death specifically, see Philip J. Gallagher, “‘Real or Allegoric’: The Ontology of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost”, English Literary Renaissance 6 (1976): 317–35, Stephen M. Fallon, “Milton’s Sin and Death: The Ontology of Allegory in Paradise Lost”, English Literary Renaissance 17 (1987): 329–50, and Knapp, Personification and the Sublime, 130–39. J. A. Burrow, Medieval Writers and their Work: Middle English Literature and its Background 1100–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 87. Tuve, Allegorical Imagery, 12. Robert Henryson, “The Paddock and the Mouse”, in Poems, ed. Denton Fox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 103–110. Burrow, Medieval Writers and their Work, 107. Cf. Tuve, Allegorical Imagery, 13.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene There is a certain rationale to that taxonomy. For, we might say, the very kind of description ordinarily called ‘literal’ is itself exemplificative in nature. Thus, when we say that ‘this rose is red’ or that ‘Prince Arthur is a virtuous man’, the literal meaning of our statements would seem to be that the rose in question is an example of a red thing, and that Arthur is an example of a virtuous man – or that the rose exemplifies redness, and Arthur virtuousness.33 But that is not the way Spenser himself seems to understand the matter. Rather his account in his letter to Raleigh of The Faerie Queene’s “Allegoricall deuises” consists chiefly in expounding the poem’s exemplificative meaning. Indeed when he describes himself as using “Allegorical deuises” in the poem rather than speaking “plainly in way of precepts”, he is actually summing up the procedure which he has already discussed at length of presenting “doctrine by ensample” rather than “by rule”. According to the letter, “a vertuous man” is at least a key aspect of what Arthur represents allegorically. In that respect, as William Nelson observes, the letter to Raleigh is typical of its time; for it is common for Renaissance poets and poetic commentators to include “the lessons to be learned from the example of the characters in the story” amongst what they call the ‘allegorical’ readings of their texts.34 And that makes its own kind of sense: for, we might say, a character no more literally ‘is’ what he or she exemplifies (the individual fictional person no more literally ‘is’ a kind of person) than the character we call a personification literally ‘is’ the thing, impersonal in kind, that he or she personifies; both sorts of reading involve taking one thing as the sign of another. There is no easy way to reconcile the two perspectives. Rather the exemplary occupies a contestable border area between the literal and the allegorical, to which each side can lay a plausible claim. But there are distinct advantages for the Spenser critic to treating exemplary meaning, as Spenser did, as a species of the allegorical. For much that I have said about allegory is applicable to the exemplificative interpretation of texts; moreover, Spenser in particular weaves exemplificative interpretation into the structure of his poem’s selfcommentary in a way that cannot be fully appreciated so long as we regard reading the story as ‘allegory’ and as ‘exemplum’ as two fundamentally distinct operations. For one thing, exemplificative reading, like allegorical reading at large, can

33

34

Thus in the philosophy of language we encounter, as the names of reciprocal functions in literal language use, the ‘denotation’ of an object by a predicate (e.g. ‘bright’ denotes – amongst other things – the sun), and the ‘exemplification’ of a predicate, or of the corresponding property, by an object (e.g. the sun exemplifies – amongst other things – what we mean by ‘bright’). See Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, 2nd edn (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), 52ff. William Nelson, The Poetry of Edmund Spenser: A Study (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1963), 129–30 and 324. See, e.g., Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, ed. Jan Van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 53.

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Allegorical Characters be made to occur in the experience of the fictional characters whose world is being interpreted. Indeed the interpretation of characters as exemplars can be brought into narrative contact with other forms of allegorical character interpretation. Thus Alma actually compares Guyon, as an exemplar of bashfulness, to Shamefastness, as its personification: . . . Why wonder yee Faire Sir at that, which ye so much embrace? She is the fountaine of your modestee; You shamefast are, but Shamefastnesse it selfe is shee.

(II.ix.43).

Similarly, when Arthur encounters the character Ignaro who keeps the keys to Orgoglio’s dungeon, he makes the comical mistake of respectfully treating him as an exemplar of “reuerend” old age, when in fact he is a personification of the contemptible quality of ignorance, as the prince eventually surmises (I.viii.30–34). And Guyon and Pyrochles actually come to blows over the question whether the character “Occasion” ought to be treated as a personification of what her name and iconographic appearance suggest (II.iv.4 and 10–13), or rather as an exemplar of the helpless woman, whose oppressor, Guyon, is by definition a cowardly villain – the very “ensample of . . . childish might” (II.iv.45; also II.v.17). The frequency with which characters in the narrative argue and make mistakes about whom to treat as personifications and whom as mere exemplars should alert us to just how fine is the line between the two kinds of figures in The Faerie Queene. To the extent that a character consistently behaves virtuously, or gluttonously, or whatever, he or she becomes susceptible of interpretation, both by fellow characters and by us, either as an exemplar of that quality or as its personification – or indeed as both. For the personification of any attribute that a person might have, will normally also exemplify the kind of person who has that attribute: as, for instance, in any appearance of the Deadly Sins, Idleness will exemplify the idle person, Gluttony the gluttonous one, and so on (as in The Faerie Queene I.iv.18–35). In some cases we even divine solely from characters’ exemplary behaviour what it is they personify, as we gather that the seven unnamed “Bead-men” of the holy hospital on the road to the New Jerusalem personify the seven works of mercy, from the fact that what they do is to perform those acts in an exemplary way (I.x.36–43).35 So where a text does not indicate clearly where exemplification stops and personification begins, it may be in vain for us to seek the ‘correct’ answer ourselves. For example, when Spenser in the letter to Raleigh describes himself as using the heroes of the first three books to “expresse Holynes”, to “sette forth Temperaunce”, and to “picture Chastity”, it may be in vain to ask whether we are meant to construe them as actually personifying or merely exemplifying 35

See Hamilton’s note on The Faerie Queene, I.x.36.3.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene their respective virtues. In either case their behaviour is being glossed as a narrative representation of the qualities in question; and that may be all we can or need to know. To that extent, Angus Fletcher seems right to say that a character’s being “a personified abstraction or a representative type . . . amounts to much the same thing”, the point in either case being that he or she will have a “characteristic way of acting, which is severely limited in variety”.36 But Fletcher’s account, while usefully emphasising the similarity of the personification and the exemplar, in another respect is too narrow in scope to allow for all the ways in which characters are used allegorically in a poem like The Faerie Queene. While some of Spenser’s characters do invite an allegorical reading simply in virtue of their “characteristic way of acting, which is severely limited in variety” – I think again of the seven “Bead-men”, whose whole imagined existence consists in performance of the seven works of mercy – many others, in particular the poem’s various questing heroes, are less limited in the range of their imagined activities. In fact while it may be true that having a tendency to behave virtuously, or gluttonously, or whatever, will make a character susceptible of being interpreted as an exemplar and/or a personification of that quality, with the poem’s heroes it seems we proceed in the opposite direction: we start from their having allegorical meanings explicitly ascribed to them, and thereupon attempt to reconcile their behaviour as the poem presents it to the expectations the ascription of allegorical significance raises. Here we come to one further reason for treating exemplary meaning under the rubric of the allegorical – namely that exemplificative reading, like allegorical reading at large, can involve a certain violence’s being done to the object of interpretation. Somewhat as the allegorical scheme of the Convivio can be said “to rob the ‘donna pietosa’ of the Vita Nuova of all real existence”,37 so extracting characters from the complexities of the stories in which they appear to hold them up as exemplars of particular virtues or vices can be said “to flatten” those characters, “in so far as it sees them only from the point of view of the general truth in question”.38 Thus a triptych in the Comedy’s circle of the proud (Purgatorio, x.28–99) depicting David, Mary, and Trajan at moments of great humility, reduces them to “the humble King of the Jews, the humble Queen of Heaven, the humble Emperor of Rome”. The effect of isolating those scenes from their lives is to eliminate from view everything except their exemplifying humility, much as (to adopt an analogy proposed by Fletcher) a caricaturist aims at “the powerful elimination of any complicating features in the drawing of his characters”, so that the desired “meaning” of each figure is “isolated”.39 Such exemplificative reading, with its flattening or excision of character complexity, is, as Carolynn Van Dyke has said of allegorical exegesis, 36 37 38 39

Fletcher, Allegory, 38. Singleton, “Dante’s Allegory”, 98. This and the following quotation, Burrow, Medieval Writers and their Work, 109. Fletcher, Allegory, 33–34.

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Allegorical Characters “not just a method of discovering implicit meanings . . . but . . . a declaration that certain meanings, implicit or explicit, constituted the text’s intention, while other meanings, although explicit, were insignificant . . . [or] in short, a method of suppressing meaning”.40 Spenser’s letter to Raleigh, with its representation of Arthur and the other chief knights of the The Faerie Queene as straightforward exemplars (and perhaps even personifications) of their respective virtues, is a notable instance of such after-the-fact interpretative ‘flattening’. For it is far from clear that, in the poem, those characters invariably behave in a manner consistent with the virtues with which the letter to Raleigh allegorically identifies them.41 Even more remarkably, in the very body of the poem, the narrator’s exemplificative glosses on the action often ride roughshod over complexities of plot and character. For instance, it seems only a narrator hell-bent on reading everything Redcross does as exemplifying holiness could treat his combat with Sansjoy in the House of Pride as an exemplum of the power of “The faithfull knight” to overcome “his faithlesse foe” (I.v.Arg.), given that his actual motive for fighting seems to be a small-minded pride in certain battle prizes which, so far from being worth the trouble taken in keeping them, actually dishonour him by association.42 But the potential violence of exemplificative interpretation is not limited in The Faerie Queene to such ‘authorial’ comments on characters, made from outside the story events. Rather such violence is also a feature of many exemplificative interpretations that take place in the story, as intrinsic parts of characters’ experience. Accordingly we have to consider not merely an abstract sense in which the poem’s exemplificative self-commentary can be said to ‘do violence’ to the poem’s characters, but a concrete sense as well, in which characters are made actually to experience the violent interpretative wrenching of their deeds’ significance. Thus in Book Two, Guyon is continually subjected to Pyrochles’ and Cymochles’ wilful construing of his actions as exempla of knavishness. In fighting with Occasion, he is told that he is “th’ensample of . . . childish might” (II.iv.45); in killing Pyrochles’ horse, that he exhibits a 40 41

42

Van Dyke, The Fiction of Truth, 44–45. Cf. Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 24. Cf. Colin Burrow, Edmund Spenser, 55, who observes that The Faerie Queene’s principal knights often shed light on the virtues with which they are associated “through negative, or testingly near negative, example”; and Kelley, Reinventing Allegory, 29, who argues that the poem questions the letter to Raleigh’s presentation of the knights as “tidy emblematic packages . . . each fully representative of the truths embedded in the ‘continued allegorie’ of the poem.” Those who have noted the inadequacy of the narrator’s interpretation of the Sansjoy episode include: Jerome S. Dees, “The Narrator of The Faerie Queene: Patterns of Response”, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 12 (1970–71), 559; Elizabeth Heale, The Faerie Queene: A Reader’s Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 37; David Lee Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 121. But see also Chapter Four, below.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene “coward courage” which typifies his conduct (“So hast thou oft . . . thine honour blent”) (II.v.5); in breaking off a fight with Cymochles, that he has “foully fled from famous enemie” (II.vi.39). Even his apparent death after the trial of Mammon’s cave can be construed, absurdly, as proof of having lived shamefully: “The worth of all men by their end esteeme, / . . . / Bad therefore I him deeme, that thus lies dead on field” (II.viii.14). Similarly, Redcross weathers Archimago’s and Duessa’s attempt after the completion of his quest publicly to depict him not as an exemplar of faithfulness but the opposite, a “False erraunt knight, infamous, and forswore” (I.xii.27). And Artegall, at the end of his book, must patiently endure railings from “Enuie” and “Detraction” (V.xii.28–43), despite possibly being aware that it is just such carping at “Faerie Court” that caused him to be called away from the “course of Iustice” he had begun in Irena’s kingdom (V.xii.27). Characters subjected to such interpretative violence are sometimes able to respond by themselves working towards a more favourable public interpretation of their own deeds. Most evidently successful is Redcross, who with Una’s help discredits his foes’ depiction of him (I.xii.31–36), and achieves instead the acclaim to which the Palmer appeals in citing him as an example of virtue to which Guyon may aspire (II.i.31–32). Such acts of favourable interpretation involve the poem’s virtuous characters in the exemplificative reading of their own and each other’s deeds – with all the potential for the flattening or excision of character complexity that such exemplificative reading implies. As we shall see in the following chapters, those acts of apologetic interpretation within the story are often better understood as having to do – like the apologetic letter to Raleigh – with the “auoyding of gealous opinions and misconstructions”, than as aiming to represent the story impartially. Nor is such a comparison between the characters inside the story and the authorial persona proffered as having written it, merely fortuitous. For the author is presented to us as deeply sharing the chief interpretative concerns of his protagonists – with the ill effects of slander on the one hand (see esp. VI.xii.40–41), and with the virtuous motivating influence of appropriate “prayses” on the other (I.Pr.1). Indeed by imagining himself as a “Poet historical” who revives the memory of heroic deeds from a past age, Spenser makes his authorial persona’s interpretative activity in the poem not merely analogous to his characters’ own interpretative performances, but a concrete part of the world they inhabit. He is the one who can fulfil his heroes’ motivating desire that history should preserve a memory of their accomplishments in a version that does credit to their names. Like the God of Dante’s Comedy, he is the final arbiter, within the characters’ own world, of the significance that will be attributed to each of them. Thus there is a continuity, both thematic and narrative, between the acts of self-interpretation that the poem’s principal characters undertake, and the acts of self-interpretation that the poem as a whole undertakes in the person of its ostensible author. In both cases, we need to be equally aware of the extent to 52

Allegorical Characters which such self-interpretation may “direct your vnderstanding”, not to the inherent meaning of what is commented on, but to a meaning the commentary itself sets out to produce for a particular end. It is those two linked sorts of self-interpretation in The Faerie Queene that the remainder of this book sets out to explore.

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Part Two

Self-Interpretation in The Legend of Holiness

Introduction

It has been widely observed that the ostensibly authoritative moral selfcommentary prominent in the first book of The Faerie Queene cannot be relied on to accord with the moral significance we would attribute to the story’s events in that commentary’s absence. Nor is it merely, as Paul Alpers argues, that the commentary we get en route is “provisional”, “true but incomplete”, but that, as Jerome Dees shows, it appears at least at times to be quite on the wrong track, “falsifying” the significance of what is commented on, actually construing as virtuous what appears on other evidence to be vicious, and so on.1 The four chapters that follow examine in detail two substantial respects in which Book One skews its apparent significance through self-interpretation. The first is its inclination to treat as so many virtuous achievements the protagonist’s early victories in battle; the second, its tendency to ascribe the blame for his mishaps to the disguised enemies he encounters along his way, and above all to Duessa. For critics who have taken on trust the book’s self-interpretation in its first six cantos, the significance of the Redcross knight’s early martial victories is that he proves himself superior therein to a series of vices opposed to holiness: to error, faithlessness, and so on. Such a reading implies either, as John Ruskin supposed, that Redcross embodies his titular virtue throughout the story, or, as F. M. Padelford influentially argued, that he acquires it step by step along the way, in the very act of defeating his foes.2 But as various more recent critics have shown, there is also much contrary evidence in the story implying, firstly, 1

2

Paul Alpers, “Narration in The Faerie Queene”, ELH 44 (1977): 19–39; quoting 30. Dees, “The Narrator of The Faerie Queene”, 564. An example of what Dees means by the incorporated commentary’s being on the wrong track is the narrator’s enthusiastically espousing, in the House of Pride cantos, the very values of secular “prayse and honour” (I.v.7) which even then are leading the hero astray into the service of Lucifera (Dees, 559). John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Vol. 3, App. 2; reprinted in Spenser, Works: a variorum edition, ed. E. A. Greenlaw et al., 10 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1932–49), vol. 1, 422–24. F. M. Padelford, “The Spiritual Allegory of The Faerie Queene, Book One”, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 22 (1923): 1–17.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene that the knight acts less than virtuously in winning those battles;3 secondly and more broadly, that the whole direction of his moral evolution during that period is not progressive but regressive, amounting to confirmation not in virtue but in sin.4 Thus, in the first half of Book One, the poem itself gives rise to two opposed accounts of its hero’s “character development”.5 Trusting the book’s self-interpretation in its second half similarly leads to an essentially positive evaluation of its protagonist, though not quite to the same positive evaluation as is implied in cantos one to six. The picture here is no longer of a hero who, throughout his story, either always possessed or else progressively acquired his nominal virtue, but rather of a man who, though good at heart, went astray, misled by bad company, and only on being found by his true friends returned to the laudable life for which he was destined. That discrepancy in itself poses something of a challenge, even to a criticism that entirely trusts the poem to interpret itself.6 But what compounds the problem is that the book’s retrospective interpretation of the hero’s early adventures fails to tally not only with the positive evaluation, but likewise with the negative evidence found in the first half of the story. For it appeared there that the knight’s foes, on whom the blame is later to be systematically pinned as the culpable agents of the knight’s mishaps, in the event at worst pandered to a sinful course actively pursued by Redcross himself.7 So that in its later as well as its earlier cantos, the first book in the act of interpreting itself does not so much clarify its own moral significance as divide itself against itself in the experience of an attentive reader. The recognition of such intrinsic tensions in Book One constitutes an 3 4

5

6

7

See, e.g., Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene, 69, and Heale, The Faerie Queene: A Reader’s Guide, 36–37. This thesis has been pursued by a number of critics, e.g., Kerby Neill, “The Degradation of the Red Cross Knight”, ELH 19 (1952): 173–90; Williams, Spenser’s Faerie Queene; Patrick Cullen, Infernal Triad: The Flesh, The World, and the Devil in Spenser and Milton (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 1974); Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet; and Darryl J. Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). On the grounds of such self-contradictory evidence in the poem, Nelson, in The Poetry of Edmund Spenser, 122, advises us not to expect consistent “character development” in The Faerie Queene’s heroes. But it is not, as Nelson would have it, that the poem lacks narrative logic, but rather that it has in effect too much, painstakingly giving substantial grounds for two different moral narratives, separately plausible but mutually incompatible. Thus I will speak not of the poem’s incoherence but of its internal tension. Padelford’s account, in “The Spiritual Allegory of The Faerie Queene”, 8, of the hero’s being duped early on by cunning enemies, as merely a part of the instructive experience whereby he gradually becomes strengthened in virtue, is a good example of an attempt to smooth over that discrepancy. See especially Hume’s account, in Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet, 76–84, of the evidence convicting the protagonist of moral responsibility for his own fall. The discrepancy between that evidence and the exonerating retrospective accounts is the focus for Berger in “Displacing Autophobia”.

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Part Two: Introduction advance on two earlier kinds of critical approach: on the one hand that of Padelford, who took it for granted that the poem’s acts of self-interpretation are reliable guides to its moral significance, to which our own reading of all its narrative details must be accommodated willy-nilly; on the other that of A. C. Hamilton, who, noting the violence done to the story by Padelford’s kind of interpretation, denies that the poem itself (as opposed to its critics) in any part solicits such a reductive reading.8 But if the tensions that Padelford and Hamilton in different ways sweep over have now begun to be acknowledged, nonetheless our critical analysis of them to date has been only fragmentary. In the first place, suspicion regarding the poem’s self-interpretation in the course of the hero’s early encounters has focused mainly on the commentating voices which can most easily be treated as interpreting the story world from somewhere outside it: the voice of the canto arguments and, especially, that of the narrator.9 As a result, the analysis has had a piecemeal character, certain episodes largely escaping the close scrutiny to which others have repeatedly been subjected. For example, in contrast to the hero’s duel with Sansjoy, which has come in for much suspicious reading, his earlier battle with Error continues to be seen for the most part in terms carried over from a less sceptical phase of Spenser criticism.10 In Chapter Four I try to correct the situation by giving a clearer account of the determining locus of selfinterpretation in those early scenes, and by showing how due attention to the allegorical interpretation that takes place within the story world can reveal a more systematic connection between episodes than is otherwise discernible. What emerges is that the book’s chief interest in the early cantos lies not with the hero’s failure to live up to some agreed moral standard, but with the failings of the moral standard itself that governs his choices. In Chapter Five I look more closely at the specious mode of moral self-interpretation that leads Redcross astray, asking what relation it bears to the various modes of interpretation put forth by rival religious and political systems vying for supremacy in Spenser’s society, and showing how the knight’s recovery from his erroneous ways involves a shift to a different self-interpretative paradigm with different religious and political associations. In Chapters Six and Seven, my attention turns to the way that, in retrospect, 8 9

10

Padelford, “The Spiritual Allegory of The Faerie Queene, Book One”, 10 and passim. Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory, 32; cf. Hamilton’s specific references to Padelford, 7–8. See especially Dees, “The Narrator of The Faerie Queene”, and Kathleen Williams, “Vision and Rhetoric: The Poet’s Voice in The Faerie Queene”, ELH 36 (1969); such an approach has been echoed in various writers, for example, in Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet, 84–85. Thus for example Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory, 37–38, Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet, 77–81, Heale, The Faerie Queene: A Reader’s Guide, 34, John N. King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 47, and Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser, 69–73, all tend to discount the praises the hero accumulates in his duel with Sansjoy, but are much less sceptical as regards the supposed laudability of his victory over Error.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene responsibility for the knight’s earlier errors is reallocated to his enemies. The small amount of criticism attending to that difficulty has acutely observed the complicity of the hero himself and his friends, along with the narrator, in that reallocation of blame, and accordingly has asked whether a hero who interprets his own past deeds more generously than the facts seem to warrant can really be regarded as a reformed character, or whether on the contrary the characters and narrator who collude in representing him as such ought themselves to be regarded with moral suspicion.11 That line of enquiry has important ramifications, because it raises in a concrete manner an extremely big question, namely, whether the dubiousness of the ostensibly authoritative self-interpretation which the book places on its own story details might extend likewise to its ostensible overall significance, didactic and nationalistic, as an exemplary tale of the knight of holiness and patron saint of England. That is, might even the overall picture the book gives of itself, as a loyal instrument of the Elizabethan polity, amount to an outright falsifying of the story’s intrinsic meaning? In Chapter Six I argue that, while that possibility should be taken seriously, in fact the book’s declared moral purposes are probably intended, not to be falsified by, but rather themselves to justify, the poem’s conspicuous complicity in scapegoating the hero’s enemies for the hero’s own sins. In Chapter Seven, however, I look in detail at the allegorical structure of the procedure of scapegoating, and at that procedure’s crucial role in the Legend of Holiness, in order to show how the self-interpretative energy concentrated in Book One into trying to establish the soundness of its own moral agenda cannot help but leave in the text indications of that project’s ultimately being doomed to failure.

11

See J. T. Miller, “The Omission in Red Cross Knight’s Story”, and Berger, “Displacing Autophobia”.

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Chapter Four

The Locus of Self-Interpretation

I

N THE FIRST half of the Legend of Holiness, the canto arguments and the ipronouncements of the narrator are certainly amongst the most conspicuously unreliable of the poem’s self-interpreting voices. But it is not sufficient to regard them as doing the whole or even the chief work of misrepresenting the story’s moral significance. That remains the case, even if we ascribe to the narrator not only such reflective commentaries as appear at canto openings, but equally, moral valuations attributable to the storytelling voice which occur in the forward stream of the narrative itself.1 For as I mean to show, it is not merely such ‘external’ valuations of the protagonist’s actions as are attributed to the narrating voice that present difficulties to our making consistent moral sense of his early adventures, but likewise the allegorical interpretation of his encounters intrinsic to the narrative events themselves.2 Moreover, the much-noted unreliability of the narrator proves to be a secondary phenomenon, an extension of the story’s own dubious self-interpretative regime rather than a gratuitous imposition of a misinterpretation on the story’s action from without. What I mean is this. We know, simply in virtue of what happens in the story, the name of each of the knight’s opponents in battle: it is given in his first encounter, for example, by Una’s declaration that “This is . . . Errours den” (I.i.13), and in his second by a “great shield . . . writ with . . . Sans foy” (I.ii.12). So even apart from the interpretative ‘help’ provided by the narrator and canto arguments, the question is already before us, what the hero’s vanquishing of a 1

2

Examples of the latter are the following dubious moral valuations: “his stout heroïcke heart” (I.ii.21); “the noble pray” (I.iv.39). See the criticism of Jerome Dees on this point in Alpers, “Narration in The Faerie Queene”, 22, and Stan Hinton, “The Poet and his Narrator: Spenser’s Epic Voice”, ELH 41 (1974): 165–81, esp. 175; cf. Dees, “The Narrator of The Faerie Queene”, 540. The positions of all three critics are discussed in Berger, “Narrative as Rhetoric in The Faerie Queene”, 10–14. Berger, in “Narrative as Rhetoric”, citing examples chiefly from Book Two, likewise argues that in The Faerie Queene the story itself, and not merely the narrator, is an unreliable guide. For comparable points regarding Book One, see Berger, “Displacing Autophobia”, esp. 169.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene monster called Error can mean if not that error of some kind is done away with, and what his defeat of the knight Sansfoy if not that faithlessness is in some sense overcome. Nor is it only the narrator, but likewise such a seemingly trustworthy character within the action as Una, who drives home the obvious kind of answer – as when she construes the knight’s defeat of Error as a proof of his virtue and of his being worthy to bear the armour of holiness (I.i.27). Those are the sorts of evidence that the critics have had to ignore who have tried, by demonstrating the untrustworthiness merely of the poem’s narration, to refute the trusting variety of reading typified by Padelford. That is not to say that the criticism which has displaced Padelford’s is wrong to find grounds in the story for a contrary reading – in Anthea Hume’s acute terms, for regarding the knight in his early encounters as in fact possessing “little or nothing of the required virtue” of holiness, and his progression from one adventure to the next as the tale of “a moral fall, a surrender to sinful impulses”, in which “over-confidence, lust, pride and sloth carry him with a kind of inexorability into Orgoglio’s dungeon in the central cantos of the book”.3 The problem is only that such criticism often fails, meanwhile, to reckon fully with the evidence in the story world that seems stubbornly to support Padelford’s kind of reading. Thus Hume, for example, when she comes to the battles whose seeming significance forms the backbone of Padelford’s account, rightly observes that the Redcross knight’s choosing to fight them may be less praiseworthy than it appears, but wrongly writes as if it is only the narrator’s say-so that makes them appear praiseworthy.4 She does not reckon, that is, with the fact that, even apart from the narrator’s commentary, the knight’s getting the better of a character whose very shield names him “Sans ioy” (I.iv.38) seems to beg for the sort of reading we find in Ruskin, to the effect that our hero (having already “vanquished . . . Error” and “conquered Infidelity”) has now “partly conquered Despondency” as well.5 But that is to leave intact the ultimate basis in story events on which Padelford had built his critical narrative of the hero’s moral progress – a fact Hume unwittingly registers, when in places she treats the protagonist’s early victories, even if “perhaps somewhat ambiguous”, as still in some ill-acknowledged sense reflecting well on him.6 Hence in comparing Hume’s and Padelford’s readings it can seem that each merely reads selectively, imputing to the poem one or another sort of coherence that it does not intrinsically possess. Such a relativistic conclusion would accord with William Nelson’s view that the Legend of Holiness comprises no one “continuing moral tale”, but that, 3 4 5 6

Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet, 84 and 73. Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet, 84. Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Vol. 3, App. 2 (in Spenser, Works, I.422). Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet, 73. Something similar is true, e.g., of Hamilton (see esp. The Structure of Allegory, 69–71), who for all his declared rejection of Padelford’s approach vacillates between scepticism regarding the moral value of the knight’s victories and a repetition of the same assumptions about their significance as govern Padelford’s reading.

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The Locus of Self-Interpretation putting aside the coherence falsely attributed to it by critics, “the narrative structure of The Faerie Queene is . . . almost frivolously weak”.7 And indeed, to ascribe unreliability only to The Faerie Queene’s narration is insufficient to rebut Nelson’s charge of the poem’s being weakly plotted. For what he cites is a mismatch between narrative evidence concerning the state of the knight’s moral development and allegorical meanings manifestly suggested by story events themselves. For example, it is just while Redcross is evincing by his actions deepening faithlessness to Una that “he is nevertheless able to conquer Sans Foy, or faithlessness.”8 The mismatch is a problem not only for Nelson’s principal targets, critics like Padelford who had built around the knight’s victories a self-consistent story of gradual “character development” towards complete embodiment of his nominal virtue, but equally for those like Hume who would have the action univocally register the opposite, his continuous moral degeneration. Nor is the difficulty solved if, observing that the poem gives grounds for seeing the hero’s victories themselves as loci of his moral degeneration, we simply conclude that to read those battles favourably, as critics like Padelford do, is a mistake, and that the actual rule of The Faerie Queene’s allegory is that “psychomachian battles confirm the identity between the two knights rather than distinguish them.”9 For it remains to be explained why Spenser would choose means of expression so palpably conducive to misinterpretation. Why, that is, express a character’s moral failings by a series of victories in battle, when doing so would inevitably open the story to the kind of misreading found in Ruskin and Padelford? At any rate we can hardly suppose that it was just an oversight on Spenser’s part – that he was unaware of the likelihood of being read in Padelford’s manner – since he himself lends to that species of reading, even if “with irony”,10 the extensive support of his narrator and others in the poem. A more satisfactory solution resides, I think, in the fact that all the interpreters who impute a positive moral significance to the knight’s early martial victories, be they critics, figures like the narrator who interpret the story from within the poem, or even characters within the narrative action such as Una, make a generic assumption in so doing: namely, that the allegorical meaning of the hero’s encounters is grounded in the symbolic conventions of medieval romance, according to which a victory in combat implies the triumph of the morally as well as physically better.11 But in the early cantos of the Legend of 7 8 9 10 11

Nelson, The Poetry of Edmund Spenser, 133–34. Nelson, The Poetry of Edmund Spenser, 134. Wofford, The Choice of Achilles, 284–85. Quoting Wofford, The Choice of Achilles, 284, who follows Dees, Hume, etc., in making the narrator the locus of misinterpretation in the poem. Cullen, Infernal Triad, 37 (and cf. 43–45), while invoking the conventions not of romance but “the vices-and-virtues combat”, makes the point well that “The literary background would

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene Holiness, it is first and foremost Redcross who engages in battles on the assumption that winning them will have a conventional chivalric significance, establishing his superiority in moral terms.12 Thus in the encounter with Sansfoy it is the knight himself, with the connivance of his unrecognised foe Duessa, who having slain his foe makes that act out to have been a conventional romance rescue, whereby a lady is delivered from the clutches of an evil knight into the safe hands of a good one. In his own words to her, “Henceforth in safe assuraunce may ye rest, / Hauing both found a new friend you to aid, / And lost an old foe, that did you molest” (I.ii.27). Meanwhile, though, the irony of the declared moral distinction between victor and vanquished is intimated in the strongest terms, by the fact of the hero’s angling, in the very act of pronouncing it, for a role in practice indistinguishable from the one that Sansfoy previously had played.13 The same assumption about the role of combat in establishing moral distinctions informs the knight’s approach to his duel with Sansjoy, which he pursues in the conviction that it will prove his chivalric and moral right to Sansfoy’s shield, “the meed he wonne in fray” (I.iv.39), and the corresponding iniquity of the one who tries to take it from him. Here too the irony is palpable, for his very inclination to stake his life on entitlement to a worse-than-worthless prize (a shield that is the very badge of faithlessness) actually shows how far astray he is from truly moral considerations. So it seems that, contrary to the protagonist’s presupposition, the romance convention which equates martial with moral victory does not in general pertain in the Legend of Holiness – a notable exception being his fight with the dragon, whose unique standing will prove very much to the point in the poem’s moral allegory. Nonetheless (and for current purposes this is the crucial point), however mistaken the hero’s moral assumptions, it is his largely successful pursuit of the actions that seem morally good from his perspective that actually shapes the story in the early episodes – so that inevitably his part in the resulting narrative will have a certain specious appearance of creditworthiness, precisely if looked at under the same assumptions as guide his actions. Such a perspective is adopted by all those, be they fellow-characters, the narrator, or trusting critics, who accept the knight’s early victories in battle

12 13

lead us to expect, in a combat between a pagan and a Christian knight, clear-cut moral polarities: Sansfoy will be defeated by Foy in a kind of moral mathematics. In fact, however, the defeat of an evil does not necessarily testify to the triumph of a good.” Cf. J. King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition, 187, for whom the poem sharply questions “the formulaic concerns of romantic epic”, and in particular, “the traditional association of heroism with military victory”. Cf. the equation that Cullen makes in Infernal Triad, 45, between “the naive simplicity of the hero’s and the genre’s moral vision”. As Wofford observes in The Choice of Achilles, 284–85, “Redcrosse . . . is victorious over Sans Foy, only to pick up his armor, take up with his consort, Duessa, and in all ways show himself to be well within the grip of Faithlessness.” Cf. Cullen, Infernal Triad, 38.

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The Locus of Self-Interpretation as moral victories vis-à-vis the vices his enemies embody. The resulting reading indeed does violence to the story it interprets, but a violence that is initiated inside the story by its wilfully self-misinterpreting protagonist; its seeming coherence as a moral narrative depends on an ignoring of just the contrary evidence which the knight himself ignores in choosing his course of action. In the narrator’s case, we may observe time after time that it is not that the story neutrally awaits moral interpretation, a job the narrator is for whatever reason then made to perform badly, but that the narrator’s misinterpretations merely express in seemingly objective terms the hero’s own point of view, with the effect of displaying to an attentive reader by a kind of reductio ad absurdum the fundamental inadequacy of that point of view as a moral key to the developing story.14 When Redcross recovers Sansfoy’s shield from Sansjoy’s hands, he is described as having “reskewd the noble pray” (I.iv.39), a description that could only report the hero’s own mistaken view of the shield’s significance. Similarly, when he is unable to sleep on the eve of his duel with Sansjoy, he is said to be kept awake by a “noble hart, that harbours vertuous thought” and that will not let him rest until he has won “glorie excellent”, an account that pseudo-authoritatively echoes the self-assessment of one who lies in a “restlesse passion”, “Deuizing, how that doughtie turnament / With greatest honour he atchieuen might” (I.v.1). What such commentaries properly establish is not that Redcross actually exemplifies the moral excellence they attribute to him,15 but how the world looks to one who believes he exemplifies such virtue, how a vaingloriously confident self-image as one who highmindedly “striues for right” (I.v.8–9) can in the first place motivate such a misguided course as he pursues. Attending to the unreliability not only of the narrator’s interpretation, but firstly of the knight’s self-interpretation, allows us to see the full significance of the “restlesse passion” that “did all night torment” our would-be hero with yearning for recognition of his worth. It is not merely that that passion is in reality (as befits the house in which it robs him of sleep) the sin of pride, but that it is pride in the specific form of self-

14

15

Dees, “The Narrator of The Faerie Queene”, 547, does note as an aspect of the narrator’s unreliability that “A generalisation which at first appears to be the narrator’s own may on second glance turn out to be his expression of a character’s thoughts”, and that “The narrator may even adopt for extended periods a character’s mode of thinking”. I agree, but see the relationship as more systematic: the almost ubiquitous function of the narrating voice is to express the perspective of the characters from whose point of view the action unfolds. Cf. Cullen’s valuable discussion, in Infernal Triad, 45–51, of the way that, in the House of Pride episode, the effect of “the narrator’s tempting of us” with a specious rhetoric of moral opposition where the narrative reality is moral convergence, is that “We experience Red Crosse’s hypocrisy, and we quickly perceive the fraudulence behind his vision of himself”. As against Alpers, The Poetry of The Faerie Queene, 340–41, and Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser, 96–97, for whom the narrator’s comments on “The noble hart, that harbours virtuous thought” offset the more negative implications of the knight’s lying in a “restlesse passion”.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene righteousness – the pride that, in its arrogance, believes itself to be the true righteousness that is actually its opposite.16 The hero’s actions acquire the specious appearance of being good deeds, because it is precisely in seeming (to himself) to exemplify virtue that he in fact exemplifies an unrepentant state of sin. As is the case systematically in the Legend of Holiness, evil’s power to lead astray consists in a capacity to recommend itself under the appearance of good.17 Now, what I have said of the narrator – that, where he is unreliable as a guide to the action’s real significance, he merely expresses under the semblance of objectivity the point-of-view character’s own perspective – seems also to be true, mutatis mutandis, of the story world itself. For what the hero’s environment time and again is made to present to him in his encounters is precisely a reflection of his own erroneous desires, not only in the familiar sense that what a foe such as Sansfoy ‘is’, at bottom, is an externalisation of the sin then dominant in the protagonist’s psyche, but in the further sense that what the story serves up to him in each adventure is exactly what he is looking for at the time. For example, the fight with Sansfoy, and the booty that comes from it (the enemy’s lady and shield), are just what a straying knight, destitute of cause and companion, might most wish for: they give him a handy and seemingly a well-suited replacement set of objects on which to fasten his interest in defending his own honour and building his heroic reputation. Hence he needs no prompting in “Bidding the Dwarfe with him to bring away / The Sarazins shield, signe of the conqueroure” (I.ii.20); hence, too, so far from needing to be persuaded by Duessa’s account of herself into taking her as a new companion, the knight scarcely needs to listen to her words (I.ii.26), being already strongly predisposed, in what he regards as “his stout heroïcke heart”, to take such a “seeming glorious” prize into his care (I.ii.21). Here lies the specific explanation of the fact that the fight’s outcome seems superficially to reflect well morally on Redcross: for it is precisely by fulfilling his wishes on his own pseudo-moral terms – giving him the seemingly laudable victory and the apparently honourable spoils he so desires – that the story world passes off onto him the incriminating physical regalia that befit his actual spiritual state, bestowing on him a coat of arms and a companion which now suit him better than those with which he set out on his quest. Even a detail such as Duessa’s 16

17

Cf. Heale, The Faerie Queene: A Reader’s Guide, 36, who writes that the knight “acts with self-conscious virtue according to the inadequate rules of chivalry and personal prowess”; also the observation of Andrew Weiner, in “‘Fierce Warres and Faithfull Loues’: Pattern as Structure in Book I of The Faerie Queene”, Huntington Library Quarterly 37 (1973), 48, that “Redcrosse’s weakness is that he seem[s] strong . . . to himself”; and Cullen, Infernal Triad, 43, who sees “Pride’s blindness” in the way “the knight . . . covers his corruption with the gilt of virtue”. Spenser’s concern with this theme has deep roots in Renaissance modes of thought. See for example Quentin Skinner, “Moral Ambiguity and the Renaissance Art of Eloquence”, Essays in Criticism 44 (1994): 267–92.

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The Locus of Self-Interpretation apparent fear of falling into the conqueror’s hands (I.ii.20–21) serves its purpose in that regard, for in giving Redcross occasion to show seemingly laudable courtesy to a helpless lady, it enables him to pursue his very falsehood to Una under the rubric of a knight’s good faith (the rubric “Fidessa”). A comparable back-handed pandering to the hero’s specious value system is seen in each of his early encounters.18 Just as Duessa not only personifies the falsehood of which he is guilty in desiring a new lady but appears in a guise calculated to abet his specious moralisation of that desire, so when Sansjoy arrives at the House of Pride to challenge the knight’s right to his prizes it is not only (as more than one critic has said) that he personifies the kind of hypocritical moral earnestness which the hero himself has displayed in “estraunging” himself from the “ioyaunce vaine” of Lucifera’s procession (I.iv.37–38),19 but moreover that on arriving he behaves in just such a way as to provide a sterling chance for Redcross to put that hypocritical earnestness into bloody-minded action. Likewise Archimago’s first appearance, with a tale of a “wicked wight” suitable for slaying by adventurous knights, follows hard on the heels of the hero’s going in search of “new aduenture” (I.i.28–31), promptly supplying him with just the kind of news he seeks. In fact all the hero’s foes in the early cantos are somewhat like Archimago’s invented “wicked wight”, in seeming made to order such that none of the knight’s pseudo-moral impulses shall go without an object to attach itself to and to further itself upon. I said a little earlier that the story is shaped by the knight’s largely successful pursuit of the actions that seem, from his perspective, morally good; now I can add that his being successful in that regard need not be construed as even a restricted compliment to his knightly prowess. For his success may be seen to spring not from a heroic strength of character whereby he betters his foes (though things do seem that way to him), but from a process of narrative construction of which he is unwitting, whereby his world is made to cater to every sinful wish engendered by his specious moral self-interpretation. The process is akin to that which operates in the narrator’s running commentary, in that its effect is to display more clearly the knight’s disastrous misconstruction of his own role – in this case, by letting it determine the very outward form his experience takes. Indeed the two processes are not only similar but closely linked, for it is essentially insofar as the narrator’s commentary adheres to the outward appearance of events that it is found to be unreliable.20 18

19 20

Weiner, in “Fierce Warres”, 49, makes a kindred point when he observes that, in the first half of Book One, the Redcross knight’s “foes . . . defeat him by allowing him the appearance of winning”; but I would stress that it is not only (though it is in part) the poem’s evil characters who cater to the knight’s mistaken notions of self-advancement, but likewise the story itself which is organised so as to bring those characters onto the scene at just the moments and in just the forms best to serve such a purpose. See, e.g., Heale, The Faerie Queene: A Reader’s Guide, 36–37, and Hamilton, in The Faerie Queene, I.iv.38.6n. Cf. Van Dyke, The Fiction of Truth, 255–56: “throughout The Faerie Queene, Spenser frequently

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene Another habitual reader of events at their face value, and hence yet another contributor to the fact that the knight’s early encounters acquire the specious appearance of reflecting well on him, is surprisingly to be found in the person of Una. It is Una, as I noted earlier, who lauds the hero’s first martial victory, over the monster Error, as “Well worthy” of the Redcross armour he has recently donned; indeed, in praying that he may have “many such”, she sets it up as an exemplary instance of the kind of action he should undertake as a knight (I.i.27). But such a retrospective assessment contrasts suspiciously with the poem’s prior depiction of a battle which, far from showing off the knight’s armour to advantage and so illustrating how “Vertue giues her selfe light, through darkenesse for to wade” (I.i.12), could coax from it only “A litle glooming light, much like a shade” (I.i.14).21 Nor, indeed, was it Una’s original counsel to Redcross to provoke a fight with Error, but to avoid such an apparently needless battle; in fact the only thing we saw obliging him to go forward was his own dubious, hot-headed sense of chivalric honour and shame (I.i.12–14). Such considerations might not be sufficient by themselves to invalidate Una’s subsequent panegyric: to have defeated Error might still legitimately be counted as a good thing, even if chief amongst the errors the knight needed to overcome in so doing were his own deficient motives for undertaking the battle in the first place. But what is telling is that an end to that error of motivation is just what is not found in the course of his winning the fight and receiving praises for so doing. On the contrary, confirmed by his lady in a virtuous interpretation of his action, what he proceeds to do, as if taking to heart her wishing him “many such” encounters, is immediately to go seeking “new aduenture” (I.i.28) wherever he can hear of it, in the process letting his assigned quest disappear from view. Thus he is actually reinforced by his success in the battle, and by Una’s response to that success, in his initial error of interpreting himself as a conventional “errant knight” of the secular romance tradition, who rides forth in search of evils to be put down, with no higher purpose in mind than increasing his own renown.22 It is as such that he latches onto a hermit’s red-herring adventure of a man whose existence is a “disgrace” to “all knighthood” (I.i.31); as such that he chivalrously murders an unknown knight and lays claim to his lady and shield; as such that he lingers in the House of Pride to fight for the supposed honour of possessing those spoils.

21

22

uses his narrative voice to involve us in the empirical surface of the story”. Also Berger, “Narrative as Rhetoric”, 47: “the narrator models a kind of reading . . . inviting identification rather than distance, innocent rather than suspicious response”. As noted, e.g., by Williams, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 3, Quilligan, The Language of Allegory, 36, and by Weiner, “Fierce Warres”, 40; Hamilton, in The Faerie Queene I.i.14.4n & 5n, notes the implicit connection between the two images but not their mismatch. For the way the Legend of Holiness associates the term “errant knight” with error, see e.g. I.ii.34, I.x.10, I.xii.27, as well as Quilligan, The Language of Allegory, 33–34, and Gareth Roberts, The Faerie Queene (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992), 4.

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The Locus of Self-Interpretation To say that Una is a misleading interpreter of the knight’s victory over Error may require some further defence, in view of the fact that she herself is repeatedly referred to as “Truth” (I.ii–iii.Args), and consequently has been regarded by most critics as intrinsically reliable.23 But Una’s equation with Truth, like the poem’s repeated indications that the knight’s early victories are virtuous achievements, turns out to be a case of our being told that something is so in the face of immediate evidence to the contrary; for her fallibility in this early part of the story is manifest. Not only is she repeatedly deluded by Archimago – firstly, into accepting his hospitality (I.i.32–33), and secondly, into accepting his impersonation of Redcross for the real thing (I.iii.30) – but in each case, her acceptance of the trick involves a mistake on her own part: the mistake, precisely, of acquiescing in her champion’s “errant” behaviour. Hence when Redcross makes clear his intention of pursuing the adventure offered by Archimago (I.i.30–31), she, rather than stepping in as we might expect with a timely reminder of the undertaking to which he is already committed, offers only the conventional chivalric-romance advice, disastrous in this case, that he should rest for the night with the hermit before setting out on his journey (I.i.32–33). Similarly, when Archimago disguised as Redcross offers, as excuse for having abandoned her in a dangerous wilderness, his having gone off to undertake that same “aduenture in strange place” of which the hermit had informed him, she again accepts that adventure as a legitimate diversion from his quest on her behalf (I.iii.29–32). Only much later, after she herself has allegorically read her especial foe Duessa as “falshood” (I.viii.49), does Una herself start to act in a way more reconcilable to her own allegorical association with the “Truth”, in that thereafter she reliably guides the Redcross knight towards completing his quest (see I.ix.20, I.x.2, I.xi.1–3), even as Duessa had effectively 23

Thus, e.g., Alpers, The Poetry of The Faerie Queene, 338, treats Una’s praise as ratification of the heroic mindset that defeats Error, whereas I ask whether that praise is in turn ratified by its narrative consequences. Russell J. Meyer, The Faerie Queene: Educating the Reader (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 43, notes in passing that Una’s appraisal of her knight’s victory over Error is problematic, but still lets “her allegorical significance as Truth” govern his interpretation. Richard Mallette, Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 30, notices the poor quality of her advice on their meeting with Archimago, but does not consider the implications thereof with regard to her reliability more generally, so that, e.g., he repeatedly speaks of her interpretative “authority” in the encounter with Error (24–25). Gless, in Interpretation and Theology in Spenser, 69–73, notes that “Una’s apparently unqualified praise for Red Cross knight’s victory over Error contributes to the tempting deceptiveness of the episode”; but while allowing that “Readers who perceive Una . . . as a romance heroine rather than a metaphysical principle will suspect that she errs”, himself develops the contrary supposition, concluding that “her overly simple praise of the knight” exemplifies Christian charity in interpretation. But surely it is not the part of Christian charity, in anyone’s conception, to flatter vices, as Una unwittingly does here. Once again, Cullen (Infernal Triad, 32) is nearest the mark, convicting Una’s prayer for “many such” victories of “perilously naive optimism”, and concluding that “Una is scarcely much more prepared to guide Red Crosse . . . than Red Crosse is to be guided.”

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene guided him in a more destructive direction (I.iv.Arg.).24 But Una’s fallibility earlier on is not usually noticed, much less seen as a contributor to the knight’s going off course – and indeed, he is not even observed to have gone significantly off course at his departure from the wandering wood – because her reading of his victory over Error is what we take to be the poem’s authoritative moral interpretation of itself, our guide to the episode’s allegorical significance. The usual assumption as to the authority of Una’s interpretation of the knight’s first adventure is not, of course, made in isolation; not least it is abetted by the narrator’s parenthetical remark, immediately thereafter, that it is “with God to frend” that Redcross then goes off in search of “new aduenture” (I.i.28).25 But we should suspect an assertion of God’s backing for the knight’s shelving of the dragon-quest in favour of nearer-to-hand adventures of telling us, not Spenser’s, but the knight’s own self-righteous notion of what God values. Something similar is true of the superficial appearance of the episode as a whole. For the very physical setting does seem to corroborate the protagonist’s sense of achievement: of his having, Theseus-like, heroically defeated the monster in a “labyrinth” (I.i.11). But just as his later opportunity to act the part of Duessa’s chivalrous rescuer in reality only allows him to embrace vice under the very appearance of acting virtuously, so here the apparent heroism of his battle with Error is contrived so as to enable him to place under the rubric of virtue the sort of needless distraction from his quest that caused him to lose his way in the first place (I.i.10). Making the battle with Error a paradigm for subsequent heroic acts allows him to think of his knighthood in terms detached from the specific reason why he was made a knight and given the armour he wears, and so sets his feet more firmly on the erroneous “beaten” path of knight-errancy into which he has already culpably strayed (I.i.11 and 28).26 As in subsequent episodes, then, what seem to be grounds here on which we may judge the knight’s actions praiseworthy turn out in every respect to be rooted no more deeply than in the knight’s own self-flattering opinions – and indeed, actually to function in the story as reinforcements to the moral confidence with which he goes astray. But because the two things, the hero himself and the moral interpretation of his actions, go off course hand in hand, 24 25

26

For more on this characterisation of the later Una, see Chapter Six. Critics who take at its face value God’s apparent approval of the knight’s actions during this episode include Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory, 37, and Alpers, The Poetry of The Faerie Queene, 338. Hamilton’s exonerating explanation, in The Faerie Queene, I.i.28.3n, of the hero’s return to the broad and heavily travelled path after defeating Error (that in retracing his steps, he should be seen as following the “beaten” path not towards destruction but away from it) looks to me like special pleading. Cf. Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser, 73. Cullen, Infernal Triad, 32, more plausibly infers that “The adventure has . . . led them nowhere. They return the way they came.”

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The Locus of Self-Interpretation paradoxically it can seem as if all is still well as he and his companion leave Error’s den, heading straight for Archimago’s trap. Only as the poem’s built-in readings of its own action become more and more palpably inadequate to the increasing depravity of the knight’s behaviour does their actual unreliability start to become more readily apparent. If, by the time we get to the House of Pride, the violence which those self-interpretations do to the story has become quite flagrant, then that is simply because the knight himself, who is the chief subscriber to such a reading, has become by that point in the story so flagrantly wrong about the moral quality of his own actions. But to see clearly the genesis of the sinful state in which he has by that time become more obviously immersed, we must pay equal attention to the less obviously erroneous ways in which his deeds come to be represented as exemplary from the very beginning of his story – and in particular to the way that, from the outset, it is on the knight’s own misunderstanding of his role as hero that the book’s tottering structure of self-interpretation is built. Such an approach provides an alternative to the superficial sense the book gives of its hero’s having a mixture of success and failure in the early cantos, with his triumph in open battle with Error being set against his succumbing to the subtler Archimago, and so forth.27 It is a symptom of the ongoing critical life of such a reading, that the knight’s actions are still regularly discussed as though in relation to a kind of balance sheet, on which his admitted failings are understood to be offset, to some greater or lesser degree, by at least the glimmerings of his destined moral virtue. Such a perspective is found not only in those for whom (as for Padelford) even in the first section of the story the pluses of the hero’s character outweigh the minuses, but equally in more recent critics who, though they regard the knight’s early record as preponderantly sinful, take Spenser’s attitude towards his would-be hero to be one of moderate reproof, and go out of their way to acknowledge what seeds of holiness there seem to be even in the sinner.28 My view, in contrast, is that what is submitted to our judgement in the early cantos of the Legend of Holiness is not essentially the degree of the protagonist’s success or failure according to a moral standard which we are all presumed to know about and confidently to subscribe to, but rather the success or (as it turns out) the failure of the moral standard itself to which the 27 28

For the locus classicus of such an interpretation, see Padelford, “The Spiritual Allegory of The Faerie Queene, Book One”, 7–9. Thus, e.g., Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet, sees the Error episode as revealing “the high potential of the book’s protagonist together with his significant limitations” (76) and, more broadly, adopts an attitude very like what she attributes to the book’s narrator, which “combines . . . awareness of the Redcross knight’s faults with an affectionate sympathy” (84–5); cf. Heale, The Faerie Queene: A Reader’s Guide, 33–35, and J. King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition, 188. Gless, Interpretation and Theology, 63–69, argues (in deliberately paradoxical terms which he associates with sixteenth-century Protestantism) for a perspective which sees both sin and holiness in each of the knight’s early encounters.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene protagonist adheres through his misadventures – its success or failure, that is, as measured in the practical narrative terms of where the hero’s subscribing to that ethos truly leads him, as compared with where it seems to him to be leading. What can indeed appear, in the early cantos, to be signs that we ought not to regard Redcross as being ‘all bad’, prove in practice to be moments of dramatic irony, wherein we are invited to see the gap between a specious moral construction of experience and the direction its adherent is actually heading. Even what seem the strongest indications of the hero’s possessing, despite his truancy, some sparks of his titular virtue, like the “quickning faith” that converts near defeat into victory against Sansjoy (I.v.12), may invariably be seen to be sites only of an especially telling dramatic irony.29 In this case, the context shows that what is here esteemed as “faith” is no more than a knight-errant’s idolatrous devotion to “his Ladie” (I.v.11–12). So far from depicting the sudden awakening of a temporarily neglected virtue, the incident only underlines how far gone he is in his moral self-delusion – far enough to take for a saving virtue the very credulity that has led him, as Duessa’s “faithfull knight”, to the House of Pride (I.iv.Arg.). Likewise, even when events there finally show so bad a face as to warn the knight where he is heading (I.v.52), his precipitous flight from the place is hardly evidence of a moral awakening, much less of his never having been “seriously seduced” by its charms.30 Glimpsing where his pride-filled code of honour is leading him, so far from spurring him to reject it for the kind of knighthood intended for him by Gloriana, induces him to reject knighthood altogether, and so to cast away the armour wherein his hope of salvation resides, trading in the pseudo-moral severity of his secular ethos not for a truer moral discipline but for sensual slackness (I.vii.2–3). Nor does that surrender into ease even constitute a genuine alternative to the sinful role he deserts, but results only in his adhering to a disarmed version of the very courtly ethos under whose sway he went astray in the first place: for as the poem puts it, “Yet goodly court he made still to his Dame” (I.vii.7).31 Such is the unflattering reading required to account for the fact that the hero’s fleeing from the House of Pride, far from signalling a reprieve in his moral degeneration, leads immediately to his succumbing to another version (personified by Orgoglio) of the same deadly sin. The reason, then, why a ‘balance sheet’ approach to the hero’s early adventures fails is that, while the idea of his having some claim to virtue is certainly present in that part of the story, the whole point of the idea is its powerful delusiveness, its being as superficially plausible, yet as devoid of reality, as Archimago’s seeming piety and Duessa’s seeming beauty. It is not merely that 29

30 31

Contrary, e.g., to the assertion of Alpers, in The Poetry of The Faerie Queene, 342, that “We cannot . . . dismiss the fact that, Duessa or no, the hero experiences ‘quickning faith’, just as he did when Una called to him.” Contrary to Heale’s position, The Faerie Queene: A Reader’s Guide, 37. Contrast Alpers’s reading in The Poetry of The Faerie Queene, 148–49.

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The Locus of Self-Interpretation the knight’s victories are minor or fleeting – not merely, to cite a standard account, that “Hardly has [he] freed himself from the entanglements of Error, when he falls victim . . . to the deceptions of Archimago”32 – but that the specious appearance of eventual moral victory in each crisis is the very springboard by which he launches himself headlong into the next. As a result, unless we look at all the acts of moral interpretation in the first half of Book One in relation to the systematic self-deludedness of the hero’s self-interpretation, the very chain of moral consequences that links the story’s successive episodes remains hidden.

32

Quoting Heale, The Faerie Queene: A Reader’s Guide, 34.

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Chapter Five

Specious and Valid Paradigms of Self-Interpretation

I

HAVE ARGUED that the early cantos of Book One present to us a hero who idoes not so much fall short of an agreed moral standard, as adhere to a moral standard itself revealed to be erroneous. But it remains to ask what exactly is the significance in the book of the misleading moral code, the ethos of knight-errantry, in whose terms the protagonist misconstrues his own role in the story. What is to be achieved by targeting again an ethos already widely critiqued and parodied, in works as far separated in time as The Quest of the Holy Grail and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso? There are, in general terms, two kinds of plausible answers to such questions. One is exemplified by a recent reading of Book One by Harry Berger Jr., which treats the chivalric ethical code as directly tied in to the poem’s ostensible didactic and panegyrical aims as laid out by the letter to Raleigh, so that Spenser’s critique of the former acts as part of an implicit critique of the latter.1 In this view, the spuriousness of the interpretative system that approves the deeds of Redcross signals the spuriousness of the very values the poem appears superficially to endorse. I shall say more about that possibility in Chapter Six. But there is also a different possibility, for which important precedents exist, namely that the book’s critique of the values of knight-errantry might rather be performed in the service of its declared overall moral and political allegiances, with the false ethos that initially leads Redcross astray serving as a foil for a different ethos which the book finally advocates in earnest. It is the argument for the latter case (which is, I think, a strong one) that I shall be making here. For it would appear that, as in the medieval Quest of the Holy Grail, the first book of The Faerie Queene poses for its hero a choice, between a right and a wrong set of knightly values – between what the Quest calls “heavenly” and “worldly” chivalry respectively. 2 It is only that we have to allow for two

1 2

Berger, “Displacing Autophobia”, esp. 165. Translating “chevalerie celestiel, et . . . seculer” – La Queste del Saint Graal, ed. Pauphilet, 45.

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Specious and Valid Paradigms of Self-Interpretation important adaptations of the scheme. Firstly, where the Quest’s “heavenly chivalry” is shaped by medieval Catholicism, and more specifically by Cistercian monastic ideals with their emphasis on chastity and unworldliness,3 the Christian knighthood of the Legend of Holiness is markedly Protestant and politically engaged in character – a contrast Spenser all but announces when he has the hermit Contemplation, in a reversal of the exhortations that characterise his literary forebears in the Quest, refuse Redcross leave to abandon active military life or service of his earthly lady (I.x.63). Secondly, where the thirteenth-century Quest can maintain a simple dichotomy between two monolithic value systems, Christian and courtly respectively, The Faerie Queene is written against the backdrop of a time that had broken the unity of both terms of that comparison, producing deeply opposed notions of Christian life on the one hand and of political authority on the other. Accordingly, in the Legend of Holiness, it is not merely that there is a right, Christian chivalry and a wrong, secular chivalry, but that there are right and wrong notions of Christian knighthood itself; and given that the Protestant knight is not enjoined to abandon the things of this world, that there are right and wrong forms of political engagement as well. In religious terms, the key distinction is between sixteenth-century Catholicism’s assertion of the Christian’s capacity to live meritoriously, and a rival Protestant insistence on humanity’s more persistent depravity and more complete dependence on unmerited grace. In political terms, the crucial division is between an entrenched feudal thinking (with its emphasis on the nobility’s rights) which in Spenser’s experience most conspicuously survived amongst rebellious Irish barons and their partisans, and an emergent absolutism (with its emphasis on the monarch’s rights) which served Elizabeth and her various orders of ‘new men’, not least the New English administrators in Ireland.4 Despite those complications, I shall argue, Spenser in Book One of The Faerie Queene produces something analogous to 3 4

As regards “the Cistercian influence” on the Quest, see Matarasso’s introduction to The Quest of the Holy Grail, 20–21. I should clarify straightaway that by “absolutism” I mean not the implausible notion that the prince should “attend personally to everything of any consequence . . . done in her name”, but the principle that she has a monopoly on legitimate political authority – a monopoly conceived minimally in terms of her exclusive right to dispense justice (as Sir Thomas Smith puts it, “We do say in England the life and member of the kinges subjectes are the kinges onely, and that no man hath hault or moyenne justice but the king”, a formulation which specifically excludes such feudal institutions as “countie Palatines” still extant in Elizabethan Ireland), and maximally in terms of an unlimited right to make and unmake laws and institutions (the kind of “absolute power” ascribed to Elizabeth and her forebears by Spenser’s interlocutors in A View of the Present State of Ireland). See Patrick Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (London and Rio Grande: Hambledon, 1994), 35–36, Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 87, and Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. W. L. Renwick (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 9–10. Absolutism in the latter sense is consistent with redistribution of power from the feudal nobility not only towards the centre but outwards towards a new class of loyal subjects: thus Spenser, in View, 147, attributes

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene the clear, dichotomous moral structure of the Quest, by linking his version of true Christian chivalry both with salvation on a Protestant model and with political loyalism on a ‘divine right’ absolutist model, and conversely by associating the insufficiency within his story world of the secular romance ethos both with the perceived speciousness of Catholic notions of human merit and with a portrayal of the feudal honour code (unless reclaimed for a higher end) as merely a belligerent cult of personal pride.

From the False to the True Religion Book One’s anti-Romanism is at a superficial level obvious enough: for example, we hear adoring talk of “Saintes and Popes” from Archimago (I.i.35), and the papacy’s imperial claims to “the wide West” alluded to by Duessa (I.ii.22). But the link between the Catholicism of the knight’s foes and his own specious mode of moral interpretation is easily missed, either if we split interpretation into distinct “moral” and “historical” allegories, or if we treat the hero’s disregard for the papist associations of his enemies as a mere instance of a supposed general rule of allegory, which dictates that its characters “live in a world . . . [whose] meanings . . . are opaque from within”.5 Richard Mallette helps to repair our understanding of the poem on both counts, when he suggests that the knight’s incapacity “to discern the diabolical in Archimago’s speech, even when the old man flaunts it so no Protestant audience could mis-hear” is itself a feature of the moral allegory, part of a narrative pattern of the hero’s being “illiterate and hard of hearing” in the face of warnings of spiritual danger.6 But I want to argue that the hero’s credulous acceptance of a popish hermit’s hospitality is, more specifically, of a piece with his erroneous self-image as a conventionally virtuous knight errant of the chivalric romance tradition. As Elizabethan readers of works like Malory’s Morte D’Arthur had ample occasion to be aware, the antiquity of the age that genre evoked was not only military but religious: one met therein with a world as innocent of Protestantism as of gunpowder, a world of the monastery and sacrificial mass, wherein one might indeed safely settle in for the night at the cell of a pious and papist hermit.7 Indeed (to depart somewhat from Mallette’s view) it seems to

5 6 7

to England, and advocates for Ireland, a structured national system of accountability in which “the noblemen . . . have no command at all over the commonalty, though dwelling under them, because every man standeth upon himself, and buildeth his fortune upon his own faith”. Quoting C. S. Lewis, Spenser’s Images of Life, 29. Mallette, Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England, 30–31, 25. Hardly an episode goes by, either in The Quest or in Malory’s adaptation, wherein the unreformed nature of the author’s Christianity is not thrust on the reader’s attention; for example,

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Specious and Valid Paradigms of Self-Interpretation me that an Elizabethan Protestant reader, though well-versed in the perils of popery, might conceivably have passed over at first reading the warning sounded by Archimago’s Catholicism, if like the hero he or she fell into supposing the story to conform to generic expectations learned from medieval romance. Spenser’s signalling peril by means of an event that in Malory would have been innocent is, I think, one of the tricks of defamiliarisation that confront readers in the first canto of The Faerie Queene, challenging them into a mistrust of the chivalric ethos confidently adhered to by the protagonist and unwittingly abetted by his companion. The scene at Archimago’s hermitage, which occurs so early in the story, amounts then to a momentous departure from the text that directly or through Malory’s adaptation provides Spenser with his great precedent in poising his hero between two chivalric value systems, one earthly and damning, the other heavenly and saving. For whereas in The Quest of the Holy Grail the distinction between the two value systems lay between the secular course habitually pursued by the knightly hero and the spiritual chivalry taught to him by the hermit he meets along his way, here that hermit is made to pander diabolically to the very secular values leading the knight towards destruction. Spenser absorbs what is for him the false Christianity of the Quest into the Quest’s own negative foil for Christian values, the ethos of secular chivalric romance. Such an assimilation of Catholicism to worldliness, though the literary shape Spenser gives it is original, was already a staple of English Protestant thought, whether in political discourse representing the pope or Catholic kings as Machiavellian atheists like Lucifera,8 or more pertinently still in such attacks as this by Roger Ascham on the romances themselves: In our forefathers’ time, when papistry as a standing pool covered and overflowed all England, few books were read in our tongue, saving certain books of chivalry . . . made in monasteries by idle monks and wanton canons; as one for example, Morte Darthur . . . in which book those be counted the noblest knights that do kill most men without any quarrel and commit foulest adulteries by subtlest shifts . . . . This is good stuff for . . . honest men to take pleasure at. Yet I know when God’s Bible was banished the court and Morte Darthur received into

8

the events leading to disclosure of the allegorical meaning of Melias’s wound are bound up, in both versions, with the presumptions of medieval Catholicism, in particular with Melias’s insistence on being taken to a nearby abbey to make his confession and partake of the mass before Galahad attempts the life-threatening removal of the spearhead that inflicted the injury (Quest, 69; Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur, 2 vols [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969], II.259). An example roughly contemporary with the first edition of The Faerie Queene is the prologue to Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, spoken by “Machevill”: “Though some speak openly against my books, / Yet will they read me, and thereby attain / To Peter’s chair”; (quoting Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays, ed. J. B. Steane [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969], 347).

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene the prince’s chamber. What toys the daily reading of such a book may work in the will of a young gentleman or a young maid that liveth wealthily and idly, wise men can judge and honest men do pity.9

In Ascham’s polemic, Catholicism is an irreligious vacuum of values into which the corrupt, secular values of the romances flow, a “standing pool” of idleness in which they can take root and flourish unchecked. So too, I think, in the Legend of Holiness: Redcross, in his self-image as a secular romance hero, sleeps the moral sleep of medieval Catholicism. For it is not that, in setting out on his chivalric misadventures, he fails altogether to profess Christianity: on the contrary, we see even from the first canto’s opening tableau that he regards his Redcross arms as a sign doubly of his devotion to “his . . . Lord” Christ, and of the “hope, which in his helpe he had” (I.i.2). The problem, rather, is that the Christianity he professes itself seems to be understood in chivalric romance terms: that he treats being a ‘Christian knight’ as a mere specification of his knightly allegiance, easily conformable to the conventional chivalric desire “To proue his puissance in battell braue” (I.i.3), rather than as that spiritual state opposed to the worldly warrior’s which the underlying Pauline metaphor suggests. In treating his allegiance and the quest it entails as mere accoutrements of an ordinary chivalric self-image, he is already on the slippery slope toward accepting such substitutes for them as seem to serve the same function. Conversely, his education in the House of Holiness will consist in significant part in learning to interpret his life with reference to the Bible, the book Ascham opposes to Morte D’Arthur and familiarity with which was the hallmark of Protestant lay education. His Biblical training is both described generally (I.x.19), and exemplified by Caelia’s lesson in the New Testament symbolism that structures the Fairy road system and so signals the moral choices involved in choosing one’s way thereon (I.x.10). Prior to that time, the knight’s inability to spot such symbolism in the landscape, or comparable warning signals like Duessa’s open likeness to the Biblical whore of Babylon (I.ii.13), differentiate him from readers who can pick up on those signs, precisely in virtue of their already having the working Biblical knowledge the protagonist so far lacks. One might say the story constitutes a specifically Protestant allegory less in the sense of encoding a Protestant church history (the kind of thing conventionally looked for under the rubric of the poem’s ‘historical allegory’, which recent criticism largely agrees is present at most in broad terms), than in giving to readers familiar with the Bible an interpretative key to the ‘moral’ allegory, a key conspicuously lacking to those, like the straying knight, who are still bound up in the medieval ignorance damned by Ascham. A further respect in which Catholicism is made to go hand in hand, in Book 9

Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster (1570), ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 68–69.

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Specious and Valid Paradigms of Self-Interpretation One, with worldly romance values is suggested by the fact that the criticism, from Padelford onwards, which took the Redcross knight’s achievements as a chivalric hero in the early cantos at face value tended, in doing so, either wittingly or unwittingly to represent the Legend of Holiness as, in sixteenthcentury terms, effectively Catholic rather than Protestant in its ethical paradigm. Padelford himself, though he claims to read the poem “in line with current theological principles”, “especially as defined in the Institutes of Calvin”,10 does so in practice only in isolated instances (notably in his exposition of the knight’s rescue from Despair in terms of justification by faith11), while the broader tenor of his account is not characteristically Protestant at all. His allegorical interpretation of the book as the story of a progressive personal attainment of spiritual virtue, particularly such claims as that “Red Crosse . . . must follow the dictates of Reason if he is to attain holiness” and that he is sufficient “in his own strength and unaided save by common sense . . . [to] overcome the temptations of carnal pride”, run quite counter to Calvinist teaching concerning the depravity of all man’s faculties, and his incapacity, “in his own strength”, to relinquish sin in any measure.12 Something similar is found in other critics who read the early cantos as a cumulative education in virtue. Pauline Parker, like Padelford, pays lip service to Spenser’s Protestantism.13 But she also in practice follows Padelford’s example in systematically downplaying the knight’s shortcomings to accommodate them to a narrative of his gradually increasing in holiness; and the terms in which she does so (though she seems unaware of it) put her squarely on the Roman Catholic side of a sixteenth-century doctrinal war over what constitutes a sinful and, conversely, a meritorious state. Nothing could be more contrary to the Protestant view of postlapsarian man as sinful in all his acts, even after justification, than her continual refrain that Redcross, despite all-too-human tendencies towards folly and concupiscence, steers clear of actual sin.14 Isabel MacCaffrey likewise unwittingly invokes a distinctively Catholic set of categories in defending the narrator’s term “guiltlesse” (I.vii.1) as a valid 10

11 12

13 14

Padelford, “The Spiritual Allegory of The Faerie Queene, Book One”, 3. Recent historiography largely agrees with Padelford’s citation of Calvin as the dominating, if not quite the monopolising influence on Elizabethan Protestant theology, especially with regard to the doctrine of salvation (as distinct from the controversy about church government, ceremony, etc.) – though it is, of course, a separate question whether Spenser’s Legend of Holiness is “in line with” that dominant theology. Padelford, “The Spiritual Allegory of The Faerie Queene, Book One”, 14. Calvin is in fact at pains to discredit the view, whereon Padelford unwittingly draws, of the classical philosophers and Catholic theologians who regard the will as free and reason as an upright faculty capable of gradually taming the corrupt passions (Institutes, II.ii.2). Rather “all parts of the soul were possessed by sin”, and “reason”, in particular, “choked with dense ignorance, so that it cannot . . . hold to the right path, but wanders through various errors . . . as if it were groping in darkness, until it strays away and finally disappears.” (Institutes, II.ii.9–10). Pauline Parker, The Allegory of The Faerie Queene (Oxford: Clarendon, 1960), 69, 82, etc. Parker, 75–86 and 94–95. Cf. Calvin, Institutes, III.iii.10 and III.xiv.11.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene description of the hero’s record in the first half of the book, on the grounds that, while “he has made plenty of mistakes . . . he has more or less kept his distance from mortal sin, though from no lofty motive where Lucifera and her band are concerned.”15 Such readings are of a piece not with Reformation but with Counter-Reformation theology, which takes great pains in raising the bar as to what is to be regarded as inherently damnable, in order to defend against Protestant anthropological pessimism the intrinsic clearness from guilt of a “Christian man liuing but an ordinarie honest life”.16 One critic who acceded to Padelford’s broad picture of the poem’s moral allegory, Thomas Nelan, did see what is at stake in doctrinal terms, and made the bold (though, I think, mistaken) step of explicitly advancing the conclusion toward which other such critics unwittingly tended, namely that Spenser is at least intuitively Catholic in his salvation theology. For Nelan, a Calvinist reading of Book One, requiring Redcross to put his faith in “being arbitrarily translated to sanctification and glory, notwithstanding every evidence that he has of his inescapable corruption . . . would destroy every dramatic element in the story”; and it is, “[o]n the contrary . . . the Catholic sense of man’s battle against sin which provides a comprehensive understanding of the picturesque struggle of Redcrosse against the diabolical Archimago, the curious House of Pride, and the ensnaring Duessa.”17 Nelan’s conclusion seems to me so perfectly wrong as to be quite illuminating. For the story he describes as essentially Catholic, of the knight’s high-minded struggle against his foes, is a story the poem does not tell (in fact, Redcross seeks out and embraces all those enemies have to offer, taking it to be the very stuff of virtue), but it does neatly capture the kind of mistaken reading to which the book so readily lends itself, and in such a way as to suggest how and why such a reading finds purchase in what Spenser did write. For it is not by any means that Book One offers nothing to suggest, in its hero, a “picturesque struggle” against evil: on the contrary, the knight himself regards his actions in just such a positive light.

15

16

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MacCaffrey, Spenser’s Allegory, 159. Compare Calvin’s polemic, Institutes, II.ix.59: “What they confess to be sin because they cannot deny it they nonetheless contend is not mortal sin. But . . . [l]et the children of God hold that all sin is mortal. For it is rebellion against the will of God, which of necessity provokes God’s wrath.” Quoting The New Testament of Jesus Christ (Rheims, 1582), 385 (annotations to Romans 1:17). Cf. Council of Trent, Session 6, Decree on Justification, cap. 11 (in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols, ed. Norman P. Tanner [London: Sheed & Ward and Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990], vol. 2, 675–76): “it is certain that they are opponents of the orthodox religion who say that in every good work the just person sins at least venially, or (which is more intolerable) that he deserves eternal punishment”. Thomas P. Nelan, Catholic Doctrines in Spenser’s Poetry (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1943), 287; quoted (with approval) by Virgil K. Whitaker, in The Religious Basis of Spenser’s Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1950), 57. Whitaker’s own reading, like Nelan’s, is deliberately anti-Calvinist; but his position relies on an anachronistic view of the Elizabethan Church as itself anti-Calvinist in salvation theology.

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Specious and Valid Paradigms of Self-Interpretation The point is rather that the poem invites us, more and more clearly as the story proceeds, to see him not only as generically mistaken but as damnably sinful in so doing. Only when, in confronting Despair, he is made to see that all his attempts to achieve virtue through his own efforts have been not only futile but sinful – that all he has achieved is to have “sold [him] selfe to serue Duessa vilde”, and so to have “High heaped vp . . . huge iniquitie, / Against the day of wrath” (I.ix.46) – is the way opened for him to discover the more remarkable, and incomparably more Protestant, significance of having been “chosen” to wear Christ’s armour, namely that it is indeed (to borrow Nelan’s phrase), “notwithstanding every evidence that he has of his inescapable corruption”, that he shall have “In heauenly mercies . . . a part” (I.ix.53).18 The life he pursues till that time, in which a self-righteous assurance of acting meritoriously actually leads him ever deeper into sin, closely matches what Protestants took to be the case of those adherents of the Roman church who presumed to be earning salvation in virtue of their own deeds;19 and his experience in being saved from Despair, where for the first time we observe him hearing the gospel word of grace, is correspondingly redolent of the calling into true Christian life, and away from a false and merely outward profession of Christianity, which Protestants spoke of as occurring in conversion from Catholicism.20 So critics who took as genuine the specious moral virtue portrayed in the Redcross knight’s early adventures likewise tended to take for the real thing the specious Christianity that fosters such self-righteousness. As in the prior case, the mistake came of taking at face value, not merely the glosses of an unreliable narrator, but, more fundamentally, the way things look within the story world to the self-misinterpreting hero himself. In particular, they took it on trust that his life as a Christian truly begins at his donning of Christ’s armour, that is, when he takes himself for a Christian and begins to profess Christianity outwardly. Thus Padelford accepts the account in the letter to Raleigh of “a clownish young rustic, through the armor of Christ suddenly transformed into the goodliest seeming man in all the courts of Faerie” as a representation of the way “acceptance of Christ and the dedication of one’s life to His service

18

19

20

For further discussion of the way Spenser overcomes the difficulties of adapting the conventions of chivalric romance to Protestant ethics, see Andrew King, The Faerie Queene and Middle English Romance: The Matter of Just Memory (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 126–29 and cap. 6 passim. As noted by Cullen, Infernal Triad, 35; Cullen’s collateral suggestion, that the knight’s behaviour in the early cantos may also constitute a critique of “radical Protestantism” (36), seems to me, however, to muddy the issue. “For if we diligently consider the things that pertain to Christ, we will find Christ among the heretics in name only, not in reality. So . . . the words ‘Son of God, Redeemer of the world’ resound upon the lips of the papists. Yet . . . they are satisfied with the vain pretense of the name, and strip him of his power and dignity” (Calvin, Institutes, II.xv.1). Cf. Quilligan, The Language of Allegory, 39–40.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene regenerate a man.”21 Comparably for Parker, Una’s arrival at Fairy court, with “the sacred armour” in tow, straightforwardly depicts “the experience known as vocation, the call to devote oneself to one heaven-chosen task”.22 We might be alerted to the dubiousness of such conclusions by Parker’s own remarks, that the hero’s supposed initiation into his Christian calling “comes rather easily”, and that it seems “the armour suits . . . perfectly” the purposes of one whose wish in coming to court was only “to be a knight” – or in the letter’s words, to “haue the atchieuement of any aduenture, which during that feaste should happen”.23 The possibility of thus passing, “as it were, spontaneously”, from a romance scenario whose motivation is a rustic’s desire to rise up to “independent personal virtue”,24 directly into an assumption of Christian knighthood, almost as if it could be sufficient grounds for adopting the latter that such was the chivalric panoply that made itself available on the day, is, I think, just what the poem puts in question from the start. More recent criticism, while as a rule more sceptical about the hero’s Christian as well as his heroic credentials in the early cantos, here too, I think, has not overturned the previous orthodoxy in a self-consistent way, because it has not quite come to grips with what most fundamentally needs refuting in earlier readings, namely the view of the story that comes of taking at face value the knight’s own reading of events. Thus while a number of critics have noted strong evidence that the knight’s conversion and justification do not occur until much later in the story, none directly questions the apparent support given to their having occurred earlier by the simple narrative fact that the protagonist, from the moment he dons the Redcross armour, regards himself as a Christian (I.i.2). As a result, they paint a self-contradictory picture of his induction into the faith, writing at some points as if he is a veritable Christian from the time he leaves Gloriana’s court, at others as if he becomes such only in the latter half of the story. Thus for example Anthea Hume, despite declaring that the whole course of events up to the hero’s capture by Orgoglio merely “demonstrates man’s bondage to sin”, and conversely that “It is only after his justification that he will begin to show traces of . . . virtue in his life and actions”,25 does not press her so-far Calvinist reading to its logical conclusion, namely that, prior to the hero’s justification – that is, right through the first half of the book, from its opening tableau on – he, like “the papists”, must be a Christian “in name only, not in reality”.26 Rather she introduces a contradiction into the centre of her argument by allowing Redcross initially to be “well

21 22 23 24 25 26

Padelford, “The Spiritual Allegory of The Faerie Queene, Book One”, 3–4. Parker, The Allegory of The Faerie Queene, 78. Parker, The Allegory of The Faerie Queene, 78. Parker, The Allegory of The Faerie Queene, 78. Quoting Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet, 73–74; cf. 91–92. Quoting Calvin, Institutes, II.xv.1.

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Specious and Valid Paradigms of Self-Interpretation intentioned” and only later to suffer “a lapse into seductive irreligion”.27 To end up by describing the hero at the time of succumbing to Duessa as a “spiritually imperfect believer beguiled by false religion”28 (whereas for Calvin the elect man prior to justification is not yet a “believer” at all) is in effect to have thrown in the argument that in his early actions Redcross exemplifies the still unregenerate sinner. Elizabeth Heale goes farther, on the one hand (like Hume) placing his justification at the time of his rescue from Orgoglio, but on the other speaking as Parker had done of the protagonist’s initial “innocence”, and referring to Christian virtues he possesses from the start but of which “he does not yet enjoy full assurance”.29 John King, despite plausibly speaking of the knight’s having arrived, at the time of encountering Despair, only at the “conviction of sin” that precedes justification, elsewhere says that the prior encounters reveal not the absence but only the “insufficiency” of the hero’s faith and virtue.30 Other critics, notably Patrick Cullen and Darryl Gless, express effectively the same irresolution in an opposite manner, allowing with Padelford and Parker that the protagonist’s justification coincides with his putting on the Redcross armour, but only to cite substantial evidence showing that his actual behaviour until much later in the story is just as if that supposed justification had not yet taken place.31 All the above critics, by failing to challenge directly a key assumption of earlier, more trusting accounts of the book’s moral allegory, namely that the hero puts on Christ inwardly when outwardly he puts on Christ’s livery, leave themselves trying to accommodate to that assumption readings with which it is incompatible. A more consistent development of their shared perception (that narrative evidence of the knight’s regeneration comes only in the second half of the story) would be that his very profession of Christianity is at the outset a mere vanity, an active feature of rather than a counterweight to his self-righteous self-image. The view that Redcross on first going forth in Christ’s armour has put on Christianity only outwardly does not of course mean that the act of bestowing those arms has no spiritual significance, only that the knight, and with him much of Spenser criticism, may mistake that significance, imagining that the 27 28 29 30 31

Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet, quoting 77 and 75. Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet, 75. Heale, The Faerie Queene: A Reader’s Guide, 33–35, 41. Cf. Parker, The Allegory of The Faerie Queene, 78. J. King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition, 213 and 187. Cullen, Infernal Triad, whose scepticism regarding the knight’s heroic self-image during his early adventures is otherwise very astute, accepts at face value that the protagonist’s “assuming the armor of Ephesians and his transformation into ‘the goodliest man in al that company’” indicates, at least in principle, his inward regeneration (21). Gless, in Interpretation and Theology in Spenser, likewise places the hero’s justification at the time of his donning the Redcross armour (55), but later acknowledges the evidence for regarding him still in canto seven “as an image of natural man, awaiting his foreordained calling” (129–30 and 142–46; quoting 129).

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene investiture itself confers the power to live virtuously as a Christian, whereas its true value (as he later discovers) is as proof of his having been “chosen” for God’s mercy (I.ix.52–53). Such a revised view of what conferring the Redcross arms actually entailed is closely analogous to Calvin’s revision of the doctrine of baptism;32 it also accords well with the evidence of the knight’s early battles, wherein he convincingly differs from his foes not by any moral superiority, but only in the fact that unlike them he is always warded, apparently by God’s grace, from being slain in his sins. Sansfoy’s complaint, “Curse on that Crosse . . . / That keepes thy body from the bitter fit; / Dead long ygoe I wote thou haddest bin, / Had not that charme from thee forwarned it” (I.ii.18), paints precisely the picture of an elect but as yet unregenerate man who (no thanks to himself, and without observable recognition thereof) is “protected by God’s especial mercy from rushing headlong into the final ruin of death.”33 Likewise the narrator’s parenthetical observation, after the knight’s run-in with Error, that he goes forth “with God to frend” (I.i.28): words which on one level convey the knight’s own assessment of his first adventure as a moral victory that has advanced him in God’s esteem, and which to that extent suggest a specious Catholic notion of divine grace as co-operating with virtuous human initiatives, from a revised point of view suggest that he owes to divine favour his very emergence in one piece from an ill-judged encounter, in the more characteristically Protestant sense of God’s having preserved a sinner from a manifestation of his own error.34 One might venture it as a rule of the hero’s early adventures, that if during that time he has “God to frend”, it is not in the way he thinks: not in co-operation with, but despite his own undertakings. For his professed Christianity, at that time, is all on the surface, a matter of outward show – and, ipso facto, of inward pride – and hence no different, at bottom, from any other worldly conceit of virtue, not least from that of the secular chivalric honour code. Whether as knight or as self-professed Christian, he wears his armour as if being worthy thereof is a matter of making a good showing, “As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt” (I.i.1), rather than of receiving through faith the inward regeneration promised by Christ. What is 32 33

34

See Calvin, Institutes, IV.xv.17. Quoting Calvin, Institutes, III.xxiv.10. As against Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser, 81–82, who in this episode as elsewhere (esp. 68–69) is quick to see the evidence of God’s acting in the knight’s early victories as a sign of his having received justification. But Gless repeatedly concedes the hero’s apparent unawareness, at that stage, of God’s grace towards him, and his seeming rather to act (even while God acts in him) only out of “anger and pride” (68; cf. 65–66, 82) – precisely the Calvinist picture of how God acts in an elect person who has not yet received faith and justification but remains in his sins. As against, e.g., Whitaker, The Religious Basis of Spenser’s Thought, 41, and Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser, 74, for both of whom the statement that the knight has “God to frend” is to be accepted as an indication of his being in a state of grace as he leaves the wandering wood.

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Specious and Valid Paradigms of Self-Interpretation condemned in exposing the specious basis of his self-interpretation is not just the secular ethos of chivalric romance but, more topically and more consequentially, an ethos depicted as only nominally Christian, whose actual foundation is an anti-Christian self-exaltation.

From a Specious to a Valid Politics Closely bound up with the Redcross knight’s religious education is an important political lesson, without which he is not allowed to regard his spiritual training as complete. It is made clear that, fresh from his discipline in the House of Holiness, he would prefer to pursue a life of faith apart from all worldly ends, which he lumps together as contemptible and fruitless beside the kingdom of God (I.x.58, 63). But Contemplation, while emphatically agreeing that heaven “quite dims” by comparison all earthly things (I.x.58–59), will not allow on that account that all earthly things are equally to be despised and forsaken. Rather he declares that one “earthly” activity, “seruice to that soueraigne Dame” the Fairy Queen, is itself conducive to the pursuit of heavenly “glorie”: “For she is heauenly borne, and heauen may iustly vaunt” (I.x.59). Moreover he insists that Redcross himself must go back to fulfil his terms of service to Gloriana before he can attain to heaven (I.x.63). Nor, strikingly, does the hermit, in explaining why that should be so, have recourse to the spiritual meaning of the quest that service requires, as his predecessors in The Quest of the Holy Grail might have done; rather, he presents the knight’s mission in a wholly literal light, as an “earthly conquest”, “worthy” insofar as it does “seruice” to the Fairy Queen and accomplishes her wish “To aide a virgin desolate foredonne” (I.x.60). Gloriana is treated as the sole bridge between purposes mortal and divine: in her “heauenly” mandate lies the reason it “well beseemes all knights of noble name” to haunt her court and do her “seruice” (I.x.59). Not that the Redcross knight’s mission thereby ceases to have its particular significance within the book’s spiritual allegory, as the task of every “Christian man” (Letter to Raleigh) to defeat the “infernall feend” (I.i.5). But having Contemplation insist on the quest’s status as an “earthly” endeavour, assigned by God’s representative in the mundane political order, brings that spiritual significance itself radically down to earth, even as the hero’s own notion of a Christian life is brought down to earth by the hermit’s practicallyoriented exhortation: to fight in the lists of God is, for Redcross, to do his duty to a godly queen. Such a strong interconnection of religious and political endeavour, though announced explicitly only at the conclusion of the tenth canto, is prepared for by all that goes before. The hero’s failing, from the start, has been his neglect of the specific quest that was the condition of his being knighted, and his pursuing instead whatever apparent opportunities for chivalric glory have offered themselves to him in his assumed role as a freelance “errant knight”; it 85

Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene has been by neglecting his manifest political duty that he has failed also to play the true part of a miles Christi. So it makes good plot sense that when Una, to save him from Despair, reminds him of having been “chosen”, the word refers equally to his having been elected by God for salvation (“In heauenly mercies hast thou not a part?”) and to his having been picked by Gloriana for a specific mission (“Is this the battell . . . / With that fire-mouthed Dragon . . . ?”) (I.ix.52–53). Just as a life of knight-errantry eventually is revealed to the hero himself to be a form of sinful errancy (I.x.10), so conversely being “chosen” at Gloriana’s court to undertake the dragon-slaying quest comes from this point onward increasingly to be understood, within the story world itself, as coextensive with being “chosen” by God for redemption (I.x.57). By the first canto of Book Two, the Palmer will be able simply to assert the equivalence of the Redcross knight’s “hard atchieu’ment” in Gloriana’s service with gaining a place amongst the saints (II.i.32); but in Book One, an awareness of that crucial equivalence is not to be taken for granted, but rather is a decisive accomplishment of allegorical self-interpretation within the story world. The linking in the Legend of Holiness of religious and political life gives something important to each: to a particular political authority, a religious ratification; to religion, a practical basis for moral action, to fill the void left by a sustained Protestant critique of the conventional motives and achievements of virtue. On the one hand, heavenly reward is made all but contingent on earthly service to a godly prince; on the other, the declared acceptability of such service in the eyes of heaven gives a secure point of reference for action amid the specious claims of other frameworks of moral interpretation, and indeed a defined domain within which the traditional forms and rewards of chivalric effort can after all be sanctioned (I.x.59, 66). The prior Protestant critique of moral pride is not abandoned, for any impression that the works done in Gloriana’s service and rewarded at her court might in any degree be meritorious for salvation is promptly banished (I.x.60, 62); nonetheless the hermit makes clear that performing such works is, here and now, what is morally required of the hero (I.x.63). So that for Redcross it now becomes quite straightforward: he has only to get on with doing what he manifestly has been “chosen” to do, and in due course he will receive his promised rewards both on earth and in heaven. Prima facie, then, what the story seems to advocate is not Protestantism simply, but a kind of Protestant monarchism, a symbiosis of religious and political claims in which the uprightness of an individual’s actions must be sanctioned by reference to the moral authority of a godly prince. However, even such an outline of the book’s apparent investment in a politico-religious ideology of iure divino monarchism comes directly up against the views of a number of the poem’s recent critics, who regard its true politics as running counter to its superficial celebration of the Queen as the linchpin of moral legitimacy in her subjects’ lives. Particularly to the point is Richard Helgerson, who argues that in a Renaissance context the chivalric 86

Specious and Valid Paradigms of Self-Interpretation romance genre that predominates in Spenser’s poem tends to support a feudal-aristocratic ethos with its emphasis on the autonomous rights of the nobles, and ipso facto to subvert an absolutist ethos which gives the prince a monopoly on moral legitimacy.35 He contrasts Tasso, who in Gerusalemme Liberata subjects romance narrative multiplicity, and the “individualistic aristocratic prowess” of its hero “the errant knight”, respectively to the unifying canons of epic and to the authority of the “divinely appointed ruler”, such that noble characters like Tancredi and Rinaldo finally forego “their resistance to royal justice, their solitary feats at arms, [and] their erring loves”, for due submission to the authority of Goffredo and to “the communal cause which has brought the crusaders to Jerusalem”.36 “All this”, Helgerson says, “The Faerie Queene lacks”: Its principal ruler, the Faery Queen herself, never appears in the poem and exercises only the loosest and most intermittent control over the action – or, rather, over its actions, for there are many. . . . Nor are the quests themselves parts of a unified enterprise . . . Indeed, what readers of The Faerie Queene experience is, in this regard, not unlike what they would experience in reading Boiardo or Ariosto: they encounter a large and varied collection of more or less independent adventures that serve no common end. . . . The Faerie Queene, unlike Gerusalemme Liberata, allows no place for the representation of a powerfully centralized and absolutist governmental order. It acknowledges and celebrates a sovereign lady, but it grants a high degree of autonomy to individual knights and their separate pursuits, represents power as relatively isolated and dispersed.37

In sum, “Whether consciously or unconsciously, Spenser makes his poem the implicit advocate of a partially refeudalized English polity” – a claim that Helgerson aligns historically with the poet’s well-known support for “the

35

36

37

Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 40–59. On the beleaguered survival of a feudal-aristocratic honour ethos in the Tudor period, and its “emphasis on moral autonomy” as against absolute monarchic authority, see Mervyn James, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in early modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), especially cap. 8, “English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485–1642”, 308–415 – quoting 314. On the role of chivalric forms in fostering it, see Arthur B. Ferguson, The Chivalric Tradition in Renaissance England (Washington: Folger, 1986), 17 and passim, and Richard C. McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 2–7 and passim. On the increasingly absolutist stance of the Elizabethan monarchy in the latter years of the reign, see, e.g., John Guy, The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 126–49. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 44–48; Helgerson, 46, also quotes with approval a paper by Sergio Zatti, “Cultural Conflict as Military Encounter in the Jerusalem Delivered”, read to the Southern California Renaissance Conference (1983): “The old chivalric code is denied and overwhelmed in an epic world that reorganizes itself according to a new custom, a world where for the concept of ‘ventura’ (the medieval ‘aventure’) is substituted that of ‘service’, where the role of ‘knight errant’ is suppressed for that of ‘soldier’ to a collective cause.” Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 48.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene militant, interventionist policy of the Leicester-Essex faction”, and in particular for Essex himself, who, as “the leader of the last English ‘honor revolt’ ”, “stood – and died – for the martial and aristocratic values that were essential to chivalric romance.”38 Helgerson offers this as a description of Spenser’s poem as a whole, not only of Book One, so whether it gives a fair account of later books will need to be considered at a later stage. But several doubts can be raised even here. In the first place, his chief point regarding Tasso’s poem could, I think, be made with equal justice of the Legend of Holiness, namely that its conventional chivalric romance episodes, and the motivations driving them, are systematically represented as digressive in relation to a single main plot whose achievement comes to be seen as the story’s true moral end. Admittedly, in the first book of The Faerie Queene, that true moral end itself requires an individual chivalric exploit, slaying the dragon. But that exploit is given a context (not in Spenser’s sources39) that emphasises its being validated not by the hero’s private sense of virtue, nor indeed by his own immediate apprehension of God’s will, but by a public duty prescribed to him by God through a godly queen. What is more, emphasis is placed, at the book’s very conclusion, on that deed’s forming only part of the hero’s ongoing service to Gloriana, a service conspicuously made to take precedence over his private interests as exemplified by marriage to Una (I.xii.41). Likewise Prince Arthur, the other exemplar of valid chivalric heroism in Book One, is represented as fulfilling that role only in virtue of having traded a prior chivalric “libertie” (I.ix.10, 12), and a concomitant sense of moral self-sufficiency (I.ix.9–12), for subjection to the same Fairy Queen. (The fact that Arthur’s humbling is experienced in secular rather than religious terms underlines my point that the book’s moral theme extends beyond the purely spiritual to take in the political as well. Where in the main plot an independent-minded chivalric ethos is treated chiefly as a manifestation of spiritual pride, requiring religious conversion, in the subplot it is the reformation of the political will, from an ethos of noble autonomy to an ethos of service, that is emphasised.) The mere fact that, unlike in Tasso, the deeds accorded a heroic status in The Faerie Queene remain romantic and chivalric rather than classical and epic in form is insufficient to establish Spenser’s being “consciously or unconsciously . . . the implicit advocate of a partially refeudalized English polity”. For as Helgerson himself goes some way towards acknowledging, the cultural prestige of chivalric romance forms was in the Elizabethan period pressed into ideological service not solely by an aristocracy faced with continual encroachment by an increasingly absolutist regime, but

38 39

Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 54 and 51–52. See Spenser, Works, I.379–85, as well as John Lydgate, The Minor Poems, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken (London: Kegan Paul, 1911), 146 and 148, and Alexander Barclay, The Life of St. George, ed. William Nelson (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), 35, 42, and 113.

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Specious and Valid Paradigms of Self-Interpretation on the part of various interests, not least that of the regime itself.40 So the question is how that prestige is put to work in any given poem which invokes it. Secondly, the point on which Helgerson lays especial emphasis in contrasting Spenser’s narrative with Tasso’s, namely the relative distance from which its monarch is depicted as exercising authority over the action, is much less clear in its political import than he suggests, since it reflects, at least in part, the very different conditions of power in a state ruled by a woman, who always conducted her military campaigns at one remove by delegation to male generals.41 For Spenser, like Tasso, to have presented a divinely authorised leader in the field as the ideal earthly governor would have been to render more rather than less problematic his ostensible support for Elizabeth, since that model was less evidently applicable to the Queen than to an ambitious subject who might use military command (as Leicester and Essex, at least in her eyes, each in his turn did use it) as a platform whereon to challenge her carefully guarded monopoly of political authority.42 It remains true of course that a poem which focuses on noble knights acting at a distance from the court that nominally authorises their exploits could be made to serve an “ideology of renascent aristocratic power”;43 but equally it might be made to serve the

40

41

42

43

Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 50–51. Cf. Stephen Orgel, “Making Greatness Familiar”, in Stephen Greenblatt, ed., The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (Norman, Oklahoma: Pilgrim, 1982), 41–48, for its survey of the politicised forms the conventions of chivalry assumed in the period: chief amongst them the “courtly mythology”, “a nostalgic medievalism . . . designed to validate . . . an authority that must have seemed, to what was left of the old aristocracy, dangerously arriviste” (41); another, that of aspirant gentlemen like Spenser himself, who in seeking coats of arms and other traditional trappings of status aimed “not simply to move up into . . . the gentry” but “to become a part of that same courtly mythology of romantic medievalism” (45). On the state’s use of chivalric mythology see also Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), cap. 3, “Elizabethan Chivalry: The Romance of the Accession Day Tilts”, 88–111; James, Society, Politics and Culture, 328ff and 413; and Ferguson, The Chivalric Tradition, 47 and 107–08. On the chivalric pretensions of the ‘new man’, Ferguson, The Chivalric Tradition, 77–78, and John Adamson, “The Aristocracy and their Mental World”, in John Morrill, ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of Tudor and Stuart Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 173–90. Indeed the point might be made more broadly than in military terms, to include “implementation of policy” in general; John Guy argues, in “Tudor Monarchy and Political Culture”, Oxford Illustrated History of Tudor and Stuart Britain, ed. Morrill, 234–35, “it was certain that under a woman ruler, and especially an unmarried one, the Privy Council would retain its place as an élite executive bureau because the inherent social assumption was that the business of government was properly conducted by men”. Cf. the problematic way in which Shakespeare’s “conquering Caesar”, Henry V, attracts comparison not with Elizabeth but with Essex, “the general of our gracious empress” – King Henry V, ed. Andrew Gurr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), V. Chorus, 22–35. See Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 86–87. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 59.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene crown, by holding a mirror up to the Elizabethan reality of delegated military power in such a way as to warn against that power’s insubordinate use. Nor, finally, is it so obvious historically as Helgerson implies that Spenser’s political interests lay with the former course. For not only his patrons Leicester and Essex (of whom the latter, in any case, takes centre stage only very late in Spenser’s career, and not yet as the prospective perpetrator of an “honor revolt”44) had recourse to a romantic feudalist emphasis on the autonomous rights of the nobility. On the contrary such thinking was the inevitable partner, through Elizabeth’s reign and in both her realms, of baronial self-assertion;45 and most notably so, in Spenser’s experience, for figures whose political interests were patently inimical to his own, namely those ‘Old English’ magnates in Ireland who resisted the project of imposing ‘New English’ governors and settlers on their nation.46 Spenser himself, in his View of the Present State of Ireland, includes in Irenius’s list of things “inconvenient in the realm of Ireland” the retained feudal powers of the Old English lords, powers described as fostering both general lawlessness, and in the nobles themselves “disloyal action” and destructive “private wars”.47 Conversely, an absolutist language was the obvious recourse, when faced with such entrenched powers, not only for the Queen, but for whole classes of Elizabethan ‘new men’ whose positions ultimately depended on alliance with the state interest, be they committed

44

45 46

47

Even the post-Cadiz Prothalamion (1596), with its hyperbolic invocation in Essex’s praise of the language of “Honor” and “Chevalrie”, can identify unproblematically the Earl’s advancement of his “owne name” with that of “great Elizaes glorious name”; cf. McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood, 152. See, e.g., James, Society, Politics and Culture, 290 and 342, and McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood, 35, on its role in the 1569 northern rebellion. Hence, for example, William Camden’s sense of what was ideologically at stake in the Desmond rebellion: “that infamous Rebel and Traitour to his Countrey, Girald Fitz-Girald . . . the eleventh Earl of Desmond of his Family . . . who derived his Pedigree from Maurice Fitz-Girald of Windsor, an Englishman, and of great Renown amongst the first Conquerours of Ireland in the year 1170 . . . had very fair Lands and Possessions, yea whole Provinces, with Kerry a County-Palatine, many Castles, a number of Vassals and Dependents, and of his own Kindred and Surname he had about five hundred Gentlemen at his Devotion. Of all which, yea and of his Life also, he was bereft within three years, very few of his Family being left, after he had once forfeited his Allegeance to his Prince.” – Camden, The History of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth Late Queen of England, Selected Chapters [Annales], ed. Wallace T. MacCaffrey (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 165. A View of the Present State of Ireland, 29 and 63–64. The particular feudal structures that Irenius is made to single out for blame are, firstly, “the grants of the county Palatines”, and secondly, the fact “that the wards and marriages of gentlemen’s children should be in the disposition . . . of those Irish lords, by reason that their lands are held by knight’s service of those lords; by which means . . . those gentlemen’s children . . . are . . . for ever after so bounded to their services, as that they will run with them into any disloyal action.” On the importance of those particular feudal institutions, and particularly of the latter in maintaining the vitality of the aristocratic ethos as against the expanding claims of the state, see James, Society, Politics and Culture, 271–73 and 357–58 (and cap. 7 and 8 passim).

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Specious and Valid Paradigms of Self-Interpretation Protestants, English planters in Ireland, or the newer nobility or gentry dependent for their status on court favour – all categories that included either Spenser or his patrons, and all eminently vulnerable to a change of regime or even to its unassertiveness on their behalf. So the ostensible alliance in Book One between Protestantism and absolutism, of which I have spoken already, itself makes good historical sense in terms of what we can reconstruct hypothetically of Spenser’s political self-interest – including his interest in aristocratic patronage – without our having to presume a less overtly declared and more subversive agenda. It appears to me, in fact, that the political ethos Helgerson attributes to The Faerie Queene features, at least in Book One, precisely as a foil for the ultimate promotion of monarchic absolutism and of its beneficiaries, just as (to recapitulate the argument made in the first half of the chapter) the book clarifies the value of the hero’s eventual Protestant conversion by first allowing him nearly to shipwreck himself on the contrary tenets of an implicitly Catholic morality. We may allow, with Helgerson, that Spenser differs from Tasso in retaining a place in his poem’s ethical scheme for chivalric “private honor” alongside “public duty”;48 but it is, I think, crucial to observe also how Spenser, before asserting the proper compatibility of the two, first depicts as utterly selfdefeating a version of “private honor” which does not look to “public duty” for direction and validation. Indeed in the Legend of Holiness, the ethos of the autonomous noble whose guiding light is his private honour has its most direct support in the House of Pride, much of whose business is to flatter with a semblance of public legitimacy the private causes of its knightly visitors. Such in particular is the job of its “many Chroniclers, that can record / Old loues, and warres for Ladies doen by many a Lord” – explicitly the promoters of a truly medieval aristocratic value system, replete with heroic private wars – and of their colleagues, “Bardes, that . . . / Can tune their timely voyces cunningly”, presumably to lauding whichever camp they find themselves in, and whoever is currently on top there (I.v.3). The result of giving such an ethos free rein, it is made clear, is a wholly pernicious relativism, not only political but moral, in which knights each arrogantly certain of being in the right clash savagely for the most fickle and delusive of rewards. To sum up, such a relativistic ethos of aristocratic personal honour (suitably presided over, in the House of Pride, by a self-justifying usurper with no more intrinsic right to rule than anyone else [I.iv.12]) is depicted in Book One as merely another face, the political face, of the same vain self-righteousness whose religious associations I have already explored. Against that dual background, the divinely-anchored absolutism of Gloriana’s regime can be brought into the poem with almost self-evident moral and political force, to cure at a stroke the protagonist’s despairing relativism regarding worldly ends 48

Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 59.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene – a relativism which is the bitter legacy of his misadventures, and which, until Contemplation schools him better, inclines him to abandon all worldly things along with his own worldly pride. If in religious terms the cure for a specious ethos of self-exaltation was the sinner’s humbling before God, in political terms it is the humbling of a belligerent baronial relativism before a godly monarchic absolutism. Such is the composite and topical lesson in moral self-interpretation that is depicted as finally setting Redcross on the straight and narrow.

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Chapter Six

The Rhetoric of Self-Interpretation

I

HAVE ARGUED that a fundamental aim of The Faerie Queene, Book One, iis to distinguish a specious from a valid mode of self-interpretation, and that the former’s spuriousness is revealed chiefly in narrative terms, that is, in terms of where the protagonist’s subscribing to it really leads him (to Orgoglio’s dungeon by way of the House of Pride), as compared with where it seems to him to be leading (to knightly glory). On that basis, we might expect the contrasting genuineness of the latter ethos to be indicated in an equal and opposite manner, by the hero’s actually attaining the goals a reformed mode of self-interpretation sets before him. And to an extent, that is what we do see; for once Redcross is schooled in the importance of performing his earthly duty to Gloriana, he promptly brings to a successful end the dragon-slaying quest he was previously disinclined and unfit to perform, and thereupon obtains both the earthly fame and the declared status of sainthood (see esp. II.i.32) that Contemplation has set out for him as the twin rewards of righteous obedience (I.x.59–61). There is, however, another respect in which his very attainment of those rewards actually renders questionable the supposed reformation of his character. For the means whereby he secures a good reputation after slaying the dragon can put in doubt whether his self-interpretative regime is genuinely rectified, or whether instead the characters and narrator who collude in representing him as reformed should themselves be regarded with moral suspicion. Those means involve Redcross and Una, and with them the narrator, in conspicuously reallocating the blame for the knight’s former sins to Duessa and Archimago, in what the book gives surprisingly strong reasons for seeing as either a disingenuous or a self-deceiving piece of revisionism. Harry Berger, drawing attention to the “strange and unsettling interchange” in which the reallocation takes place, justifiably describes it as “a micro-event of great importance, one that places in question not only the happiness of the ending but also the motives and interests of the narrative itself.”1 1

Berger, “Displacing Autophobia”, 171.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene What will be at issue here is whether, as Berger supposes, Spenser’s handling of that scene is indicative of a tendency in the poem to subvert the moral framework it ostensibly champions, or whether, instead, such “strange and unsettling” self-interpretative activity is itself a part of what that moral framework is genuinely meant to justify. I shall argue the latter, and more specifically that in canto twelve Spenser tries to do for homo rhetoricus what he does in canto ten for the chivalric man of action, namely recover a potentially loose cannon for moral ends by subjecting it to the guiding authority of a godly prince. But to show that will require first examining the strengths and weaknesses of the contrary argument.

A Subversive Spenser? In the scene in question, Redcross, acceding to a request to retell his story, “Discours[es] his voyage” in a version that elicits “pitty” for his sufferings and “prayse” for triumphing over them (I.xii.15–17). But then Archimago enters, disguised, with a message from Duessa which paints a contrary picture of the knight, not as an exemplar of perseverance, but as a “False erraunt knight, infamous, and forswore” (I.xii.27). Only by seeing off that account can the hero secure the “euerlasting fame” which is ordained as a reward for completing his quest, and later held up as a shining example for Sir Guyon to emulate (II.i.32). It is not that Redcross fails to win the contest over the interpretation of his deeds; the problem is rather that his doing so, with Una’s help, does not furnish us as we might expect with anything like a neat exemplum of simple truth’s proving itself against duplicitous falsehood. For one thing, while the knight’s foes, being personifications of falsehood and hypocrisy, unsurprisingly are not above telling an outright lie – as in claiming that Redcross was the one who forsook Duessa (I.xii.27) when in fact just the reverse is true (I.vii.14–16) – what is remarkable is that their picture of the hero is not a wholly baseless fabrication. Rather their chief allegation, that he has taken “another loue” (I.xii.26), is true; and more broadly (if not to Duessa then to Una and his quest) he has been “False”, “erraunt”, and “forswore”. Moreover, the bringing of those allegations calls attention to distortions and outright gaps in the versions of events he himself offers. Not least (as noted by Jacqueline T. Miller in an article dedicated to the scene), his response to the charges makes clear that, in his own prior recitation of his woes, he had managed to leave out all mention of Duessa, an omission he only now makes good, his hand having been forced.2 What is more, even when

2

J. T. Miller, “The Omission in Red Cross Knight’s Story”.

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The Rhetoric of Self-Interpretation he revises his story to include his amour with Duessa, he contrives to depict her purely as a persecutor,3 thus maintaining the exonerating impression his first rendition had created, of his having been a victim rather than a seeker of the “straunge aduentures, and . . . perils sad, / Which in his trauell him befallen had” (I.xii.15). In particular, he imputes any infidelity on his part, not to his own having “strayd” (I.xii.31), but to the overwhelming malicious agency of Duessa, Who by her wicked arts, and wylie skill, Too false and strong for earthly skill or might, Vnwares me wrought vnto her wicked will . . .

(I.xii.32).

But the story as we have read it belies his self-acquittal as decisively as it does Duessa’s comparable reassignment of blame in claiming that he was the one who ultimately forsook her. For she needed no sorcery to win or keep his amorous devotion beyond what made her physically beautiful, having found in him only too willing a victim. So not merely his first, but also his final version of his own story (a version accepted as true by Una’s father, and allowed to pass without further comment), shows his past not in its true colours but in what looks like a deliberate whitewash. Far from holding the high ground of truth against falsehood’s calumnies, he looks like both the instigator and the victor in a contest of bending the truth. Few commentators have noticed the hero’s economies with the truth in this scene.4 However, that may be due in no small part to the fact that his self-interpretation continues to be seconded by the characters friendly to him, and by the narrator, just as during his early, “errant” adventures – and with the same result, that his picture of himself is given the look of authority and objectivity.5 But while such endorsements make the still problematic nature of the hero’s self-interpretation in canto twelve easy to miss,6 they do not render it any less problematic – no more than his early actions are less sinful for being systematically treated as morally exemplary. Indeed, as Miller notes, the chorus of affirmation that answers his claim to being worthy of “pitty” and

3 4

5

6

As noted by Berger, “Displacing Autophobia”, 171. Besides Miller and Berger, I note only Hamilton, The Faerie Queene, I.xii.31.8n, who implausibly exonerates Redcross for “[t]he omission of any reference to Duessa in [the knight’s] ‘point to point’ account” with the arguments that he “is not yet wedded to Truth” and in any case may have had “the memory of his sin . . . purged in the house of Holiness”. Thus the final version of his story is corroborated by Una (I.xii.33) and accepted by her father (I.xii.36); and even the version that leaves Duessa out is glossed over by the narrator as a complete rendition “From point to point, as is before exprest” (II.xii.15) (cf. Berger, “Displacing Autophobia”, 171, and Miller, “The Omission in Red Cross Knight’s Story”, 281–83). As Berger puts it in “Displacing Autophobia”, 171, “the machinery of closure . . . glosses over the interchange and urges the reader on toward the happy ending”.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene “prayse” only deepens the problem, by giving us not just the hero’s skewed self-interpretation to account for, but the matching gullibility or collusion of his audience, and more broadly still the poet’s apparently partisan construction of the whole scene.7 Nor is the problem confined to canto twelve, but as Berger observes comprises the whole climate of moral interpretation in the second half of Book One.8 In canto seven, recounting her knight’s misadventures, Una momentarily acknowledges that “me desolate he quite forsooke” (I.vii.50), but only to ascribe all the blame to the bad woman he “chaunced” to meet, “Who with her witchcraft and misseeming sweete, / Inueigled him to follow her desires vnmeete” (I.vii.50). In not facing up to whether he followed “desires vnmeete” of his own, her account anticipates his own rendition in canto twelve, in which the “wicked will” is spoken of as all Duessa’s. The same dubious exculpatory process recurs after Redcross is rescued from Orgoglio’s dungeon. Here too his allies initially show ambivalence about where the responsibility for his woes lies – with Arthur, especially, openly equivocating as to whether his misadventures comprised “things, that grieuous were to do, or beare” (I.viii.44).9 But soon Duessa, “that wicked woman”, is singled out as “The roote of all your care, and wretched plight” (I.viii.45), and the charge is forcibly corroborated by stripping her to show what a hideous dissembler she is (I.viii.46–49) – a deed that amounts (as Berger puts it) to “a violent act of scapegoating”.10 Amongst those partaking in Duessa’s scapegoating is “the narrator, who spends three stanzas describing and expressing his horror at the monstrous female uglinesses his ‘chaster Muse for shame doth blush to write’ (viii.48).”11 Indeed the narrator is more widely complicit in an exonerating interpretation of the knight’s woes. For he prepares readers to see the blame pinned on Duessa, and the protagonist largely absolved, by prefacing the relevant scenes with stanzas suggesting that Redcross is a “guiltlesse” and even a “righteous” man, whose troubles are attributable to his being beset by “many perils”, chief among them “The false Duessa”, an enemy so “crafty cunning” that “What man” could have detected her “guile” (I.vii.1 and I.viii.1)? The dubiousness of such a gloss is meanwhile rendered visible by a momentary airing of the thought that the so-called “righteous man” may have fallen “through his owne foolish pride” (I.viii.1) – something so contrary to the broader exonerating thrust of the stanza as to render apparently incoherent its subject’s being called “righteous”. But at once an alternative is appended, less true to the story but 7 8 9

10 11

Miller, “The Omission in Red Cross Knight’s Story”, 281. Berger, “Displacing Autophobia”, 172. Noted by Berger, “Displacing Autophobia”, 172, who observes also the “potentially damaging accusation” latent in Una’s words to Redcross “That of your selfe ye thus berobbed arre” (I.viii.42). Berger, “Displacing Autophobia”, 172–74. Berger, “Displacing Autophobia”, 174.

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The Rhetoric of Self-Interpretation more self-consistent, namely that he fell from “weaknesse”, all-but-innocently succumbing to an essentially external evil (I.viii.1). Just as in the first half of the book, the narrator’s gloss here echoes under the semblance of objectivity an interpretative procedure typical of the principal characters themselves, in what can seem a corroboration of their view, but on further examination only holds it up to closer scrutiny. What effect should such a self-interpretative trend in the latter half of the Legend of Holiness have on our own interpretation of the book and its hero? For Miller, “what Spenser does in the last canto of book 1 is to radically challenge our faith . . . so that we may see how easily we can misplace it, and how few things in this world (including the text of The Faerie Queene) deserve it.”12 It is a significant argument, but one Miller underplays when she represents it as ultimately supporting the expected “lesson” of the Legend of Holiness by underscoring the pious message that “a properly directed faith” should be abidingly suspicious of earthly things, not excluding “The Faerie Queene itself”.13 For if it really is the case that Redcross, even at the very end of his story, is just “one more source of the half-told, partial, mangled, disguised, and false truths to which [the reader] is constantly exposed” in Book One,14 then the whole narrative of his conversion from sinner into living saint becomes deeply suspect: at least prima facie, such behaviour seems to lower him to a moral par with his duplicitous adversaries. But if the book’s suggestion really is that even the one offered to us as “Saint George of mery England” (I.x.61) and “The Patron of true Holinesse” (I.i.Arg.; and cf. letter to Raleigh) is in truth, right to the end of his story, an incorrigible liar or self-deceiver, and hence never morally exemplary except in his own eyes and those of his credulous or partisan admirers, that amounts not just to a spiritually salutary challenge to the reader’s faith in earthly things but to an implicit subversion of every aspect of the story’s ostensive moral, religious, and nationalistic purposes. For if the moral reformation supposedly effected in the House of Holiness makes no real difference to the hero’s character, so that his supposed righteousness at the end of the story is as much a mere façade of self-righteousness as he presented in the House of Pride, all the moral distinctions the book seems to draw collapse like a house built on sand, not least its ostensible distinction between specious and morally legitimate ways of pursuing earthly glory, and hence between the moral authority of their respective royal patrons, the charlatan Lucifera and the purportedly true queen Gloriana. If Spenser were indeed to be regarded as having engineered such a collapse, the implications for the book’s topical significance could hardly be overstated. For one thing, he would have to be seen as undermining rather than

12 13 14

Miller, “The Omission in Red Cross Knight’s Story”, 283. Miller, “The Omission in Red Cross Knight’s Story”, 283–84. Miller, “The Omission in Red Cross Knight’s Story”, 284.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene advocating the notion that a Protestant and monarchist ethos offers real escape from the pernicious moral and political relativism whose selfdestructive futility he so effectively displays in the House of Pride. What is more, if Gloriana’s supposed moral mandate is no more effectual in practice than Lucifera’s, the implication would be that it is to Lucifera rather than Gloriana that we should look for the book’s true commentary on the nature even of the supposedly legitimate queen’s authority. Nor would that be a hard reading to fasten to Lucifera. Even in the absence of larger grounds for suspecting Spenser’s intentions, a few critics have seen in the “mayden Queene . . . that too exceeding shone” (I.iv.8), and who with false claims about her “parentage” (I.iv.11) “did vsurpe with wrong and tyrannie / Vpon the scepter, which she now did hold” (I.iv.12), inescapable reference to Elizabeth herself, as she was represented by her most ardent enemies.15 Indeed, not only does the poem level at Lucifera just the charges of illegitimacy, usurpation, atheism and tyranny made against Elizabeth by her foes,16 but it attributes to the charlatan very much the same kind of luminous aura that its own proems habitually ascribe to Elizabeth as a mark of greatness (e.g. I.Pr.4), only to construe that aura here as a sign of empty pretence to greatness. If all that were not enough, the picture of a queen who “too exceeding shone”, “Ne ruld her Realmes with lawes, but pollicie, / And strong aduizement of six wisards old” (I.iv.12), might seem, after all, with its stock charges of a tyrant’s contempt for subjects’ rights and reliance on wicked counsellors, to savour of the anti-absolutist language of baronial self-assertion, and in that respect too to undermine the book’s narrative movement towards iure divino monarchism. In all those ways, Spenser’s extraordinary picture of a vainglorious “mayden Queene” might be supposed to go hand in hand with the events of canto twelve in rendering suspect the moral value of the hero’s finally deferring to royal authority, and so to corroborate the notion of a deliberate and sustained subversive agenda at work behind the book’s ostensible purposes. Berger, though he does not raise the latter points, comes somewhat closer than Miller to acknowledging the full depth of the challenge his reading poses to the poem’s declared aims. For him, it is indeed the first book’s effect to put in doubt the moral value of the Christian-chivalric identity that Redcross acquires in the course of his quest. For the result, he argues, of the poem’s conspicuously questionable self-interpretative programme is that it “opens up a position for readers” to interpret the book’s “allegorical narrative subversively and disobediently”.17 In fact The Faerie Queene is for Berger no 15 16

17

See, e.g., Simon Shepherd, Spenser (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), 35–36, and Roberts, The Faerie Queene, 58. See, e.g., Pope Sixtus V’s “Declaration of the Sentence and deposition of Elizabeth, the usurper and pretensed Quene of Englande”, in J. W. Sider, ed., The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England (New York and London: Garland, 1979), 212–19. Berger, “Displacing Autophobia”, 167 and 178–79.

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The Rhetoric of Self-Interpretation less than an “unruly text that impersonates or ventriloquizes [the] government . . . in [a] mode . . . that promotes sedition among its readers.”18 But the force of his conclusion is blunted by a certain abstractedness from the particular historical difficulties that by rights it should pose: one feels it is more a question of the armchair kind of sedition that is very well for us as critics four centuries after the fact, than of the kind that could bring people to the scaffold or the sharp end of a pike in Spenser’s time. It would indeed be a remarkable historical proposition to say that the poem “promotes sedition among its readers” in the latter sense; but to that proposition, though his language regularly suggests it, Berger carefully avoids committing himself. Rather than attributing the “subversive” streak he finds in The Faerie Queene, even as a matter of probability, to its author’s political intention, he goes only so far as to say that such a “method of writing . . . may have been responsive either to external constraints (censorship, for example) or to internal unconstraints, that is, the unruly and explosive generativity of language.”19 But that is a difference which makes a difference: it is one thing to imagine a Spenser who, under cover of a tactical affirmation, in fact deliberately sets out to undermine an authoritarian regime and its state religion; quite another to suppose that through his use of language he unwittingly reveals the cracks in that regime’s ideology – and even so perhaps only belatedly, that is, to us.20 Accordingly we ought to separate carefully the respective cases that can be made for the two possibilities. The proposition that Spenser deliberately subverts his declared aims in The Faerie Queene is one that is advanced, though not with reference to Book One per se, by another recent critic, Annabel Patterson. The basis of Patterson’s argument is the point to which Berger alludes in mentioning Spenser’s “external constraints (censorship, for example)”: namely that a text which ostensibly backs an authoritarian state and its “official values” may do so only from necessity, and “between the lines” of that mandatory orthodoxy may imply a contrary message.21 Patterson pursues such a thesis in Spenser’s case only in relation to his later writings, in particular the 1596 instalment of The Faerie Queene and A View of the Present State of Ireland.22 But the conclusion she reaches regarding those works tallies closely with the picture of Book One

18 19 20

21 22

Berger, “Displacing Autophobia”, 177. Berger, “Displacing Autophobia”, 179. On the one hand Berger says that the poem “demands the reader find a framework, a perspective, a method, outside the one the poem putatively privileges”, but on the other hand he allows that that “perspective . . . may not have been accessible or articulable” to Spenser or his contemporaries. (“Displacing Autophobia”, 179.) Patterson, Reading Between the Lines, 7, 81, and passim. Patterson allows the politics of the 1590 Faerie Queene to pass as “considerably” more “optimistic” (Reading Between the Lines, 87).

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene that follows from Miller’s and Berger’s readings. For she regards the later works as undermining the “essentialist system of value” they claim to champion – the system defining Elizabeth’s regime as necessarily “good” and its opponents as obviously “evil” – by hinting that it is merely a cover for effectively amoral “pragmatic” politics, a fig leaf for “the naked realities of opposed interests and unequal power relations”.23 That is very much where Miller’s and Berger’s readings of Book One tend, insofar as they imply that in the last canto, behind the ostensibly absolute moral distinction between Redcross and his enemies, anchored in Gloriana’s supposedly God-given authority, we can discern a parity of self-interested duplicity, in which are implicated not merely the knight himself but the very interpretative machinery whereby the book putatively sets him apart morally from his foes. Where Patterson sees such a subversive effect in Spenser, she is not coy about ascribing it to his conscious intention: his aim, she argues, is to call in question the ideology he ostensibly champions, in such ways as “he thought he could get away with.”24 For example, when the speakers in A View of the Present State of Ireland, on the way to reaching agreement on the need to uproot Irish culture and to slaughter the more obstinate Irish rebels, draw attention to the fact that that culture, and even those rebels, can be represented (and are so presented by the poets of their own party) as good on their own terms, Patterson proposes that it is Spenser’s intention to insinuate the ultimate arbitrariness of identifying “the good” with English interests in Ireland, and (more subversively still) with the queen’s interest in maintaining her authority in both her realms. What is more, she suggests, it may have been a legitimate suspicion on the part of “Spenser’s official readers” that such was his meaning, which kept the View out of print during Spenser’s and Elizabeth’s lifetimes.25 So how plausible is such a picture, either of Spenser’s writings in general or of the Legend of Holiness in particular? In fact, I think, both Patterson and

23 24

25

Patterson, Reading Between the Lines, 110–11. Patterson, Reading Between the Lines, 109. Patterson does not, like Berger, use the terms “subversive” and “seditious” to describe Spenser’s writings, but – what amounts to the same thing – she does include him amongst the Elizabethan writers who “promoted alternatives”, “republican or egalitarian”, to the “hierarchical status quo” (5–6). Patterson, Reading Between the Lines, 99–103, 108–11 (quoting 108). See Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, 95 and passim. Patterson is preceded in her suggestion as to the reason for the (alleged) censorship of the View by David Baker, “ ‘Some Quirk, Some Subtle Evasion’: Legal Subversion in Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland”, Spenser Studies 6 (1985): 147–63; she differs with Baker in holding “that Spenser’s official readers were right to be suspicious” of his intentions. Both Baker and Patterson may be wrong to assume that it was state censorship that kept the View out of print in the 1590s: see Jean Brink, “Constructing the View of the Present State of Ireland”, Spenser Studies 11 (1990): 204–09, and Andrew Hadfield, “Certainties and Uncertainties: By Way of Response to Jean Brink”, Spenser Studies 12 (1991): 197–99.

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The Rhetoric of Self-Interpretation Berger, insofar as they ask us to imagine such a subversive Spenser, bend the limits of historical and of textual credibility. It is not by any means that they are wrong to attribute to the passages in question a strong potential for being read subversively, whose presence requires some explanation. But both stack the deck in favour of a subversive reading, on the one hand by ignoring historical and textual evidence of the poet’s more than superficial interest in supporting the regime, and on the other by not considering what possible aims other than out-and-out subversive ones the problematic passages on which they focus might plausibly serve.

The Alternative to a Subversive Spenser Berger, in suggesting that the unreliability of self-interpretation in Spenser’s poem implies in all cases the unreliability of “the establishment view”,26 passes over the dichotomous structure of Book One to which I drew attention in Chapters Four and Five. That is to say, he proceeds without noting the book’s apparent interest in distinguishing a negative from a positive version of chivalry, straight to “the hypothesis that ‘the ironic evaluation of the chivalric ethic’ [which] Spenser found in Ariosto . . . may also be directed toward the Protestant ethic in Book I”.27 Such a shortcut points, I think, to a larger problem with Berger’s recent critical methodology, namely that even while criticising the views of Northrop Frye, Paul Alpers, and Stephen Greenblatt, who in various ways treat The Faerie Queene as a direct instrument of ruling powers and ideas, he nonetheless accepts their accounts of “Tudor ideology” as, if not quite a monolith, at least a well-cemented aggregate of “conventional discourses (of gender, class, morality, religion, and hierarchy)”.28 Hence the only alternative he can propose to a poem which (as those critics see it) frankly serves the whole system of “the culture’s dominant discourses” is exactly the reverse, one that frames that entire system as an object of critique.29 More specifically, he allows with Alpers that the poem everywhere “speaks” with the “voice” of traditionalism, a “voice” which trusts its (ideologically defined) world and solicits a similar trust from its “audience”, but unlike Alpers, he sees that voice and that audience not as identifiable with the poet and the competent reader, but on the contrary as the “targets” of a continual parody, whose effect is to undo the trust in traditional values and traditional ways of inculcating them that the poem seems superficially to participate in and commend.30 26 27 28 29 30

Quoting Berger, “Displacing Autophobia”, 172. Berger, “Displacing Autophobia”, 165. Berger, “Narrative as Rhetoric”, quoting 43 and 25. Re Frye, see 13, 48; re Alpers, 10–13, 22–25, 28–30, 45n–46n; re Greenblatt, 43–44. Quoting Berger, “Narrative as Rhetoric”, 40. Berger, “Narrative as Rhetoric”, esp. 11–13 and 45n–46n.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene For Berger, then, the poem’s seemingly ingenuous romance storytelling voice is in reality a sophisticated effect, comparable to that winning semblance of spontaneous ‘plain speaking’ which it is the rhetorician’s conventional aim to capture in writing; and Spenser is like the sixteenth-century humanists who turned the tables on that aim, using the resources of the “writerly text” deliberately to highlight the factitious nature both of the pseudo-oral rhetorical transaction and of the conservative ideology it privileges.31 So in The Faerie Queene, “if the narrator and his story are working for the government, the poem is not. Rather it is a double agent that kidnaps the narrator and his chivalric idealism in the service of a more subversive agenda”.32 Such an account of Spenser is ground-breaking in its discussion of rhetorical means, throwing much light on the ways a text might turn its ostensible message and modes of delivery into “targets” of a critique; but it is relatively simplistic in its analysis of political ends. For as I have tried to acknowledge in my own discussion of the politics of Book One, neither traditional discourses nor political conservatism are the sole preserve of the state, nor always aligned with its interests. In the Elizabethan period in particular, the state-endorsed Protestantism and monarchic absolutism which the first book of The Faerie Queene at least ostensibly promotes faced conservative as well as radical opposition – being themselves to a significant extent still radical ideologies, for which the cloak of traditional authority was sought in part as cover for their novelty. Correspondingly, conventional discourses like that of chivalric romance, whose values we may agree The Faerie Queene problematises, could equally be linked in practice with Catholicism or feudal revivalism as with Elizabeth’s evolving version of “Tudor ideology”. The question is which political appropriations of the voice and values of chivalric romance the poem targets; and whether at the same time there are other appropriations thereof that it not only spares from parody but in which it actually participates.33 The context-sensitive reading that such a question calls for depends on our not taking too generalised a view of the poem’s relationship to its own storytelling voice, as happens when (whether with Berger or with the critics whose readings he inverts) we speak in the singular of that voice’s agenda. The rhetorical power of storytelling, whose importance in the poem Berger rightly 31 32 33

Berger, “Narrative as Rhetoric”, 4–10; quoting 6. Berger, “Narrative as Rhetoric”, 48. Berger does to a degree acknowledge, as does one of his foils, Northrop Frye, that The Faerie Queene’s linking of romance values with the claims of the Protestant state constitutes a very particular appropriation thereof (one that Frye regards the poem as intentionally partaking in, Berger as subversively parodying); but both misleadingly write as though that stateappropriation of romance were the only one occurring on the Elizabethan political scene, thus occluding the more complex possibility of the poem’s participating in one politicisation of traditional forms but in the meantime critiquing another. (See Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976], 29–30, and Berger’s reversal of Frye’s position in “Narrative as Rhetoric”, 13 and 48.)

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The Rhetoric of Self-Interpretation stresses, in practice serves various ends, being used not least by numerous characters in the story (from Archimago to Arthur) who in pursuit of different narrative aims, and with varying degrees of narrative success, interpret their world to one another. Even the voice of the poem’s narrator, far from consistently being associated with any one ideology, seems, as it were, the variegated outgrowth of those multiple sites of interpretation within the story world, on all of which in turn it confers the appearance of naturalness, but not all of which the poem treats as equal in other respects. Thus the narrating voice seems as ingenuously positive about the cheering effect on Una of the maliciously disguised Archimago’s “louely words” (I.iii.30), as about the comparable effect on her, at a later point, of Arthur’s “cheerfull words” (I.vii.52); yet our relation to that voice differs radically in the two places, since in the former it reflects a view manifestly subject to cruel dramatic irony, in the latter one whose validity the story will bear out. That is not to say that the poem’s seemingly ingenuous storytelling voices are anywhere genuinely innocent of rhetorical sophistication. On the contrary, we have already seen the opposite to be the case, just at the points when we would most expect to see Spenser setting forth the claims of simple truth: namely, when Una, Arthur, and finally Redcross himself assume the role of storytellers in the latter half of Book One. But the fact that even those characters’ apparently straightforward renditions of events are found, on closer attention, to intervene to a surprising degree in the moral meaning the hero’s story is finally seen to have, and the further fact that the poem’s narrator colludes in that interpretative intervention, ought not to propel us too quickly to regarding the rhetorical strategy discernible in all those voices as just one more target of a relentless critique. Nor should we be too quick in equating that strategy morally with the spurious interpretative means by which the knight contrives to regard himself as a heroic figure during his early adventures, let alone with the mendacious rhetorical strategies by which Archimago and Duessa confirm Redcross in his error. For as is widely attested, all manner of things offered to us as morally good in Book One of The Faerie Queene look at first glance disconcertingly like evils, indeed like specific evils we have already seen demonised.34 As in the case of the book’s apparent about-face in canto ten with regard to the moral value of chivalric works, even a striking similarity may be meant to press us to discover the deeper grounds for drawing a moral distinction. That something of the sort may be required from us in the present case, moreover, may be made the more plausible by the fact that, in the rhetorical tradition whose sophistication Berger persuasively asks us to see reflected in

34

See esp. the discussion of images in The Faerie Queene repeated in bono et in malo, in Carol V. Kaske, Spenser and Biblical Poetics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), chapters 2 and 3.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene Spenser, the promotion of both truth and falsehood, and of both good and bad ends, is admitted to rely on identical technical means, which in themselves look disconcertingly like prescriptions for an art of lying.35 Where Berger would have the poem universally target the rhetorical voice by which its ostensible didactic purpose is conveyed, it may actually be that Spenser, though alive to and indeed explicit about the potential for that rhetorical voice’s abuse, strives precisely in the face of its already-notorious capacity for misuse to establish clear grounds for a right use of rhetoric, and so to recover it for truly moral ends. Far from being intended as grist to the sceptics’ mill, the poem may be meant to answer the sceptics’ charges – to defend, rather than to join in censuring, the rhetorical means by which its didactic message is conveyed. Berger, however, takes almost the opposite view to my own of The Faerie Queene’s characters, minimising their individual importance as interpreters to the point of seeing “even the major characters in the story” as “little more than ventriloquists’ dummies” for “conventional discourses” which the poem is presumed ubiquitously to target.36 Such an approach leaves no room for differentiating right from wrong interpretations within the story, by distinguishing characters’ readings that do, from those that do not bear themselves out by leading to positive narrative results. Hence where I have distinguished two attitudes in Book One, respectively polemical and recuperative, towards its generic and rhetorical resources, Berger assumes a universally polemical text, a mere agglomeration or “crazyquilt . . . of discursive traductions”.37 That generalising assumption plays in turn into his tendency to universalise the object of the poem’s polemic: to set up that all-too-broad target, “Tudor ideology”, at which all The Faerie Queene’s scepticism can be regarded as directed. A comparable oversimplification is seen in Patterson, who writes as if a loyalist poetry, under an authoritarian regime, could only be one that spinelessly or unthinkingly parrots an established political orthodoxy, and conversely as if the only politically sophisticated message an Elizabethan poem could be meant to convey were a deliberately subversive one. 38 That 35 36 37 38

See e.g. Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. 133–35. Berger, “Narrative as Rhetoric”, 25. Berger, “Narrative as Rhetoric”, quoting 47. Such a narrow view of what supporting the government might mean in the Renaissance is not especially unfair to the particular critics against whose presuppositions Patterson articulates her more suspicious view. Thus for Alvin Kernan, The Death of Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 11, Elizabethan “poetry was defined in ways that suited ruling-class interests and values”, because “The crown controlled all writing, directly through censorship or indirectly through a courtly poetics.” Similarly, for Frye, The Secular Scripture 163, 29, Spenser is, in political terms, simply “speaking for an establishment”, just as “In every period of history certain ascendant values are accepted by society and embodied in its serious

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The Rhetoric of Self-Interpretation presumption is then translated into a dichotomous choice for the modern reader: either we read naïvely, taking “much too literally the statements of orthodoxy and deference to rulers that, unsurprisingly, mark the pages of Spenser”, or we take a sophisticated, which is to say a subversive, attitude towards his declared aims, “reading between the lines” for indications of “heterodox opinion”.39 I do not say we should rule out in advance the possibility that any given Elizabethan writer may wish clandestinely to convey a subversive political position; only that we ought in each case to weigh the plausibility of such a reading against something more than the hypothesis of the poem’s having been a mere mouthpiece for the official policies or ascendant values of its time.40 As in Berger’s case, Patterson’s dichotomous political model leads to her passing over the non-negligible political work that Spenser’s writings appear to be doing on the near side of subversion, in favour of teasing out an undeclarable agenda whose seeming plausibility gains precisely from that omission. Returning, for example, to the case of A View of the Present State of Ireland, we may note that there is a much more obvious reason than the one Patterson adduces why the work might have been thought unsuitable for printing, either by Spenser’s “official readers”, or by Spenser himself, namely that, while by no means manifestly subversive of the value system sustaining the Elizabethan regime, it is openly and systematically critical of Elizabeth’s existing policy on Ireland.41 That explicit laying of the blame at the queen’s feet – something The Faerie Queene itself uniformly avoids, however implicitly critical of Elizabeth’s policies it may in places be found to be – seems to me crucial to our making sense of the one work’s having remained in manuscript while the other was printed, whether the hand that kept A View from press was a censor’s or

39 40 41

literature”. But Patterson passes over a body of recent criticism which rejects the very notion of a monolithic Elizabethan state whose “official values” (to borrow Patterson’s term) a poet had either passively to support or actively to subvert, and which places him, instead, within a politically active social stratum, wherein he might have tried, without being subversive of the system itself, to exert a discreet influence on the crown’s political agenda. See esp. David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 13 and passim, and Louis Adrian Montrose, “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text”, Literary Theory / Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 303–40, and cf. Collinson, Elizabethan Essays, cap. 1 and 2. Patterson, Reading Between the Lines, 8. For more extensive development of this point, see Paul Suttie, “Edmund Spenser’s Political Pragmatism”, Studies in Philology 95 (1998): 56–76. See, e.g., A View of the Present State of Ireland, 96–97: “Iren[ius]: . . . in this last two years’ wars, hath vainly been expended . . . [by] the Queen above 200,000 pounds . . . yet nothing done. The which sum, had it been employed as it should be, would have effected all this that I now go about . . . [for] it is not now disbursed at once as it might be, but drawn out into a great length, by sending over now 20,000 pounds, and next half year 10,000, so as the soldier in the meantime is for want of due provision of victual . . . starved and consumed . . . and yet [he] is the Queen’s charge nevertheless . . . . Eudox[us]: I take this sure to be no good husbandry.” Cf. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, 143.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene Spenser’s own. Patterson’s suggestion regarding the View’s censoring, in contrast, raises for me the question of how, if the authorities were such suspicious readers as she implies, they did not likewise move against The Faerie Queene. For if it were a question of what can be inferred from a work by reading against the grain of its declared intention, then there are characters in The Faerie Queene (like Book Five’s egalitarian giant, with whom Patterson indeed suspects Spenser of covertly sympathising) who speak much more to the point, in calling in question the “hierarchical status quo”, than does either character in the View;42 and there are descriptive passages, like that of the “mayden Queene . . . Lucifera”, which I wonder how such readers could have laid eyes on without falling over themselves to call the poem in. As to the further question whether the subversive meaning Patterson finds in the View, even if unlikely grounds for censorship, might have been part of what Spenser intended to convey to his most capable readers, that too seems doubtful, precisely in light of the work’s obvious sensitivity as a frank critique of current policy. For it is improbable that, in the act of going out on a limb to pen a work whose overt aim is to promote a firmer royal policy in Ireland, a writer would meanwhile directly undermine that aim – as putting in doubt the very right of the English to rule in Ireland, and of the queen to put down rebels by force, clearly would do.43 I do not deny that the View, or indeed The Faerie Queene, has a remarkable potential for being read subversively, which requires some specific explanation. Indeed I have been at pains to show that even the Legend of Holiness, whose nationalistic credentials and, more generally, the earnestness of whose ostensible design, are still the most taken for granted of any in The Faerie Queene, has surprisingly great subversive potential. But the question is whether the most textually and historically sensitive explanation of that fact is to postulate a subversive intention on Spenser’s part – an intention to undermine the very “essentialist system of value” in which his ostensible aims are grounded. The alternative I propose is that the subversive positions Patterson and Berger find in Spenser’s texts are actually objects of his critical scrutiny and poetic riposte rather than conclusions his most attentive readers are urged to reach. For it looks to me that both A View of the Present State of Ireland and 42 43

See The Faerie Queene, V.ii.29–54, and Patterson, Reading Between the Lines, cap. 4, esp. 109. See further Suttie, “Edmund Spenser’s Political Pragmatism”, 62–63. The dialogue form might be cited in objection to my characterisation of the View as an overt political declaration, but against that it ought to be observed that the futility of the queen’s current policy of paying piecemeal for her Irish wars is something about which the dialogue’s two characters emphatically agree from the moment the topic is introduced. I am not, in other words, assuming that Spenser speaks transparently through one of his characters, Irenius, an approach whose inadequacy has been noted by Patterson, Reading Between the Lines, 98–99, and others. Even Patterson must acknowledge “that the View as a whole promotes” the “policy of Irish subjugation” that Irenius advocates, though unlike me she regards it as plausible that Spenser would, from a sense of integrity, deliberately have weakened his own act of lobbying through Eudoxus’s interventions (110).

106

The Rhetoric of Self-Interpretation The Faerie Queene, Book One, far from implicitly endorsing a morally relativistic view of politics, present that view as itself the superficial one, which must be stripped away to apprehend truly what we may call with Patterson “the naked realities” of the political world. My point may be seen in brief in a specific exchange in the View which Patterson sees as implicitly advocating the morally relativistic idea that “One man’s rebel is another man’s hero”.44 Its subject is the Irish bards’ supposed partisan abuse of the rhetoric of praise. Both speakers agree that, so long as it is the right people and deeds a poet sets out to celebrate, it is proper for him to use whatever rhetorical devices will serve “to beautify and adorn [their] virtue”, since that is conducive to the ethical aim of poetry that others be “stirred up to affect like commendations, and so to strive unto the like deserts”.45 Poetry is licensed, that is, to make examples of its subjects, with all the active reshaping of its materials that such exemplificative readings may imply. A problem arises only when that poetic license is “abused”, “to the gracing of wickedness and vice”.46 For by giving “a goodly gloss and painted show thereunto”, a corrupt poet can “set up and glorify” even a man of the “most dangerous . . . and rebellious disposition”, such that others will take him as their “example to follow”.47 The ethical force of exemplificative interpretation, which is what justifies in the first place a poet’s putting an interpretative slant on the strict truth, can in that way be reversed. So too, by the same token, can the very roles of hero and villain: such that the man of a “dangerous . . . and rebellious disposition” is made to look like a champion of virtue. Such an account does certainly draw attention to the reversibility of moral judgements, as Patterson says. But to say that, in doing so, it hints seditiously at the merely rhetorical nature of English and royalist claims to be in the right, is to neglect what the passage does explicitly, which is not only openly to acknowledge that reversibility (which in any case was notorious48), but furthermore to try to address it, and on a particular set of terms: one that will not at the same time incriminate every rhetorical departure from the strict truth, including panegyrical poetry as a species. It does so by advancing the notion that one can get behind the pliable rhetoric of moral interpretation, to a more stable perception of good and evil, by looking into the abusive interpreter’s motives – here, by alleging that the bards have a corrupt interest in praising whom they do, namely that in return for celebrating bandits they receive a share of the spoils.49 The discussion implies, firstly, that the actual power of rhetoric is only to accentuate or to obscure a clear moral status which the facts nonetheless do possess in 44 45 46 47 48 49

Patterson, Reading Between the Lines, 103. Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, 73–75. Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, 73–75. Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, 73. See e.g. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 172–78. Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, 74–75.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene themselves, and, consequently, that the very appearance of moral relativism arises only when that rhetoric is unscrupulously abused. As in the View, so too in the Legend of Holiness, the possibility that moral terms may be deployed cynically, by obsequious interpreters whose underlying presumptions are morally relativistic, is not merely glimpsed “between the lines” of the book’s putative allegiances, but rather is openly shown; and, as in the View, among the chief instruments of such moral cynicism are skilful but sycophantic poets, “Bardes, that . . . / Can tune their timely voyces cunningly” (I.v.3). Lucifera’s bards epitomise the danger the relativistic ethos of her court poses to the book’s declared moral project, by showing that the renown Redcross desires is awarded not only at Fairy Court, but in various places and in the service of various interests, and that one court’s fame is liable to be another’s infamy and vice versa. Were that the book’s final word on the subject, it would be fair to infer that it represents virtue and vice as themselves relative concepts, nothing more than reputations contingent on the slant of the particular poems or chronicles in which they are enshrined. The question, though, is whether the first book of The Faerie Queene, having thus openly raised the spectre of a morally relativistic world view, goes on to try to present a viable alternative – and in particular, whether it attempts to give a more substantial moral basis to the interpretative process brought to bear on Redcross once he returns to his friends and his original quest, than to that which is clearly capable, on its own shallow terms, of “Greatly aduancing his gay cheualree” right here in the House of Pride (I.v.16). If we were to judge solely on the evidence put forward by Jacqueline Miller and Harry Berger, the answer to that question might seem to be a very surprising no. But Miller and Berger, I think, give us only one part of a larger picture. For it may well be that both sides bend the truth, and yet the possibility remains that the one is to be seen as having a morally valid and the other a morally invalid or indeed a malevolent reason for doing so. The crucial point is not whether the favourable interpretations of Redcross seen in the latter half of Book One depart from the strict truth – plainly they do – but whether, in so doing, they promote the accomplishment of what are clearly depicted as good ends. And the answer, as we shall see, is that they do serve that purpose: for they are shown to facilitate, firstly, the knight’s completing his quest, and secondly, the morally exemplary role he plays in the story thereafter, both of which things, besides having a clearly beneficial character in their own right, are depicted as according with the will of God. Where the panegyrical readings of the hero found in the first half of the story play to his inclination to stray from his appointed end, those in the second half, while no more straightforwardly accurate, do in very practical ways help first to set him on course towards his proper goal, then to keep him on course once he is there. Thus it is not merely arbitrary that in the second half of the story, in contrast to the first, Redcross is rewarded with the good renown he seeks. Rather the very mode of interpretation that is typical of Redcross and his allies in the latter part of the 108

The Rhetoric of Self-Interpretation book, and which reasonably troubles Miller and Berger, is nonetheless depicted as intrinsically conducive, maybe even necessary, to the achieving of those worthy ends in view of which his good reputation is finally secured. Such partisanship in an unassailably good cause is as different from the earlier interpretative pandering to the hero’s errant self-image, as is (according to the View) the proper use of the poetry of praise to advance the cause of virtue, from its abuse in service of “the gracing of wickedness and vice”.

Moral Advocacy – Forwarding the Quest One “voice” in the Legend of Holiness does tell what we might call the unvarnished truth about the Redcross knight’s misadventures, but that voice is not Una’s. It is the voice of Despair, who says, accurately pinning the agency of sin squarely on Redcross, Thou falsed hast thy faith with periurie, And sold thy selfe to serue Duessa vilde, With whom in all abuse thou hast thy selfe defilde . . .

(I.ix.46).

That is not to say that the plain-speaking Despair is no rhetorician: for his ruthless exclusion from view, in predicting the knight’s future, of everything but the damning facts of his career to date, is itself a powerful rhetorical strategy. But the version of events Despair sets forth, while certainly hard on Redcross, is not so hard on him as to embellish facts with falsehoods, as Archimago and Duessa will do. Indeed, that Despair’s assessment is no mere misreading, not an account that could be answered by a more accurate rendering of the past, but in some sort a moment of truth, is strongly suggested by its effectively being ratified in the very House of Holiness, where the hero, on being taught to read the Bible, is again so “Greeu’d with remembrance of his wicked wayes . . . / That he desirde to end his wretched dayes” (I.x.21). However, it is not Despair’s strict accounting of the hero’s sinful character that is given the final word. On the contrary, it is made clear that a relentless focus on the real extent of his culpability could lead the protagonist only to spiritual paralysis and suicide (I.ix.48–51, I.x.21). Despair’s harsh reading, and the knight’s own comparably unflattering self-interpretation under Fidelia’s discipline, acquire positive moral value only in virtue of the hero’s going on to appreciate the countervailing fact of God’s generously having “chosen” even such a damnable sinner as himself both to perform good works and ultimately to be saved. There is, in other words, a dialectic between the stark truth of the knight’s utter culpability as insisted on by Despair and by Fidelia, and the gracious overlooking of all his faults whereof Una and Speranza are messengers and God the effectual agent and guarantor. In terms of the Protestant dynamics of salvation, the hero’s meeting with Despair constitutes the indispensable 109

Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene moment of conviction of sin, which puts the utterly humbled sinner in a position to comprehend the gospel promise of salvation by grace alone.50 Here, I think, is the context in which Una’s partisanship towards the hero may finally be understood: at its best, it accords with God’s own interpretative partisanship towards his chosen ones.51 Indeed to look in Una for what we might call the ‘simple truth’ about Redcross turns out, despite her association with those words, to be curiously inappropriate; for stating the plain truth about him is not even ideally Una’s role. Rather her function, as it emerges in practice, would be better described as one of always being true to her knight – a part whose moral fallibility is seen in early episodes, where her unconditional but all-too-human fidelity to him only encourages (and soon makes her too a victim of) the false self-image that leads him astray, but which takes on its potentially positive moral character when, in the latter half of the narrative, and most notably in her striking intervention in canto nine, it becomes anchored in the higher fidelity of God to those whom he has elected. Conversely, her succinct reminder to the knight at the cave of Despair of his having been “chosen” for something other than the self-destructive course he has till then pursued, far from being an isolated incident in her interpretative career, or one that serves the allegorical needs only of the episode in hand, is only the most telling moment in a larger, more gradual reformation of her interpretative role in the story – and one, as I shall now show, which has a substantial secular as well as an evident theological dimension. The secular justifications the humanist tradition gave for departing from strict truth when rendering an account of events were conventionally two: firstly, that one might move one’s auditors to the active support of good ends, of which they might otherwise be negligent; secondly, that one might counter the effect of the same techniques’ being misused (as they surely would be) by those with a desire to turn those auditors away from the good and towards the bad.52 That both those justifications are put into play extensively in the Legend of Holiness may be seen by looking at how the interpretative initiative, and with it the narrative initiative, passes after the book’s midpoint from the enemies of the quest to its advocates. 50

51

52

For an account of the Despair episode in terms of the “conviction of sin” preceding grace, see J. King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition, 213. Compare, e.g., Tyndale’s New Testament (1534), ed. David Daniell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 221 (“Prologue to the Romans”, chapters ix–xi), and Calvin, Institutes, II.vii.8. “God justifies us . . . not by the confirmation of our innocence but by the imputation of righteousness . . . . Thus . . . justification is set down, as it were, by way of interpretation.” – Calvin, Institutes, III.xi.3. Both justifications are found in Cicero, De Inventione, trans. H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1949), 7 and 11–13. For the latter see also Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1921), IV.ii.75, and for the former Francis Bacon, “The Colours of Good and Evil”, in The Oxford Authors: Francis Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 97.

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The Rhetoric of Self-Interpretation In the first six cantos, the most effective wielders by far of the power of interpretation, and especially of self-interpretation, are Archimago and Duessa, who represent themselves in ways shrewdly calculated at once to ingratiate them with the protagonists and to give apparent confirmation to their errors. This goes well beyond a question merely of physical disguise, and extends to their explicitly specifying for their own persons and actions such moral-allegorical interpretations as suit their evil ends. Conversely, the hapless protagonists as yet show no such acumen, rather interpreting themselves with short-sighted reference to conventional roles that have no specific bearing on the goals they are meant to be pursuing. In fact the main difference, in the early episodes, between the protagonists and their doubles lies not in the ethical content of the readings they give themselves (for in just that respect Archimago and Duessa are virtuoso mimics), but in the degree of clearsightedness with which the reading is made: a mode of self-interpretation that in the hands of Redcross and Una proceeds from a debilitating lack of moral prescience, in the hands of their foes is echoed back to them as a deliberate and effective ruse. Thus Archimago not only disguises himself as Redcross but, in justifying to Una apparently having abandoned her, cannily hits the very secular-chivalric moral register in which Redcross and Una themselves had unwisely been interpreting the knight’s career (I.iii.28–29), thereby at once clinching the impersonation, and protracting the evil influence which that ethos already had been exerting over Una’s fortunes. Similarly Duessa, when Redcross first speaks with her, backs up her assumed appearance with an account of herself which, with its emphasis on high birth and chastity, makes her seem a complete substitute for the disgraced Una precisely on the secularromantic moral terms on which he is already operating (I.ii.22–26). What happens from canto seven onwards, in contrast, is not by any means that the protagonists’ foes lose their malign interpretative touch (for they are at it as impressively as ever even in canto twelve, and indeed in the first canto of Book Two), but that Redcross and Una at last rise to the challenge their enemies pose, and in more than one sense become their betters, by seizing on behalf of the story as it was meant to be the power of setting the narrative agenda through effective self-interpretation. They do so in two respects, conforming to the conventional justifications for taking license with the facts: that is, they begin both to animate their own party toward the good, and to discredit those who circulate the alternative versions of the story which have led it into dead ends. To begin with the former: if the hero’s going astray at the start of the story is linked to his not grasping what distinguishes his armour and quest from those of an ordinary wandering knight, and hence easily losing sight of his assigned task in favour of a romantic adventurism which seems superficially fitting to his new chivalric status, correspondingly the movement that leads to his rehabilitation and to the final success of his mission can be marked from the point where the role he is meant to be playing is clearly spelt out within the story 111

Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene world. That happens, with increasing assertiveness, from canto seven onwards, beginning from the moment when Una retells their so-far-luckless tale in response to Arthur’s prompting (I.vii.43–51). It is a measure of how far the advocates of the quest have failed to take the lead in shaping the story to that point, that Una’s narration to Arthur of the events he has entered midway marks the first time any character in Book One has actually spoken of the dragon. Indeed even the narrator (following as usual the chief characters’ lead) has not spoken of it since the book’s opening tableau (I.i.3–5). So with Una’s acceptance of the storyteller’s mantle, the forsaken purpose is suddenly restored to view, both for readers and for the characters themselves. As the letter to Raleigh informs us, it was Una’s telling of her tale at Fairy court that first set the quest in motion; correspondingly, in persuading Una to renew that crucial act of storytelling with which the quest began, Arthur helps renew the story’s impetus towards a successful conclusion. What is more, Una’s account here of the mission from which her knight has been diverted, for the first time notes the unfitness for it of ordinary “knights aduenturous . . . / That famous hard atchieuements still pursew”, “Full many” of whom have already been made the dragon’s “pitteous pray” (I.vii.45). Her specific reason for their failing – their “want of faith, or guilt of sin” (I.vii.45) – at last starts to clarify, above all within the story world, the spiritual nature of the chivalry required to succeed. Once reunited with her knight, Una continues in the course her interview with Arthur establishes. She is shown from that point always to be thinking of the dragon quest, and of the need to bring her champion in a state of both physical and spiritual readiness to the scene of the battle he is foreordained to fight (I.ix.20, I.x.2, I.xi.1–2); and when necessary she now explicitly and forcefully reminds him of it (I.ix.52), as she so notably failed to do at the time of their first encounter with Archimago. Looked at in that light, Una’s intervention at Despair’s cave is no isolated event, but the decisive moment in a broader reformation of her interpretative role, whose effects are felt through the latter half of Book One. For from canto seven, she takes on a new function as one who interprets Redcross, not once but continually, as a dragon-slayer in potentia, and who in so doing helps him finally to realise that capacity. Such extraction from the complexities of events of an ideal storyline and heroic role, so as to hold them up as models for action, is the essence of the interpretative device of exemplification, albeit here the ideal figure held out to Redcross for emulation is not some past historical personage, but his own potential historical identity as St George the dragon slayer, his own self marvellously transcribed into the heroic register. It is that prospective transfiguration into a doer of good deeds, anchored in God’s intention so to transfigure him in fact, which creates for him an effectual object of emulation. Whereas earlier, with her inept interpretation of the knight’s actions, Una was an accessory in misleading both him and any reader who trusted her judgement into seeing his problematic behaviour as morally exemplary, now her goal-directed responses to the story’s events create a more genuinely 112

The Rhetoric of Self-Interpretation exemplary image, which puts both knight and reader decisively on track towards the story’s intended conclusion. Meanwhile (to come to the second or polemical aspect of the leading characters’ interpretative reformation) the revision of Una’s role involves a powerful seizing of the interpretative initiative from her evil double, which transforms the way Duessa herself is interpreted within the story world. Duessa, for her part, not only on first meeting Redcross but through the first half of the book, is at pains to maintain a virtuous reputation with those she meets, to the extent, finally, that in the House of Pride she is able, by selling each combatant a different version of the story, to make that reputation seem an object worthy of defence to both simultaneously.53 Intrinsic to her success is that each of her lovers believes her to be the faithful “Fidessa” (see esp. I.iv.42, 45). Such scrupulous avoidance of her real name, and, with it, of the implication in falsehood of all kinds with which that name is bound up (I.ii.35, I.v.26), gives us a measure of the importance of Una’s at last identifying her evil substitute, in her account of the knight’s misadventures, as the “false Duessa” (I.vii.50), something no one directly involved in those misadventures was able to do. With that deceptively simple act of naming, Una is assuming control, in what proves a decisive manner, of the allegorical reading of her adversary’s character, and with it of the wayward storyline that the knight pursued in the role of Fidessa’s champion. For from that point, it is a short step to her explicitly reading Duessa as a personification of “falshood” for the protagonist’s own benefit (I.viii.49). Readers have seen Duessa called “falshood” as early as the argument to canto two; but that allegorical meaning is impressed on Redcross himself only here. And only in thus alienating the hero from the figure he had previously been content to treat as her substitute does Una decisively emerge from her own earlier, unwitting role as a misleading influence on him, to become herself a more profitable guide than Duessa. The singling out of Duessa for unmasking is not, as I noted earlier, a case of strictly accurate interpretation on Una’s part: rather her focus on Duessa’s dissembling in explanation of the hero’s prior woes is pursued at the expense of any reckoning with his, or indeed her own, culpability. But the attack levelled here at Duessa, and the same is true of the blame Una pins later on Archimago (I.xii.34), corresponds, if not to those characters’ being the ultimate causes of the hero’s downfall, at least to their being deliberate agents thereof. Hence Una’s identifying them as the deceitful malefactors of the piece, if it does not amount to a revelation of the whole truth, has nonetheless a value in rightly discrediting their motives as moral interpreters, either of themselves or of the story in which they take part, and hence in breaking the link whereby

53

In particular, she takes care to answer Sansjoy’s compromising reading of her relationship with Redcross (I.iv.42) with another, ad hoc version of the story which entirely clears her own character of wrongdoing while further incriminating that of the hero (I.iv.47).

113

Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene a specious self-image is maliciously reflected back to the protagonist by his enemies. Put simply, after Una’s graphic revelation of Duessa’s deceitfulness in canto eight, the knight is roundly disinclined to look to the witch for guidance ever again. Considered in those terms, Una’s placing of the interpretative spotlight on Duessa appears neither gratuitous nor cynical, but rather of a piece with her emergence in the story’s second half as an interpreter who effectively sets events on track towards their intended conclusion. That is not to deny that the didactic parading of Duessa’s ugliness is a “scapegoating”. But Berger may give Spenser an undeserved kind of credit in supposing that his poem’s scapegoating of “the wicked witch” is meant as a polemical “target” rather than as a real instrument of his moral thought.54 Una’s rebirth as a more effective interpreter in the second half of the book has a midwife, Prince Arthur, who in that respect rescues the story for its intended ending in more than just his most obvious capacity as the liberator of Redcross from Orgoglio’s dungeon. For Arthur is more broadly the exemplar in the story of an ethos of mutual aid, expansively enough conceived to include a generosity not only of deeds but likewise of words, and summed up by the first stanza of canto nine, with its exemplificative picture of knights “allyed . . . / In braue poursuit of cheualrous emprize”, who “each did others prayse deuize / How to aduaunce with fauourable hands” (I.ix.1). For Arthur, speaking about events is itself an act justified by its advancing a worthy cause; and in his hands, or under his influence, renderings of the past consistently issue in forward-looking action. We see that not only in his telling of his own tale, which directly “the Prince amoues, / With fresh desire his voyage to pursew” (I.ix.18), but in his interactions with Una. The grounds on which he persuades her to repeat her woeful story are that only by telling her troubles can she hope to see them redressed (I.vii.40), a hope he at once justifies with a vow to “acquit your captiue knight” (I.vii.52). And after Redcross has been rescued, with equal pragmatism he warns Una against taking comfort in mere passive reflection on past events’ badness – on the conventional supposition that fortune’s wheel will now necessarily turn upwards (I.viii.43) – since on the contrary, an active assimilation is first needed of bad events’ “ensample”, and “th’onely good, that grows of passed feare, / Is to be wise, and ware of like agein” (I.viii.44). The latter intervention leads directly to the question how the hero means to behave “Henceforth”, not least with regard to “that wicked woman in your sight, / The roote of all your care” (I.viii.45), a lead Una promptly picks up by instigating the didactic display of Duessa’s deceptiveness which ensures that Redcross will never again treat her as a plausible companion for an errant knight. And if the interpretation Arthur encourages gets less to the root causes of the hero’s woes than does the subsequent

54

Berger, “Narrative as Rhetoric”, 174 and 171. I return in Chapter Seven to the question of Spenser’s use of scapegoat figures.

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The Rhetoric of Self-Interpretation assessment by Despair, it is also true that Arthur’s variety of reading is manifestly more conducive to the hero’s putting behind himself the things the prince equivocally glosses over as “grieuous . . . to do, or beare” (I.viii.44), so as to get on henceforth with the “braue poursuit of cheualrous emprize” (I.ix.1).55 And that, with Arthur, is openly the point. Not that a knightly ethos of advancing “each . . . others prayse” is depicted as itself a sufficient basis for guiding Redcross to the successful conclusion of his mission; indeed the hero, once set free from Orgoglio and Duessa by such generous help, is shortly seen not yet to be immune from falling again into the old kind of error, as soon as he hears of another wrong that it seemingly befits a knight’s pride to set right (I.ix.23–32). Rather, the chivalric ideal of aid in deed and word with which the ninth canto opens must give way by the canto’s closing to a higher, Christian analogue of that ideal, in which the aid, and the favourable interpretation with which it is bound up, are seen to spring not simply from the secular good will of honourable knights towards their fellows, but from God’s benevolence towards his “chosen” (I.ix.53). For as the opening stanza of the tenth canto will remind us, in orthodox Protestant fashion, “all the good is Gods” (I.x.1), and hence no endeavour towards a worthy goal can prosper which is not grounded in divine grace. Yet for all that, the higher Christian grace will not in the end quite displace but only subordinate its secular analogue. What might have been, in canto nine, mere ad hoc gestures on each other’s behalf by members of a knightly caste, are given in canto ten a larger coherence in two connected ways: both insofar as Cleopolis anchors knightly praises, through the Fairy Queen’s divine mandate, in the will of God, who alone can ultimately ratify those praises by assigning the hero a place in heaven; and also insofar as Gloriana and her court can, by more mundane means, effectively ratify them in the here and now. For it is at Fairy court alone that even earthly lauds are granted that are not merely personal, like those traded between Arthur and his new friends prior to their parting ways in canto nine (I.ix.16–17), let alone fickle, like those lightly won and lost in the House of Pride, but public and secure, laid up for posterity “in th’immortall booke of fame” (I.x.59). Of course such earthly “glorie”, however “immortall”, can reasonably seem to the newly converted Redcross a mere vanity when set beside the truer immortality of salvation (I.x.58–59), and so must be shown in turn to be inseparably aligned, at Fairy court, with the attaining of a higher kind of “glorie”, by virtue of Gloriana’s purposes being also God’s (I.x.59). Yet the earthly glory of fame, far from simply conceding the stage to its higher namesake, is insistently kept on the scene as heavenly glory’s co-partner in drawing

55

Cf. the charitable motives attributed to Arthur by D. L. Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies, 85, in the hero’s being “Spared a review of his errancy” but nonetheless forced to “take a second look at Duessa”.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene knights on to the performance of good deeds (I.x.60), to the extent that Contemplation insists, in the end, that the hero’s having gone to “To Faery court . . . to seeke for fame” is after all what “best became” him (I.x.66). For the exemplary self-image Una holds out to Redcross for emulation is anchored jointly in New Jerusalem and in Cleopolis: at once in God’s higher, and in fame’s more perceptible power to transfigure him, to bestow on him the stature of St George the dragon slayer. Indeed, so functionally important is the earthly and militant component of his goal, that the hero has insistently to be reminded of the worthy earthly self-image that is to be laid hold of in service to his godly prince, lest he try to dematerialise his task into a wholly unworldly one (I.x.59–66). So it is not only by analogy, but in concrete partnership with the glory to be granted by God, that the glory bestowed by fame is depicted as drawing its suitors towards morally exemplary images of themselves.

Exemplary Panegyric – Promoting the Right Interests The opening episode of Book Two suggests that the same kind of idealising interpretation of the Redcross knight that helped motivate him to complete his quest may continue to be justifiable, even after his quest has been completed, by virtue of its capacity to motivate others. For the emphatically laudatory reception with which the Palmer greets Redcross, as well as showing us the knight receiving in practice his promised earthly reward of fame, serves another function directly relevant to its context in Book Two: namely to set him up, in virtue of having completed his quest, as an example for Guyon to follow: “we,” says the Palmer, “where ye haue left your marke, / Must now anew begin, like race to runne” (II.i.32). And that exemplificative aim, in turn, is directly served by a continuation of the kind of selective rendition of the Redcross knight’s story that troubles Miller and Berger in regard to the closing portion of Book One. It is not only that the image held up to Guyon for emulation isolates the single incident in his predecessor’s career, his eventual “atchieu’ment” of his quest (II.i.32), that readily serves the Palmer’s exhortatory purpose, leaving aside all else that might be said about him (not least by his foes, whose versions of his story also contain some truth). What is more, the knight himself, in a response that seems at first glance a qualification of the Palmer’s panegyric on him, actually corroborates the reductive view it gives of his past. Says Redcross, “His be the praise, that this atchieu’ment wrought, / Who made my hand the organ of his might; / . . . / For all I did, I did but as I ought” (II.i.33) – a self-appraisal which, while certainly conducive to the Palmer’s purpose of setting before Guyon an edifying image of pious submission to one’s task (II.i.32), meanwhile so strikingly passes over his ever having strayed from his appointed quest, as to seem very nearly a claim of his not having done so. (“All you did?”, a sceptic might demand.) So the exemplary version of his story that 116

The Rhetoric of Self-Interpretation Redcross helps set forth for Guyon’s benefit, even while it demonstrates his much clarified grasp of the duty-bound version of chivalry required of him by the true custodians of glory, also brings to a culmination just the manipulation of his moral history seen in the latter half of Book One. The Palmer and Redcross in effect collaborate in setting before Guyon a picture of his predecessor of exemplary simplicity, equivalent to the straightforwardly heroic image of him that will survive in popular legend. And the poem, as first printed, seconds what they do by including at the close of Book One, and facing the opening of Book Two, the well-known woodcut reducing the morally complex character of Redcross to a traditional figure of St George the dragon slayer.56 What happens here may be looked at in the light of Philip Sidney’s argument in A Defence of Poetry for the didactic justifiability of being free with the facts in drawing an exemplary image from history. Sidney frankly allows that Xenophon’s representation of Cyrus the Great as an ideal king is a fiction – a falsification of the actual, imperfect king whose character we can read about in the historian Justin – but only to argue that, “if the question be, for your own use and learning, whether it be better to have it set down as it should be, or as it was, then certainly is more doctrinable the feigned Cyrus in Xenophon than the true Cyrus in Justin”.57 It is only that Spenser in The Faerie Queene actually depicts, as a part of the story itself, what Sidney describes as the setting down of the story as it should be rather than as it was. Spenser, in other words, does not simply give us the exemplary fiction recommended by Sidney, but represents, in his fiction, the process of recasting imperfect characters as exemplary ones. It might be imagined, however, that the effect of the poem’s allowing us actually to see the work of falsification that goes into making a morally exemplary figure out of Redcross could only be to undermine the result that work is supposed to achieve, as a magician’s trick is ruined if the mechanism that makes the trick possible is revealed. Hence it might be supposed that Spenser’s aim in putting that work on display in the story world itself could only be to display to capable readers the duplicity on which Sidney’s recommended rhetorical strategy relies, and so to discredit it. But there is another possibility. It is argued by Eudoxus in A View of the Present State of Ireland that a considerable spur to emulation of the exemplary deeds set before us by poets is the prospect of being in turn enshrined in fame in the same manner as the heroes whose praises those poets sing: it is by being “stirred up to affect like commenda-

56

57

The woodcut is restored to its original position in Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 2nd edn, ed. A. C. Hamilton, text eds. Hiroshi Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki (Harlow, etc.: Longman, 2001), 156. Cf. the images carved on the wall in Dante’s circle of the proud (Purgatorio x), extracting exemplary moments of humility from the lives of David, Mary, and Trajan. Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, 35.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene tions” that we come, ourselves, to “strive unto the like deserts”.58 Spenser here echoes a humanist theme found for example in Jacques Amyot, the translator of Plutarch’s Lives. Amyot, while conceding that the chief motive for virtuous action ought to be love of virtue for its own sake, nonetheless emphasises the important and in his view legitimate ancillary role played by men’s desire for honour in after ages, and observes that histories of exemplary lives can inspire readers to emulation on both counts: firstly by setting forth “the beauty of vertue, which is of such power, that wheresoever she is seen, she maketh herself to be loved”; and secondly by clearly showing them “the immortal praise and glory wherewith [history] rewardeth well doers”, which itself “is a very sharp spur for men of noble courage and gentleman-like nature, to cause them to adventure upon all manner of noble and great things”.59 So an exemplary value belongs not only to the account of good deeds per se, but likewise to a reader’s seeing evidence in the exemplificative account’s existence of those deeds’ being rewarded with remembrance that does them credit. For the exemplificative reading of a person’s good deeds is, ipso facto, a panegyrical reading as well; and the desire for a lasting panegyric – for earthly glory – is itself, as in the Redcross knight’s career, a potential spur towards virtuous undertakings. From that perspective, we might argue that what Spenser achieves in putting the process of exemplificative reading on display inside his story world, where its mechanism can be observed, far from being to expose the process as a conjurer’s trick, is rather to show with especial clarity how exemplification and panegyric are two sides of one coin, a coin that can enrich in virtue both the one praised and the one to whom those praises are sung. For the emphatically heroic image of Redcross that the Palmer sets before Guyon as an example to emulate, at the same time shows the prior knight receiving in practice the glorious reputation on earth that was held up to him in the House of Holiness as one of the prospective rewards of doing his duty to God and Gloriana. Indeed it appears that, by putting into his narrative not only an exemplary image of St George, but the way that exemplary image comes to be enshrined in history, Spenser enables himself to set before his readers in an especially concrete manner the prospect of being similarly praised should they undertake similar deeds. In effect he defines for his fellow-Elizabethans the conditions under which they might plausibly expect to be as well received as Redcross (albeit their lives, too, are not so perfect as to set them beyond the reach of detractors): namely, if they will follow the knight’s example in the latter part of Book One and get on with the tasks assigned them by their own godly queen. My view that the poem has such a positive rather than a polemical aim in 58 59

Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, 73. Quoting Amyot’s preface to the Lives, in the translation of Sir Thomas North: see “Amyot to the Readers”, in Plutarch’s Lives Englished by Sir Thomas North (1579), 10 vols (London: Dent, 1898), vol. 1, 10–11.

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The Rhetoric of Self-Interpretation calling attention to its own exemplificative readings is supported by the fact that the Redcross knight’s acquisition of exemplary stature in the eyes of his fellow characters is accompanied by evidence of his now living up to that part in deeds as well as words. Far from only having mastered a rhetorical technique for presenting himself in a positive light, it appears that the knight, in virtue of having become a more effective self-interpreter than at first, has likewise acquired a capacity for acting in an exemplary fashion. For his deeds in Book Two show him no longer liable to being shunted into a storyline of his foes’ choosing, precisely because now clear about and attentive to the “course” he ought to take (II.i.4). It is true that maintaining such an effective grasp of his designated heroic role entails not expansive but selective self-interpretation: he no more dwells, as Despair would have had him do (I.ix.43), on the fact that all his earthly deeds, even his completion of the dragon quest, in a strict accounting must contain a great measure of “guilt” and “sin” (I.x.60), than does the Palmer in singing his praises. But while it remains, even now, very much a matter of interpretation whether the knight’s character is to be regarded as virtuous, that is no more than what is true, in a Protestant view, of the earthly life of any “Saint” (I.x.61–62). And therein lies a final analogy between the hero’s attainment of mundane and of supramundane glory: in the Legend of Holiness, neither earthly heroism nor saintliness is achievable as a matter of intrinsic merit, but rather each necessarily (as Calvin says of the latter) “is set down . . . by way of interpretation”.60 What we see, I think, in the contest over the final interpretation of the knight’s story, is a case not so much of a true rendition’s proving itself against a false one, as of a true interest’s overcoming a false one: a case of the forcible establishment, by a community aiming at virtuous ends, of a version of the story that promotes the right interests, against a version of the story that perverts those interests and promotes the wrong ones in their place. If the knight’s history is not so faultless as to set him above the reach of malicious detractors, he has nonetheless risen in the end to the task for which he was chosen. If he is now to receive, and be seen to receive, his ordained reward on earth, the right points must be stressed: his actions will have to be depicted with a favourable emphasis, alike by himself and by his allies. As regards the narrator, if in the first six cantos his collusion in interpreting Redcross as the knight interprets himself links him to the abuses of Lucifera’s bards, here in contrast his partisan reading associates him with the quite different court that now undertakes to receive the knight as a hero. He participates in effect in the community of virtuous interests that rallies round the knight at the end of his story. And indeed that is the role ideally set out for him: as a “Poet historical”61 60 61

Calvin, Institutes, III.xi.3. I take the role of “Poet historical” to characterise Spenser’s fictional persona within the poem, rather than Spenser himself, because it is chiefly from the perspective of that persona that the events of the poem are understood to be historical.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene (letter to Raleigh) he is offered not as a disinterested reporter of past events, but as one who aims to revive the “prayses” of the “gentle deeds” he recounts (I.Pr.1). And that role, in turn, is depicted as having the same dual function as has the favourable interpretation of Redcross by his peers: on the one hand, to help procure for the hero the role in the book of fame whose prospect was instrumental to his success in the quest; on the other hand, to set that heroic image before others, in this case the poem’s readers, as an inspiring example to follow. So what we see in the relation of Redcross and Guyon extends to the projected relation between the poem and its readers: as in Amyot’s version of history, panegyric and exemplification appear as the two sides of a single enriching coin. That having been said, it remains true, as Spenser acknowledges in A View of the Present State of Ireland, that the case for such interpretative license as characterises the second half of Book One is a precarious one. For the rhetorical devices that are to adorn the characters of those who do their godly duty are, technically if not morally, the same as those which if “abused” will serve equally well for “the gracing of wickedness and vice” – such that, for example, even the Redcross knight’s slide into depravity in the first half of Book One can be depicted as a virtuous progress towards heroic glory. And indeed the apologists of such poetic license had always had enemies, who saw, in the equal serviceability of the ars rhetorica to the advocates both of good and bad causes, “[t]he danger . . . of opening up a world of complete moral arbitrariness”, in which “the very possibility of moral argument” could only be looked on with cynicism.62 But just as the View does not allow the potential for abuse to scupper the ethical case in favour of poetically ‘adorning’ history, arguing rather for a reform of the practices that lead to the abuses, so too the first book of The Faerie Queene, while calling attention to the danger of panegyric’s being morally abused, as by the flattering bards in the House of Pride, does so not in such a way as to censure in general the poetic glorification of human deeds, but rather in a manner that highlights the indispensability of such exemplificative reading’s being firmly tied to a genuinely moral end. Within the imaginary world of the Legend of Holiness, the secure aim to which favourable moral interpretation can be tied is the completion of the quest assigned by the Fairy Queen. Because she is God’s delegate on earth, such lauds as are won in her service are won in God’s service as well, and therefore are not vanity but a foretaste of heavenly glory. All the rest, like the so-called “aduauncing” of the Redcross knight at the court of Lucifera (I.v.16), are vain pretension. By implication the poem encourages its Elizabethan readers similarly to place their prescribed duty to God and a godly monarch before all other apparent moral goods. At the same time, it implies that its own

62

Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 174–75, citing examples from Euripides and Thucydides, through Seneca and Plutarch, down to Thomas Hobbes.

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The Rhetoric of Self-Interpretation invocation of the “heauenly” monarch Elizabeth as the linchpin of its didactic scheme (I.Pr.4; cf. esp. III–VI.Proems) gives it a true moral authority, guaranteeing its credentials as a true use of poetry, as distinct from the poetic abuses of Lucifera’s, or the Irish rebels’, bards. Nevertheless, the moral argument of the first book of The Faerie Queene remains a fragile one; and there are signs of its straining to carry too much weight at what is in effect the load-bearing point of its structure. For to take seriously the topical application outlined above, a reader would first have to take seriously the idea, to which the poem continually recurs, that Queen Elizabeth is a real-life Gloriana, God’s delegate on earth who through her rule communicates to her subjects the purposes of “Maiestie diuine” (I.Pr.4; cf. esp. V.Pr.11). If that account of Elizabeth were not a true one – if it were only the queen’s fictionalised self-image, purveyed to her, and on her behalf to the nation, by courtly panegyric, not least by The Faerie Queene itself – then the analogy would dissolve whereby the poem suggests that the real queen’s commands and rewards can like Gloriana’s confidently be regarded as being at one with God’s. It is not enough, in Elizabeth’s own case, to suppose that such an idealised portrayal might be justified by its exemplary value – much though the poem does turn its panegyrical accounts of her to just that purpose (see esp. I.Pr.4, III.Pr.1, IV.Pr.4, V.Pr.11, and VI.Pr.6–7) – because the standing those panegyrics ascribe to her as God’s earthly deputy is first required to be in place as the standard by which a morally valid exemplary image may be distinguished from a morally specious one. It would manifestly be for the poem to proceed in a circle, if it tried to anchor the right use of panegyrical and exemplificative rhetoric in a view of the monarch which is itself a product of that rhetoric. If the book’s apparent grounding of morality in Protestant monarchic absolutism is to be taken seriously, what it cannot afford to acknowledge is that the proposed linchpin of the earthly moral order, reference to whom enables one to distinguish true from specious moral good, real from delusive heroic glory, and valid from abusive deployments of the rhetoric of praise, might herself be merely a product of the rhetoric whose use her godly mandate supposedly justifies. Were that conceded, and Elizabeth’s claim to godly authority admitted to be any less sure a priori than Gloriana’s, then the difficulty of discerning the true from the merely apparent good, from which Redcross is rescued in the second half of Book One, would assert itself for readers with a new intractability. For comparison’s sake, we may return to the discussion of the Irish bards in A View of the Present State of Ireland – a discussion which, by maintaining that it is possible to get behind the pliable rhetoric of moral interpretation to a more stable perception of good and evil by looking into interpreters’ motives, suggests that the appearance of moral relativism arises only when that rhetoric is unethically abused. What I want to observe now, is that that supposed restoration of moral clarity is itself suspiciously one-sided. For the tables might well be turned and Spenser himself accused, just as he accuses the bards, of both 121

Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene mercenary motives (in pursuing patronage) and corruption by stolen goods (the properties he received in Ireland, his interest in which is material to the politics of the View).63 Interpreters’ motives, recourse to which was supposed to get us behind the apparent relativity of moral judgements, turn out, at least in the case in hand, to be just so many more matters for interpretation; so all that stands between the View’s discussion of the bards and an infinite logical regress is the partisan fantasy of a clear and a priori set of stable moral categories by reference to which a given instance of poetic license may be deemed either legitimate or abusive. Yet crucially, the View does not seem designed to draw attention to that abyss: one needs to know the relevant external facts, to which the work does not allude, to observe how readily its author is tarred with his own brush.64 Nor, pace Annabel Patterson, does it seem at all likely in principle that the View’s moralising fantasy is one that Spenser, its beneficiary, would have intended his tract to expose as such, if in fact he were conscious of it himself. What I am suggesting of the first book of The Faerie Queene is that it appears to be plying a more extensive version of essentially the same fantasy. For Spenser is at pains, therein, to construct a fictional world conforming to the reassuring notion that moral interpretation, though admittedly a dangerously pliant tool, is nonetheless always itself deployed for clearly wrong or right purposes, which can be decisively disentangled. But that fiction, being ultimately a castle built in air, cannot but betray to a sufficiently sceptical eye its lack of foundation in reality. Thus by a long circuit I return to the distinction, adumbrated by Harry Berger, between a Spenser who, under cover of a tactical affirmation, in fact deliberately sets out to undermine an authoritarian regime and its state religion, and a Spenser who, in spite of his genuinely apologetic intention, betrays the cracks in that regime’s ideology. But I leave it to the next chapter, firstly to argue more fully the case that the Legend of Holiness seems designed to conceal, not to expose, the weak foundation of its ostensible political stance, and secondly to examine in detail both the means by which that concealment is effected, and the signs by which it is betrayed.

63 64

As has been observed, for example, by Shepherd, Spenser, 39. Richard McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), cap. 2, observes both the underlying symmetry between Spenser’s goal of court patronage and what the View casts as the bards’ mercenary flattery, and the degree to which Spenser occludes that symmetry, representing what in reality was itself a courtly patronage system as a savage parody thereof. McCabe’s account is a sobering corrective to Patterson’s argument that Spenser’s View surreptitiously gives voice to the content of Irish poetry.

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Chapter Seven

The Mythology of Self-Interpretation

A

T TWO CRUCIAL moments in the Legend of Holiness, the narrative is iadvanced past a point of crisis, and given new impetus towards a happy conclusion, by means of the virtuous community’s closing ranks against an individual it identifies as the source of evil and confusion in its midst. First Duessa (I.viii.45–49), and later Archimago (I.xii.34–36), are exposed as the rogue elements, the common enemy the community must expel in order to consolidate itself as a force for virtue. Of course, both characters are guilty parties. But only by a concerted revisionism can either of them, or both together, be made to carry the whole of the responsibility for the prior miscarrying of the quest: the “wicked will” of a Duessa or an Archimago (I.xii.32; cf. I.vii.49–50) serves as a conducting rod for blame, drawing off charges that otherwise would fall heavily on the hero himself. The scenes are instances of what Northrop Frye describes as an archetypal episode, the expulsion of “the pharmakos or scapegoat”.1 The scapegoat’s status in a given text may fall anywhere on a continuum from the innocent victim whose suffering elicits pity or horror, to the confirmed villain whose unambiguous evil facilitates our identification with the group meting out the punishment – an identification made either in earnest, or (as with the hissing audience of a pantomime) in exuberant play.2 Indeed the moral status of the whole event is sufficiently unstable that a complex version, as in the case of Shylock or Falstaff, may elude attempts to place it securely at any one point on the spectrum. But in the first book of The Faerie Queene the pharmakos is made to order as an unalloyed villain. An author’s constructing the scapegoat as indubitably evil largely frees the story world per se from any moral difficulty over his or her being punished. But it does so only by displacing that difficulty onto the reader. For the incitements to readers of such a morally simplified spectacle, even in its playful pantomime

1 2

Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 41. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 45–47.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene form, border on those of political propaganda and hate literature, at the point where the caricatured villain begins to suggest a stereotyped social hate figure. As Frye expresses it, a rendition of the scapegoat-drama as a simple “triumph of moral virtue over villainy”, with “the consequent idealizing of the moral views assumed to be held by the audience”, brings us “as close as it is normally possible for art to come to the pure self-righteousness of the lynching mob”.3 To see the potential applicability of that assessment to the Legend of Holiness, we need only observe the obvious demonising in Duessa and Archimago of Catholicism and crypto-Catholic English priests. But the interpretative process in the poem that constructs those characters as pharmakoi is more complex and peculiar than such a summary observation suggests, and has significant implications for our understanding of the poem’s workings as an allegory.

Finding Fault The creation of a scapegoat, whether on an author’s part, or on the part of a story’s characters, relies on the device of personification, for it requires that a character be taken as the concrete representative or embodiment of an evil of whose effects the community is aware. We may see the connection of scapegoating and personification especially clearly in the scene, performed for Redcross, in which singling out Duessa as “The roote of all your care, and wretched plight” (I.viii.45) entails allegorically reading her secret ugliness as a revelation of the very “face of falshood” (I.viii.49).4 But the use of personification in such cases must be carefully managed if it is to serve the interpreter’s intention. In the early cantos of Book One, Duessa had signified falsehood most concretely in the sense that her presence in the protagonist’s company was a tangible sign of his falsehood, that is, of his being false to his original companion and quest. Hence her presence and influence in the story were not so much the causes as the effects of falsehood. But just the contrary allegorical interpretation must be made if Duessa is to serve as scapegoat for the wickedness she and the knight have got up to together. She must be construed not as an indicator of falsehood in him (and so as an argument of his guilt), but as being in her own right the very agent of falsehood in his story (and so as an argument for his exculpation, since if she is the cause of his mishaps he may be their mere victim). Una prepares the ground for such a reading, in denying any causal connection between the knight’s own behaviour or state of mind and Duessa’s appearance on the scene: in her account, it simply “chaunced” that he should “false Duessa meete” (I.vii.50; cf. I.viii.43). But the knight himself

3 4

Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 47; cf. 45–46. Cf. the narrator’s supporting personification of “deceipt” in I.vii.1.

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The Mythology of Self-Interpretation brings it to fruition when, revealingly ‘correcting’ a slip of the tongue, he declares, There did I find, or rather I was found Of this false woman . . . Who by her wicked arts, and wylie skill . . . Vnwares me wrought vnto her wicked will,

(I.xii.32).

Just how strange such readings are, we can appreciate by imagining that, in The Quest of the Holy Grail, the monk who construes Sir Melias’s assailant as “representing” the sin of pride had also pointedly exonerated Melias of having any share in that pride, insisting instead that it was mere bad luck that he was the one that character had happened to attack. Of course what the monk actually says is that the arrogant knight’s attacking and wounding Melias physically merely reflects Melias’s own prior inward action of succumbing to pride: though the knight himself who so tangibly represents Melias’s sin does himself act from pride, and in that restricted sense is himself an agent of the sin that lays Melias low, his agency is kept clearly subordinate to Melias’s own.5 Only a reader wholly unattuned to the story world’s allegorical logic, whereby outward physical encounters reflect inner spiritual states, could blame Melias’s assailant rather than Melias for what happens. But that is the sort of reading that seems involved in saddling Duessa with the blame for the falsehood that takes Redcross off course. Obviously Duessa herself is wickedly false (as we expect of a personification of wicked falsehood), but to make that the end of interpretation is to fail to ask why she appears on the scene in the first place, and why when she does appear she seems to Redcross such a suitable companion. Blaming her for his failings is not only a matter of focusing attention on one guilty party so as to get another off the hook, but a strange misreading of the very structure of signification that shapes the story world. We have heard of blaming the messenger for the message (indeed Archimago’s scapegoating in canto twelve involves at least a dose of that medicine), but here we have a blaming of the signifier for the thing it signifies – the blaming, as it were, of the barometer for the storm. Such strangeness is not limited to the first book of the poem. In the ninth canto of Book Two, the illogicality of attempting to lay the blame for a quality of one’s own on a character who appears in the story as a sign of that quality is confronted directly, if light-heartedly, when Arthur and Guyon are caught out socially trying to do just that. In Alma’s parlour, each chooses a lady to court, and Arthur, apparently “by chaunce”, finds himself speaking to one whose demeanour is “somwhat sad, and solemne eke in sight, / As if some pensiue thought constraind her gentle spright” (II.ix.36). He enquires “why . . . ye . . . /

5

The Quest of the Holy Grail, trans. Matarasso, 71.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene . . . your faire beautie do with sadnesse spill?”, adding that, “What euer be the cause, it sure beseemes you ill” (II.ix.37). She replies, How is it, that this mood in me ye blame, And in your selfe do not the same aduise? Him ill beseemes, anothers fault to name, That may vnwares be blotted with the same: Pensiue I yeeld I am, and sad in mind, Through great desire of glory and of fame; Ne ought I weene are ye therein behind, That haue twelue moneths sought one, yet no where can her find. (II.ix.38).

Far from being merely a sermon on the theme of “the mote, that is in thy brothers eye” (Matthew 7:3), this is, I think, one of the poem’s cleverest comic moments, and one of the clearest indications of the self-conscious virtuosity with which Spenser deploys the resources of allegory. Certainly it catches Arthur “vnwares” (though “inly” he well knows to be “trew, what she had rashly told”), and only after much embarrassment can he gather himself to ask the question crucial to a full, allegorical, understanding of the encounter, which could have saved him from his self-incriminating blunder – namely, “What wight she was” to whom he had been speaking (II.ix.39). Immediately, the trick he had missed is revealed: “It answered was, her name was Praysdesire, / That by well doing sought to honour to aspire” (I.ix.39). No wonder if his fault-finding is turned back on himself, since, as is now clear, she is in the first place precisely a personification of the passion bound up with his own virtue, whom he has met not by mere “chaunce” at all but as a direct result of embarking on the tour of a house whose rooms and inhabitants signify a human being’s parts and faculties. Whom should one meet when looking in on the heart, if not one’s own especial passion?6 Guyon, meanwhile, is in for a similar surprise, which will clinch the rule underlying their apparently fortuitous encounters: for he, to his consternation, finds he has been offering help in allaying the “strong passion” of shame to none other than “Shamefastnesse it selfe” – that is, to the personification of his characteristic passion, or as Alma calls her, “the fountaine of your modestee” (II.ix.43). To be fair to Arthur and Guyon, there is a sense in which the illogic on display here is not theirs, but that of the world they are imagined as living in. For what they are made to confront is exactly the absurdity at which Addison and his successors were to balk, of abstract ideas’ being presented as concrete characters, able to interact concretely with the story world’s other inhabitants. Ordinarily, as Gordon Teskey observes, the personifying of an abstraction is couched in such a way as to hide quite effectively the logical absurdity it

6

Cf. D. L. Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies, 170.

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The Mythology of Self-Interpretation involves: not only does a poem usually make no attempt to account for an abstraction’s being encountered as an embodied individual (an accounting which would be logically impossible), but the very question of who or what that character ‘is’, is discouraged or diverted in any of various ways.7 The most familiar device of distraction is assigning to personified abstractions a feminine gender: that femininity, Teskey suggests, because it is conventionally associated with the material substrate in which abstract forms are imprinted, can appear to give to the abstractions represented as women “something solid to stand on”, without our having to face the implication of their material concreteness per se.8 In the scene in hand, says Teskey, should we feel inclined to ask, “What is the stuff out of which Shamefastness is made?”, the poem will oblige us to rest content with the pseudo-answer that “She is made of her gender.”9 But it seems to me that this scene, which Teskey invokes as an example of the way allegorical poetry can mask its own logical absurdities behind the metaphorical associations of gender, is actually the exceptional case, one that invites us not to rest content with the idea that what the abstraction in question (‘shamefacedness’) is predicated of, is the feminine gender – not to content ourselves with the narrative ‘fact’ that what Shamefastness ‘is’, is a “shee” (II.ix.43). For in this case it is the principal characters themselves, Guyon and Arthur, who look only so far into the shamefacedness and the desire for praise they encounter here, as to suppose what those passions are predicated of is the ladies to whom they speak; and it is for just that reason that they are caught “vnwares” when the ladies prove to be only indices of symptoms more consequentially predicated of the knights themselves who single them out for conversation. The episode, as I read it, invites us to enjoy the surprise emergence into the narrative foreground of the allegorical weirdness of the knights’ world, and the consequent comedy of their unwittingly incriminating themselves by the common-sense but here faulty assumption that the characters whose behaviour they criticise are the ones responsible for that behaviour being exhibited here, and so potentially agents of their own moral reformation. In fact it is the visiting knights (as the letter to Raleigh could have warned them, had they been given access to a copy) who are the principal subjects of character formation in the story; they, willy-nilly, are the ones to whom their own lessons in morality will finally be applied, albeit to their surprise. Moreover, even when, the unlooked-for lessons having been taught, the knights revert to treating those personified abstractions as mere court ladies, chatting to them “awhile 7 8

9

Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 21–23. Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 22–23. Re the gender of matter, see also 15ff. Of course, not all personified abstractions are female: on some of the other strategies for deflecting attention from the contradiction inherent in representing the abstract as a concrete individual, see Teskey, 21–22. Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 23.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene with court and goodly game” (II.ix.44), that seems to me no mere reversion on the poet’s part to the more ordinary mode of allegorical writing in which the illogicality of personifying abstractions is conveniently skimmed over. Rather it is a final twist to the joke, whereby the return to a less perplexing mode of experience is depicted as the result of an intervention on the part of the well-bred hostess, who “Dissembled faire, and faynd to ouersee” Guyon’s discomfort on being identified as the more appropriate object of his own advice to Shamefastness (II.ix.44). The restoration of a more conventional type of allegory which masks its ontological instabilities behind conventional appearances is wryly made a matter of social tact on the part of the ladies themselves who are more than they seem.10 Indeed, here the finding of fault with the personification of one’s own governing passion is treated as a matter of no great seriousness, in any sense of the word: it is neither much more consequential, in story terms, than any more ordinary social faux pas, nor anything like grave in its hold on readers, who are liable to be engaged as strongly by the surprising weirdness of the story world’s signifying structure as by what it signifies. Elsewhere, however, as for example in the focusing of blame on Duessa or Archimago, the same materials show themselves capable of more serious use. For while a fictional world in which such things happen – with its strange law whereby outward events reflect, and so comment on, inward states – may seem on the face of it remote from situations that concern us in real life, in fact a similar personifying of intangible faults takes place whenever one person, fictional or real, is singled out as the representative of a social ill, that is, in all instances of scapegoating. In the poem’s world or in ours, the same semantic instability characterises the figure given the role of personifying an intangible ill: for in either case that person has the potential to serve as a sign either of others’ innocence, or of their guilt. Indeed the exotic world of allegorical romance, by displaying its semantic strangeness so graphically, can actually illustrate in a heightened fashion the illogic underlying the procedure of concentrating blame on any scapegoatfigure – much as happens when that illogic is comparably ‘mapped out’ onto the external world by imaginative reconstruction of the ancient rituals that give Frye his names, “pharmakos or scapegoat”, for the figure at the heart of that unstable signifying process.11 What the scenes in question from The Faerie Queene chiefly have in common with such rituals is that they enact a fundamental disowning of the 10 11

Cf. D. L. Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies, 173–74. Quoting Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 41. Two notable illustrations of the conceptual utility of imagined historical versions of the pharmakos-ritual are the uses made of Frazer’s account thereof by Frye, op. cit., 148, and by Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy”, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Athlone, 1981), 130–34 – in the former case with an explicit acknowledgement that the account is equally useful to literary criticism regardless of whether it is thought to be historically true.

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The Mythology of Self-Interpretation scapegoat: they interpret the one expelled as the representative of an outside force, which through that person’s agency has intruded on and disrupted a supposed prior purity. Jacques Derrida explores the self-contradictory nature of the process by reference to the archaic Athenian ritual of expelling the pharmakos properly so called: The city’s body proper . . . reconstitutes its unity . . . by violently excluding from its territory the representative of an external threat or aggression. That representative represents the otherness of the evil that comes to affect or infect the inside by unpredictably breaking into it. Yet the representative of the outside is nonetheless constituted . . . in the very heart of the inside . . . . “The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public expense; and when any calamity . . . befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcasts as scapegoats.”12

Indeed, Derrida suggests, not only the specific person led out of the city to be sacrificed as a representative of an external evil, but the very occasion for the expulsion, in an important sense originated with those who carried out the ceremony. An action in principle required by the incursion of a particular evil “(drought, plague, famine)”, was in fact, in an effort to master such crises’ unpredictability, “prepared for: by rules, by law, by the regularity of repetition, by fixing the date. This ritual practice . . . was reproduced every year in Athens.”13 That is, even failing an identifiable threat, it was felt necessary periodically to perform the purgation so as to maintain the integrity of the ‘body politic’. The “proper” unity of that body did not simply exist unless violated, but had always to be “reconstitute[d]”, by continually driving off the ‘alien’ – an ‘alien’ which, paradoxically, was itself produced by and within the society that disowned it, so contradicting (if the matter had been attended to) the very distinction the expulsion continually reiterated, between what belongs inside, and what outside.14 The disowning of scapegoats in The Faerie Queene is founded on a similar attribution to external causes of what “is nonetheless constituted . . . in the very heart of the inside”. Indeed, the metaphor of the “heart” is a particularly apt (as is the metaphor of the “body” more generally) to the scene in which Arthur and Guyon attempt to attribute responsibility for their own passions to Praise-desire and Shamefastness. It is scarcely less so, in the case of the Redcross knight’s successful blaming of Duessa and Archimago for the effects

12

13 14

Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy”, 133. Derrida quotes Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 3rd edn, 12 vols (London: MacMillan, 1913), “Part VI: The Scapegoat”, 253; the quoted passage may also be found in Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion: A New Abridgement from the Second and Third Editions, ed. Robert Fraser (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 599. Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy”, 133. Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy”, 133.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene of his own faithlessness and hypocrisy, a passing off of blame which, like the pharmakos-ritual as characterised by Derrida, depends on systematically obscuring the actual internal origin of the fault whose personification is used to draw the blame away. Reconceived as chance intruders into the supposed original integrity of the quest and of the community that values its completion, Archimago and Duessa must be put ‘back’ outside, where they ‘belong’, so that unity of purpose can be ‘restored’. And just as those who ritually expel the pharmakos, if they are to serve their purpose of seeming to draw a clear line between the inside and the outside, must not attend too closely to their own procedure lest they note the native origin of what they expel as alien, so in the episodes I have considered, Redcross is in story terms successful in disowning his fault, while Arthur and Guyon are not successful in disowning theirs, for the reason that only in the latter case is the ultimate origin of the figures who are blamed (which is to say, the nature of the allegorical devices that give them their significance) attended to in the story world.

Making a Clean Break In the foregoing I have emphasised the importance to the resolution of the Redcross knight’s quest of the acts of scapegoating carried out by the ‘virtuous’ communities that rally to his support in the latter part of his story. But it is not in those scenes that Redcross first begins to look for scapegoats, through whose defeat he can vindicate his own reputation as a virtuous knight. On the contrary, nothing seems to come more naturally to him from the very start than seeking such foils for his supposed virtue, as in his responding to the error of having gone astray in the Wandering Wood by keenly flushing out the monster Error (who emphatically is not the one to pick a fight) (I.i.11–17). It is to that tendency that Archimago plays, in conjuring up made-to-order villains for the hero to turn on in righteous indignation: first a “straunge man” answering to the knight’s enquiries after “straunge aduentures” (I.i.30–31), then Una herself recast as culpable instigator of the lust to which he finds himself prone (I.i.47ff). That the “straunge man” whom Archimago invents for the knight’s distraction originates in the hero’s own “desire” for such a foe, seems to be teasingly suggested by Archimago himself, with his paradoxical indication that the villain, though supposedly both foreign (“straunge”) and residing “Far hence”, nonetheless is a “homebred euill”, “which hereby doth dwell” (I.i.30–32).15 Comparable insinuations that what Redcross treats as a straightforwardly external foe has, in fact, its more essential roots inside himself, permeate the

15

Archimago’s “equivocation” is noted by Hamilton, in Hamilton, ed., The Faerie Queene, I.i.31.1–4n.

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The Mythology of Self-Interpretation description of his subsequent nocturnal struggle with phantasms of an unchaste Una. To an extent, that is the result of a pattern of linguistic equivocation which repeatedly invites the suspicion that Redcross is the agent of his own temptation: that the “spright” that causes him to dream of a sexual encounter with Una is none other than his own “irkesome spright” (I.i.55), and that when, “with gealous fire”, he beholds Una apparently in bed with another man, it is not so much what he witnesses as his own impassioned looking that constitutes “his guiltie sight” (I.ii.5–6).16 But such linguistic ambivalence only reinforces the powerfully dislocating effect primarily given to the knight’s experience by his temptation’s uncanny crossing from the ‘inner’ realm of dreams, into the ‘outer’, waking world. In particular, the effect of his waking from a dream of Una’s having come to his bed, only to be confronted at once with what seems to be her really having done so (I.i.48–49), is to lend to the waking encounter the confusing appearance of having sprung dreamlike from inside his mind. A sign of that confusion is the knight’s shocking impulse, when he wakes to find what seems to be Una hovering over his bed, to “haue slaine her in his fierce despight” – a reaction not merely to her inappropriately being there (which in itself, as he soon realises, hardly calls for such an extreme response), but to his associating her with the Una of the threateningly seductive dream from which he has just emerged, as though the waking world’s Una could possibly be to blame for the all-too-tempting sexual advances his dream-Una had been making towards him (I.i.49–50). Indeed the confusion begins earlier, with the equivocation of the dream itself, which seems already to externalise, in the dangerous figure of the seductress-Una, a lust at other points identified as his own (I.i.47–49, 55), so that his hostility to Una on waking seems to carry over into waking not just specific dream associations but the whole dream-psychology of projecting guilt-ridden desire outwards onto its objects. That projection is, in certain respects, very like what he and his allies will more successfully do, in scapegoating Duessa for the “desires vnmeete” (I.vii.50) that began as the knight’s own. But here the effect is different: for such violence as Redcross thinks to offer to Una, on waking to find her at his side, only implicates him in what he proposes to attack, exposing in him the very “passion of vnwonted lust” which, though he is the one it has woken, he passionately attributes to her (I.i.49). In similar fashion throughout his early adventures, Redcross “moves about like a man in a dream”,17 picking fights that tend only to expose him as the unacknowledged original of the crimes his chosen foes personify. For example, his passionate battles with the passionate ‘Sans’ brothers (which though superficially framed as triumphs of his native virtue over their foreign villainy, in 16 17

These ambiguities are noted by Hamilton, in Hamilton, ed., The Faerie Queene, I.i.55.5n and I.ii.6.2n. Cf. Berger, “Displacing Autophobia”, 176. Nohrnberg, The Analogy of The Faerie Queene, 42; the quoted words refer, in Nohrnberg, to the behaviour in the poem of Arthur, but they seem to me all the more applicable to Redcross.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene their detail only hold up a glass to his “homebred” depravity) show us the scapegoating impulse at its most self-defeating, continually implicating the character who sets out by violence to vindicate his good name. Only with Despair does the crisis arrive that wakes the knight from his self-incriminating spiritual slumber. Of all the adversaries Redcross picks for himself, Despair possesses most dangerously, because most knowingly, the quality of being only proximately an agent whom one can confront as an external foe, and more essentially an embodiment of the sin of the one confronting him. In that grasp of being an insider to the hero’s soul consists Despair’s uncanny capacity, very like what Praise-desire and Shamefastness will later exhibit in lighter circumstances, for making the hero look to himself where he thinks to judge another.18 The knight’s very initiation of the encounter shows him still to be asleep to the kind of confrontation he has in hand. Though repeatedly warned that the danger a man faces here comes from “him selfe” (I.ix.23), from “his owne guiltie mind deseruing death” (I.ix.38), our hero responds in just the way in which, from the start, he has greeted all news that there is villainy abroad. “Certes (said he) hence shall I neuer rest, / Till I that treachours art haue heard and tride” (I.ix.32) – as if such a foe is no more than another welcome opportunity for an errant knight to demonstrate his prowess.19 Not even Despair’s visually confronting him with an image of his own “raw-bone” physical state (I.ix.35)20 wakes him to the perilously reflexive nature of the encounter. Hence he is totally unprepared for an ad hominem response to his chivalric challenge, and it comes as a rude awakening indeed when his adversary incontestably exposes Redcross himself as the true author of all the evils that have beset him from the start of his misdirected career. The knight must own the justice of the charges, “Well knowing true all, that he did reherse” (I.ix.48; cf. Arthur’s “Well weeting trew, what [Praise-desire] had rashly told” [II.ix.39]). His eyes opened to his own history, he now sees as it were the Duessa within, “The vgly vew of his deformed crimes” (I.ix.48). His stark conclusion, that he must commit suicide to punish his own depravity (I.ix.50–51), is far from being merely the result of Despair’s rhetorical skill and exegetical legerdemain, and far as well from expressing only the particular erroneous lines of thought characteristic of the despairing state of mind (as if this were just one in an episodic series of temptations the holy man must learn to resist). Much more than that, the knight’s thus turning a knife against himself is the logical culmination of the whole self-implicating course of his story so far, a graphic acknowledgement of

18 19 20

C. Burrow, Edmund Spenser, 46, aptly cites Despair as evidence of the way “Personifications in Spenser . . . can drift inconspicuously into the minds of those who encounter them”. Cf. A. King, The Faerie Queene and Middle English Romance, 127–28. Noted by Hamilton, ed., The Faerie Queene, I.ix.35.8–9n. Cf. D. L. Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies, 87.

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The Mythology of Self-Interpretation the fact that the enemy he has been pursuing and damning all along is none other than himself. It is also true, of course, that in resolving on suicide, Redcross is ‘forgetting’ something, or some things – as Una is quick to point out – namely his having been “chosen”, despite his sins, for “heauenly mercies”, and on earth for the worthy “battell . . . / With that fire-mouthed Dragon” (I.ix.52–53). But in another sense those are things which, despite prior professions of loyalty to God and Gloriana (I.i.2–3), the knight has never known, or at least never had occasion to understand. His ‘forgetting’ of his predestination to sainthood and saintly acts is, in that sense, only proximately attributable to cunning omissions from the persuasions of Despair (I.ix.47, etc.);21 more fundamentally, those are truths the very need of which he cannot know until he faces the otherwise unanswerable conclusions to which not only Despair’s argument, but his own worldly chivalric existence, everywhere tends. With Una’s timely words, both the dragon quest and Christian salvation are reintroduced into the story with a wholly new significance: no longer as mere objects of allegiance, causes for which one chooses to fight, but as what we might call a rescue package – one that uniquely can extract a sinner from his self-damning course.22 What that rescue package consists of, in a story world otherwise reduced to a hall of mirrors displaying nothing but the depravity of the ‘hero’ himself, is access to secure points of reference beyond that self – points of reference both social (Gloriana’s authority, and the need of Una’s people) and divine (God’s providential plan for him). The knight’s record remains in its own right just as death-deserving as ever (I.x.21–22). What changes is that an escape is enabled to a secure outside perspective on his sinful existence, whence it is possible for him to level at himself, or rather now at his former self, his “old man”, the condemnation he deserves, yet to survive the prescribed penalty: to substitute for death a dying unto sin.23 The achievement of that outside perspective is announced by the knight’s assuming, at Contemplation’s retreat, of his saintly identity – an identity, complete with its own name and history, which is on the one hand new (in that a self he has never known is, at least empirically, a self he has never been), but on the other hand, marvellously elder and truer than the self he has known till now (I.x.61–66). 21

22

23

As suggested, e.g., by Hamilton’s remark, in Hamilton, ed., The Faerie Queene, I.ix.47.5n, that Despair, in citing the “law, Let euery sinner die”, “recalls only half of Scripture: ‘The wages of sinne is death; but the gifte of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord’ (Rom. 6.23)”. “For except thou . . . hast felt thyself brought unto the very brim of desperation, yea and unto hell gates, thou canst never meddle with the sentence of predestination without thine own harm . . . By which predestination our justifying and salvation are clean taken out of our hands, and put in the hands of God only, which thing is most necessary of all. For we are so weak and so uncertain, that if it stood in us, there would of a truth no man be saved, the devil no doubt would deceive us.” – “Prologue to Romans”, Tyndale’s New Testament, 221. Cf. Calvin, Institutes, II.vii.8. See Romans 6:6–11, and cf. Ephesians 4:22–24 and Colossians 3:9–10.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene But the hero’s exchanging an “old man” for a “new” does not by any means mark an abandonment of the scapegoating dynamic that animated his vain worldly adventures. On the contrary, what his preparation for identifying with the “new man” largely consists in is the reconstitution of his own sinful being – represented more tangibly, on the model of the Pauline “body of sin”, by his corporeal being (I.x.24–28)24 – as itself a scapegoat for the sins he has committed, a personification of an outward evil which must be disowned and discarded so as to restore his supposed original purity. Thus does the allegorical mirror that shows Redcross his image go from showing him the moribund body of Despair, to showing him the mortified body of Contemplation, exchanging a wasted frame which is self-regarding and self-consuming (I.ix.54), for one which is disregarded and all but discarded, left “long vnfed” to enable “spirituall repast” (I.x.48). For whereas the despairing mind cannot escape identification with the sinful flesh, the contemplative mind can treat it as something extrinsic to be sloughed off. The knight’s impulse to make an enemy of what Despair embodied was not, then, in the story’s terms, essentially the wrong one; but it could only rebound on him so long as it was in his unregenerate person that he made the assault. Only by disowning the very self that has bred such monsters can he finally shake off his implication in what those monsters have represented. So the irruption into the poem of saving Christian grace at the point of the hero’s despair, while it does effect a decisive reversal of his fortunes, actually does so not by discarding, but rather by rendering more effective, the very procedure of scapegoating that he has followed in an erroneous manner all along. Indeed, all varieties of scapegoating involve something corresponding to the Christian concept of the “new man”: namely that hypothetical pure and integral body that is conceived of as ‘proper’ to the individual or to society, and all actual shortfalls from which are attributed to the scapegoat.25 In the earlier cantos of Book One, the idealised self in whose name Redcross performed his acts of scapegoating was simply his self-image as the embodiment of chivalric virtue, as that “Gentle Knight”, “faithfull” and “true”, with which we see him striving self-flatteringly to identify himself from the opening stanzas of the story (I.i.1–2). What is accomplished by the revelation of a divinely fashioned version of that virtuous ‘proper’ self, is that a procedure previously anchored only in the knight’s vainglorious fantasy of heroic stature, is given incomparably more secure purchase in a revelation of his predestination to sainthood.26 24 25

26

Romans 6:6. Cf. D. L. Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies, 91–92. See, e.g., Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989), 126, on the “fundamental ideological fantasy” of “Society as an organic Whole”, the actual “structural impossibility” of which must be accounted for by a scapegoat, “an external element, a foreign body introducing corruption into the sound social fabric”. A sceptical criticism, especially of a psychoanalytic stripe, might at once question the reality of

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The Mythology of Self-Interpretation The route towards assuming his predestined identity – the act the hero must perform before he can coincide with the “new man” promised to him – is his slaying of the dragon. Not by coincidence, that act is also the climactic instance of the reclaimed form of scapegoating made possible by the procedure’s being subsumed in a Christian framework. To Redcross himself, the dragon is presented essentially as a literal foe, the oppressor of an innocent people whom he is bound by charity and by his duty to a divinely appointed queen to rescue; and even on those terms his assigned quest offers him what he lacks in his other adventures, namely a course of action grounded in a moral framework more reliable and consequential than that provided by his own self-righteous sense of personal honour.27 But the monster’s further significance, as a representation or embodiment of the “infernall feend” (I.i.5; cf. I.xi.2, 35), also plays a crucial part in the story’s outcome, in that the knight’s capacity to win the fight depends on his stumbling – literally, though providentially (I.xi.45) – into the pattern of Christ’s, and so of every Christian’s, victory over the devil.28 Not, of course, that every Christian literally meets an “infernall feend” in combat: rather the point is that Christianity’s devil, whether or not regarded as an actual evil being at work in the cosmos, is always a personification of, and more specifically a scapegoat for, the evil each Christian must disown in order to be saved. So that it is, in effect, irrelevant whether we construe the dragon as an allegorical representative of the devil per se, or rather as signifying sin in the abstract; in either case it serves the function in the poem of Christianity’s devil, as a made-to-order figure of blame for the evil besetting the social and divine order – a figure conceived of as intruding from outside on our proper nature, yet signifying, and ultimately taking the fall for, something “constituted . . . in the very heart of the inside”,29 namely our own (individual and collective) burden of sin. I use the idiom ‘taking the fall’ to try to express something of the way the dragon’s serving as a personal and a social scapegoat is realised in the story in terms of a providential transfer onto it of the liability to a certain type of “fall” – one that is both literal and, at the same time, an incriminating allegorical sign of a “false foundation” in the one falling (I.xi.54). Initially, it is to those who fight against the dragon that the danger of such a damning fall pertains: the hero’s predecessors, in falling prey to the monster, expose their “want of faith,

27

28

29

the difference: thus, e.g., D. L. Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies, 71, 90–91. I take up that point in the last part of the chapter. Cf. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 118–19, on the function of the magical enemy as a scapegoat in relation to which the moral absolutes and class solidarity of the chivalric romance genre are constituted. For an indication of some of the views critics have propounded on the relation between Redcross and Christ in canto eleven, see Hamilton, ed., The Faerie Queene, 26, and Harold L. Weatherby, Mirrors of Celestial Grace: Patristic Theology in Spenser’s Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), esp. 34–39. Again quoting Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy”, 133.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene or guilt of sin” (I.vii.45); and even for Redcross himself, at the outset of the climactic encounter, the prospect of being devoured by the dragon is all but equated with being damned, with falling through “the griesly mouth of hell, / . . . into [the] darke abisse” (I.xi.12). But though Redcross, as surely as his antecessors, is “ouerthrowen” (I.xi.30) by the dragon – as indeed all Una’s people have been, on whose behalf he fights (I.xi.47) – this knight falls only to rise again, “As if late fight had nought him damnifyde” (I.xi.52). That “As if” is telling. For it suggests that he too, strictly speaking, ought to have been “damnifyde” when he “fell” (I.xi.30, 48): that he deserved like the rest to have been accounted as just one more for the “abisse” (I.xi.12), and that the divine intervention which enables him to fight again owes nothing at all to a measure of his merits, everything to a gracious overlooking of his faults.30 Meanwhile, the judgement that would, by rights, have lighted on the hero, and indeed on those he rescues, lights instead on the dragon, whose fall, alone amongst all the many in this scene, is presented as an exposure of ill deserts: “downe he fell, as an huge rockie clift, / Whose false foundation waues haue washt away” (I.ix.54). That the dragon can be “ouerthrowen” in the place of Redcross and those he rescues, is to be explained by the fact that the dragon is, to begin with, an outward personification of his and their own inward burden of evil. The knight, and with him Una’s people, become “As if . . . nought . . . damnifyde”, by the elimination of that which allegorically represents their own damnable status. In that respect, the dragon’s taking the fall for them is very like Sansfoy’s earlier taking the fall for the Redcross knight’s faithlessness, or like Error’s for his straying from the single-minded pursuit of his quest. But as I have already suggested, the case of the dragon also differs from the earlier episodes in significant ways. Firstly, there is the scale of the operation: both what the knight fights, and what he fights for, are now much larger than himself. Secondly, there is the degree to which blame for the evil that the foe represents is successfully apportioned to the vanquished: whereas earlier, it was chiefly in his own good self-opinion that Redcross seemed to have overcome faithlessness, error, and so on, now his defeat of the dragon is widely acknowledged to constitute a great moral victory. Thirdly, there is the fact that now the passing off of guilt takes place within a specifically Christian framework. In sum, the procedure of scapegoating has not by any means been left behind in the climactic episode, but rather has only been taken out of the hands of the hero and rooted in his society and its religion – or more precisely, has been given the backing of the institution that expresses the purposes of a true Christian society, the divinely-sanctioned monarchy of Gloriana. To put it another way, here God and a godly polity confirm the knight’s disowning of what his enemy embodies, making possible the decisive emergence of his new saintly identity, 30

Cf. A. King, The Faerie Queene and Middle English Romance, 137.

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The Mythology of Self-Interpretation untainted by association with the personifications of his old self’s failings. Defeating the dragon is, in that respect, the focal point of a larger process which includes both the religious repudiation of his former self in the House of Holiness and the social repudiation of Archimago and Duessa at the court of Una’s parents.

Getting Caught in the Act From another point of view, however, even the process I have just described of securing the procedure of scapegoating in outside points of reference may be called into question. Certainly social approbation of the knight’s own interpretation of his actions would not by itself constitute a secure grounding thereof, as the House of Pride episode demonstrates: in such a case, society itself is just another of the story’s outward mirrors of the knight’s inner depravity, showing him precisely what he wants to see. Rather, the approbation is properly to be sought only of a society whose purposes reflect those of God, as is the case (so Contemplation reveals) at Fairy Court (I.x.59). Personal integrity can truly be validated by society only if the social order is itself validated by a grounding in a transcendent order. But as is also drawn to our attention at the House of Pride, even such divine backing for a regime can readily enough be faked (I.iv.11–12). Indeed, to any politically aware Elizabethan, who could see the respective leaders of the most radically opposed political forces each claiming to act with God’s authority and decrying comparable claims made by others, it must have been apparent that at least some such claims had to be false. (Most obviously, such a situation existed in Elizabeth’s realms, especially after her papal excommunication, in regard to the authority claimed on either hand by queen and pope.) Hence even a moral system based on deference to divinely constituted authority clearly had to be rooted more fundamentally still in an ability to discern which authority genuinely had that status. In the Redcross knight’s case, attaining such discernment is marked by arrival at Contemplation’s cell: the hermit personifies his own new capacity to contemplate with clarity the matters expounded to him there. Only at the completion of his own personal moral and spiritual reformation, when he himself has become sufficiently well grounded in virtue to see so clearly, is the enlightening revelation of Gloriana’s true status as God’s deputy on earth afforded him. Thus God’s will, far from constituting a straightforwardly external and independent reference point, a stable marker against which all earthly claims to right can be measured, has itself to be distinguished from false pretenders by reference to the inner yardstick of a personal competence. Even as personal virtue must be ratified by a virtuous social order, and the polity’s virtue by the transcendent will of God, so the true will of God must be ratified by the virtuous individual. The manifest circularity of such a verification process raises the question whether the protagonist whose virtuous destiny it appears 137

Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene to confirm has after all really been saved by outside intervention from the hall of mirrors wherein he had seen only and always just what he wished to see; or whether instead the “new man”, and the society of the elect in whose name he will henceforth act, might themselves be no more than collectively endorsed versions of the same fantasy of moral integrity that has possessed Redcross from the outset. Certainly there is at least an element of unreality to the knight’s supposed acquisition in the House of Holiness of complete moral integrity, though described at the time unequivocally enough as his becoming “so perfect . . . / That from the first vnto the last degree, / His mortall life he learned had to frame / In holy righteousnesse, without rebuke or blame” (I.x.45). For even after his education there, in practice he must remain at a certain significant remove from the ‘proper’ self Contemplation reveals to him, his deeds still stained with “guilt of bloudy field” (I.x.60). He is truly to become identified with his regenerate self only when he repudiates even his reconstituted military identity, to enter “peaceably” as a saint into the New Jerusalem (I.x.60–61). Hence his ‘proper’, saintly self, far from being put on once and for all at his first, and prima facie entire, disowning of the “old man” in the House of Holiness, remains to an important degree a hypothetical identity for so long as his earthly life and narrative presence continue.31 Similarly even the elect city of Cleopolis can never be, in its earthly existence, more than a relatively dim image of its ‘proper’ self, the New Jerusalem (I.x.58–59). The narrative corollary of such a continued individual and collective shortfall from the ideal is that neither the personal nor the political process of self-purification – which is to say, of expelling the relevant scapegoats – can ever really be completed, once and for all, in narrative time. For example, even after the end of his own quest, Redcross can take on his saintly identity in the eyes of his successor, Sir Guyon (II.i.32), only after he has been cleared, without proof, of the apparent shame of having taken part in stripping and disgracing the helpless woman Duessa (II.i.9–19; cf. I.viii.46ff), and after the shame initially imputed to him (II.i.11) has been reassigned to the one who cast imputations on him (II.i.30). Indeed in terms of narrative organisation, Archimago’s active resumption of the scapegoat’s role – his returning by a convenient magic (II.i.1) into the fold, despite what seemed decisive collective action against him (I.xii.35–36), to function again as the hidden villain through whose rejection our hero’s name can be cleared (II.i.30) – is the

31

This apparent contradiction is rooted in the letters of Paul and omnipresent in Protestant theology: see esp. Romans 8:23–25 and 2 Corinthians 5:1–8, and Luxon, Literal Figures, 14–15. But the first book of The Faerie Queene puts that Pauline theology into narrative in such close juxtaposition with apparently similar self-interpretative structures that it repudiates, as to make particularly pressing the question whether the Christian version here escapes being tarred with the same brush.

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The Mythology of Self-Interpretation enabling move by which Spenser gets the story underway again at the opening of Book Two (II.i.1–5). From the standpoint of a critical tradition no longer predisposed to grant a unique metaphysical basis to the Christian scheme of salvation, such a pattern of indefinitely recurring purgations in the name of a pure, hypothetical self which never decisively appears, looks highly susceptible to being construed as merely one more version of the same old suspect pharmakos-ritual, just one more rendering of the perhaps universal quest of flawed humanity for that chimerical ‘proper self’ to which the scapegoat would be truly alien.32 At the least, the look of solidity to the first book’s moral resolution depends on a reader’s accepting that the protagonist’s vision of the New Jerusalem, and of his own and his society’s destined place therein, mark a radical departure from what, prior to the House of Holiness episode, had been the very rule of his experience – namely that all he encountered without had been, at bottom, reflections of his own inward state. For unless such a radical change takes place here, both the “new man” and the “New Jerusalem” of which he is a citizen might be, yet again, no more than the self-flattering projections of desire, mirrors that merely show our hero, and the society that endorses his heroism, what they wish to see: namely transcendentally secure moral grounds on which to base their earthly actions and allegiances.33 The fact that, to judge by the history of Spenser criticism, the story has not widely been seen as inviting such suspicions, is partly attributable (though only partly) to the poem’s invoking, as the substance of the hero’s apocalyptic vision, Biblical images of redemption that were matters of faith common to the whole of Renaissance Christian culture, acknowledged as verities even across the deep religious divide that polarised late-sixteenth-century Europe. Certainly it is easy to assume that an early modern poem which brings such images into play would do so in the firm expectation of their being construed by readers as certain, self-subsistent realities. And yet we know that the atheist alternative was conceivable for the Elizabethans – if anything, too conceivable for their liking.34 Spenser’s political 32

33 34

Cf. Luxon, Literal Figures, 207, and D. L. Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies, 81–91; see also the passage from Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy”, 133, cited earlier, itself citing Frazer, who is a key figure in this levelling of Christian with pagan and primitive ritual (as regards which, see Robert Fraser, ed., in James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A New Abridgement, xxv–xxvi). Cf. Frye’s characterisation of the apocalyptic vision as embodying “the conceivable or imaginative limit of desire”, in Anatomy of Criticism, 119. Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 200, documents “godly” Elizabethans’ sense of living in a world full “of ranke Atheists” (quoting Arthur Dent, The plaine mans path-way to Heaven [1601], 144). Such an impression of ubiquitous atheism is more intelligible if we understand that it included not only open scorning of belief, but the pragmatic trimming in religion that the Tudor century’s upheavals had made very widespread: for if “we call Atheists” those who, “whatsoever any prince doth set forth, that they will professe”, then a significant share of

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene world, as I have said, was one in which at least some standing claims to divine backing had to be spurious; we may add that his intellectual world was one in which Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy were well known, with their notorious representation not only of the ancient Roman religion but of state religion in general as, in Richard Hooker’s words, “a mere politic device, forged purposely” to augment rulers’ power over the people.35 In such circumstances one could hardly fail to be conscious, even if only as a formidable objection to be answered, of the possibility that all religion, including the Christian, might actually be “a meere civill invention to hold the world in reverence and fear”.36 Indeed, as Stephen Greenblatt has observed, the Elizabethan atheist, though hard to pin down, seems universally to have been ‘known to be out there’, and what is more, it was known exactly what he believed: as with any such scapegoat, “If the atheist did not exist, he would have to be invented”.37 That atheist, or ‘Machiavel’, lurking in society’s midst appears in the Legend of Holiness in the person of Lucifera, marked out as such by her stereotypically Machiavellian cynical political expedience both in statecraft generally (she rules her realm not “with lawes, but pollicie”) and in religion specifically (“thundring Ioue . . . she claymed for her syre, / Or if that any else did Ioue excell”) (I.iv.11–12). More precisely, Lucifera is the atheistic foil for the genuinely godly queen – the lightning rod for any suspicions about Gloriana’s, and ultimately Elizabeth’s, politico-religious standing, in the sense that the poem’s attribution of “heauenly” authority to Gloriana, and by extension Elizabeth, seems to be ratified by its corresponding forthrightness in exposing a charlatan’s claim to such. But we ought not simply to assume that Spenser’s representation of such a

35

36

37

society must have been susceptible to the charge of being “of no religion” (quoting George Gifford, A briefe discourse of certaine points of religion . . . [1581], in Collinson, loc. cit.). Cf. Patterson, Reading Between the Lines, 126–28. Quoting Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, V.ii.3, in Works, 3 vols, ed. John Keble, 7th edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1888), vol. 2, 21. See Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), I.xi–xv. On university-educated Elizabethans’ considerable knowledge of Machiavelli’s works, see Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli: A Changing Interpretation, 1500–1700 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, and Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), 51–76; on their having digested his arguments about religion, Raab, 63–66; on the “close familiarity” of Spenser in particular with Machiavelli’s views, Raab, 61–62. From John Levitt, “The Epistle of the Translator to the Reader”, in a MS translation (1599) of the Discourses, quoted by Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli, 65–66. Cf. the evidence cited by Stephen Greenblatt in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 25, 34, 168, of wide cognisance in Elizabethan society of the scandalous view attributed to Christopher Marlowe by the informer Richard Baines, “that the first beginning of Religioun was only to keep men in awe”. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 21–23. Greenblatt does not use the term “scapegoat”, but does speak of the atheist as “the archetypal corrupter” (23).

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The Mythology of Self-Interpretation contrast between a truly godly claim to political authority and its fraudulent, sanctimonious counterpart would necessarily lend itself only, or even primarily, to the orthodox reading that I have suggested. Certainly that was not thought to be the case of Machiavelli, whose superficial show of excluding the Christian religion from the cynical analysis he levels at its pagan counterparts tended only to press home to Elizabethan readers the sense that his thoughts had indeed compassed and approved the very impiety he tactically disowns.38 As with any scapegoat, Lucifera has the dangerous capacity to implicate as well as for seeming to exonerate: like Machiavelli’s carefully circumscribed remarks on religion, Spenser’s concentration into the figure of Lucifera of all that Elizabeth had to be seen not to be, had the potential to be taken as an oblique attack on what could not be attacked openly. Indeed, the Machiavellian Queen Lucifera could have been taken, not only as a veiled treasonable depiction of Elizabeth, as I noted earlier, but moreover as a veiled atheistic reading, on Machiavellian lines, of the Christianity in which her monarchic authority was anchored. What is finally at stake in the relation between Gloriana and Lucifera is nothing less than the ability of Elizabethan Christianity to differentiate itself convincingly from such politically motivated religious fraud as was diagnosed by Machiavelli amongst the pagans. If Book One makes the case (as in the final analysis I think it does) for a bona fide Christian regime, it does so chiefly by means of persuading its readers of the significant difference, for the Redcross knight, between serving Lucifera and serving Gloriana. That is to say, it concentrates its rhetorical force at the personal and narrative level, to make as convincing as possible the radical difference between the fantasy of self-realisation and personal integrity that in the early cantos directs the knight’s course towards enlistment in the ranks of Lucifera’s knights at the House of Pride (I.v.16), and the true Christian self-realisation and wholeness placed in his grasp once he embarks by way of the House of Holiness on the course set for him by his Christian queen. To show that, I shall point out three ways in which Spenser brings his rhetorical and narrative resources fully to bear in order to achieve the appearance of such a radical difference. Firstly, there is the tour de force of rhetorical enargeia whereby the poem, introducing the New Jerusalem, the linchpin of its moral universe, seems “not 38

Machiavelli’s explicit, and invariably double-edged, gestures in the direction of excluding Christianity from his analysis of religion’s basis in fraud include his sanctimonious comments on Savonarola (Discourses, I.xi), and his show of deference to a pious view of “ecclesiastical states” (Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Robert M. Adams [New York and London: Norton, 1977], cap. xi). Such coy gestures only underlined for Elizabethans, as they do for us, the broader impression that the Mosaic and Christian religions are tacitly included in the general analysis. Even an Elizabethan defender of Machiavelli allows that it is generally “objected against him, that (amongst other errors) . . . speaking of religions, he doth not distinguish them, nor preferreth the true and good, before the false and fained” (Levitt, quoted in Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli, 65–66).

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene so much to narrate as to exhibit the actual scene”.39 That is to say, Contemplation, instead of merely telling Redcross of the heavenly city which is to be the reward of his obedience, strikingly shows it to him in all its glory, and not as a mere phantasmal vision, but a place in the concrete distance, reachable from where he stands by “A litle path” (I.x.55). It is as if the Legend of Holiness were to have the prophetic status of another book of Revelation: for Spenser’s scene borrows the powerful rhetorical effects of visibility and first-hand witness found in Revelation 21:2 – “And I Iohn sawe the holie citie new Ierusalem come downe from God out of heauen”. That the spectacle is, moreover, revealed to the knight only after several stanzas’ discussion of what he is to see, has the effects both of building our sense of the essentially visual nature of the coming disclosure, and of provoking an ever-greater anticipation on the reader’s part of what we might describe as the drawing away of the curtain (I.x.50–54). And when, at last, at the moment of revelation, the author voices the familiar inability topos – to describe what the hero sees is “Too high a ditty for my simple song” (I.x.55) – he not only effectively suggests the surpassing grandeur of what is disclosed, but clinches his fiction that it is not through his own “wordish description” (to borrow Philip Sidney’s phrase),40 but through the very eyes of Redcross, that the scene enters into the reader’s imagination. The powerful effect that results, of the knight’s, and by extension our own, directly witnessing a reality, is what seems so persuasively to give unique solidity to the New Jerusalem as a secure external point of reference in which the hero can henceforth anchor his moral and spiritual enterprise. Secondly, there is the presenting of the inevitable non-coincidence in earthly life of the faithful Christian with the “new man” in whose name he acts, not as the thorny doctrinal problem it is,41 but as the result simply of a concrete moral choice. According to the poem’s fiction our protagonist could wholly assume, straight away, the redeemed self whose existence Contemplation declares to him, except that he is morally obliged to return below for the sake of earthly commitments still outstanding (I.x.63–64). It is a fine narrative finessing of the problem, which leaves us, on apparently firm moral grounds, where it might otherwise be unsettling still to find ourselves, namely with the virtuous integrity of the supposedly perfected hero still endlessly having to be re-established amid scapegoats that still dog his steps. Thirdly, there is the way the hypothetical “new man” that the knight is never able wholly to assume within narrative time is made to seem more concrete and tangible – and thus, like the vividly realised New Jerusalem, to seem a more secure anchorage for the work it does in the story – by being all but equated with the more down-to-earth lost identity that comes of his being

39 40 41

Quoting Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, VI.ii.32, trans. Butler. Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, 32. See Luxon, Literal Figures, 14–15 and passim.

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The Mythology of Self-Interpretation a foundling, who is noble rather than (as till then supposed) common by birth. Thus Contemplation explains the hero’s being “worthy” to serve the “heauenly borne” Gloriana, by his “race” (I.x.60) – a point explained, when Redcross seeks clarification, as referring to his actually having been born not to a ploughman but “from ancient race / Of Saxon kings” (I.x.65). In relation to the story’s moral thesis, that is an egregious cheat. For the very aristocratic ideal which the book in larger terms treats as legitimate only when strictly subordinated to a Protestant-absolutist ethos of loyalty to a godly regime, is here called in, conversely, as a narrative prop for that supposedly higher ethos – as though now it were earthly gentility that could justify divine favour, rather than the reverse.42 But in narrative and rhetorical terms, it is an effective contrivance. In such devices lie the story’s crucial sleight of hand, whereby it appears decisively to establish the reality of those pure and virtuous bodies, individual and social, in whose name the expulsion of scapegoats can be carried out with moral impunity. What is crucial about those devices is how, in persuasively grounding the scapegoating procedure in the purported certainties of Christianity, they appear to reclaim the scapegoating procedure itself from the self-implicating way in which the Redcross knight uses it during his early adventures – how they appear firmly to establish the solid basis, and hence the moral integrity, of the Christian form of the procedure, by contrast with the false appearance of moral integrity that results from its abuse in the service of false ideals such as that of secular chivalric honour. The result, in fact, is a kind of ‘meta’-scapegoating drama, wherein what seems to be established is a pure, proper form of scapegoating itself, and wherein what is disowned is a morally corrupt and delusive version of the same.43 But as we have had occasion to observe repeatedly, the scapegoat has always the potential to implicate what it is intended to clear; and so it is that here, in the broadest outlines of the story’s structure, we may observe quite clearly the possibility the story is designed to occlude – and which, if we may judge by the history of Spenser criticism, it has in fact occluded with quite remarkable success. For if the story’s scapegoats, the disowning of which permits the emergence in tandem of a truly righteous hero and a truly righteous monarch, are respectively the self-righteous hero (Redcross himself in his early adventures) and the self-righteous monarch (Lucifera), then from what does the tale so resolutely draw our attention away, as from the perilous susceptibility of a moral order that requires such means of defence, to a charge of mere selfrighteousness? In fact, we come tantalisingly close to having that charge 42

43

Pace A. King, The Faerie Queene and Middle English Romance, 150, who asserts that “the different kinds of birth – aristocratic and spiritually elect – are in no way related in Spenser’s text”, and rather that the one is used only as “an analogous model” for the other. Of course in its Christian version scapegoating is never called that; it is called, for example, ‘renouncing the devil and all his works’.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene acknowledged in the closing canto of Book One, where (as we saw in Chapter Six) the hero whom we expect to find fully justified in both religious and secular senses by victory over the dragon is instead found, remarkably, still to be engaged in what looks like mere self-justification. I argued in that place that such a role can itself be justified in terms of a moral discourse common to the age, one on which Spenser himself draws elsewhere in defence of the deeply problematic political project in Ireland in which he was engaged; but what I want to emphasise here is just how very close the narrative of Book One comes, in trying to defend that discourse at its weakest point, to exposing it as itself ultimately no more than a grand exercise in moral self-justification. We may note that, historically speaking, Spenser lies on the cusp of a severe intellectual reaction “against the entire rhetorical culture of Renaissance humanism”, most especially against its espousal of the technique of re-describing things as morally better or worse than they are in fact.44 My contention, on those terms, is that in the first book of The Faerie Queene the reaction has not yet set in, but that we can sense its imminence like the cracking of a dam ready to break. In that respect, Jacqueline Miller and Harry Berger, who read the finale of the Legend of Holiness as an unmasking of its supposed hero’s moral deficiencies – of his being, to the end, no less a figure of duplicity than his enemies Archimago and Duessa – are truer to the text than the mass of criticism which takes for granted the knight’s achievement of his titular virtue by the end of his Legend. Where both Miller and Berger misrepresent the poem, I think, is only in suggesting that it openly invites and encourages such a reading, whereas in fact, as I have tried to show, it concentrates a vast rhetorical energy precisely into discouraging it. What we have, I think, is a particular instance of the general observation I made in Chapter One, that if allegorical works may be viewed as deconstructing their own claim to embody a single, ‘whole’ meaning, then that self-exposé typically springs from their trying but failing to marshal themselves into a seamless order. That is to say, we observe the poem’s duplicity through its efforts radically to distinguish its own procedure from the duplicity it decries in the figures of its scapegoats. As I noted in the first section of the present chapter, the success of the scapegoating procedure relies on a certain degree of inattention, lest the native origin of what is disowned as alien be noticed, and hence the very distinction that it aims to secure be radically undermined. And (to borrow Gordon Teskey’s words from a not dissimilar context), “no one is meant to listen as closely as we have just now” to the dissonance that besets the selfinterpretative procedures of the Legend of Holiness.45 In subsequent books of The Faerie Queene, a willingness to attend more closely to the essential illogic

44 45

See Skinner, “Moral Ambiguity and the Renaissance Art of Eloquence”, 269; cf. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 179–80. Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 22.

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The Mythology of Self-Interpretation on which scapegoating is founded will bring that procedure’s basis in selfcontradiction deliberately more to the fore (as I have already suggested in regard to one of the episodes in Book Two, the encounter in Alma’s parlour between the heroes Arthur and Guyon and their governing passions). But that will take place in the context of the poem’s going on to explore a question the first book leaves insistently unasked, namely whether the purposes of a selfvalidating political power could ever justifiably be treated as a foundation for moral action. What I think needs to be emphasised, however, so far as Book One is concerned, is the great rhetorical energy the poem dedicates precisely to distracting itself and its readers at the key moments from the merely selfconfirming nature of its whole Protestant-absolutist moral edifice – and what is more, distracting them by means of just the kind of duplicitous rhetorical surface brilliance that the book is at such pains morally to disown.

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Part Three

The Problem of Self-Interpretation in Later Books

Introduction

In each successive book of The Faerie Queene, the titular virtue, however uncertainly defined, nevertheless continually asserts itself as a criterion in relation to which all moral interpretation is obliged to proceed. That is true not only for the hero and minor characters directly associated with each book, but likewise for those who, as it were, wander in from the different interpretative environments of the other books in which they had originally appeared. Thus for example Redcross, in the opening cantos of Books Two and Three, is perceived through the filter of local interpretative conditions not so much as the embodiment of holiness, as an exemplary figure first of temperance (II.i.4), then of chastity (III.i.24); and Britomart, initially a champion of chastity in her own right, is reinterpreted in Book Five as a subordinate figure representing a mere “part of Iustice” (V.vii.3). Nor is it only the characters, but the moral climates themselves of earlier books, that are cast in a different light in retrospect: stories that had looked complete or even incomplete on their own terms, are revisited in later books as raw material for a new interpretative machinery. The Mount of Contemplation is reconstituted as the Chamber of Eumnestes, and the Bower of Bliss remade first as the Garden of Adonis, again as the Temple of Venus, then yet again as Mount Acidale, in each case being transformed into something that could not have been predicted and would not have made sense from the perspectives of the former books in which similar motifs were seen. Criticism is tempted to try to find either an overarching synchronic frame of reference in which these analogical structures can be definitively co-ordinated (for example, a Neoplatonic cosmic vision in which the Bower of Bliss can be placed as a derivative copy of the Garden of Adonis, and so on) or a linear narrative movement within which successive books represent progressive stages (notably the cumulative education in virtue of a single person, be it Arthur or the reader). Such attempts at ordering the poem, as the Letter to Raleigh illustrates with its own prescriptive gestures in both those directions, can be called misreadings only in the special, ‘authorised’ sense I described in Chapter One. Nonetheless, within the body of the poem, the only concrete self-interpretative standpoints we are given from which to try to get such a 149

Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene larger view of the poem are the individual books themselves. That is, each virtue in turn is provisionally offered as a framework for assimilating not only its own materials but all that has gone before, like the latest regime or colonial power exerting itself for a time in the poem’s landscape. Each book in that sense does to itself and to its predecessors something rather like what (in less detail) the Letter to Raleigh does to the 1590 poem as a whole, not so much functioning as a step towards some cumulative vision, as making a bid for hegemony on its own terms, one whose claims end up looking less than total only because “yet the end is not” (III.iii.50). The sequential reading of the poem’s later books that follows tries to take account of the dynamic I have just described by paying attention in turn to what each book makes of its predecessors before it likewise cedes the interpretative initiative to succeeding books. My reading is therefore not cumulative in the straightforward sense of the term (although like the poem it is continually drawn towards cumulative articulations of what the poem has been ‘about’ so far): rather it seems to me, for example, that what Book One offers as a solution to the fundamental moral problem is itself taken up in Book Two as a problem, requiring a radically new basis of approach – and so on from book to book. Likewise I do not see the Mutability Cantos as properly speaking a conclusion to The Faerie Queene, though like earlier books (notably the first, third, and sixth) they make an impressive bid (or rather several bids) to articulating a definitive epiphany. What I think they do instead is to recapitulate the dynamic I have attributed to the poem more widely, intensifying right to the end its restless and recursive attempts at interpretative conquest of a material that resiliently resists assimilation. Like many previous readers, I am left feeling that The Faerie Queene is in some sense like life – but less in the sense of exhibiting, even gradually or tentatively, the orderliness of design, than in showing, willingly or not, how the very quest to impose such an orderly design is itself embroiled in replicating the messiness of history.

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Chapter Eight

The Legend of Temperance: Self-Interpretation from the Ground Up

T

HE SECOND book of The Faerie Queene, like the first, is in my view concerned less with portraying a particular character’s success or failure in living up to an agreed moral standard, than with exploring the viability of the different standards themselves that offer themselves as a basis for moral self-interpretation. But the terms of reference have changed. Book One in a sense dictates that the problem its successor inherits should be that of temperance, by arriving at the conclusion that the moral ideal is a middle course, between the arrogant self-assertion that leads Redcross to the House of Pride and the despairing quietism from which (ironically) it is Contemplation’s task to rouse him. The Legend of Holiness links those pernicious extremes with Catholic worldliness and Catholic unworldliness respectively, marking as moral a Protestant middle way whereby one shoulders the responsibility of the active life even while humbling one’s personal sense of right and wrong before the tasks set out for one by God. Its touchstone for that humble active life is loyalty to a godly monarch. But such unqualified turning to divine and concomitantly to human authority leaves the actual content of the faithful subject’s moral life all but unexplored. Indeed for Redcross the problem hardly exists, because in his case the task of acting morally in the world is straightforwardly represented by a single symbolic act, spelled out by a direct order from above. It is the knight of temperance, whose quest accordingly comes next, who must grapple with the difficulties of negotiating practical moral problems, and the moral uncertainties inherent even in loyal action.

Moral Ambivalence in Guyon’s Quest In mission terms, Guyon’s quest is as successful as the Redcross knight’s before him; and the authority that morally endorses the mission is in either case the same. Yet the modern critical traditions surrounding the completion of the two undertakings could hardly be more different. Whatever failings Redcross 151

Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene shows in the course of his quest, it has always seemed clear that its object, slaying the dragon, is offered to us as a good and glorious deed. Not so Guyon’s razing of the Bower of Bliss, the poem’s moral endorsement of which has been a matter of persistent debate.1 My purpose here is not to take a side in that debate, but to look into the problem in Book Two of moral ambivalence as such, of which Guyon’s actions in completing his quest are the crowning but by no means the only significant example. For it seems to me that Spenser begins in this book actively to cultivate moral ambivalence, in a way uncharacteristic of Book One. Not, however, in an unstructured way, as if his sceptical purpose were to cast doubt equally everywhere. Rather the ambivalence itself has a particular form and cause, which I shall try to describe. Of course, uncertainty about what constitutes the good does feature in Book One too: the straying Redcross pursues evil precisely under the guise of virtue, and even the good, when it appears, often looks unsettlingly like an evil already rejected. But the dragon quest, assigned by Gloriana, serves amid that ambiguity as a much-needed beacon of moral clarity, the very sign of the hero’s having been “chosen” for salvation. Guyon’s quest, in contrast, is itself caught up in moral ambivalence from start to finish. That is partly a function of the quest’s nature: for where Redcross was to rescue Eden from a monster – clear enough – for Guyon the two are conflated, such that the Eden is the monster. But it has also to do with how the quest figures in the story at large, from how it is initiated to how its hero is received after completing it. To take the reception after the fact first: Redcross reappears at the opening of Book Two as a figure of exemplary moral self-control, to whom shame will not stick, and receives rapturous praise for his “late most hard atchieu’ment” (II.i.32); whereas Guyon, in Book Three’s analogous scene, encounters at his successor’s hand not praise but tremendous “shame”, and his response, till restrained by his friends, is “wrath” and a “fierce” impulse “to reuenge”, which looks like anything but the attained virtue of temperance (III.i.9). So where the Redcross knight’s moral attainment is underscored both by explicit praise and by his own example, Guyon’s is made to look suspect, raising a retrospective question about the ethical value of his whole prior quest. However, it would be simplistic just to label Guyon a failure on those grounds. For such vengeful wrath, while undoubtedly problematic from the point of view of any classical definition of temperance (and greeted with alarm even here by the stoic Palmer), far from simply having been the enemy of Guyon’s quest, has been 1

See the summary in Hamilton, ed., The Faerie Queene, 168, as well as Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, cap. 4, Lauren Silberman, “The Faerie Queene, Book II, and the Limitations of Temperance”, Modern Language Studies 4 (1987): 9–22, esp. 20, Berger, “Narrative as Rhetoric”, 43–44, and Jay Farness, “Disenchanted Elves: Biography in the Text of Faerie Queene V”, in Judith Anderson et al., eds., Spenser’s Life and the Subject of Biography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 21–24.

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Self-Interpretation from the Ground Up intrinsic to its motivation from the very start. There is a contradiction at the heart of his project, which we do not touch merely by saying that Guyon never successfully becomes in practice the classically temperate man. For in fact there are two very different models of heroism in play in Book Two, of which the self-restraint that defines temperance is only one. The other is an outgoing, militaristic ethos of valour (broadly speaking, a chivalric ethos), which marks as noble not one’s capacity to restrain the passionate nature but its native strength: where temperance would rein in and subdue irascibility and concupiscence, this valour ethos makes it the sign of nobility “to be borne by natiue influence / . . . feates of armes, and loue to entertaine” (II.iv.1).2 Of course, the book at points satirises such a conception of virtue, notably in the proudly passionate characters Pyrochles and Cymochles. By no means does it simply disown it, though, any more than it unambiguously champions the opposite, stoic ideal – which, for example, looks as ludicrous as Pyrochles and Cymochles ever do, when in the Palmer’s advice to Phedon it is reduced to the supremely trite as well as (to use Harry Berger’s term) “gynophobic” notion that the kind of love that aims at marriage is the “monster” at the root of Phedon’s woes.3 The simultaneous presence of those two value systems, not only in the story but in Guyon’s own thinking, makes the moral significance of all his actions radically ambivalent, because each one’s ideal of virtue is from the other’s perspective a type of vice. And while it is tempting to imagine that the book’s deeper moral project would be to mark out a middle way between the respective extremes of such stoic and aristocratic paradigms, in fact the Legend of Temperance consistently rejects that pat solution. We can see that already in the first two cantos, where the hero gets his quest underway; for he gives it, as it were, a double launch, first by Amavia’s grave, then again at Medina’s court, and in each case he cuts such a different heroic figure as to come away looking like a walking self-contradiction. At the graveside, “temperance” may be on the Palmer’s lips (II.i.58), but could not be more alien to Guyon’s actual deed, which is deliberately to work himself up into a sufficient passion resolutely to assume the tragic revenger’s role: Sir Guyon more affection to increace, Bynempt a sacred vow, which none should aye releace. . . . Such and such euill God on Guyon reare, And worse and worse young Orphane be thy paine, If I or thou dew vengeance doe forbeare . . .

2

3

(II.i.60–61).

It will be seen that I think the book is less interested in discriminating amongst the different classical definitions of temperance than in pitting a syncretic amalgam of those against a radically different conception of virtue, one predominantly chivalric in its terms but itself widely enough conceived to include classical strains, notably the tragic and the Homeric. The Faerie Queene, II.iv.35; Berger, “Narrative as Rhetoric”, 30ff.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene At Medina’s table, in contrast, it is not towering passion but humble duty that Guyon makes the motive of his quest. “My Soueraine,” he explains, Whose glory is in gracious deeds, and ioyes Throughout the world her mercy to maintaine, Eftsoones deuisd redresse for such annoyes; Me all vnfit for so great purpose she employes.

(II.ii.43).

His own painful experience is appealed to now only in a forensic vein: of Acrasia’s crimes, he declares, “I witnesse am” (II.ii.44). And indeed, it would have sounded very strangely to have cited his former motive here. For his hostess has already spoken out categorically against “wrath” and “mortall vengeaunce”, even where there is “rightfull cause of difference” or a “crime abhord” has been committed (II.ii.30). One might try to salvage logic from Guyon’s change of tack by supposing that in visiting Medina’s house he corrects his own motives, bringing them into line with reason. But the poem does not depict any such process of correction, in the way it showed Redcross being chastened into subordinating his own motives for chivalric endeavour to his duty to the godly queen who knighted him. Rather Guyon’s two motives are merely juxtaposed. When he departs Medina’s house “mindfull of his vow yplight” (II.iii.1) this might include his recently reported vow to Gloriana, never to “rest in house nor hold, / Till I that false Acrasia haue wonne” (II.ii.44), but any sense that his dutiful oath may have replaced his other, impassioned vow of vengeance vanishes when he hands the bloody-handed baby to Medina, enjoining her of all people to teach him, “so soone as ryper yeares he raught . . . T’auenge his Parents death on them, that had it wrought” (II.iii.2). Ruddymane, after all, has not been given his sovereign’s orders to do any such thing: we are back to the passionate vendetta that animated Guyon at the graveside. Nor can we even say, in view of his parting act, simply that Guyon has failed to learn Medina’s lesson, as if the lesson itself were patently right. Rather her philosophy is itself suspiciously oversimple, in the same sort of way as is the Palmer’s later advice to Phedon. As Lauren Silberman observes, Medina “makes accord itself a value, at the expense of any substantive meaning the dispute may have. The difference between two [parties] is granted no significance except insofar as that difference allows a mean to be struck.”4 Such indiscriminate peacemaking hardly looks like an adequate ethical basis for the task Guyon has assumed. So not only does the passionate vengeance ethos remain a part of the hero’s moral makeup, but the question whether that ethos can appropriately play a part in his quest remains unresolved. All that is clear is that the two models of morality in play cast doubt on one another’s legitimacy. The parallel and in either case precarious standing in the book of each ethos 4

Silberman, “The Faerie Queene, Book II”, 11.

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Self-Interpretation from the Ground Up is seen with particular clarity in canto nine, where Guyon and Arthur come face to face with Shamefastness and Praise-Desire. Here the two potential models of virtue, the self-restraining and the high-aspiring, are themselves linked to two strong, contrasting passions dwelling in the human heart. The encounter deeply challenges the notion that virtue might consist simply in steering a rational course between the extremes of excess and defect, “forward” and “froward” passions: rather the potential motives for virtue are themselves seen as powerful “forward” and “froward” passions respectively.5 Hence, too, both are laid open to a charge of being themselves forms of the very intemperance that the one ethos, at least, had promised to remedy – a charge made against each, ironically, by the very knight in whose moral life it is especially active. Nor does the episode offer to resolve the confusion. It rebuffs the knights’ attempts to disown their animating passions, but leaves resolutely unclear whether their error is to reprove in others excesses they should reprove in themselves, or rather to reprove qualities necessary to their own heroism and hence in practice good; it leaves tellingly unresolved, that is, whether either passion is properly understood as a morally enabling or disabling energy. Those two points, that there is no neutral moral stance between the extremes of passion, and that the “forward” and “froward” motives for virtue are both ambivalent in their real moral value, are demonstrated throughout Guyon’s adventures. Though in one encounter after another, our hero tries to assume the part of the temperate judge who reproves passionate excesses from the authoritative stance of the golden mean, with telltale regularity the possibility of taking such a place above the fray is called seriously into doubt. Even in Medina’s house, which seems of all the book’s settings most clearly and schematically to offer him such solid middle ground to stand on, the action he takes, of interposing himself between the champions of Excess and Defect, does not in practice display but put into question his capacity for assuming the arbitrator’s role: for it is the ironic levelling of the aspiring mediator with the other combatants, rather than Guyon’s high intention, that proceeds to dominate the episode. But it is in the hero’s later encounters, especially his notoriously ambivalent adventures at the Cave of Mammon and the Bower of Bliss, that these problems receive their deepest exploration. For it is there that the “forward” and “froward” motives for virtue are themselves put on trial. Those two great scenes have in common the nature of a Catch-22. The Mammon episode begins as a critique of the “forward”, acquisitive model of virtue, the ethos of Praise-Desire. For Guyon relies on that ethos to summon up disdain for the offered treasure – as he puts it, “Regard of worldly mucke doth fowly blend, / And low abase the high heroicke spright, / That ioyes for crownes and kingdomes to contend” (II.vii.10) – but only to find that his own announced goals themselves fall within his adversary’s worldly purview. If he 5

Cf. Nelson, The Poetry of Edmund Spenser, 182.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene rejects gold for pursuit of kingdoms, he will be offered kingdoms (II.vii.10–11); if he rejects political climbing by ignoble, mercenary means, he will be offered advancement “for workes and merites iust” (II.vii.49); if he disdains the court at which advancement is offered (II.vii.50), he will be offered an object of heroic aspiration removed from political considerations (II.vii.54ff). The exchange has the effect of inducing Guyon progressively to retreat from the very motives for heroism he himself begins by declaring. But therein lies the trick: that finally the episode will be a critique not only of the “forward” but of the “froward” ethos, on which Guyon falls back in systematically shunning the moral ambivalence of heroic aspiration. He may not give in to Mammon’s temptations, but the process of never giving in is itself pursued to a reductio ad absurdum. For Mammon, in reply, so refines the nature of the “gold” he offers as to expose Guyon’s underlying premise: that all desire whatever is morally suspect, and every object suspect insofar as it is an object of desire. Trying to set himself apart from all morally dubious ends, Guyon cuts the ground from beneath his own feet, till left with nowhere to stand: presented at last with the objects of the inalienable human aspirations towards food and rest (II.vii.63), he is obliged by his own premises to push from beneath himself those two “pillours” of “food, and sleepe, which . . . vpbeare / . . . this fraile life of man” (II.vii.65), and promptly falls into a faint (II.vii.66). As for the Bower of Bliss, it constitutes a similar but in some respects opposite trap for the hero. Here the adequacy of the “froward” ethos of self-restraint is more obviously on trial, as Guyon’s self-control falters before “sights, that courage cold could reare” (II.xii.68). But with the Palmer always at his shoulder here to keep him in check, ultimately the Bower’s more dangerous incitement to Guyon is, not to let go of his quest in Verdant-like sensual selfabandon, but rather to carry it through: to carry it through, that is, on terms that will reveal in his very success something potentially as culpable as his failure would have been. That deeper incitement structures the whole episode, making what stands between Guyon and the goal of his quest a concentric series of the very kind of false barrier that the Bower everywhere interposes between desire and its object: flimsy and weakly guarded gates, transparent veils, and permitted crimes, whose real function is not to dissuade but to solicit the force that will breach them. With its elaborate and insistent pretence of denying entry, the whole island is a grand exercise in inciting the kind of impassioned violence with which the hero does in fact respond to it at every stage. If by the time he chains Acrasia and unleashes on her Bower “the tempest of his wrathfulnesse” (II.xii.83) his level of violence seems linked to his susceptibility to the place’s charms, and even suggests a kind of erotic possession by other means,6 then that I think is the trap into which the Bower

6

Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 173; Madelon S. Gohlke, “Embattled Allegory: Book II of The Faerie Queene”, English Literary Renaissance 8 (1978): 123–40, esp. 137.

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Self-Interpretation from the Ground Up has been concertedly luring him. Mortdant himself was drawn here not initially by lust, but “As wont ye knights . . . / . . . his puissant force to proue” (II.i.50); and Guyon, even in pursuing his quest, becomes Mortdant’s successor as much as his avenger. Whereas the Cave of Mammon corners him into disowning his own enabling heroic passions, the Bower draws him into expressing them in a form that implicates them in the disabling vice his violence was meant to remedy. In sum, he looks damned if he doesn’t, and damned if he does. So if Book Two presents all Guyon’s actions as morally ambivalent, still it does not construct that situation as a matter of personal failing, as if in similar circumstances another hero with a firmer grip on virtuous motives could have succeeded more convincingly. Rather it suggests that he really is between a rock and a hard place, in that the motives for virtue from which he has to choose may be indistinguishable from the vices they are meant to conquer. In those circumstances, “God guide thee, Guyon” (II.i.32). As Book Two kicks off, and Guyon and Redcross pay homage to one another’s nominal virtues, it looks briefly as though the first book’s lesson in faithfulness will be furthered straightforwardly by one in self-restraint – as though there will simply be two complementary guides, piety and moderation, to keep in check the potentially loose cannon of heroic aspiration.7 But it is precisely the weaknesses of that facile solution that the rest of the book explores. If Book One extols a Protestant as against a Catholic basis for moral action, Book Two looks to build on that ground by seeking in the Protestant camp an adequate practical definition of the faithful active life. It tests what might summarily be described as Cecilian Protestant Stoicism against Dudleian Protestant Militarism; and while, prudently, not trumpeting the inadequacy of either, in the way the first book explicitly demonizes Catholicism, it does grapple seriously with the difficulties of each, finding in them a Scylla and Charybdis between which it will be no mean task to steer.

“Such, as clamyd themselues Brutes rightfull haires” However morally ambivalent Guyon’s motives are in completing his quest, one might defend his actions by reference to the moral authority of the godly queen who assigns his quest. Failing, that is, to find a coherent basis for moral action in an autonomous ethical realm, one might appeal to the credentials of the political order, as a guarantor that duty, at least, will be a reliable moral guide – somewhat as, in Book One, duty supplied the place left vacant by a discredited ethical autonomy. But even in that regard Guyon’s situation is not so straightforward as his predecessor’s: for the “heauenly” basis (I.x.59) of his

7

Cf., e.g., F. M. Padelford, “The Virtue of Temperance in The Faerie Queene”, Studies in Philology 18 (1921): 334–46, esp. 336.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene queen’s mandate is not so directly revealed to him as it was to Redcross. Where Redcross in the House of Holiness is shown how his assigned quest is secured in a transcendent moral order, Guyon in the House of Temperance receives only a grounding in political history.8 The difference is indicative of a wider change in the poem’s approach to a crucial issue, cognate with the change in focus from the supernaturally anchored virtue of holiness to the downto-earth virtue of temperance. Where Book One solicits from its reader a leap of faith in the metaphysical legitimacy of the Elizabethan regime, Book Two proceeds more empirically, attempting to define true virtue, and the true monarch who is its patron, not through a putative revelation from above, but (to borrow the book’s own recurrent image) from the ground up; it asks whether we can justify, even in earthly terms, the leap of faith required to ascribe moral legitimacy to a claimant of our political duty. It does so, by putting the leap of faith that in Book One is required of the reader, inside the story world, where the moral grounds for making it can be explored. By thus creating for its characters self-interpretative conditions more nearly resembling those of Elizabeth’s actual subjects, Book Two allows a deeper examination of the grounds on which one might identify the Elizabethan regime as having God’s backing. Guyon’s first adventure repeats in miniature the pattern of his predecessor’s long moral truancy and eventual awakening to the need to make God and Gloriana the standards of ethical judgement. Guyon, like Redcross, begins as an uncritical champion of whatever apparently moral cause is presented to his attention, a failing promptly exploited, as before, by Archimago. But Guyon recovers quickly, balking at the unholiness of attacking his own saviour’s Redcross arms; and when Redcross in return regrets his near-intemperance, the fact that his “hastie hand so farre from reason strayd” as almost to do violence to Gloriana’s image on Guyon’s shield (II.i.28), a solidarity is established between them, grounded at once in reciprocal affirmation of one another’s virtues, and in shared allegiance to God and the queen. However, Guyon learns his lesson in loyalism without benefit of a top-down vision of how the Fairy Queen’s regime is anchored in God’s. In fact his sudden awakening to the reality of his situation can seem enigmatic. For the sight of the Redcross shield, which occasions his change of heart (II.i.27), is not unanticipated: it is despite knowing just who is charged with villainy, and what that knight’s renown is at Fairy court, that Guyon first determines to make trial of him (II.i.18–19). Only in retrospect, when Archimago flees guiltily on seeing his enemies united (II.i.30), does Guyon have tangible evidence that his last-moment about-face has brought him back in line with the truth. His intuitive recourse, against appearances, to religious and social piety, is in that sense

8

Cf. David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 154.

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Self-Interpretation from the Ground Up a leap of faith – and one ratified even after the fact not by any word from heaven, but solely by its practical moral utility in exposing a hitherto unrecognised enemy to the moral community’s solidarity. For Guyon, the basis of moral action is laid not in an assurance of his society’s divine election, but in the visible good brought about by mutual fidelity. Something similar characterises the lessons in political history taught to Guyon and Arthur in the House of Temperance. In Book One what was crucial was establishing how the earthly political ideal derives its mandate from above, as an authorised likeness of heaven. But from the more down-to-earth point of view of Book Two, what matters is the relation (simply assumed in Book One) between the ideal of Cleopolis and the realities of history and experience, shown in their stark ambivalence in the British chronicles. In such a context, the Fairy regime does not need explicitly to be justified by its ruler’s divine mandate – in particular, the Christian God need not figure in the account of its origins as a monarchy (II.x.70–76) – because in its perpetual peace and monumental durability, it so manifestly represents a good compared with the perennially divided and besieged human nation with which it is juxtaposed. Not that the correspondence between the Elizabethan and the Fairy regimes, on which the first book’s implicit political application depended, is abandoned: on the contrary, even the war-wracked British chronicle is no mere negation of the Fairy ideal, but portrays a realm which, though continually besieged from without and betrayed from within, at moments triumphs over its own predicament, to display fleeting glimpses of the ideal perpetually displayed in Fairyland. Where in Book One the virtuous political order mirrors the divine order above, and seems to come into being by divine fiat, in Book Two it is conceived of as having to be built up from below, from out of a pre-political chaos of faction and strife, and as having to be maintained in the face of relentless forces that would reduce it to chaos again. The Fairy ideal that British history is shown fitfully labouring to emulate functions, from that standpoint, as the virtually self-justifying goal of peaceful unity and continuity towards which any society aspires in striving to raise itself from an aboriginal morass of self-division. As was the case for Guyon in canto one, a moral foundation is laid here not in the certain knowledge of a particular society’s divine election, but in the manifest good arising from cohesion in a political community. Significantly, each tenuous success in achieving such cohesion is depicted as involving a leap of faith in the moral and religious foundation of the regime – as when the heroic king Donwallo is depicted as reuniting a realm “cut into sundry shaires/ By such, as claymd themselues Brutes rightfull haires” (II.x.37), not by establishing a better lineal claim than those of his “miscreate” rivals,9 but by winning the people’s faith in his “wisedome” and in the “sacred” 9

Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, trans. L. Thorpe (Harmondworth: Penguin, 1966), 88, describes him as one of the several heirs of the fragmented Britain, “The son of Cloten king of Cornwall”.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene authority of his “lawes” (II.x.37–39). The point is underscored by Arthur’s exemplary reading of the British records. For it seems an extraordinary response, prima facie, to such a deeply ambivalent national history, to be impressed by it as he is with a sense that our country is the source of “what euer good we haue” (II.x.69). But for Arthur at least, such optimism would seem not to be groundless. For as we are invited to recall by the history’s breaking off at the threshold of his own succession, just over the future horizon of the history he reads is the legendary glory of his own reign: the character who responds to the “Briton moniments” as if they were as propitious a tale as that of the Fairy kingdom is the very prince under whom the real may touch that ideal, so closing (if only temporarily) the gap between the two realms. A related leap of faith sustains his quest for Gloriana, marriage with whom might effect such a union of kingdoms in narrative terms. What Redcross has to be shown from on high before he grasps his duty to the Fairy Queen, that she is the linchpin of earthly moral order, Arthur can gather from her mere traces in the world: a dream-visitation (I.ix.13–15), her picture on a shield, a fellow-knight’s report (II.ix.2–7). For Arthur as for Guyon, a leap of faith in the moral basis of the social order bridges the distance between a present reality of factional strife and the robust, purposeful unity represented in Gloriana’s regime; only for Arthur the scale of the leap is more heroic, in that his nation as a whole must be brought along in it. Such is the context in which Elizabeth’s claim to be the rightful monarch around whose authority the English nation ought to cohere is, for the first time in the poem, also made a part of the story world, rather than simply being given, as from above, as a supra-narrative ‘fact’. It is of course not directly asserted even here that a leap of faith is required to believe in the legitimacy of Elizabeth’s claim to the throne. But the effect of reading the chronicle supplied as evidence for that claim is to suggest that such a leap of faith is eminently necessary: for with its long series of usurpations, contested claims, and outright failures of the royal bloodline, it virtually demands the question how any clear right to rule the nation, let alone Elizabeth’s specifically, could ever be derived from such an ambivalent history of seizing and clinging to power. The poet’s assertion that, through such a chronicle, “I would assay, / Thy name, O soueraine Queene, to blazon farre away” (II.x.3), itself comes to read like the call for a leap of faith, equivalent to the one Arthur makes on reading the same material. But that leap of faith now has a context, in society’s desire to make the ascent from a naturally fractious and inglorious condition to the peace and renown figured in the Fairy Queen’s regime: the leap that connects Elizabeth with Gloriana, England with Fairy land, has become a moral leap upwards, “from earth . . . / . . . to heauens hight” (II.x.2). The contrasting approaches of Books One and Two correspond to two sorts of argument typical of Renaissance socio-political thought more widely. E. M. W. Tillyard’s influential discussions of Elizabethan political theory greatly emphasised the approach found in Book One, whereby the political 160

Self-Interpretation from the Ground Up hierarchy is justified by divine institution and universal analogy; the reverse approach, whereby human authority is justified by appeal to the anarchic free-for-all from which it purports to liberate its subjects, he registered only as a corresponding fear, strong to the very extent that the religious embrace of hierarchy dominated thought.10 But in fact the fearful prospect of chaos should the nation fail to defer to the established authorities was a basis for argument not necessarily subsidiary to the line of reasoning Tillyard emphasised. Thus in Holinshed’s Chronicles, in the summary of English history up to the Norman conquest featured in the “Preface to the Reader”, the idea that political affairs are ordered by God is present, but the point driven home far more insistently is that dissension always gravely weakens a society and leaves it vulnerable to its enemies.11 James VI of Scotland, in “The Trew Law of Free Monarchies”, goes farther, arguing purely with regard to subjects’ self-interest that they should not subvert the authority even of a “wicked and tyrannous” ruler, despite his clearly failing to fulfil his proper moral role as God’s deputy: For a king cannot be imagined . . . so vnruly and tyrannous, but the common-wealth will be kept in better order . . . by him, then it can be by his way-taking . . . where by the contrary, no King being, nothing is vnlawfull to none . . .12

In the extreme case, notoriously represented in the sixteenth century by Machiavelli, the pragmatic moral argument (from the evils of disunity) for a strongly unified state does not just predominate over the top-down argument from divine institution, but assimilates it altogether, as merely a useful piece of rhetoric whose deployment even as an outright lie by an atheist governor is justified by the worthy end of social cohesion.13 King James in effect argues for preferring even a Lucifera to a state of anarchy; Machiavelli goes farther, recommending the moral utility of a Lucifera’s religious pretence. This may seem a long way from Spenser; and it is, at least in the obvious sense, a long way from the resolution of Book One. But in Book Two, King Donwallo’s saving institution of “sacred lawes, which some men say / Were vnto him reueald in vision” (II.x.39, my emphasis) strongly registers the possibility of a socially beneficial religious fraud – a possibility Spenser underscores by calling Donwallo the “Numa of great Britanie” (II.x.39), since it was the Roman

10 11 12 13

E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto and Windus, 1943), 7–15. Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 6 vols., ed. Vernon Snow (New York: AMS Press, 1965 [repr. of 1807–08 edn]), vol. 2, A3v–4r. “The Trew Law of Free Monarchies” (1598), in King James VI & I, Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 79. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, I.xi–xv; cf. Livy, trans. B. O. Foster (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1919), I.19.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene lawgiver Numa that Machiavelli, following Livy, made the examplar of such laudable deception. That is not to say that what we have in Book Two is a Machiavellian undermining of the first book’s idealism; rather, I think, a taking account of the first book’s vulnerability to accusations of Machiavellianism. For it is Book One, with its rhetorical tour de force in support of Elizabeth’s moral authority, that is most exposed to the charge of being written from truly Machiavellian motives, that is, with the aim of bestowing a religious aura on a merely secular authority so as to bolster its ability to command its subjects’ loyalty. Book One’s invitation to conclude that loyalty to the Elizabethan regime is the linchpin of the virtuous active life, thrilling as its execution may be, is mere rhetoric, an invitation to a leap of faith in what it so brilliantly displays. Book Two, in contrast, puts the favourable view of the regime that Book One solicits from the reader, inside the story world where it becomes a matter of interpretation for the principal characters; and it tentatively suggests, through Guyon’s and Arthur’s examples, that the worthy end of social cohesion might morally justify a leap of faith in the powers that be, and thereby in one’s own ethical agency as a dutiful subject. Where Book One’s moral advocacy of loyalism looks open to the charge of being finally no more than a grand exercise in self-justification, Book Two looks into the possibility of shoring up that seeming weakness, by examining whether a claim to moral authority on behalf of a regime of doubtful historical credentials might perhaps be self-justifying in a moral sense, in virtue of the social good to which that claim is conducive. Such an enquiry takes us beyond the first book’s question of how to tell the true from a false system of moral interpretation, to ask how a valid system might in the first place be established. Much as Guyon is seen in his various encounters struggling to find a coherent moral stance securely above the contest in which he engages with opponents, from which he can judge the issues and (if need be) implement his rulings by force, so in the political sphere the problem for any claimant to authority is to rise from a welter of such claims into a position of arbiter over all claims, whose force in subduing opposition will carry the authority of law – or in other words to derive, from a history of de facto monarchy, a monarchy de jure. And in each case, the conventional means for acquiring that position look shakier the more they are looked into: for Guyon the mandate of virtue, and for the monarch the mandate of history, turns out to be not so much a basis whereon rival claims can be adjudicated, as the very territory being fought over. However, by advancing coherence itself – “goodly order” (II.ix.33) – as a self-justifying political goal, the possibility arises of discovering moral legitimacy even in arbitrary dominion, and on that basis devolving similar “good order” (II.ix.25) to the ethical life of dutiful subjects. Such a morally self-interpretative act would in effect found both the state and the self as unified moral agents, from out of a primordial bellum intestinum of separately plausible but mutually competing claims. There is of course a large gap between pragmatic defence of loyalism for the 162

Self-Interpretation from the Ground Up sake of averting the evils of anarchy and invasion, and the former book’s ideal of loyalty to a “chosen” nation, the privileged vehicle of God’s purposes on earth. Such a rudimentary social ethic as emerges in Book Two might justify rallying to the nation’s defence when it is under attack (might suffice for one’s purposes when faced with an Armada), and it might be enough when at issue is the very existence of unified political authority and the rule of law (as seemed to Spenser the case in Ireland); but it cannot discriminate between the relative claims to righteousness of one state and another, nor within the state of one prospective regime and another. Nor is it a small consideration that such pragmatic arguments are capable of being used in defence of the most wicked tyranny: patently in Machiavelli’s case, but likewise for James VI, who by arguing a fortiori from the position that one ought not to disobey even a monarch as “vnruly and tyrannous” as can be imagined, reveals how much is actually at stake for the subject in the loyalty being called for. To put it in terms borrowed from Spenser’s description of the House of Temperance, one might well ask whether the socio-political edifice the individual moral agent is asked to uphold above all other apparent moral duties is genuinely the aimed-at “goodly frame” (II.xii.1), or whether on the contrary it might be an ungodly “Babell towre” (II.ix.21). Neither of those large reservations is fatal in itself to the political project of Book Two, since if one means to justify an ethical system from the ground up, one must after all start somewhere; but they do indicate how much work the poem has left to do, if it is successfully to sail past the danger of capitulating morally to injurious and immoral rule.

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Chapter Nine

Self-Interpretation and Self-Assertion in Books Three and Four

I

N THE FIRST and second books of The Faerie Queene, the relationship ibetween ethical striving and political authority is made clear: legitimate political authority, whether so defined by divine will or national interest, provides the space wherein valid individual ethical endeavour can occur; and that ethical endeavour, in turn, directly enacts the authority of the prince. Books Three and Four, in contrast, put such a straightforwardly beneficent transaction between polis and ethos in question, by suspending the narrative pattern whereby each hero’s quest is assigned by Gloriana, and putting in its place a more fraught relation between sovereign power and its subjects, which brings into view for the first time the prospect that their respective interests may not coincide, and hence the possible costs as well as benefits to the individual of interpreting oneself in dutiful terms.

Self-Assertion in the Legend of Chastity In urging Britomart to “submit” dutifully to her destined role in her nation’s history, Merlin does his best to seem morally as unanswerable and metaphysically as securely grounded as did Contemplation in bidding Redcross to render service to Gloriana (III.iii.24). But neither the collective end Britomart is enjoined to serve, nor the individual reward for doing so, comes off looking as compelling as in the former case. Whereas Redcross could be assured both of the apocalyptic victory of the chosen earthly city and of his own moral and spiritual perfection, Britomart can be promised both personally and nationally only an ambivalent and open-ended future, to include not only a fertile marriage but her husband’s premature death, and for their offspring not only a time of kingly rule but ages of oppressive foreign domination – and “yet the end is not” (III.iii.50). Like Arthur in the House of Alma, she would need a leap of faith to take any comfort in such a history, or to anchor her own sense of moral calling in its shifting sands. But here the advisability of such a leap of 164

Self-Interpretation & Self-Assertion in Books Three & Four faith looks newly doubtful, for at least two reasons. Firstly, with the future as well as the past now in view, the second book’s optimistic, architectural notion of the state, as something that can progressively be built up by the united efforts of succeeding generations, till it reaches “heauens hight” (II.x.2), starts to look decidedly shaky: the “sacred Peace” of a united nation (III.iii.49) may still be in prospect, but less in the form of the monumental stability of the Fairy realm, than as a brief and fragile flower, blooming intermittently in an often hostile environment, and forever subject to being blasted by the next storm that “th’heauens haue decreed” (III.iii.41). Secondly, where in Book Two the politically unified nation was treated as a body whose health belongs collectively to all its members, here the question arises which that metaphor had occluded – the question of how, in whose interests, and at whose expense, power is exercised within society (III.ii.2) – and Britomart, in particular, is given much reason to doubt whether her own interests are represented by the forces pressing for her submission, or whether instead putting herself into the service of the declared national interest would be merely to capitulate morally to a tyrannical and alien will. For while, in theory, to be told that the “Imperious Loue” that “tyrannizeth” in her heart (III.ii.23) serves a higher purpose should be reassuring, in practice it only musters before her, under the sweeping rubric of “his will” (III.iii.24), a daunting array of masculine forces – destiny, Arthegall, Merlin himself – as mysteriously motivated and potentially as tyrannical as love itself. Accordingly Britomart is left still looking for assurances, even after her quest has begun, of the desirability for her of reaching its goal (III.ii.8–17). In the meantime, moreover, an apparent alternative has appeared. Ostensibly Glauce’s scheme to “disguize” Britomart “in feigned armes” is merely instrumental, a “deuise” to enable her ward to pursue her desire for Arthegall (III.iii.52–53). But in practice it proves to be something more. For the stirring “ensample” she sets before Britomart of the female warrior Angela at once sinks, like Cupid’s arrow before it, “deepe into the mynd / Of the young Damzell”, kindling in her a second “great desire” alongside the first: not eros this time, but the fire of heroic emulation (III.iii.55–57). So from the start Britomart has two parallel motivations for being abroad in arms, and knighthood is for her much more than a costume, more even than a practical means of self-defence: it is an inspiring ethical discipline in its own right, which soon transforms her from a tender maid prone to “often steepe / Her daintie couch with teares” (III.ii.28) to a stern warrior whose “great courage would not let her weepe”, even privately (III.iv.11), and which correspondingly shapes her whole attitude to the world she encounters, as is felt most vividly in Marinell’s luckless case (III.iv.12–18). How that self-assertive, androgynous, martial ethic (III.iii.56) relates to the dutiful, feminine, marital ethos enjoined by Merlin (III.iii.24), is a running question as the story proceeds: whether one or the other is a false trail, like the errant ethos initially pursued by Redcross, or, if neither is a clear victor, whether they tend to undermine each other like the 165

Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene ethical systems Guyon awkwardly straddles, or rather are somehow potentially compatible or mutually reinforcing. On the face of it, Britomart’s selfinterpretative options, an ethic of heroic self-assertion versus dutiful submission to the national interest and divine will, resemble those that characterise the two phases of the Redcross knight’s career. But their relative claims on her look much less certain than in his case, for several reasons. On the one hand, whereas for Redcross the armour representing the virtuous identity he aims to acquire in the course of his quest is conferred at Gloriana’s godly court, and hence can seem only by a gross misreading to be a basis for independent heroic virtue rather than for the dutiful ethic he eventually adopts, for Britomart the equivalent armour of chastity is a legacy of the self-sufficient heroic figure Angela, and one that our heroine assumes very much on her own authority (III.iii.57–60). And where in the Legend of Holiness the climactic adventure marking the hero’s attainment of his virtuous identity corresponds to the completion of his assigned quest, the climactic episode of the Legend of Chastity does no such thing, but rather constitutes the fullest realisation of Britomart’s independent chivalric identity in the mould of Angela. Hence even though it is possible to see in Britomart’s freelance adventures throughout Book Three a self-righteous, belligerent strain comparable to that which marked the early phase of the Redcross knight’s career,1 one cannot in the same way oppose that spirit to the one wherein she takes on the final adventure of her book, which in fact constitutes the climactic episode in her freelance career and in the self-interpretative audacity that drives it. On the other hand, as I have indicated, the rhetoric of metaphysical certainty that produced the neat dichotomies and hierarchical solution of Book One has been progressively called in question in subsequent books, to the point where Britomart encounters it principally as a suspect basis of argument on Merlin’s part. Nor is it only in Merlin’s rendition that it looks questionable, but in Book Three much more widely. In Book One, the story world was found to be constructed on broadly Christian-Platonic lines, as a graded hierarchy of being emanating from and tending back to God (I.x.59); and the narrative correspondingly took on a cyclical shape, proceeding down to a crisis before returning up by virtue of a providential rescue in canto eight towards a happy conclusion. Gloriana’s court, as one would expect in such a cosmos, functioned not only as itself an image pointing to a higher reality, but ipso facto as the subordinate source of a similar narrative pattern of emanation and return, a still point of glory in which her knights’ cyclical quests are ethically anchored.2 In Book Two, though the metaphysical basis of the regime was 1 2

See, e.g., Parker, The Allegory of The Faerie Queene, 163, and Richard Lanham, “The Literal Britomart”, Modern Language Quarterly 28 (1967), 442–45 and passim. Cf. Lewis, Spenser’s Images of Life, 79–82; Alastair Fowler, “Emanations of Glory: Neoplatonic order in Spenser’s Faerie Queen”, in A Theatre for Spenserians, ed. Judith M. Kennedy and James A. Reither (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), 68–72 and passim; and Jon

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Self-Interpretation & Self-Assertion in Books Three & Four depicted more as an article of faith than of experience, the same narrative pattern was maintained, thus seeming to give that faith a plausible basis in narrative reality. Book Three, in contrast, disrupts the expected structure in almost every respect. Most strikingly, in canto eight, instead of a decisive reversal of fortunes enfolding the story in a single circular movement we encounter only a simulacrum of such an event. Proteus’s supposed providential rescue of Florimell, proving in practice to be more in the nature of a capture, only confirms the very different pattern operating in her story: one of near disaster followed by provisional escape tending immediately towards new disaster, which leads events not up to a resolution but only ever headlong over a repetitious and morally ambiguous terrain. The resultant picture of providence – if indeed we can trust that there is something providential operating here – is accordingly highly ambivalent, particularly if we note that Florimell’s string of misadventures is not only constantly spun out by such indecisive divine intervention, but likewise apparently initiated by heavenly fiat, since it was “the vnknowen purpose of eternall fate” that Proteus’s prophecy be misconstrued and Marinell’s and Florimell’s woes begun (III.iv.28). Hence the moral ambivalence she sees in all her would-be rescuers can appear also, or even primarily, to belong to the “high God” who, like all those who act ostensibly to give her “succour” (III.viii.29), seems in practice as much persecutor as deliverer. Meanwhile a comparable change has come over Fairy court, such that the heroic endeavour that emanates from it or aspires to reach it also looks less securely grounded than previously in a clear ethical structure. On the one hand, Gloriana’s courtiers now turn out to include scoundrels like Paridell, persecutors rather than protectors of chastity; accordingly, the ostensibly cheering news that the whole pack of them, having heard of Florimell’s defencelessness, “after her are gone” (III.viii.46), verges here on sounding positively sinister. On the other hand Prince Arthur himself, the eighth-canto rescuer of prior books, is made unavailable for that role here precisely by becoming caught up in the same forest of moral ambivalence as entangles all the book’s other would-be rescuers, a state brought about in him by his losing sight of the former lodestar of his ethical endeavour, his pursuit of Gloriana’s love. Try as he might, with his invective against Night, to re-establish the clear metaphysical bearings and moral polarities of earlier books (III.iv.55–60), it looks here like a case of locking the stable door after the horse has bolted. It has of course been suggested that his error in pursuing Florimell in Gloriana’s place might itself be excused with reference to a metaphysical scheme, if Quitslund, Spenser’s Supreme Fiction: Platonic Natural Philosophy and The Faerie Queene (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), passim. For the philosophical background, see, e.g., Proclus, for whom in “greater circuits and lesser”, “all things proceed in a circuit, from their causes to their causes again” – Elements of Theology, trans. E. R. Dodds, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 37; cf. 30–31.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene Florimell is construed as a Platonic likeness of Gloriana, a rung in love’s ladder but one step removed from his proper goal;3 but such a reading assumes knowledge of what Florimell’s whole story calls in question, namely whether there is a real or only a rhetorical difference between the kinds of desire her various pursuers feel for her. It is not only the morality of Arthur’s desire for Florimell but the whole metaphysically anchored scheme on which the distinction between kinds of love depends, that Book Three calls into question – not only the object of his quest the Prince loses sight of, but the order of the universe. The effect produced in the narrative foreground by Florimell’s story extends also into the third book’s background picture of human history at large, where again providence expresses itself in terms not of a clear telos which the virtuous are assured of attaining, but only of the perpetuation of a bloodline, whose fortunes seem interminably to oscillate between the brink of extermination and the moments of transient glory achieved in the likes of Troy, Rome, and “Troynouant” (III.ix.44–45). So far as one can see, the sons of Troy, like Florimell, are to be driven ever onwards, over land and sea, by the “fatall course” (III.ix.49) of an equivocal destiny as intent on continually renewing their trials as on sparing them from extinction. Such is the larger context in which the results of Britomart’s love for Artegall, even if it is “Led with eternall prouidence” (III.iii.24), refuse to appear so wholly desirable or so morally compelling as Merlin makes out. The third book’s retreat from the clear metaphysical underpinnings seen in Book One, and the very different nature of the interpretative milieu in which Britomart pursues her quest, are expressed in concentrated form in the third book’s allegorical core, the Garden of Adonis. Superficially, the Garden gives the impression – whatever it may mean in its difficult details – of broadly participating in a Neoplatonic metaphysical system based on cyclical patterns of emanation and return.4 But in those details it notoriously resists a clear metaphysical interpretation. We are told of babes, plants, forms, lives, deaths; but those things resiliently refuse to be sorted into a signifying scene on the one hand and something signified on the other, much as in Book Three more widely, key images – the wounds of Timias and Marinell, Belphoebe’s rose, the pursuit of Florimell – both demand and defy translation, leaving us, like the characters, entangled in a world of insistent materiality which nonetheless insists on its pregnancy with meaning, a world irreducibly “double” (III.iv.28). Far from seeming merely equivocal or confused, the Garden’s description,

3 4

See A. Fowler, “Emanations of Glory”, 73, and Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, 382–83. Advocates of such a reading include Nelson, The Poetry of Edmund Spenser, 210, Roche, The Kindly Flame, 125, Hankins, Source and Meaning in Spenser’s Allegory, 234ff, and Quitslund, Spenser’s Supreme Fiction, 93–95.

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Self-Interpretation & Self-Assertion in Books Three & Four though “a tissue of paradoxes”,5 continually gives the impression that another rereading from any point x may yet produce an interpretation consistent with x. That effect of interpretability, which never resolves itself into a satisfactory interpretation, is what makes the scene a locus of illimitable commentary.6 The experience of reading it is of forming a series of tentative metaphysical propositions at those various points in the text, which one then tries to expand like fields of force in order to make sense of surrounding passages, a process which continually throws up new uncertainties in the mind: not only, for example, ‘Do I know that form is masculine and matter feminine, and might I make more consistent sense of all this if I tried it the other way around?’, but even, ‘Do I know that the “fleshly weedes” (III.vi.32) in which a living thing is clothed are its material part, or since they give visible shape to a previously invisible entity, might they conceivably be regarded as its form? And do I then know at all how to apply those basic philosophical terms, “form” and “matter”?’ The effect, that is, of really working at the passage is interminably to encounter new doubts not only as to what one knows about it, but as to what one really knows about the metaphysical questions it purports to answer, even (or especially) certain quite consequential ones, like, ‘Can I tell what actually distinguishes life from death? Or truth from consolatory fiction?’7 The Garden is a forcing bed of philosophical thought.8 What it generates is not a stable structure of ideas that can then be assumed to underlie the text as something logically and creatively prior to it, but a series of ephemeral blooms of thought, fragile notions that grow for a certain time before exhausting their soil or meeting insuperable opposition, then are duly scythed and their components taken up in a different form by the next wave of growth. We glimpse here, in contrast to the vision of Book One, a possibility radically non-Platonic: a world in which the phenomena come first, and are not only themselves all subject to time and change, but are the ground from which even metaphysical structures are sprouted, as fading forms thrown up then mulched by the wheel of time.9 And not only metaphysical structures, but (if we expand our field of vision again to the poem more widely) the moral and political forms too that 5 6

7 8

9

Quitslund, Spenser’s Supreme Fiction, 93. It has been widely noted how ambiguous the Garden is and how much commentary it elicits. See esp. Harry Berger’s speaking of the Garden’s creating, through its indecipherability, “the effect of allegory” – “Actaeon at the Hinder Gate: The Stag Party in Spenser’s Gardens of Adonis”, in Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. Valeria Finucci and Regina Schwartz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 102. Cf. Quitslund, Spenser’s Supreme Fiction, 78–79, on the use of the macrocosm as a mirror for the microcosm, to enable a process of moral reflection. For the associations of the Garden of Adonis with an ephemeral kind of philosophising based in the instability of the written word, see Plato, “Phaedrus” 276b, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). Cf. Sean Kane, Spenser’s Moral Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 84:

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene cling like ivy to such metaphysical trunks, whether it be an ethical discipline based in erotic desire, or the fragile political order of a Troy or a Troynovant. It is true, of course, that in some places the third book interprets Britomart’s love, and virtuous love in general, in precisely the Platonic metaphysical terms (see esp. III.iii.1–3) that I have described it as putting in doubt. Moreover, as Carol Kaske observes, such an interpretation does seem to have at least the potential to clarify some of the more problematic aspects of what Britomart feels. For example, when she fashions Arthegall “in her mind, / And in her feigning fancie did pourtray / Him such, as fittest she for loue could find” (III.iv.5), her idealisation could be rescued from charges of naïveté and self-absorption, and given a moral force, by the Neoplatonic doctrines “that what is loved is the idea of the beloved . . . an idea which . . . also exists in the mind of God”, and “that a lover teaches the beloved to live up to this ideal image”.10 But the role Platonism assumes in such a reading, as something which potentially “answers the charge” that the heroine acts merely from more fallible and all-too-human psychological motives,11 highlights the salient point that metaphysics may be no more at this point than a cobbled-together means of rationalising ambivalent experience. Such a Platonic reading may well be helpful in making sense of the action as the unfolding of a benign destiny contriving to effect the happiness and moral fulfilment of its protagonists; but what remains persistently unclear is that Britomart’s fate is so benign. In relation to the brief flowering of her career as a moral agent in her own right, her encroaching destiny seems not so much to gather her upwards to a higher purpose as ultimately to mow her down like Time’s scythe, ending her existence as an ethical character at the moment of her exit from the poem (V.vii.42–45). Not that Britomart’s career as a ‘self-made man’ is morally any less ambiguous than the destiny that finally claims her. From her remorseless felling of Marinell to her threatening of Amoret with pretended lust, she is frequently a morally dubious force in the story. But her whole world is a scene of such morally ambiguous action, which elicits from every would-be virtuous character – whether Arthur, Timias, Belphoebe, Marinell, or even Satyrane or Paridell – an attempt, however unconvincing, to take control of the ethical terms on which they mean to act. In such a forcing bed of self-interpretation, Britomart’s extraordinary moral self-assertion seems less an expression of, or

10

11

“With its revolving and dissolving motion, the legend is haunted by the fear that forms may not be eternal, but are merely casual properties of some ‘huge eternall Chaos’ ”. Carol V. Kaske, “Neoplatonism in Spenser Once More”, Religion and Literature 32 (2000),166, citing Ficino’s Commentary on the Symposium, VI.xi. Cf. Quitslund’s suggestion, in Spenser’s Supreme Fiction, 260 (also citing Ficino), that in Britomart we see enacted the Platonic notion that the lover learns to behold in the beloved, as in a mirror, his or her own ideal self as an object of moral aspiration. Kaske, “Neoplatonism in Spenser Once More”, 166.

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Self-Interpretation & Self-Assertion in Books Three & Four wilful deviation from, some scheme clearly laid out for her, than a notably vigorous growth within a garden or forest of ethical possibilities – one capable of being overwhelmed only by the still more morally assertive force of her destiny. Correspondingly, the eros that both fires her will and closes in on her against her will seems less the elevating Platonic force than the eminently equivocal power which both motivates and hounds Florimell, and which for character after character imponderably blurs the distinction between rescue and capture. What Britomart’s moral self-assertion at bottom depends on is a seizing for herself of the interpretative initiative that Merlin arrogates to destiny and to himself as its spokesman. The key to her doing so is laying hold of an alternative view of history, which highlights the arbitrary bias of Merlin’s version by focusing on the English nation rather than the British, and a confirmed virgin rather than a willing wife, as sources of inspiration to heroism. Indeed one could hardly find a deeper challenge to Merlin’s authorised version of history than the eponymous original of the English (III.iii.56), whose descendants are destined to dominate those of the Trojan Brutus in the future history of the land, and whose name will vie with his in its very landscape. And Britomart, in choosing to emulate this original subverter of the national destiny declared to her, begins at once to imitate on a smaller scale the kind of subversion that makes Angela’s “ensample” (III.iii.55) so dangerous; for in pressing back into service the armour that her father had hung up “for endlesse moniments / Of his successe and gladfull victory” over the Angles (III.iii.59), she turns a sign of Angela’s apparent defeat into a proof of her ongoing influence, and thus suggests how precarious and reversible all such “endlesse moniments” are, be they as localised as one warrior-maiden’s suit of arms, or as all-encompassing as Brutus’s supposedly eternal rights of conquest in the land. Britomart’s seizing of the interpretative initiative, by which she lays claim in her own right to chivalric moral agency, involves her in a notable readiness to be free with the facts. It is not only that she allows others to assume that a knight in shining armour must be male, but that when that assumption proves wrong she is ready to replace it with a false account of a martial upbringing (III.ii.6) and of her motives for being abroad (III.ii.7–8) which make her seem a more independent-minded, Angela-like figure than her true history would suggest (esp. III.iii.53). Yet the effect is not to make her seem a Braggadocio; for not only in words but in deeds she carries off with emphatic success the impression she aims to create as an Amazonian “mayd Martiall” (III.iii.53). Hence her accounts of her character and aims, however false as history, regularly acquire a certain truth en route. And in that process of verifying Britomart’s claims for herself, the narrator is notably complicit, so avidly seconding her self-interpretation as a “martiall Mayd” (III.iv.18), and so designedly withholding the information that would cast doubt on it, that the more homely truth about her upbringing comes as a narrative surprise when it appears, and afterwards is easily lost sight of again. Likewise story events 171

Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene themselves are organised to collude in lending truth in retrospect to Britomart’s false claims – to the point that one of her lies to Redcross, that her quest is of vengeance rather than love (III.ii.8,16), proves prophetic of the literal combat in which she will meet her destined husband (IV.vi.26). Such complaisance in the protagonist’s self-interpretation is reminiscent of Book One, where the story and its narrating voice continually reflect the basis on which the hero interprets himself, whether erroneous or valid. But the effect here is morally much less clear; for there is no longer an overarching metaphysical scheme to divide her story or the interpretation she places on it into wrongly and rightly directed phases. When Britomart finally appoints herself, in a crowning act of self-interpretative boldness, at once as a more competent agent for performing her virtue’s defining quest than the hero assigned by Gloriana, and to the role of providential rescuer played by Arthur in previous books (III.xi.14), she steps into a breach to which the story determinedly calls attention, not only by Scudamour’s evident need of such relief, but more widely by the poem’s retreat from the decisive providentialism of the Legend of Holiness to a kind so wavering and uncertain that even Proteus can briefly dress himself in its mantle. The precariousness of Britomart’s achievement at the end of her book is strikingly underlined by its existing in two different versions in the two editions of The Faerie Queene. In the 1590 text, her heroic self-image is ratified by the fellow characters she sets out to relieve as emphatically as is the case for both Redcross and Arthur in Book One; in the 1596 text, exactly the same actions lead to exactly the opposite reputation. Even the specific positive interpretations made of her by her deeds’ beneficiaries in Book Three are exposed in 1596 to biting retrospective irony: Scudamour, who had asked rhetorically “what couldst thou more, / If she were thine” (III.xi.19), soon comes to suspect that Britomart has indeed made Amoret her own; and Amoret, who had voiced her gratitude with the question, “what worthy meed / Can wretched Lady, quit from wofull state, / Yield you in liew of this your gratious deed?” (III.xii.39), begins to fear that there is indeed something she may be expected to yield to her rescuer in reward for her liberation. So much the more remarkable then is how in the 1590 poem those ironies are not merely deferred but denied – how in that first and soon to be supplanted version of the story, which leads directly to the lovers’ reunion, trusting interpretations of Britomart’s character have no more narrative room in which to be tempered by doubtful experience than does the innocence with which, in Book One, Una offers to Arthur her “simple selfe” as reward for rescuing her knight (I.viii.27). In the 1596 poem, the impression given by the third book’s closing stanzas is of a run of good luck suddenly failing, leaving the protagonist isolated and exposed, without political or religious underpinnings to fall back on. Or more than that, it can seem that she herself has unwittingly swept those underpinnings iconoclastically from beneath her – that what she has exposed as illusory in Busyrane’s house is not merely a corrupt dogma of love standing between 172

Self-Interpretation & Self-Assertion in Books Three & Four her and the fulfilment of her quest,12 but the very dogma of love that gave that quest its structure. For when, on returning to where she left Scudamour and Glauce, the narratives props of her heroic enterprise, “Neither of them she found where she them lore”, it is much as if they, and it, have been caught up in the general vanishing of mirages. From that viewpoint, “Th’Enchaunter selfe, which all that fraud did frame, / To haue efforst the loue of that faire lasse”, looks less like Merlin’s demonic parody than his identical twin (III.xii.43– 44:1596). In 1590, in contrast, the impression we are left with at the close is that eros can after all be decisively sorted into bad and good kinds, that fortune does indeed favour the bold, and that though the heroine’s own desires remain for the moment unfulfilled, her prospects are good if she keeps to her course of attaining what “fate n’ould let her yet possesse” (III.xii.46:1590). What the 1590 poem’s ending tenuously achieves, in fact, is a sense that Britomart’s hard self-interpretative options, the ways that take inspiration respectively from Troynovant’s “royall virgin” and from the “Saxon Virgin” Angela (III.iii.49 and 55), may by some means ultimately be compatible, in the working out of a mysterious providence whose “subtile sophismes” and “double senses” are beyond her comprehension (III.iv.28). In other words, even as the conventional rhetoric of anchoring moral and political endeavour in supposed metaphysical certainties comes under fire, the hope is held out of a hidden God who smiles on self-interpretative audacity, and whose plan for the virtuous is broad enough to encompass interpretative strands as seemingly incompatible as those that represent two different peoples, the British and the English, as his chosen nation. In a brilliant stroke of flattery, Spenser boldly proposes Elizabeth as the node where those strands converge, both by her common presence in the superficially opposed images of the two heroic virgins set before Britomart for emulation, and by a variation on the received Tudor myth of a “vnion” of royal houses “different afore” (III.iii.49). Accordingly, in the 1590 text of Book Three, the bold fashioning of one’s own moral destiny, whether as an individual or a nation, seems a tantalisingly real possibility: the former, in the person of Britomart; the latter, in the use of her story audaciously to trump cynicism regarding the fictitiousness of the Tudor regime’s received foundation myth, by remaking and paradoxically reinvigorating that myth on a patently fictional basis.13 That apparent solution will itself have only an

12 13

Lewis, The Allegory of Love, 341–44. The extreme doubtfulness of the legendary history of early Britain to which the myth appealed, and in particular of the key stories of Brutus and Arthur, was much noted amongst Elizabethan historians (see, e.g., “Preface to the Reader”, in Holinshed’s Chronicles, Vol. 2, A3v), and is frankly acknowledged by Spenser himself in one manuscript of A View of the Present State of Ireland, where he declares it “as impossible to prove that there euer was anie suche Brutus of Albanye” as to corroborate the equivalent French claims to Trojan ancestry, or Irish claims to descent from “Gathelus of Spaine” (see View, 197).

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene ephemeral flowering; for the viability of Britomart’s example will again come into question, and more harshly than ever, with the publication of the second edition in 1596. But in the interim, as the poem’s ploughman unyokes his weary horses for the night, it is a precarious and politic moral optimism that is left holding the field.

Questionable Assertions in the Legend of Friendship Whose story is the Legend of Friendship? The title which purports to answer that question, “The Legend of Cambel and Telamond”, looks (in a way that will turn out to be curiously characteristic of Book Four) like either an arbitrary self-interpretative expedient for seeming to give allegorical order to a narrative ragbag, or a calculated distraction from a more plausible answer that reading the story might suggest.14 But if the latter, what would the more plausible answer be? Something to do with Britomart no doubt, since she, like the heroes of previous books, is the character who figures most extensively in the narrative: but Britomart not self-sufficient, as in the Legend of Chastity, but in relation to possible friends, Arthegall and Amoret.15 Here, though, we begin to sense the problem. For which would be the more appropriate title, ‘The Legend of Britomart and Arthegall’, or ‘of Britomart and Amoret?’ And what difference would it make to our experience of reading if one or the other of those self-interpretative labels came already affixed to the book? The either/or nature of the choice, which the story bears out by conspicuously refusing to let Britomart have both companions at once, is indicative of the new moral climate in Book Four.16 For a definite answer either way would in effect prejudge which of Britomart’s two possible paradigms for ethical action (as dutiful wife or self-assertive knight) will win out, whereas what the poem seems to be interested in here is precisely the scene of conflict out of which an answer might finally emerge. Gone is the hopeful sense (or wishful thinking) of Book Three, that the two might in some mysterious manner be compatible: the self-interpretative threads before kept tenuously intertwined are now inexorably being pulled apart. ‘The Legend of Britomart and Arthegall’ is the answer that would make more obvious sense in relation to the poem’s larger design – the answer we might feel called on to give if we saw it as our task to tidy up The Faerie Queene’s rough patches, like co-authors of an extended letter to Raleigh. Book Four would then be seen to function chiefly as a kind of neutral meeting 14 15 16

Cf. Hough, A Preface to The Faerie Queene, 180. See, e.g., Parker, The Allegory of The Faerie Queene, 163, and Williams, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 122. Cf. Dorothy Stephens, “Into Other Arms: Amoret’s Evasion”, Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994), 206.

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Self-Interpretation & Self-Assertion in Books Three & Four ground on which for the heroes of Book Three and Five to be betrothed; the three books together would assume an overall shape enacting the providential design announced by Merlin; and Britomart’s unprecedented retention of a central role in the story after the end of her own book could be explained by the fact that her ongoing quest is the announced narrative vehicle of that larger design. In practice, though, that narrative strand gets scarcely a look-in till the book is well underway, and meanwhile all the running is made by its rival, the story of Britomart and Amoret, a plot nothing in the earlier or larger poem enables us to foresee. Moreover, even when Britomart and Arthegall do finally, briefly meet and pass from enmity to accord, their new relationship seems hastily patched together in comparison with the established companionship of the two women, and quick too in giving way to a one-sided parting which immediately leaves Britomart thinking again of “faire Amoret, / Her second care” (III.vi.46). Second in importance or only in time? We are not told. But the last we see of Britomart in Book Four, it is Amoret’s absence rather than Arthegall’s that is on her mind: “For I thereby my former loue haue lost” (IV.ix.38). The moment gives resonance to a surprising doctrine the narrator has foisted on us just a few stanzas earlier, out of keeping with any larger philosophy the poem might be said to express, according to which the “zeale of friends” not only surpasses the “raging fire of loue”, but “doth tame” and “suppresse” it as an inferior good (IV.ix.1–2). Should we then say that the Legend of Friendship is after all ‘The Legend of Britomart and Amoret’? That is tempting; but what matters is to see where the temptation comes from, and what difference it makes that the book does not authorise it by giving itself that name. It is true that there are fleeting suggestions in the book’s construction that Amoret might be a central character: for as the subject of a rescue by Arthur in canto eight, and a presence in the allegorical set-piece of canto ten, she possesses in a certain attenuated fashion a couple of the credentials that earlier books taught us to expect of a hero.17 But to seize on those would have the feeling of clutching at straws, not much more or less substantial than any grounds that could be given in defence of the book’s actual title, or any other we might care to name. The thinness of such grounds only draws attention to how faint the echoes of the former narrative structure have now become, how much more exploded and ruinous is the universe of Book Four even than that of Book Three. If Britomart and Amoret have a claim to be the protagonists of this legend, that claim amounts for the most part to what they make of it for themselves. In fact, it is not only that the book lacks an adequate supporting structure for any moral interpretation its potential protagonists might make of themselves, but that such self-interpretation as they do attempt is threatened with being actively disorganised by the intrusion of rival readings before it can fully 17

Roche, The Kindly Flame, 202.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene take shape even in their own minds. Thus while we do begin with a picture of Britomart of Amoret, travelling together “in louely wise, that could deserue / No spot of blame”, the emphasis falls not on construing them as an exemplum of honourable friendship, but almost the opposite, namely on calling attention to something of which as yet we have been given no reason to suspect, that Britomart’s keeping company with “so faire a pray” will be widely construed as dishonourable (IV.i.4). Moreover, it is the curiosity thereby provoked, rather than the ostensible theme of virtuous friendship, that the poem goes on to indulge – not because it will serve any moral purpose, but because it “should . . . be a pleasant tale, to tell” (IV.i.5). And what that “pleasant tale” at once reveals is that it is not just the vaguely indicated scandal mongers (IV.i.4) but Amoret herself who thinks her honour to be in doubt in travelling with Britomart (IV.i.5). Only then is an explanation given, by way of a reminder that Amoret’s rescuer is disguised: “His will she feard; for him she surely thought / To be a man, such as indeed he seemed” (IV.i.8). But rather than resolving matters the answer is put in terms that make a scandalous reading of the pair still more understandable. For Amoret’s apprehensions about her companion turn out to proceed not of a mere innocent mistake, but on the one hand from the questionable lengths to which Britomart takes her “fained sex”, making “purpos . . . Of loue, and . . . lustfulnesse” (IV.i.7) towards her rescued “pray”, and on the other hand from Amoret’s own morally questionable attitude towards the one who has delivered her, “For which no seruice she too much esteemed”, though “dread of shame, and doubt of fowle dishonor / Made her not yeeld so much, as due she deemed” (IV.i.8). Such an account, particularly of Amoret (because there are no means of dismissing her attitude as mere pretence), plays right into a hostile view of the chivalric romance love ethos which the book’s proem has attributed to censorious slanderers of the poem (IV.Pr.1). For the kind of love that ethos seems to recommend to Amoret, as the reward owed to her rescuer, manifestly does not tend to honour as the proem defensively claims love does (IV.Pr.2–3), but to a sexual yielding that would destroy her honour as another man’s wife; worse, that ethos gives the temptation to yield to such love a certain pseudo-moral countenance, such that any desire Amoret may feel to give herself to her deliverer can be regarded (as she seems to do) as a laudable rendering of something owed, and so set in the moral balance against her chastity, as if it were not quite clear which has the higher claim on her.18 Such a start to the new instalment of The Faerie Queene hardly puts Spenser in a direct way to fending off critics scandalised by tales of love, let alone to advancing more specifically the barely glimpsed notion that the pair might exemplify virtuous friendship.

18

Cf. Stephens, “Into Other Arms”, 199: “Amoret acts in dutiful accordance with cultural expectations pressing upon her from two sides: she should be resolutely self-contained; she should be pliantly grateful.”

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Self-Interpretation & Self-Assertion in Books Three & Four As the story proceeds, out of Britomart’s and Amoret’s morally and erotically ambiguous companionship emerge, in effect simultaneously, two contrary interpretations between which readers are poised: one virtuous, and the other scandalous, and each in its own way apparently reductive of the psychological complexity of the relationship. The former interpretation is Britomart’s own creation, and dominates the narrative foreground while she and Amoret remain there. In what amounts to the masterstroke in her bold self-interpretative career after Angela’s androgynous example, she wins the consent of “all” (IV.i.12–14) to her claiming at once the rights of a noble knight and of a beautiful lady; and in so doing she also, by revealing her sex, clears up Amoret’s ‘moral’ dilemma, yet without relinquishing her claim to “her loue” (IV.i.10), and thereby opens the way for a “More franke affection” between them thereafter (IV.i.15). The latter interpretation is an undercurrent in the same scene, which bursts to the surface as soon as our perspective shifts away from Britomart and Amoret to where they are spoken of in their absence. The poem does not indicate (though some critics have been tempted to suppose otherwise19) that the night following Britomart’s self-interpretative pièce de résistance marks the start of a sexual relationship between the two women: what it does assert is that once Amoret knows Britomart to be a woman she willingly shares her bed (as Elizabethans of the same sex very ordinarily did, with no automatic sexual connotations), and that they spend the night telling each other their sad stories and pitying one another’s hardships in love (IV.i.15–16). But it loads that assertion with such a cargo of double entendres that it can hardly be accident if one possible impression is of the two spending their time in bed making known their loves “twixt themselues alone”, “with passion great” and much moaning.20 And lest we think we are simply over-reading, the carnal suspicions into which the passage lures us prove very much to the point, in that the scandalous interpretation of what Britomart and Amoret have got up to in bed is made the next thread by which to lead the story forward. For no sooner have they relinquished their hold on the narrative foreground than into it step personifications of mischief and falsehood, who are described as thriving on just the kind of “light” double meanings Spenser has been tempting his readers to pick up (IV.i.28), and who promptly sow similar suggestive readings amongst other characters, especially where it can do most hurt, with Amoret’s husband Scudamour. True, Ate and Duessa work on Scudamour’s jealousy not with suggestions of lesbianism but in terms exploiting the confusion caused by Britomart’s masculine disguise: “I saw him haue your Amoret at will, / I saw him kisse, I saw him her embrace, / I saw him sleepe with her all night his fill” (IV.i.49). But it is just that confusion 19

20

See, e.g., Paglia, Sexual Personae, 182, and Hamilton, ed., The Faerie Queene, 2nd edn, IV.i.16n, who dispenses with Paglia’s qualifications and refers to “the homoerotic relationship between Britomart and Amoret”. Cf. Stephens, “Into Other Arms”, 202.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene that Britomart herself exploited in laying claim to Amoret’s love, and the scene in which she successfully did so was to that extent framed in terms encouraging precisely the thought that Britomart has assumed the role of a man in Amoret’s love life (IV.i.10–16). Moreover, Ate’s appeal to her first-hand witness of the scandalous events is not borne out by the story as we have read it, but corresponds only to what we readers have been tempted to see, to the extent that we have read with Ate’s eye for risqué double meanings. Thus the poem plays a choice trick on the kind of easily scandalised reader depicted in the proem, underhandedly identifying his interpretation with that of a fury whose only achievement in the world is to confound moral consensus by wilfully construing everything in the most damaging sense. Indeed it explores at length what such damage comes to, constructing the whole story world as a scene of discord and confusion, where nearly everyone reaches at the drop of a hat for the destructive expedient of taking everything in the worst sense, and where what everyone meanwhile fails to remark is the possibility that what the two maligned women may have become, amid a sea of false-hearted unions going under friendship’s name, is just the exemplary instance of virtuous friendship that the book is in quest of. By painting a story world where slanderous interpretation spreads like wildfire and leads everywhere to enmity and chaos, whereas the possibility of a friendly and edifying reading passes all but unmarked, Spenser creates a vivid fictional equivalent of the problem with which the 1596 instalment of his poem represents itself as being beset, while leaving mired in misinterpretation, amongst the likes of Blandamour and Paridell, the “Stoicke censours” to whom, he says, “I do not sing at all” (IV.Pr.3–4). The effect may be contrasted with what happened in Book Three. There, Britomart’s heroic self-interpretation as an Angeline figure of androgynous amplitude was seconded wherever she went (“Faire Lady she him seemd, like Lady drest, / But fairest knight aliue, when armed was her brest” [III.ii.4]), until it became a general chorus (“euery one her likte, and euery one her loued” [III.ix.24]). Not even her felling of Marinell had the power to reflect badly on her, for though his mother curses her, . . . none of all those curses ouertooke The warlike Maid, th’ensample of that might, But fairely well she thriu’d, and well did brooke Her noble deeds, ne her right course for ought forsooke.

(III.iv.44)

Here, in contrast, the appearance of things going all Britomart’s way looks like a much more localised phenomenon: though she may still command respect on her own terms wherever she shows her face, be it at the castle of the first canto or at the tournament for Florimell’s girdle, behind her back or in her absence it is now nothing but enmity that is seen breeding. The new interpretative climate amounts to more than an inevitable disparaging of virtue in a wicked world. After all, Britomart’s deeds have never been 178

Self-Interpretation & Self-Assertion in Books Three & Four incontestably virtuous, and that remains true here. Riding in fresh at the very end of a three-day tournament hardly looks like a clearly fair way to win the prize as the last one standing (“For last is deemed best” [IV.v.8]), even if Arthegall’s petty grudging on that point looks hypocritical (IV.v.9). Likewise, though the slanderers of her relationship with Amoret are clearly overdoing it in condemning her as having “with shamefull spot of sinfull lust / Defil’d the pledge committed to thy trust” (IV.i.53), their invective does fortuitously echo something that did happen, and for which no virtuous explanation is given, namely that while feigning to be a man “she purpos made . . . of lustfulnesse” towards her helpless charge (IV.i.7) – a detail that still sits strangely with an exemplary interpretation of their friendship, however expertly we are subsequently chastised for reading too much into their story. Even the scene at the castle, where Britomart first commands assent to a virtuous interpretation of the relationship, looks from another perspective like an extension of what is problematic in that opening tableau of their travelling together. For what it generalises, in the form of the “custome” that establishes Britomart’s right to Amoret’s “loue” (IV.i.9), is precisely the problematic ethos that determines their behaviour towards each other in the first place, according to which a knight with the prowess to “win” a woman by force of arms is entitled to her as his prize, regardless of her own will or of any other claims upon her (IV.i.12). What is more, that suspect ethos, on whose terms Britomart seems as content as any to operate, turns out to have a very general currency in the world of Book Four, and to be the basis there for any number of the interpretative difficulties with which it faces its readers. It is in particular the whole raison d’être, not only of Paridell’s and Blandamour’s despicable efforts to secure ladies for themselves in battle, but equally – though less obviously contemptibly – of the tournament for Florimell’s girdle, whose pseudo-moral premise is that the fairest lady ought to be assigned to the strongest knight (IV.v.1). Gone here is the moral narrative of Book Three according to which the knights of Fairy land are vying with each other to be Florimell’s rescuers: rather they are now content to fight openly for the right to her possession (IV.ii.22–27). Similarly, Blandamour’s malicious reference to Amoret as Scudamour’s “spoile of loue misgotten” (IV.i.51) points to something hard to dismiss in the way Scudamour won his wife, the account of which is resiliently ambiguous as to what is meant by his having “bought” her “with force . . . / From twentie Knights” (IV.i.2): whether, as Scudamour would like it to mean, that he forcibly freed her from captivity, or, altogether less flatteringly, that he forcibly abducted her despite all she or her defenders could do. If it was a heroic rescue, it was a strange one, since its result is her having “neuer ioyed” since (IV.i.2); and Scudamour’s own rendition of the tale only makes things worse, since it reveals that he carried her off to that misery not from dolorous captivity, and emphatically not with her consent, but from an island paradise where she willingly lived as a kind of vestal virgin (IV.x.57). Still, an avenue remains for holding that his actions are not blameworthy, for the place from 179

Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene which he carries her off, the opponents he betters in doing so, and the shield whose power assists him, all cry out to be read in figurative terms as representative of a man’s winning a wife through the irresistible power of love; and from that perspective Blandamour’s slander seems to consist in slighting the story’s allegorical dimension, to read it with a reductive and damning literalism. But the obvious allegorical reading likewise seems reductive, trampling especially the literal story’s insistence that it is precisely without Amoret’s consent that Scudamour hauls her off to be married.21 And the troubling way in which that figurative reading obtrudes on the literal story to silence the woman’s dissent can make it seem an expression of the same sinister ethos that infects the literal story and indeed the whole book, according to which beautiful women figure as conveniently helpless prizes which fall by rights to whatever men are willing to seize them most boldly. Accordingly the tenth canto can seem to supply no more than a kind of prehistory to Amoret’s confusion, when later rescued by Britomart from what really is an imprisonment, over what debt of love or sex she may owe this rescuer. The analogous dubiousness of Britomart’s and Scudamour’s claims to Amoret’s love bring us to the crux of what has fragmented the moral consensus Britomart formerly enjoyed. The ethos Amoret’s presumptive champions share, though eventually it does lead to their joining forces in search of her, cannot even at the end undo a sense of their jostling for primacy of place in their rights to her love (IV.ix.38). Likewise more widely in Book Four any real uniting of moral purpose looks impossible – even where, as in the tourney for Florimell’s girdle, there is an agreement as to means – because all that is really agreed on is a belief all hold in common in pursuing their own claims to what they think they deserve. There is an intrinsic moral atomism to such a world, which makes virtually inevitable not only the imminent breakdown of every seeming accord, but also the way each self-interpretative enterprise turns out to be encircled by contrary wills and contradictory interpretations. The morally atomistic ethos that is the common basis of enmity in Book Four is not simply the antithesis of an ethos of friendship. On the contrary, it is the ethos of friendship, insofar as friendship is understood as a morally exclusive claim of one person on another, to be defended against all comers. For at best such an ethos produces diamond-hard molecules (like the tetrahedron of Cambel, Triamond, Cambina, and Canacee), themselves self-sufficient and self-regarding, without ethical links to the larger world. Not only does friendship so understood not yet look like a stepping stone towards any larger social concord, but under scrutiny it appears to be a microcosm of the larger discord – a vying for exclusive moral rights in another, at the possible expense even of

21

On the nature of the mismatch, see Elizabeth Fowler, “The Failure of Moral Philosophy in the Work of Edmund Spenser”, Representations 51 (1995), 58.

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Self-Interpretation & Self-Assertion in Books Three & Four that other’s will. It is to such an ethos of friendship that Britomart’s and Amoret’s relationship of mutual affection can provide no decisive counter-example, because ethically they do not conceive of their relationship on decisively different terms. They remain probably the book’s strongest candidates as exemplary representatives of virtuous friendship, even as Britomart was the previous book’s strongest candidate as an exemplary figure of virtuous chastity; but the lack of wider political or metaphysical backing for such candidacy is beginning to tell. One might even say that it is Britomart’s audacious inclination to go it alone in defining the terms of her ethical agency that sets the precedent for the moral atomism of Book Four, and that the fragmented and hostile interpretative world that catches up with her here is to that extent of her own making. At the same time, though, Britomart’s self-interpretative choices are no mere mistakes, which someone more prescient in her place could have avoided. For the underlying problem is that any political or metaphysical assurances in which she could more decisively have placed her hopes are themselves breaking up around her, falling into the hands of characters like Merlin and Proteus whose motives and interpretations are not above suspicion, and finally becoming diminished to the point of being scarcely distinguishable from the ambient jostle of personal moral narratives. The Arthegall she was promised was to be the hero of a nation; the Arthegall she meets is just one more self-righteous, belligerent savage who has it in for her – one way or the other. It is indicative of how far things have gone to pieces that the only appearance here of the kind of quest assigned by Gloriana to give narrative and moral shape to prior books is in the form of an unexplained “hard aduenture yet in quest” which Arthegall springs as a reason for departing from Britomart as soon as he wins her (IV.vi.42).22 So far from looking like a hint of a possible larger moral coherence in the world, the intrusion of the political in such a form tends only to level it with the individual moral narratives whereby each person endeavours to impose his own will on the wills of his enemies, or of his friends. In the event, then, Britomart’s declared destiny looks set to carry the day over her independent claims to ethical agency not as something higher but only as one more rival in her atomised moral world, like a fresh and powerful knight riding into the lists in a tourney’s final hours. The relentless levelling of moral narratives in Book Four explains how it is that here even a seemingly authorised allegorical interpretation, such as the one the Temple of Venus episode appears to require, can look, with its glossing over of a story’s moral difficulties, as violently reductive of that story’s complexity (though from another direction) as is a slanderous reading that highlights those difficulties at the expense of all else. To no character does that levelling pertain more relentlessly than to Britomart, who in the 1590 poem 22

Cf. IV.vi.Arg., and Stephens, “Into Other Arms”, 206.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene managed to carve out a moral role for herself even in excess of the one allotted to her by fate, but who in the more savage interpretative milieu of the 1596 instalment sees her self-made role pared away at from both sides: on the one hand by slanderous readings which dog her assumed persona as Amoret’s deliverer, and on the other by her providential destiny as Arthegall’s dutifully subordinate wife. The closing in, like a pincer movement, of Britomart’s prospects, as much at the hands of the book’s declared moral scheme as at those of her detractors, is seen with especial clarity by comparing her story’s opening in Book Three to its ending in Book Five. At first, in the interpretative preamble that in effect releases her as a chivalric and moral agent into the story, women are described as capable and deserving of greater liberty than is allowed them by men’s restrictive reading of their capacities (III.ii.1–2). By the end, not only is she herself made to rein in that liberty (V.vii.42–44), but no sooner has she thus repealed the basis of her own independent moral agency, and let her own chivalric activity lapse in favour of that of her betrothed, than even the credit for that deferral is stripped from her by a moralising narrator (V.viii.1–3). Such total occlusion of female moral agency in the act of interpretation is of a piece with what happens to Amoret in Scudamour’s story of having “bought” her; but here the process goes unopposed, even by the voices of slander. For by now the pincer movement has closed, and, just as when it is a slanderer who “Welds kingdomes causes, and affaires of state” (IV.Pr.1), the voice that claims moral authority is the voice of slander, of “men . . . / That in their proper prayse too partiall bee, / And not indifferent” to those who try to construct the moral world on other terms (III.ii.1).23 In the 1596 instalment of Britomart’s story we see what is finally at stake in being thus subjected to interpretative “maisterdome” (IV.i.46): not only to have permanently to capitulate to another’s will, but to have one’s own will written out of history.

23

On the 1596 Faerie Queene’s increasing identification of the state as the source of slander, see M. Lindsay Kaplan, The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 34–63.

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Chapter Ten

Self-Interpretation Beyond the Pale in Books Five and Six

T

HE FIFTH AND sixth books of The Faerie Queene seem to represent a return, after the hiatus of the central books, to the narrative and moral structure established in Books One and Two, a structure rooted in the political authority of Gloriana to assign the various heroes’ quests and to reward them for their achievements. But it is a return with a significant difference. For it is called to a reader’s attention much more obtrusively than before that the appearance of the story’s having such a structure is only one possible interpretation of the events that unfold in these books – indeed that it is a questionable self-interpretative construct, imposed after the fact and with dubious success on ambivalent narrative evidence. As a result it can seem that Spenser is questioning more radically than before, in Books Five and Six respectively, the moral grounding of the Elizabethan regime and of his own didactic poetics, implicitly exposing each in turn as an arbitrary fabrication unanchored in metaphysical certainties.1 But it appears to me that the polemical work thus attributed to the later books has already largely been done in Books Two to Four, and that Books Five and Six constitute rather a recuperative phase, in which the poem searches for a viable basis on which to reconstruct a larger moral order after its atomisation in the central books. Their question, that is, is how it might be possible to rebuild interpretative consensus in a world in which shared metaphysical premises have dissolved or proven chimerical. Their implicit answer, that it must be done by force and fraud, places the poem beyond the pale of conventional moral thought in a way more unsettling than any mere scepticism could have done.

1

Instances of the former view are Patterson, Reading Between the Lines, 109, and Quint, Origin and Originality, 162; of the latter, Jacqueline T. Miller, “The Courtly Figure: Spenser’s Anatomy of Allegory”, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 31 (1991), 52, and Quilligan, The Language of Allegory, 47.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene

Making Justice Natural Like Redcross, Artegall on completing his quest faces grave slanders representing him as an exemplar not of his book’s titular virtue but the opposite. But unlike Redcross he cannot be rescued decisively by a more favourable, authorised interpretation of his character, because, as for Britomart at the end of her story, the voice of authority is no longer clearly distinct from the voice of slander: the “enuies cloud” that “dimmeth vertues ray” now hangs over “Faerie Court” itself (V.xii.27).2 It is inevitable to see reflected in the episode the recall in 1582 of Arthur Lord Grey from his post as Lord Deputy of Ireland; and given Spenser’s persistent loyalty to Grey elsewhere it is tempting to think that the poet’s sympathies here will fall squarely with Artegall.3 But a stumbling block arises to such a reading, in the fact that, again as with Redcross, the slanders contain a surprising degree of truth: Artegall has been “vnmanly” (in the Radegund episode), used “guile” (in fighting Guile), and above all it would be hard to exonerate him of “crueltie” in using “the sword of Iustice” (V.xii.40). More flattering if less true to Grey’s memory, one might think, would have been to design Artegall’s story such that the charge of official cruelty would conspicuously find nowhere to stick. A clue to the book’s aims lies in what Artegall understands himself to be doing in his assigned quest, in contrast to what his slanderers make of him: namely installing in her rightful authority, on the Fairy Queen’s disinterested behalf, Irena, the legitimate princess of a neighbouring land. For Irena is in topical terms a transparent fiction, a personification of the irenic – or pacified – Ireland whereat Elizabethan policy aimed; inventing her creates by an opportune allegorical magic not only a native prince for that long-disputed land, but one whose sovereign interest conveniently lies in seeing its pacification fully accomplished.4 Superficially, then, Irena is a skilled allegorist’s device for avoiding acknowledgement of the messiness of Elizabeth’s Irish problem, by seeing to it that the messiness gets lost in his translation of the real political situation into fictional terms.5 A similar trick of translation allows Spenser to convert the bloody and open-ended process of imposing ‘Irena’ on a resistant population into the noble and conclusive despatching, in single chivalric 2 3

4

5

Cf. Kaplan, The Culture of Slander, 51. See esp. A View of the Present State of Ireland, 19–20 and 106–10. For an indication of the long critical history of linking Artegall’s recall with Grey’s see Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 154. One could also treat Irena as another avatar of Elizabeth (e.g., Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience, 151–52), but again that would imply a convenient allegorical finessing: Gloriana disinterestedly helping Irena as a figure of Elizabeth helping herself to her disputable Irish inheritance. Cf. McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment, 229; see also the corrosive indictment on this point in Graham Hough, A Preface to The Faerie Queene (London: Duckworth, 1962), 192.

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Self-Interpretation Beyond the Pale in Books Five & Six combat, of a second allegorical character, Grantorto. But a poet capable of such sleights of hand did not need to leave unfinished business in his narrative in the form of further resistance to Irena’s rule, nor to bring in a terrible figure like Talus to be set to brutally mopping it up: he could have kept his allegory clean, and made the subsequent detraction of Artegall seem in story terms wholly unjust. The point is that sophisticated Elizabethan readers could have seen such a trick as a trick; they knew as well as Spenser that there was no convenient exiled native Irish monarch whom Elizabeth might restore to her rightful throne, nor any one neat act whereby the resistance to her rule could be decapitated. Accordingly every attempt on Elizabeth’s part to pacify Ireland would remain wide open to being seen not as an exercise of disinterested justice, but either (depending who you asked) as a tyrannous exercise of violence against her own subjects, or a violent attempt at subduing a free people – and either way as the height of injustice. The real question for Spenser, it seems to me, was whether in the face of such intractable criticisms, and of the bloody reality on the ground from which they drew strength, there was any set of terms on which a pacification policy could legitimately interpret itself as morally valid, or whether conversely the claims of conscience were inevitably on the side of those who had thought Grey’s style of governance too cruel, and hence against the similarly bellicose policy that Spenser still promoted in A View of the Present State of Ireland.6 And the typically audacious answer his Legend of Justice proposes, I think, is that such a morally valid set of terms can exist – but only if it is first invented. That is not exactly to say that the book advises pretending some person like Irena exists, but that it offers Irena per se only as a concrete example of an important kind of fiction, which in more abstract terms consists in the idea of an original and natural order, a normative though counterfactual condition that the force of justice aims to restore. The elements of such a fiction are found in two opposed concepts of natural justice to which the book incessantly returns: respectively, justice as a redistribution (giving to each his deserts or his fortunes), and as a restitution (restoring to each his own). Their radical forms are exemplified by two possible approaches to things “plucked quite from all possessors hand” by the sea (V.iv.19): either they may be allotted to whoever finds them, on the grounds that “what the sea vnto you sent, your own should seeme” (V.iv.17,18), or they may be taken from such chance possessors without compensation and restored to their prior places (IV.xii.31–33). Only by wishful thinking can either approach seem universally right: the redistributive principle on which Artegall satisfactorily settles the dispute between two brothers over their lands and their wives’ dowries, if applied generally, would

6

Cf. Kaplan’s suggestion, The Culture of Slander, 62, that “the defamations alleged in The Faerie Queene against Lord Grey are actually the criticisms the poet himself expects to encounter in advocating a rigorously harsh policy against the Irish”.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene leave Florimell in the hands of Proteus. Indeed the two episodes constitute fantasies of a world favourably ordered according to the one principle or the other. In the two brothers’ case, accepting one’s fortunes seems a fair principle, because fortune in their experience is a matter of give and take: one need only consider how different the story would look if by chance both land and treasure had gone the same way, rather than conveniently exchanging themselves in a tit-for-tat manner. In Florimell’s story, by contrast, the fantasy is of a world wherein things bear indelible marks of their origins (“Within his mouth a blacke spot doth appeare, / Shapt like a horses shoe, who list to seeke it there” [V.iii.32]), and where all things not original are mere “counterfeits” to be “vncased” (V.iii.39). But still more wishful than either of those kinds of thinking is one in which the principles of redistribution and restitution providentially turn out to be identical, by virtue of the fantasy of a recoverable original condition which also embodies redistribution’s self-justifying principle of fairness. Such a Golden Age fantasy solves at a stroke the need to choose between possible models of natural justice, and in so choosing to trample on the principles of models not chosen. Or so it would, except that the fantasy of redistributing in order to restore an original and fair condition is a fiction available to more than one party. An especially coherent, and to Artegall especially dangerous version of that fiction is found in the hands of the egalitarian giant (V.ii.30ff). The hero’s response, in fact, looks relatively incoherent, leading some critics either to indict Spenser of ineptly handling a scene they assume is meant to tell against the giant, or to suspect the poet of wishing covertly to convey the superior claims of the giant’s position.7 But taken purely as a point-by-point polemical response to the giant’s case, Artegall’s answer is not quite so inept as all that: he does successfully identify the grounding of his opponent’s argument in a fictitious appeal to metaphysical certainty and in disputable claims as to what in nature would constitute a proper restitution and a fair redistribution of goods. (The giant says things have “encroched vppon others share” [V.ii.32], but how does he know that they didn’t start out in the current proportions [V.ii.35–36]? He says time has redistributed things unjustly [V.ii.37–38], but how does he know that that redistribution doesn’t serve a just purpose that his reverse redistribution would violate [V.ii.40–42]?) The difficulty is only that Artegall’s criticisms on each point look distinctly ad hoc, to the point of not adding up to a clear alternative view (does he hold that things are or are not redistributed in different proportions over time?), and indeed to the point of not chiming with the rationale of his own mission, which like the giant’s requires not the defence of an existing state of affairs, but revolutionary violence aimed at ‘restoring’ a radically different ‘original’ condition. Such

7

See respectively Hough, A Preface to The Faerie Queene, 194–95, and Patterson, Reading Between the Lines, 109.

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Self-Interpretation Beyond the Pale in Books Five & Six inconsistencies are certainly a problem, both in the practical sense that they weaken the effect of Artegall’s argument in relation to the giant’s, and more deeply in suggesting that the hero’s moral opinions are not built on a solid basis but contain a large element of arbitrariness; but one thing they do not suggest is the superior factual basis of his foe’s position, to which on the contrary “the vulgar” pay heed not because of any evidence backing it but “In hope . . . great benefite to gaine” (V.ii.33). Rather both disputants invoke clearly arbitrary and tendentious accounts of what is natural to defend the justice of their positions; and the question is where their apparent parity leaves our hopes of finding in Artegall a viable example of justice. As a first step towards an answer, we may note that the poem does not treat arbitrary and ad hoc formulations of justice as inherently bogus. Returning to the question of how one deals justly with properties lost and found at sea, we may see that the choice between opposite approaches, either of which can be defended as natural, must be positive, and that Spenser consistently treats it as such: the “waift” Florimell (IV.xii.31) is taken from Proteus and brought to Marinell, but the lands and treasures of Amidas and Bracidas left in the hands to which the sea has weft them, not in either case because that is what is innately right, but because . . . what the mighty Sea hath once possest, And plucked quite from all possessors hand . . . He may dispose by his imperiall might, As thing at randon left, to whom he list.

(V.iv.19)

Such “high prerogatiue” (IV.xii.31) in dealing justice, far from pertaining only to marine law, has strong echoes in the basis on which Artegall deals justice in the early episodes of Book Five, not least in the case of the two brothers itself, which he puts himself in a position to decide by winning their prior agreement to his absolute authority to do so. By laying their swords beneath Artegall’s feet, and swearing “To bide what iudgement ye shall vs afford” (V.iv.16), the brothers effectively grant him sovereign power to pronounce, however arbitrarily, what shall henceforth belong to whom. And while the decision Artegall makes is given an air of fairness by his applying the same rule to both (V.iv.17,18), the rule itself is justified only on the ad hoc grounds that in practice it gives something to each. Such case-by-case arbitration of claims by a single figure whose will is acknowledged as sovereign in deciding the dispute in hand constitutes a significant if small advance on the interpretative free-for-all that prevails through most of Book Four; but it achieves that advance only by pushing to a slightly higher level the basic problem of interpretative discontinuity, solving particular disputes but potentially pitting one system of judgement against another, each of which might regard the other’s solutions as acts of violence in themselves. Hence it is the pressure exerted on each other by rival arbiters of justice, rather than arbitrariness per se, that is the central problem for the fifth book of 187

Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene The Faerie Queene. What is hinted at by Artegall’s encounter with the egalitarian giant is his need for a more systematic – not necessarily a less arbitrary – basis of interpretative authority, whereby to resist alternative constructions placed on him. Of course it is conceivable, as Annabel Patterson argues, that the poem calls attention to the arbitrariness of Artegall’s arguments in favour of the powers that be, precisely to call their authority in question, and so to give a hearing to alternatives, notably to an egalitarian ethos according to which no one by nature is master of anyone else. In favour of that view she adduces the surprising fact that when Artegall sends Talus to smash the egalitarian giant to pieces, “Like as a ship, whom cruell tempest driues / Vpon a rocke with horrible dismay” (V.ii.50), “the simile patently mourns the Giant before the official editorial comment (‘So was the high aspyring with huge ruine humbled’) can condemn him”.8 But while it is right to see a transient pathos in the giant’s destruction, the same sort of thing appears in many other surprising places in Book Five, and not all tend the same way politically. Even in the canto featuring the egalitarian giant, a similar effect, indeed more protracted and more explicitly pitiful, marks Talus’s mutilation and drowning of Munera (V.ii.26–27), who so far from standing for an oppressed commonalty, herself embodies the plunder that “mighty men” extort by “oppression” of “the feeble” (V.ii.5,19). In fact the poem tempts us to at least a flash of sympathy for nearly all of Artegall’s opponents, even Grantorto, who in remarkably nontyrannic fashion agrees to the single combat in which he will be slain in order “the slaughter so to stay” that Artegall has been wreaking on “His scattred people” (V.xii.8–9). But as the juxtaposing of Munera and the giant makes clear, it would be futile to look for some common quality of natural justice in every episode, which Artegall in each case tramples, as though the book’s real political message were exactly the opposite of its ostensible one.9 Rather, though every dispensation the hero overturns has its arguable claim to embody justice as against his injury, the various claims are incommensurable not only with the brand of justice the hero imposes, but with one another. We may favour the egalitarian myth, and (to give Patterson her due) many of Spenser’s contemporaries no doubt clandestinely preferred it too.10 But in the 8

9

10

Patterson, Reading Between the Lines, 107. While Patterson’s Spenser is not so wholly in the giant’s camp as to repudiate unconditionally what Artegall embodies – “He is prepared to argue for violent suppression, but only on the grounds of naked necessity” (110) – he does nonetheless implicitly endorse the superior moral claims of an egalitarian ethos of the kind Talus suppresses. A more viable take on the canto might be to see Artegall as a third force checking both over-mighty feudal lords and unruly commons, a notion of sovereignty current not only in Ireland but England: cf. Louis Montrose, “Eliza, Queene of shepherdes’, and the Pastoral of Power”, English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980). In evidence, she cites as “the guiding principle of radical movements since the late Middle Ages” that “things need to be returned to their original state of equality”, a condition, as the

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Self-Interpretation Beyond the Pale in Books Five & Six Legend of Justice the notion of an original equality is treated not as a natural concept discernible beneath the accretions of spurious claims to authority, but as one fiction of naturalness amongst many, and one rooted no less than Munera’s hoard in a potentially all-devouring greed, albeit that of the poor rather than the rich. As to what the real underlying natural condition is, out of which the various pretenders to rightful sovereignty carve their claims to authority, the book’s answer to that is seen most clearly in the later cantos revolving around Mercilla’s court. Distinctly unlike Gloriana, Mercilla is introduced to us as a figure besieged on all sides by “foes, which her enuy”, and who apply all their power “to subuert her Crowne and dignity” and “her sacred selfe to slay” (V.viii.17–19). It is, we are continually reminded, against that omnipresent background of open or hidden violence, a condition likened to a “saluage woods . . . / Where still the stronger doth the weake deuoure” (V.ix.1), that she maintains a realm “of peace and clemencie . . . / Maugre so many foes, which did withstand” (V.ix.30; cf. 22, 33, etc.). An all-but-Hobbesian war of all against all, in which, as Eudoxus puts it in A View of the Present State of Ireland, “every man’s hand . . . [is] against another”, rather than a peaceful egalitarianism, is the state of nature amidst which Mercilla establishes her moral and political legitimacy, like a well-ordered pale staked out in a primeval wilderness.11 But what the moral wilderness turns out to consist of, in both the Legend of Justice and the View, is not quite the total anarchy approached in Book Four, but the conflicting and irreconcilable claims staked by rival pretenders to authority, each vying to establish moral supremacy by putting mythical roots back into time and finding itself at the beginning as what is natural and right. Where such a savage vision prevails, the arbitrariness of the power that succeeds “with the terror of his sword and the countenance of his majesty” in imposing uniform law and order is no objection, because ex hypothesi there is no other sovereignty in nature than what accrues arbitrarily to the strongest: “all is the conqueror’s, as Tully to Brutus saith.”12 Sovereignty emerges out of savagery at the point where it succeeds in excluding rival claimants to its mantle, laying down its own law with undisputed authority. What is at stake for Mercilla, and by transparent implication for Elizabeth, is touched especially nearly in Duessa’s trial. The inclusion of such transparent reference to one of the most uncomfortable incidents in Elizabeth’s reign may indicate not so much insensitivity on Spenser’s part as the episode’s crucial importance in exemplifying concretely the problem the Legend of Justice has taken in hand: that of alternative pretenders to a unique authority, each claiming jurisdiction over the other by appeal to its own version of history and

11 12

Bishop of Winchester put it in 1589, in which “all men were alike, there was no principality . . . [and] no bondage” – Patterson, Reading Between the Lines, 93–94. Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, 3. Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, 9, 11.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene natural right. Mary lays claim to Elizabeth’s throne; Elizabeth assumes the right to try Mary. The underlying issue can only be glanced at – against Duessa’s conspiracy “to depryue / Mercilla of her crowne . . . / That she might it vnto her selfe deryue” (V.ix.41) can be set only vague regard for her “Nobilitie of birth, that bread / Great ruth” at the prospect of her execution (V.ix.45) – but it is enough to put Elizabeth’s stark choice on the poem’s map. Faced with a challenge to the very basis of sovereign authority, the lawgiver must destroy or be destroyed, impose her own law or be legislated out of being. The resulting picture may appear, one way or another, to make a travesty of Mercilla’s defining characteristic: for if her merciful reluctance to sentence Duessa (V.ix.50) is real, it can seem a mere clog on justice, and the merciful nature so imputed to Elizabeth a weakness rather than a strength; but if, on the other hand, what Mercilla sheds are mere crocodile tears, then her name can seem a hollow mockery, and what is imputed to Elizabeth pointedly not mercy at all but a hypocritical show thereof.13 In fact, though, whether or not Mercilla’s grief is real (and its impenetrability to scrutiny may be part of the point), neither here nor in the episode more widely (V.x.4; cf. V.ix.25) does the merciful part she plays actually mitigate the punitive exercises by which her power is kept sacrosanct. Rather its effect is to raise her above them, preserving inviolate the disinterestedness of her sovereign will while all around her the moral agents she empowers get on, of their own loyal volition, with the continual judicial and military violence whereby her authority maintains itself and its discourse of legitimacy. A similar separation of authority from the violence that maintains it occurs to a lesser degree in Artegall’s own case, both in the book at large by his pairing with Talus, and at a crucial juncture within the story by his being paired with Britomart. It seems curious on the face of it that, in the allegory of the Temple of Isis, Britomart’s contribution to the partnership is represented as one of bringing “clemence” to his “sterne behests, and cruell doomes” (V.vii.22), when in their encounters with Radegund he is the one who shows all too much clemency (V.v.13), and she the one who proceeds with “dreadfull” sternness (V.vii.34). But what she achieves by her dauntless violence on his behalf, and by the similarly dauntless force with which she follows it up in reordering Radegund’s realm, is effectively to temper the violence required of him, setting him above the contest for sovereignty in which previously he was entangled, as a stately object of “fealty” rather than a severe agent of conquest (V.vii.43). She “Restraines those sterne behests, and cruell doomes of his” by taking them on herself. It is a key moment in the Legend of Justice, because the Radegund 13

Thus, e.g., Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience, 164–68, sees in Mercilla a critical portrait of Elizabeth as an inappropriately pacific and pitiful ruler, whereas Lewis, The Allegory of Love, 349, sees a grotesque disparity between the character and her name (although he attributes the mismatch not to a critical intention on Spenser’s part but on the contrary to runaway flattery become blind to its own absurdity).

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Self-Interpretation Beyond the Pale in Books Five & Six cantos have brought to a crisis a problem brewing for Artegall since the egalitarian giant episode, namely that so long as he acts merely as an ad hoc arbiter of disputes he does not have a sufficient basis on which to answer credibly the claims of rival arbiters of justice. His fall comes when, in agreeing to what seems just one more ad hoc formulation of justice, he allows himself to be drawn in to defining the parameters of his own virtue on another arbiter’s terms (V.iv.49–51, v.17–19). The solution he achieves with Britomart’s help is notably not one of finding a less arbitrary basis on which to define justice. For nothing could be more arbitrary than his own sovereignty over the city formerly known as Radegone, in which he has no personal claims at all; and even the notion seized on to give his dominion at least a generic basis in nature, that male authority over women is an original and natural state, looks conspicuously fictitious when invoked as grounds for “restoring” that state in the city of the Amazons specifically, where we are given no narrative grounds for supposing that it has ever previously obtained, and where the men raised into positions of authority are not even natives, but Artegall and other foreigners the Amazons had defeated and imprisoned (V.vii.42–43). What distinguishes the episode from Artegall’s previous adventures is rather the scope and thoroughness with which his claims as an arbiter of justice are advanced; the Amazon’s challenge is met by seizing the interpretative initiative at a sufficiently fundamental level to set up a coherent alternative to her system of law. Britomart’s setting herself up as the consort of a just prince is from one perspective the largest and most audacious achievement of her whole bold self-interpretative career: for want of finding the princely figure in the looking glass, she in effect makes him. But from another perspective what she does is only to enlarge into political proportions her own divided view of Artegall; the sovereign figure to whom she makes the people swear allegiance is in a sense only a public version of the fictitious ideal figure she has pursued all along. Beneath the summary self-interpretation she puts into his hands, which allows him to depart the scene in an assumed heroic character triumphantly above the vicissitudes of female influence, including her own (V.viii.1–3), the story evidence has been notably mixed as to whether indeed “To his owne loue his loialtie he saued” (V.vi.2), or on the contrary was so prone to “breach of faith to her, which he had firmely plight” (V.vi.12) as to be a pushover for the next pretty face (V.v.12). Has he or has he not shown the moral autonomy required to keep a contract? As the terms suggest, it is more than a personal matter for Britomart; it is a question of the very foundation of his claim to embody sovereign justice. Even Britomart’s dream in the Temple of Isis, the priest’s allegorical interpretation of which ostensibly resolves the question of Artegall’s true character in favour of his being a “righteous Knight” and “faithfull louer” (V.vii.22), in practice underlines yet again the ambivalence of the evidence, for the dream figure so interpreted is a “gaping greedy” crocodile “swolne with pride of his 191

Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene owne peerelesse powre”, who only on failing to overpower her “gan for grace and loue of her to seeke” (V.vii.15–16) – a figure, indeed, whose original in Isis’s statue was bluntly said to signify “open force” and “forged guile” (V.vii.7). One could scarcely devise a picture harder to reconcile with Artegall’s claim to personify justice, since justice is portrayed from the book’s outset as a condition wherein neither “force, ne fraud in wight was to be found” (V.Pr.9). But rather than resolving the seeming contradiction in Artegall’s character, the fifth book seems bent on expanding it into a pervasive problem which not only Britomart but we as readers must grapple with throughout, making a kind of semantic double vision the very condition of our quest for an image of its titular virtue. Hence a character who starts his narrative existence as the knight of “Saluagesse sans finesse” (IV.iv.39) – one who typifies the ethos of the fourth book’s lawless wilderness, asserting by main force a narrowly egoistic notion of his just deserts – is suddenly and drastically rewritten at the start of the Book Five as having been from the beginning the authorised agent of a universal justice that is both divinely sanctioned and grounded in nature, its writ running from the stars even to the beasts (V.i.5–7). There is no narrative of progress in between, whereby the fourth book’s Arthegall learns to sophisticate his originally crude notion of justice till he arrives at the disinterested even-handedness for which he is lauded at the start of Book Five; indeed there is no room for one, because in Book Five’s belated biography he has always been “this gentle childe” of unfallen nature, “with no crime defilde” (V.i.6).14 Like the original name of Bonfons (V.ix.26), Artegall’s former character survives in the Legend of Justice only under a curious kind of cancellation, as a deep seam of “force” and “guile” running beneath the surface of a new and authorised interpretation which applies itself retroactively and finds itself at the source. As in Mercilla’s case, the book displays in its hero the process of constructing a natural moral authority, where in the “saluage” beginning there is none.15 Artegall himself, from the Radegund cantos onwards, increasingly participates in rewriting his past as he proceeds, bringing it retrospectively into line with the character required of the knight of justice. Thus even prior to Britomart’s intervention, the Radegund story includes successive retellings of Artegall’s initially culpable role in his own defeat (V.v.17) that gradually exonerate him of all blame until finally the encounter can be depicted as a triumph of his virtue (V.v.32, V.v.56, V.vi.1–2, V.viii.1–3). Likewise later he fleetingly 14

15

Pace Roche, The Kindly Flame, 89, 94. One might object that Artegall’s former persona as “the Saluage Knight” (IV.vi.4) was a disguise, and that his ‘true’ history is offered only in Book Five; but if so the ‘disguise’ ran remarkably deep, shaping his very motives in Book Four. Cf. Bart van Es, Spenser’s Forms of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 124–27, who describes Spenser’s mimetic exploration, in the Legend of Justice at large and the Isis Church canto in particular, of “the allegories that history writes” in treating of kings and conquerors.

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Self-Interpretation Beyond the Pale in Books Five & Six accepts “blame” for tardiness in helping Irena, but only at once to call heaven to “witnesse . . . / How cleare I am from blame”, citing in self-defence, of all things, his time spent in “thraldome” to Radegund (V.xi.41) – a defence that only presses home how completely his blame in that matter has been expunged from the story. Eventually his delay becomes not just blameless but potentially laudable: it came, we are told, of time spent in achieving “other great aduentures”, and in any case did not, as previously indicated (V.vi.3, V.xi.39–40), prevent his arriving to aid Irena at the “time . . . assynd” (V.xii.3). By the end, the book has been comprehensively rewritten from within, in such a way as to cancel its wayward tendencies and to tie it firmly to the point where it began, namely with the quest assigned by the lawful queen to a knight who exemplifies justice. Successive interpretative innovations as to what the hero’s story might mean and what his character might be, finally are represented as having restored to view the story that always was. Such rewriting of a story after the fact, in such a way as to ascribe to the revised version the authoritative status belonging to an original, is reminiscent of the letter to Raleigh, where a politic rewriting of the poem is portrayed not as a labour of self-revision but as a return to “the wel-head of the History”. But where in the letter to Raleigh we can speak only in abstract terms of the violence done to the poem’s plot, or of the violence the poem might suffer from the slanderous “misconstructions” its author anticipates, in the Legend of Justice the interpretative violence done both by slanderers and by those who contain slander is a concrete part of the story, and includes a literal violence meted out to characters adjudged to be slanderous. That much was also true, of course, even in the Legend of Holiness; but because the dispute there over which interpretation is valid is set within an established metaphysical framework which delivers an authoritative ruling on that dispute, a reader is unlikely to feel that the question of where the right lies has been decided by violence. In Book Five, in contrast, purging interpretative dissonance much more evidently means purging alternative metaphysical frameworks for interpretation – frameworks that can only be decided against by violence, because where the very normative ideas of a natural law and an original dispensation exist in incommensurable versions, an undisputed moral authority can arise only by force majeure. Such a picture of the origins of moral authority, by suggesting that every moral system is raised at a cost to the truth, erodes the possibility of any absolute answer to the question as to who is the true moral authority and who the slanderer16 – except insofar as the argument can be ended by silencing rival claimants. Thus as we near the moment of Artegall’s passage to “the saluage Iland” (V.xi.39), the original rights and wrongs of the situations he and Arthur are obliged to resolve become ever less clear, till in Belge’s case the very 16

Cf. Kaplan, The Culture of Slander, 63 and cap. 1, passim.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene substance of Geryoneo’s “tyrannizing” (V.x.14) is expressed in terms Spenser elsewhere treats as the basis of legitimacy: that “he hath new lawes and orders new / Imposd . . . with many a hard condition” (V.x.27) is both his abuse and, from another perspective, his prerogative as a “soueraine” empowered “To doe, what euer he thought good or fit” (V.x.13). Yet it may be precisely the qualms aroused by such an intractably ambivalent picture the book aims to conquer, with its call for “iustice to . . . be perform’d with dreadlesse might” (V.iv.1). At least, it shows no way for such qualms to be translated into a political alternative to force. Rather it suggests that in shirking the resolute business of violently silencing a rival moral order, one stands only to be silenced by it, one’s dispossession and even extinction represented as a mere rendering of the enemy’s “owne” (V.xi.3). The prospect of genocide – of suffering it, or of being drawn to commit it – begins from this book to stalk Spenser’s thinking, both political and (what is still more unsettling) moral.17 For it is above all morally that “All is the conqueror’s”, since the prizes of victory are to write the histories and the laws, and to install one’s readings in the very landscape by fashioning allegorical monuments from the remains of the defeated.18 But such conquest must be truly total if it is to achieve its end, such that for the former order “there mote be no hope of reparation, / Nor memory thereof to any nation” (V.ii.28). Otherwise, like Angela’s armour, the monuments of the defeated have always the potential to be given new life in new hands. Richard McCabe observes in Talus’s violence on Irena’s behalf, so effective “that in short space . . . / Not one was left, that durst her once haue disobayd” (V.xii.25), a terrible ambiguity: “It may mean that everyone has become obedient or that everyone is dead.”19 But while there is a genuine ambiguity here about means, which amounts to a refusal on this book’s part to decide what constitutes ‘sufficient force’, there is no such ambivalence as to ends: for what is true in either reading is that the voice of resistance is extirpated. Hereafter, though the question of effective means will continue to arise, the muzzling of opposition – be it the Blattant Beast, or of Mutability, “put downe and whist” (VII.vii.59) – will be the poem’s recurrent image of moral closure. To invent an Irena is, transparently, to impose a morally neat fiction on a morally complex reality; but that, suggests the book more widely, is just what is involved in all moral ordering of the world. While no one in reality fights for the hypothetical person Irena, one does no less in fighting for any other imaginary body politic one cares to name, be it Ireland, England, Elizabeth I, or even law and order (or Astraea) in the abstract. To the extent that one regards some such coherent body as desirable, the poem suggests, one ought to have the

17 18 19

Cf. E. Fowler, “The Failure of Moral Philosophy in the Work of Edmund Spenser”, 68, and McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment, cap. 11. Spenser, View, 9; cf. The Faerie Queene, V.ii.19, etc. McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment, 230.

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Self-Interpretation Beyond the Pale in Books Five & Six moral steel – the Talus – for the necessary violence of imposing that allegorical entity on the ground. That steely point, however, cannot itself be driven home by the direct type of self-interpretative moralising that characterises the letter to Raleigh, because the authority of such moralising is what is in question here. Rather Book Five works more like Book Four, openly showing in one episode after another the plausibility of the negative reading to which it will seem to give the last word. Again and again, we see an Artegall who “for no pitty would. . . change . . . course” (V.ii.26), who seems “cruell” (V.ii.50), who sanctions “slaughters” (V.xii.8), and whose opponents, so far from being made-to-order villains as in Book One, have claims to human and moral regard.20 Even Duessa, in reprising her scapegoat role from Book One, has drifted much further along the continuum of possible response from the manifest villain whose punishment raises few qualms to the figure whose suffering elicits apprehension and pity. Nor are all the claims of alternative moral possibilities finally dismissed here as mere chimerae, like the ethos of the House of Pride; arrestingly, they include even the foundations of Britomart’s independent moral agency, the poem’s most plausible and sympathetic challenger to Gloriana’s putative, and here forcibly fashioned, monopoly on moral authority. But though by all those means we are led to feel the moral cost and collateral damage of Artegall’s project, what we are left with at the very close is something else, namely an expression of the still greater moral cost of finally acceding to the negative interpretation of the hero’s character that the high price of his actions suggests. For the dim view of Artegall’s exertions in Irena’s realm that takes hold at Fairy court, such that he is called away “ere he could reforme it thoroughly” (V.xii.27), far from representing a genuine moral alternative to the arbitrary violence of which he is accused, only redirects it at Artegall, subjecting him in turn to the kind of arbitrary relaying of the foundations of interpretation that we have already observed in Britomart’s story. But now the putative moral authority turns on, and scapegoats, not a rival moral claim irreconcilable with the integrity of its emergent body politic, but its own “right hand”, the very “powre” by which its writ runs (V.iv.1). In not standing by the project of her “instrument” (V.Pr.11), the queen does not stand by her own.21 The terms in which Elizabeth is implicitly criticised here, far from eroding the moral authority of her position as against that of her deputy, and so suggesting, as Willy Maley has it, “that Spenser is something of an incipient republican”,22 suggest the importance precisely of the sovereign’s maintaining 20 21 22

As against, e.g., Alpers’s view, in The Poetry of The Faerie Queene, 300, that Spenser expects us to “relish the violence” of Artegall and Talus. Cf. Kaplan, The Culture of Slander, 62, and Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience, 114, 154. Willy Maley, Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture, and Identity (London: MacMillan, 1997), 115.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene the undividedness of her authority, by not heeding alternative moral constructions of the world that represent the imposition of her will as an act of violence, nor herself undermining her direct appointee in his appointed task. Where the 1590 poem made the case for royal absolutism from the subject’s perspective, the 1596 instalment finds itself in the ironic position of having to make that case to the prince. I do not say that the poem manages to create much sympathy for Artegall’s final plight, in the way it does for Britomart – if indeed that is what was intended.23 For what undoes him at the end is the very power by whose mandate we have seen him crush others throughout his legend. Nonetheless the moral resistance that Artegall meets and obliterates at every step of his way may represent, not the poem’s being of two minds about the type of justice it ostensibly recommends, but on the contrary, its being willing to face up to its deepest implications, and to require its readers to face up to them too.24 Because no moral interpretation can do full justice to the complexity of the world, any attempt to impose justice will be made at some cost to the truth, and will encounter irreconcilable enemies whose moral premises are incommensurable with its own – premises that can only be responded to (so the book’s logic runs) either with loss of nerve or with resoluteness, with capitulation or with violence. And those who would choose the latter course must accordingly be ready to weather not only a close-to-the-bone kind of slander, but specifically charges of “reprochfull crueltie” (V.xii.40) which, precisely from the point of view that must be dreadlessly suppressed, might actually be just.

Planting Ideas in the Mind What force is to Artegall, guile is to Calidore: both the indispensable means by which he imposes his nominally virtuous will on the world, and itself the feature of his behaviour that stands most in need of justification. Not that Calidore relies on guile to the exclusion of force, any more than Artegall on force to the exclusion of guile. But the emphasis has shifted, such that in episode after episode it is Calidore’s guilefulness that stands out both as what makes his achievements possible and as what puts their real worth – and his – persistently in question.25 Calidore’s first adventure recreates on a small scale the pattern of Artegall’s 23 24 25

Though some sympathy is found for him on that score, e.g., by Parker, The Allegory of The Faerie Queene, 205–06. Cf. Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience, 147, and McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment, 97. Cf. Thomas H. Cain, Praise in The Faerie Queene (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), 178, and J. Miller, “The Courtly Figure”, 52.

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Self-Interpretation Beyond the Pale in Books Five & Six quest, as a basis for progressing onto new moral territory. Like Artegall in Irena’s kingdom, Calidore here redresses by force an injustice in which he has no personal interest only to be reviled personally for what is construed as criminal violence (VI.i.25). Thereafter the question for the hero is how to clear himself of such blame: it is for that sole purpose that, unlike his predecessor, he remains after the accusations are made on the scene of his supposed crime (VI.i.28–30). His self-vindication is, by the end of the canto, so successful that his former bitter accuser has not only turned into a devoted panegyrist but seems to have become a new person in a quasi-religious sense, “ouercome with infinite affect, / . . . that pearst / Her stubborne hart with inward deepe effect” (VI.i.45). So much it seems can courtesy do to supply the wants of Artegall’s harsh justice: where the one could work only outward compulsion, the other accomplishes inward conversion; where the one’s reforming effects are narrowly political, the other achieves an ethical reformation as well, allying the conquered heart to virtue’s cause.26 But the victory comes at a price: for the means whereby courtesy seasons justice, here, raise unsettling questions about Calidore’s virtue that resonate through the book. For a start, the story promptly transcends the pat notion, which it suggests at the outset, that Calidore’s courtesy might be something merely complementary to, and hence distinct from, his force at arms – a matter of “manners mylde . . . And gracious speach” to temper his also being (like the sterner Artegall) “well approu’d in batteilous affray” (VI.i.2). Instead, his good manners and eloquent speech prove by themselves to be of no avail in mollifying Briana’s opinion, not only leaving her set in her view of him as a wicked murderer (VI.i.29) but adding to her list of things with which to upbraid him his “courteous lore” itself, which she treats with disdain as a mere guileful means of morally turning the tables by deriding where he is derided (VI.i.27). Paradoxically, only by augmenting the force that first brought her bad opinion on him with another act of force in defence of his own reputation can he win her over to interpreting him on a different basis – only, that is, by reducing her champion from a state of parity to one of such abjection that he cannot resist any terms dictated (VI.i.39), and thereupon imposing a single ethical dispensation within which both Calidore and the lady can simultaneously be satisfied. That dispensation consists in the basic tenets of courtesy, not now in the prosaic sense in which the term was first applied to Calidore, and on which he initially drew in trying to talk Briana round to a better opinion of him, but in its older and broader meaning as the shared ethical code of the chivalric caste, with its specific requirements vis-à-vis fellow knights and ladies (VI.i.42). Imposing by “cruell” and “bloudy” force (VI.i.36–37) that common set of

26

The religious language suggests an analogy to that conviction of sin (wrought by another kind of “grace”), whereby the heart ceases to resist God as an enemy and embraces its own moral reformation – see, e.g., “Prologue to the Romans”, Tyndale’s New Testament, 208–09, 216.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene ethical terms allows Calidore to govern the subsequent interpretation of his deeds in a way not possible while he merely behaved courteously in a shallower sense; for the first time he can then effectually project himself as an exemplar of courtesy, instead of merely as one who knows (suspiciously enough) how to cast his own deeds in a positive moral light. One might compare the View of the Present State of Ireland, which likewise insists that the compliance of any people in ethical reform can be had only on the back of military conquest so thorough that they can be treated in their abjectness as a tabula rasa for a new moral order.27 Moreover, Calidore’s new moral order is itself a paradoxical creation, wherein selfless and selfish motives are closely intertwined in a way that makes its real moral value hard to assess. By sparing his fallen foe and acting in the interest of the lady who has done nothing but revile him, he expertly exemplifies in his own person the selfless courtesy idealised by the chivalric code. But the affective value for Briana of that example of selflessness – which she is inspired to emulate by freely laying on feasts and gifts (VI.i.46) – is inseparable from its serving, and by a nearer way (VI.i.43), the same selfish interest in winning Crudor’s hand that formerly inspired her “custome lewd and ill” (VI.i.13). Meanwhile the inspirational show of selflessness on Calidore’s part, which he backs up by declining to gain personally from Briana’s show of thanks (VI.i.46–7), in a larger sense only distracts attention from his wholly personal reason for having stayed on hand to fight a duel with Crudor. That is to say, his object of clearing his own name is so capably achieved that one easily loses sight of the fact that it was his object: his conscious exemplification of courtesy in victory seems, when it comes, like a disinterested act of spreading the courteous gospel, and Briana’s changed opinion of him incidental to the change it prompts in her. In fact Calidore achieves his personal aim here so subtly (so guilefully, one is tempted to say) that even to call attention to it might seem over-subtle were it not that subsequent episodes return insistently to the same themes. Already the review of the episode at the opening of canto two highlights the salient point, that not only the hero’s words but his deeds are “like enchantment” to “steale the hart away” (IV.ii.3). That is, Calidore’s very casting of himself in a morally exemplary role is a part of his winning rhetoric, and as such is subject to the same doubleness of perspective, whereby we could regard it either (as in Sidney’s poetics) as showing the power of virtuous example to inspire moral reform, or as an accomplished and self-interested piece of guile, a masterly use of ethos as a tool for winning favour.28 At any rate 27

28

View, 4, 9–11, 106, 121 and passim. The View is at pains to distinguish such extreme violence from the yet more extreme violence of genocide (95), which would make a tabula rasa of the land itself rather than its people; the Legend of Courtesy likewise aims at a clean slate in human terms. Sidney, Defence of Poetry, 32–33, 39–41, etc.; Quintilian, VI.ii.18 (cf. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 127–30). One might compare Irenius’s grasp, in View, 161, of the expediency of

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Self-Interpretation Beyond the Pale in Books Five & Six the question of personal interest is central to Book Six, because it is broadly insofar as the hero is seen by his “courteous lore” to serve a private advantage (as happens more markedly in his later wooing of Pastorella) that that lore comes to look less loftily gracious than underhandedly guileful. Again a comparable question can be put with regard to the desired “reformation” of Irish mores in the View. Is it seen as a selfless project for the benefit of the vanquished, or a selfish one on the victor’s part? Is it that the natives’ good opinion must be cultivated so as to be able to inspire ethical reform which will morally justify the violence of the conquest, or conversely that ethical reform is needed (in other words assimilation to the mores of the conqueror) so as to be able to foster the good opinion of the victor that will seal the conquest forever?29 In sum, is the planting not only of English dominion but of English civility a gracious policy or a guileful one? The Legend of Courtesy treats such questions not on either/or terms, but irreducibly as matters of interpretation. As Book Five suggests that there is no justice that from another perspective cannot be regarded as injury, Book Six proposes that there is no civility that could not plausibly be diagnosed as guile. Of course, the book does offer an ostensible basis for distinguishing the gracious from the guileful; but that basis consists in the same kind of problematical appeal to nature (albeit translated from the political to the ethical sphere) seen in Book Five. Two principal versions of that appeal feature here, respectively the chivalric caste ethos of virtue by heredity (if one is true to one’s high, “courteous”, and “franke” nature, one is ipso facto not villainous nor guileful), and the pastoral ethos of virtue by environment (if one lives close to nature, simply and naturally, one is ipso facto not artificial, sophisticated, guileful). Both valorise plainness and stigmatise duplicity, but the mutually contradictory terms on which they do so is emphasised, so that as in Book Five the juxtaposition of opposed versions of the naturally right puts each in question. Moreover, each version of courtesy shows strong signs of internal contradiction as well. In the case of chivalric courtesy, the notion that virtue is “franke” and vice duplicitous (VI.vii.1) is continually undermined, both by regular duplicity amongst ostensibly virtuous characters and sometimes brutally frank behaviour of vicious ones, and by a tendency for the very definitions of heroic courtesy and of villainous guile to merge. When even Turpine can be described as “comming courteously / To cloke the mischiefe, which he inly ment” (VI.vii.4), what we see is something more destabilising than a mere impersonation of true virtue (like Archimago’s impersonation of holiness), because the

29

coupling “mild persuasions” with the exemplary force of “sober life and conversation” in converting the Irish. View, esp. 157–59. Cf. Louis A. Montrose, “Spenser’s Domestic Domain: Poetry, Property, and the Early Modern Subject”, Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 117–18.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene virtue itself has been defined in terms of being able to project such an ethically winning persona. Meanwhile, the notion that nobility is inborn is deeply undermined by the episode of the bear-baby, where not only is the opposite asserted by the surrogate hero Calepine, agreed to by Matilda, and borne out by the story (VI.iv.35–38), but the accepted discourse of virtue by natural inheritance is represented as an “vnder hand” fiction (VI.iv.38), cooked up precisely to stop a gap in nature. Similarly with pastoral courtesy, a counterexample in the person of the hero himself calls the natural basis of the whole ethical scheme into doubt. Calidore successfully emulates pastoral lowliness not by dropping but intensifying his reliance on the artful “courteous guize” that Pastorella rejects when it is seen openly (VI.ix.35), using his courtly sophistication to mask itself as the humble plain naturalness that the pastoral genre valorises. His behaviour accordingly reminds us of the similar artificiality of the whole pastoral literary convention, and of the plain style of rhetoric with which it is closely associated, even in the places where we are not granted such a candid look behind its exquisitely cultivated guise of naturalness; we are reminded, for example, that even where we seem to see the poet himself, humbly displaying inside his heroic poem his own homely concerns where “all them plaine may see” (VI.x.24), what we are really seeing is no more than his pastoral persona, a painstakingly crafted poetic mask. Such glimpses of the duplicity that goes into framing an appearance of naturalness and plainness, whether chivalric or pastoral in kind, raise moral qualms to the effect that the so-called virtue the book ostensibly celebrates may actually be indistinguishable from the vices it decries – qualms given a concrete purchase in the book by its increasingly tempting us to picture Calidore not as the antithesis but the double of the Blatant Beast he pursues, to the point where he seems to be not so much chasing it down as himself introducing it into each territory he enters (VI.ix.4–5).30 Those qualms, moreover, touch not only the book’s particular content but the poem’s overall aim and technique; for in unpacking the doubtful motives and methods of ethical reformation as such, The Faerie Queene directs potentially devastating scrutiny at its own announced didactic project.31 But it seems to me that the poem, rather than dissolving at the end into self-doubt, is reflecting directly on its own means in order to home in on the cardinal point of contention in any attempt to establish moral authority, acknowledging the openness of all ethical discourse to being construed as a mere art of guile precisely in order to ask urgently under what conditions such discourse might yet be morally justified. For example, when Calepine and Matilda concoct an “vnder hand” story to give Sir Bruin the natural heir he requires, they do so to serve what seems a

30 31

Cf. Cain, Praise in The Faerie Queene, 172, and J. Miller, “The Courtly Figure”, 58. J. Miller, “The Courtly Figure”, 55–56 and passim.

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Self-Interpretation Beyond the Pale in Books Five & Six morally good end, namely preserving beyond the end of Bruin’s life the peaceful realm he has won and defended from the giant Cormorant; just at the point, then, where we are made to see clearly that the chivalric ethical discourse of natural, inherited virtue may be no more than a convenient and even a guileful fiction, we are also made to ask if a discourse’s being a guileful fiction is inevitably equivalent to its being morally reprehensible. That question receives its most nuanced exploration in the last third of Book Six. Through canto nine and most of canto ten, it is made to seem that the counterfeit shepherd Calidore is the problem, a damaging courtly intruder into a charmed circle of natural virtue and inspired poetry. But latterly his duplicitous nature as a knight in shepherd’s clothing, “armed priuily” beneath his innocuous “shepheards weeds” (VI.xi.36), appears in a different light, distinguishing him from the genuinely harmless shepherds who by virtue of their harmlessness are without resources to defend their pastoral idyll, not merely from his own minor disruption but from wrack and carnage at the hands of brigands. Meliboe’s naïve pastoral ethos, with its assumption that the lowly life of husbandry is happily beneath anyone’s coveting (VI.ix.21), is then subjected to a much more biting irony than that to which Calidore’s own intrusion puts it (VI.ix.19, 26), by the brigands’ despoiling him “of all he had” (VI.x.40), including at length his own life and the lives of his kin (VI.xi.18). So without glossing over the perilousness to the pastoral idyll of Calidore’s own qualities, the poem suggests how much more imperilled is a pastoral idyll devoid of them, if planted like Sir Bruin’s pale of civility amid a savage wilderness where the devouring Cormorant is always at the door. Moreover, even prior to the brigands’ appearance, Calidore’s artful qualities intrude on the pastoral idyll not as wholly alien to it but only as a more effective vehicle for the acquisitive self-interest that already motivates its lovers. (Thus Coridon’s long-standing love suit is described metaphorically as an investment of labour in pursuit of profit and market share, terms more befitting the nascent capitalism of actual sixteenth-century pastoralism than the conventions of the literary version [VI.ix.38,40]). To that extent Meliboe’s ethos of eschewing competition in favour of contentment in one’s original station can be seen as a naïve illusion in respect not only to the world outside but to the pastoral community itself. Calidore’s adoption of that ethos as a workable fiction, a set of house rules by which he is obliged to compete, is in that sense no sophisticated subversion of it but true to its nature from the outset. That is not quite to say that behind the mask of its naïve self-image the society of the shepherds is just like the wilderness at its borders, a mere war of all against all; rather that the pastoral ethos, whether or not consciously recognised as a fiction, governs interactions amongst those who accept its conventions in a way that both restricts and creates opportunities for self-advancement, turning what in the absence of rules would be a savage war into a civilised game.32 32

I mean ‘a game’ not in the frivolous sense (though an air of frivolity can be one of its

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene The book’s critique of different ethical systems’ claims to be rooted in nature leaves in place, then, a more ambivalent notion of their being at bottom products of art, generic conventions which it is dangerous to take naïvely for granted but which can nevertheless have genuinely civilising properties where their writ can be made to run. That vision suggests a basis whereon a given social and moral order’s ultimate arbitrariness – its lack of evident transcendent foundations to distinguish it from rival bases of moral interpretation – might prove no fatal objection to its validity as a system of civil selfinterpretation, agreed or imposed. At the same time it gives a new lease of life to the notion of poetry as a privileged moral educator, even in the absence of a universally agreed idea of the good towards which its inspiring exemplary force should be directed, by suggesting that the generic codes of poetry might themselves be the very substance of civility, the ethical fictions by which we interpret and inspire ourselves and each other insofar as we are social beings at all. In particular, the chivalric and pastoral genres, respectively, encode and culturally valorise the very energies of military force and rhetorical guile, making them available to ethics as prestigious forms of civility. Thus by a long circuit we return to the dual concerns of Book One with identifying versions of the chivalric and humanist codes of behaviour infused with grace; but we do so from a wider perspective which admits that grace itself is so far from having an evident supernatural sanction that its capacity to “steale mens hearts away” (VI.i.2) may spring not from God but from guile. The sixth book’s turning its attention to the nature of the ethical fashioning that is the poem’s own declared aim, and its attendant interest in poetic genres themselves as bearers of the ethical codes by which we interpret ourselves, can make it feel at times like a solipsistic exercise in poetry about poetry. In contrast, especially, to the preceding book’s outward movement from its chivalric romance vehicle towards extrinsic topical reference, here it can seem that the fictive medium is itself the message. For example, the book in its opening cantos conjures a strong sense of not only the action but also the moral interpretation taking place within an environment of naïve chivalric romance, according to standards of courtesy familiar to readers of Chrétien de Troyes.33 Hence it can seem (a reading the poem all but explicitly proposes) as if Spenser, recoiling from the brutalities of political engagement in Book Five,

33

conventions – cf. Montrose, “Of Gentlemen and Shepherds”, 443, 451–52) but in the sense of playing for keeps. See also Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 162–63. The sense of being thrown back into a world of pre-allegorical chivalric romance is fostered not only by personal and geographical proper names belonging to that tradition (esp. VI.ii.28–30), but by strong evocation of its landscape (a wilderness dotted with the keeps of autonomous lords), its plot-motifs (the ‘evil custom’ of shaming knights and ladies, the desire of a worthy squire to attain knighthood), and above all its ethos (of obedience to a sworn lord, succour to ladies, right behaviour to social superiors and inferiors). The poem’s interior moralisations, by characters and narrator, are now overwhelming on this territory, as if its ‘moral sense’ consists now simply in an interpretation according to the literal chivalric code.

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Self-Interpretation Beyond the Pale in Books Five & Six retreats here into a golden world of the imagination, letting allegory itself lapse in favour of poetry that simply is what it seems to be. That impression is intensified by the later retreat-within-a-retreat into the golden-age fantasy of the pastoral genre.34 But really the fashioning here, in answer to Book Five’s harshness, of an idealised and conspicuously fictitious bygone age builds directly on the fifth book’s enquiry into the way the political will generates self-obscuring fictions of naturalness rooted in an imaginary past. It is only that here we see the self-interpretative (or self-fictionalising) process extended from the naturalising of the polis to the naturalising of its ethos, from the fashioning of outward political to the fashioning of inward ethical legitimacy. In particular, as Louis Montrose notes, the pastoral genre had already become in Spenser’s poetic career a device for naturalising and moralising his and his fellow-planters’ presence in Ireland as expropriators and settlers of its land, a device whose show of relating to private concerns as against his public, epic role as a Virgil to Elizabeth’s Augustus occludes the actual continuity between the domestic and political aspects of his desire for a peaceful settlement in Ireland.35 In the Legend of Courtesy the topical pertinence of the pastoral setting is less explicitly signposted than in Colin Clouts Come Home Again or the Mutability Cantos; but it is felt finally with great force, at the moment when the pastoral settlement turns out like Spenser’s Kilcolman estate and the Munster colony at large to be precariously sited with a hostile nation on its very “border” (VI.x.39). The brigands’ obliterating raid not only plays out the soon to be realised fears of the colonists, but does so in a generic context that artfully represents as innocent and indigenous what stands to be destroyed, so inciting moral shock at the prospect of its ruin. In a Spenserian variation on pastoral poetry’s characteristic masking of the labour that produces culture as a spontaneous product of nature, the depicting of Colin Clout’s domestic domain as pastoral idyll abstracts the settlers’ desire for peace from the prior act of forcible pacification which that peace presupposes.36 In that sense the scene of pastoral contentment is for Spenser the ethical counterpart to the political fiction that is Irena, a naturalised image of the peaceful moral order aimed at by the conqueror, both as belated moral justification of

34

35

36

For a selection of positive and negative views of the poet’s apparent retreat from court politics and topical allegory, see Hamilton, ed., The Faerie Queene, 621. Cf. Montrose, “Spenser’s Domestic Domain”, 95–96. Montrose, “Spenser’s Domestic Domain”, 105–08, 119. As against Eva Gold, “Spenser the Borderer: Boundary, Property, Identity in A View of the Present State of Ireland and Book 6 of The Faerie Queene”, Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 14 (1993), 110–12, and Maley, Salvaging Spenser, 112–13, who, acceding to the received view of Book Six as aiming to define a realm apart from the court-centred politics of Book Five, see Spenser’s domestic sphere in Ireland as another site on which he increasingly seeks autonomy from royal authority. Cf. Montrose, “Of Gentlemen and Shepherds”, 445–46.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene the conquest and as guarantor of the inner contentment of the conquered in their newly settled lot. It is that finessing of political issues into ethical ones that is powerfully abetted by the book’s repeated use of a topos of retreat from an ambivalent public world into cultivation of a wholesome private one, a device that makes not only Calidore and Colin but the poem itself seem to have stepped back from the blood and guile of politics into a refreshing realm of poetic innocence, until such time as the intrusion into the idyll of those ‘outside’ forces morally obliges the hero to respond with blood for blood and guile for guile. But what seems a retreat into a world apart is really a sustained pursuit of the same themes beyond where mere political force could go, across the threshold of the individual interpreting mind. The very fact that Book Six is generally found to be more likeable than its predecessor, in particular the imaginative sympathy attracted to it by its repeated use of a topos of retreat into cultivation of a private world, is to that extent an effect of its working on our interpreting minds in a new and more inward way, by appealing for our assent in ethical rather than baldly political terms. Its attraction is a version of the effect Calidore has on Briana, in that it relies on the aim of inward ethical cultivation seeming to displace rather than to supplement the prior aim of morally vindicating outward compulsion – on our losing sight of the connection between the two phases of the story. The Legend of Courtesy, then, is playing a double game, at once exposing the basis in art of various systems of natural ethics, and artfully investing its own ethical commitments in just such a naturalising fiction. But the complex movement by which it graces its own aims with an air of naturalness even while showing the basis of such graces in guile, serves Spenser’s complex and unstable historical situation in a way neither mere polemics nor mere propaganda could have done. For he had a strong personal interest in encouraging critique of the ethical mythologies that gave an air of legitimacy to the established Old English and Gaelic aristocracies in Ireland, but not in such a way as to make those myths unavailable for fashioning a new ethical legitimacy for the New English administration and settlement. His solution is first to put all claims of natural legitimacy on a similar standing, as works of art (or guile – it is a matter of interpretation), then to ask which of such cultural works of art might be morally justified, and to prejudice the answer in favour of those that coincide with his own interests as a poet and a planter. That is not quite as simple as to say that the solution is a mere cheat; rather that the poet musters all his artful (or guileful) powers, towards making the writ of a modern English ethos – of the Tudor new man – run in Ireland, an aim he regards as having a genuinely civilising potential, compared with the brutalising fragmentation and upheaval of Ireland as he knows it.37 To that end he enlists the cultural 37

Cf. Spenser, View, 145–49.

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Self-Interpretation Beyond the Pale in Books Five & Six prestige of chivalric heroism and pastoral simplicity, investing both in a new aristocracy of merit corresponding to the English planters who see themselves, like Calidore, as noble warriors turned humble stewards of the land, and ready at need to return to the noble exercise of arms. A natural legitimacy is claimed for the figure of this new aristocracy, but at the same time we see its real basis in art: despite all that is made of Calidore’s high birth, and finally of his wife’s too, in practice both depend for their standing on craft, be it Calidore’s “courteous lore”, or the poet’s conspicuous use of the resources of genre (the same ones the bear-baby story has already problematised) to produce a gentle birth for Pastorella like a rabbit out of a hat. Their story looks, in that sense, like another version of Colin Clout’s exalting himself and his “countrey lasse” to the standing of “Grace” (VI.x.25–26) by the authority of poetry alone. Thus the poet seizes the interpretative initiative from those with longer-standing claims, in a way calculated to absorb any slighting of his own arriviste standing, whether in the Irish landscape or in the ranks of English gentility, and indeed any wider slighting of the novelty of the regime under whose authority he stakes his own moral claim to all he has acquired. In the Legend of Courtesy, the moral prestige of chivalric and pastoral romance looks not to be assigned by nature, but to be a mobile prize of the military force and poetic guile which those genres respectively valorise, as well as the carrier of those genres’ potentially civilising power. Of course an ethical system that both imposes and maintains itself by the exercise of force and guile lies open to being interpreted as the very antithesis of what it interprets itself to be, precisely from the standpoint of any of the other possible ethical systems whose claims are incompatible with it and against which its force and guile are accordingly directed. If any ethical system’s writ is to run and its potentially civilising power to be realised, it must have the courage of its nature and convictions, stalwartly suppressing the noise of the other possible ethical systems that subvert its own claims to the core. It is that interpretative noise, with its potential to confuse and confute all systems, that is embodied in the Blatant Beast, “Which spake reprochfully, not caring where nor when”, “Of good and bad alike, of low and hie”, “Barking and biting all that him doe bate, / Albe they worthy blame, or cleare of crime” (VI.xii.27, 28, 40).38 But where in concrete terms must the force and guile, or virtue and grace, come from that are needed to keep the Beast in chains? The sixth book’s proem suggests an answer: they come respectively from a strongly centred state, to which all virtues “tribute backe repay as to their King”, and from an inspired and inspiring poetry, that can well “Into the mindes of mortall men . . . / And goodly fury into them infuse” (VI.Pr.7, 2). Each needs the other. A poet without state backing can like Colin Clout conjure imaginatively a dispen38

Cf. Kane, Spenser’s Moral Allegory, 192.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene sation of grace, but has not the power to defend its pale, whether a pale on the ground or the pale of his own poem, from any “mighty Peres displeasure” (VI.xii.41). The recognition or suspicion that Elizabeth will not stiffen her policy to support the forceful and guileful ‘civilising’ of Ireland casts the poem’s political and moral programme adrift as a necessarily absolutist project lacking a willing absolutist leader. Conversely, as is hinted by the Beast’s sparing “Ne Kesars . . . nor Kings” (VI.xii.28), a viable prince needs to command not only the instruments of violence, but likewise those of interpretative authority, which means the rhetorical resources of moral prestige, notably the chivalric and pastoral forms whereby her virtue may be celebrated in poetry. In not standing by her panegyrist’s project, it is implied, the queen more deeply does not stand by her own. Where Richard Helgerson sees, in Spenser’s failure to portray within his chivalric story “a powerfully centralised and absolutist governmental order”, implicit advocacy of “a partially refeudalised English polity”,39 I see rather an implicit lament for the queen’s failure to seize with him the interpretative initiative from the traditional custodians of the chivalric ethos, on behalf of the resolute consolidation of a divided nation. Spenser represents himself at the end of The Faerie Queene as a Calidore manqué, condemned, for want of an undivided royal will to back the very moral agents it has authorised, to see disorder rage “in each degree and state” (VI.xii.40), and starkly facing the hopelessness of trying, as Calidore at first ineffectually tried with Briana, to persuade by words alone.

39

Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 48, 54.

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Conclusion

The Mutability Cantos and the Limits of Self-Interpretation

O

N REACHING the Mutability Cantos, we seem to have come full circle iback to the first book’s procedure of grounding moral and political self-interpretation in a revealed metaphysical order. But here even “heauens eternall towers” (VII.vi.20) figure as the rhetorical construct of a usurping regime asserting after the fact its own myth of aboriginal legitimacy; and though behind the dubious basis of Jove’s jurisdiction deeper grounds of judgement are asserted, avenues exist for the powerful scepticism directed at Jove’s authority to cascade onto them as well, much as the scepticism directed at Cynthia’s authority soon cascades onto Jove’s (VII.vi.12, 18).1 For the interpretation of the world that confirms Jove “in his imperiall see” (VII.vii.58–59) appears to seize on the self-confuting parts of Mutability’s argument (her invoking of seasonal and stellar rounds), but to ignore her potent polemics (“But you Dan Ioue, that only constant are, / . . . Where were ye borne? [VII.vii.53]2), so as finally only to echo, albeit in impersonal terms, the patently contrived metaphysical justification Jove has ventured for his own sovereignty (VII.vii.48). The poem, by not just participating in, but re-enacting as a story event, the Platonic allegorising of Homeric myth that raised the Olympians from conquerors and de facto rulers into eternal hypostases in a metaphysical order, draws the act of allegorical exaltation into the web of narrative motivations, and makes the Platonic version of the facts seem partial in every sense. The scepticism thus fostered in readers regarding Nature’s authority in making her judgement is nurtured by the narrator, who is likewise inclined to “way” her reading and find it wanting (VII.viii.1). And pursuing that sceptical line of thought back through the cantos, one re-encounters at the start what

1 2

Cf. Jacqueline T. Miller, Poetic License: Authority and Authorship in Medieval and Renaissance Contexts (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 102–09. Cf. Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 173.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene the intervening story makes it hard not to forget: that at the outset Nature, far from being depicted as an impartial judge between Mutability and Jove, was paired with Jove as one of Mutability’s principal antagonists, whose laws she had to break in order to establish her own sphere of influence (VII.vi.5).3 From that point of view, Nature’s later silencing of the Titaness can look as self-interested and disingenuous as Jove’s claim to be an unmoved mover behind time’s flux, a judicious muzzling of the fact that her own putatively “good estate, and . . . meet order” is really “accurst” with unrecoverable loss (VII.vi.5–6). Thus the poem, so far from rescuing Jove’s unmoved-mover rhetoric from the partisan use to which he puts it and setting metaphysical discourse on a more stable footing, gradually opens up the prospect that there may be no point stable enough – no court high enough – to serve as a certain basis of interpretation, nor any moral ordering of experience not subject to being construed as an attempt to impose a partisan fiction on the world. One effect of Mutability’s assault on Jove’s de jure authority is to direct attention to the pragmatic mechanisms by which his authority is actually asserted, namely a daunting synthesis of raw might (VII.vi.29–30) with artful command of a genre of kingly bearing, whose generic resources include but are not limited to the rhetoric of rightful authority that the Titaness principally disputes. Others include ostentatious show of mercy (VII.vi.30–31), the co-opting of insurrection as striving for position in the existing order (VII.vi.32–34), and the bold use of “his soueraine throne” (the very thing to which his right is denied) as nonetheless a potent prop for assuming “grace and Maiestie” (VII.vi.24–25). Similarly, one effect of the poem’s encouraging a sceptical response to Nature’s judgement is to redirect attention to the pragmatic mechanisms by which her authority is asserted: away, that is, from the obvious assumption that what she is or speaks for is Nature, to something obvious at another level of perception, namely that what she is, is a fictitious character to whom, by a variety of means including but not limited to her name, the poet gives an apparently natural authority in speaking. Those other means consist in a daunting synthesis of the topoi of transcendent brightness, incomprehensibility and inexpressibility, with a veil of allusions to poetic and Scriptural auctoritas (VII.vii.5–9), whose combined effect is almost insuperably to distance the voice that speaks from Nature’s throne from the poet who writes its lines.4 Calling attention to those devices means calling attention to the rhetorical surface that gives the character Nature her appearance of transcendent depth: to the way, for example, that her appearance of inaccessibility to critical 3 4

Cf. Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 173, on the importance of enforced forgetting in the Mutability Cantos. Cf. John Guillory, Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 58–59. But note that Guillory, 62, nonetheless sees “Nature’s authority” as “beyond dispute”; cf. J. Miller, Poetic License, 109–15.

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Conclusion scrutiny is maintained by diverting that scrutiny onto a discussion of her poetic lineage, which by trailing away bathetically into a frustrated pseudoscholarly regress behind the form she assumes in this poem, potentially mocks the very topos of unknowability it is used to support, and reminds us that she is finally no more than a conventional image of the poetic art which she gives the impression of standing behind. Much as in Book Five Mercilla exemplifies not Mercy but the self-effacing sovereign power whose public persona is Mercy, here the character Nature personifies not Nature per se but the self-effacing Art whereby any system of moral or political interpretation lays claim to natural authority. She is, as it were, the general case, appeal to whose authority exemplifies every attempt (be it conservative with Jove, or revolutionary with Mutability) to ground self-interpretation in a natural and original state of affairs behind the brute facts of history and the present distribution of power. At that level of generality, the fact that Nature is found to favour Jove indicates not that such appeals to nature better serve conservative than revolutionary purposes (we have seen a counterexample in Artegall’s revolutionary installation of Irena), but that by such an appeal revolution interprets itself as conservative, striving to install itself with the same backdated permanency claimed by its rival. It is because she thus relies on another version of the myth that there is something at the source that definitively establishes what is right for all time, that Mutability is doomed to seek her decay by her desire (VII.vii.59). It is not that her arguments unwittingly prove Nature’s authority over her, but that they unwittingly conjure that hypothetical authority in the act of trying to establish their own. However transparently fictitious Jove’s claim to rightful rule, no outside has been found to Jove’s mythopoeic method of defining right. Something similar may be said of the cantos’ narrator, who though almost as sceptical of the particular claim to interpretative authority made by the character Nature as Mutability is of Jove’s, appears doomed even in pursuing an alternative basis of judgement merely to replicate the kind of thought that generated the figure of Nature in the first place. The roots of his dilemma are detectable in the very genesis of the story, which as an aetiological myth seeking to explain the world’s present state by reference to a pure aboriginal condition which has since been disrupted, already invokes the same pattern of thinking that all the story’s main characters rely on. Similarly the Arlo-hill digression is launched by the same kind of mythical thinking that ventures to explain present disorder as the ruin of a fictitious original time when all went according to Nature. What is more, in both cases the stories highlight in their details the doubtfulness of the interpretation thereby placed on the past. Thus the narrator promises in his cosmological story to tell how Mutability “first . . . did pervert . . . all the worlds faire frame (which none yet durst / Of Gods or men to alter or misguide)” (VII.vi.5); but what he calls the original dispensation turns out to be Jove’s derivative one, and what he calls the first disruption of order turns out to be Mutability’s challenge that not she but Jove is the 209

Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene original disrupter. Implicitly, an entirely different aetiological account of human misery from the one the narrator was meant to be giving suggests itself: that the Golden Age may have ended not with Mutability’s usurpation but (as per the Hesiodic myth) with Jove’s, and hence that he, not she, may be the scapegoat we are looking for. Likewise in the pastoral interlude, we are promised the picture of a Golden Age, in this case Ireland’s prior to its conquest, when still it “florished in fame / Of wealths and goodnesse, far aboue the rest / Of all that beare the British Islands name” (VII.vi.38). But what is shown to us in practice is the picture of a time when Cynthia was ‘already’ the “soueraine Queene” of an idyllically peaceful Munster (VII.vi.38), or in other words an idealised image of the pacified domain at which the New English planters aspired, projected backwards in time as a mythical state prior the violence that was inseparable from it in reality. Again there is an implicit doubling of interpretative possibilities: Ireland’s present misery is due either to the successive waves of English invasion, or to the successive waves of Irish resistance; one may choose whichever imaginary Golden Age and whichever scapegoat one wishes, for the myth is inherently reversible. Certainly we cannot expect objectivity from the narrator, whose supposed authority, described as deriving to him from Muses whose own authority comes from their “soueraine Sire” (VII.vii.1), manifestly is tied in to the very network of Jovian (and hence Cynthian) power whose version of events the cantos set out to tell.5 All of this, however, is still only a fictional rendering of the problem as compared with the view from the “vnperfite” eighth canto, which alone reveals the full extent to which the Mutability Cantos are bound to the kind of thinking whose unsatisfactoriness they probe. In one sense what the poem’s closing stanzas express is an intense yearning to break free from mythical explanations, in favour of a genuinely authoritative vision, however deferred. But at the same time they demonstrate how even that yearning articulates itself as yet one more imaginative positing of a just and “stedfast” basis of interpretation, securely prior to all that is “fading” and “fickle” (VII.viii.1–2). As in the Legend of Holiness, then, the quest for an escape from a fictitious mode of ethical thinking that seeks to explain present evils by reference to an intruder into a supposed earlier purity leads in practice only to a rhetorically heightened version of the same mode of thought, whose aim is to distinguish itself from its own simulacra. But if in Book One the Christian version of the scapegoating procedure seemed to attain such a distinction through a decisive moment of grace that anchored it in another order of being securely outside the phantasmal projections of the fallen self, here the moment of grace figures only as an object of aspiration, perhaps not to be attained within the bounds of temporal existence. Moreover, the very possibility of differentiating such another order of being from the projections of the human imagination is 5

Cf. Guillory, Poetic Authority, 62–66.

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Conclusion pre-emptively put in question throughout the cantos, as their aetiological myth-making repeatedly gestures towards embracing even the Christian myths of original order and transcendent authority. The associations of Mutability’s story with that of the Fall (VII.vi.6), and of Nature with the glorified Christ (VII.vii.6–7), threaten to pour the cascade of the poem’s scepticism onto another level, putting us within view of the final question whether even the “Sabbaoth God” supposedly solidly planted behind all acts of interpretation, “Vpon the pillours of Eternity” (VII.viii.2), might only be troped into that position by art. The envoi simultaneously ventures a pious selfinterpretation for its narrator, and lays that self-interpretation before us for critical scrutiny; and what that scrutiny brings to light, as for the heroes of the various books of The Faerie Queene, is not the failings of the particular character we call the narrator, but the limits of the system of ethical thought at his disposal – indeed the possibility that for us there may be no outside to such thinking. As for where such a conclusion leaves Spenser’s project of seeking a viable basis for moral and political thought, the answer would seem to be, in a quintessentially Spenserian situation. For the “vnperfite” canto that tunes The Faerie Queene’s metaphysical scepticism to its highest pitch, at the same time brings together in a kind of discordia concors two of the chief themes of its moral and political thinking, which are also two of the chief forms in which the scapegoating motif expresses itself in the poem. The first is the moment of conviction of sin, wherein a person discerns within the shifting sands of his temporal existence the need for a total relaying of the foundations of ethical life. The second is the impulse to genocide, to finally ‘solving’ the problems of history by wiping the slate clean and laying a foundation in a truly new beginning6 – an impulse the poem finally renders expressible as a positive wish rather than a denied imputation, partly by attributing it to the unimpugnable authority of God and giving it the culturally sanctioned form of the Last Judgement, partly by imaginatively visiting it not just on ‘them’ but on ‘us all’, and in such a way that ‘we’ stand to survive the conflagration, albeit in a new form. The resultant hybrid resembles something actually advocated in A View of the Present State of Ireland, and whose two parts, political and ethical, are mimed in the Legends of Justice and Courtesy respectively: namely an act of conquest so thorough that the conquered can be treated as a tabula rasa for inscribing a new moral order. What we see here, insofar as it is imaginatively transferred from God’s putative agents into the hands of God himself, might be called either the disowning of that act, or its apotheosis. The note of the closing stanzas, however, is neither one simply of relief from, nor of triumph over, the prior moral situation, but rather of longing for

6

On the significance of genocide in the Mutability cantos, see E. Fowler, “The Failure of Moral Philosophy in the Work of Edmund Spenser”, 68.

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Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene both. As throughout The Faerie Queene, the poem’s world remains suspended at the end between two possibilities both continually deferred: the relinquishing of the quest, and its decisive completion.7 But that suspended position now takes on a look of inescapability. Like the egalitarian giant, who though he holds the scales of judgement is doomed for want of an Archimedean point outside the world never truly to weigh it (V.ii.30), The Faerie Queene is condemned never to find outside its ethical quests a truly stable point from which they can once and for all be judged. Nevertheless, to represent that failure is a great achievement of the poem’s “this and that” allegorical technique, whereby events and interpretations are portrayed as coexisting, however uneasily, in a single imaginary world. For by that technique it renders visible the dilemma of inhabiting a world in which interpretation is never from an Archimedean point outside the world interpreted, and in which, therefore, there is no uniquely privileged point from which the moral ordering of the world may begin. In such a world, the poem suggests, every act of interpretation must instead begin from within a historical milieu of contestable grounds, and so must always be, in that interminably problematic sense, an act of self-interpretation.

7

Cf. J. Miller, Poetic License, 117–20.

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221

INDEX absolutism 75–76, 86–92, 98, 102, 120–21, 143, 145, 195–96, 206 abstractions 40–42 see also personified abstraction Acrasia 9n24, 154, 156 Addison, Joseph 40, 43–45, 126 allegory see also exemplification, parable, personification, typology incidental 34–38, 44–46 kinds of (“this and that” vs. “this for that”) 17–38, 40, 44, 46–47, 49 status of (authorial/authorised vs. critical/imposed) 4–16, 30–34 violence of 15–19, 22–24, 50–52 Alma 25–26, 125–26, 128, 145, 164 Alpers, Paul 57, 101 Amavia 153 Amazons 191 see also Radegund Amidas 185–87 Amoret 170, 172, 174–82 Amyot, Jacques 118, 120 anarchy 161, 163, 189 Angela 165–66, 171, 173, 177–78, 194 Aquinas, Thomas 17–18, 20n22, 22 Archimago 52, 67–69, 71–73, 76, 80, 93–94, 103, 109, 111–14, 123–25, 128–30, 137–39, 144, 158, 199 Archimedean point 212 Ariosto, Ludovico 5n10, 6, 29–30, 74, 87, 101 Arlo Hill 209 Art(h)egall 52, 164–65, 168, 170, 172, 174–75, 178, 181–82, 184–97, 209 Arthur 11–13, 36–37, 48–49, 88, 103, 112, 114–15, 125–27, 129–30, 132, 145, 149, 155, 159–60, 162, 164, 167–68, 170, 172, 173n13, 175, 193 Ascham, Roger 77–78 Astraea 194

Ate 177–78 atheism 139–41 Athens 129 Auerbach, Erich 17, 19, 21, 23–24, 33 Augustine of Hippo 17–23, 31 bards 91, 107–08, 119–22 Bead-men 49–50 Bear Baby 200, 205 Belge 193–94 Belphoebe 30–31, 36–37, 41–42, 168, 170 Berger, Harry, Jr. 25, 32, 74, 93–96, 98–106, 108–09, 114, 116, 122, 144, 153 Bersuire, Pierre 15 see also Ovide Moralisé Bible 5, 8, 17–19, 78, 109 see also Geneva Bible, Rheims New Testament Colossians 23, 133n23 Corinthians 138n31 Ephesians 26n38, 78, 133n23 Genesis 20 Hebrews 22 Jonah 7–8, 20 Mark 23 Matthew 7–8, 20–21, 26, 78, 126 Revelation 7, 78, 142 Romans 133n21 & n23, 134, 138n31 Timothy 26n38 Blandamour 178–80 Blatant Beast 194, 200, 205–06 Boethius 4 Boiardo, Matteo 87 Bonfons 192 Bower of Bliss 149, 151, 155–57 Bracidas 185–87 Braggadocio 171 Briana 197–98, 204, 206 Brigands 203 Britain, Britons 159–60, 164–65, 168, 171, 173

223

Index Britomart 12, 35, 37, 149, 152, 164–82, 184, 190–92, 195–96 Bruin 200–01 Brutus 159, 171, 173n13 Bunyan, John 16, 24–25, 40, 42 Burghley, William Cecil, Lord 157 Burrow, J. A. 34–35, 47 Busyrane 172–73 Caelia 78 Calepine 200–01 Calidore 196–206 Calvin 23n27, 79–84, 110n51, 119 Cambel 174, 180 Cambina 180 Camden, William 90n46 Canacee 180 Catholicism 7n16, 75–85, 91, 102, 124, 151, 157 Cave of Mammon 155–57 Cecil, William see Burghley censorship 99–100, 105–06 chivalric code 27–29, 68, 70, 74–78, 84–89, 94, 101–02, 114–15, 153, 165–66, 197–201, 205 chivalric romance 26–29, 63–64, 68, 76–78, 82, 85–89, 101–02, 135n27, 202–05 Chrétien de Troyes 202 Christine de Pisan 27–29 Cistercians 75 Cleopolis 115–16, 138, 159 see also Fairy Court Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 5n9, 15, 44n17 Colin Clout 42, 200, 203–06 Colin Clouts Come Home Againe see under Spenser colonialism 150, 198–99, 203 Contemplation 75, 85, 92–93, 133–34, 137–38, 142–43, 149, 151, 164 conviction of sin 83, 197n26, 211 Coridon 201 Cormorant 201 Counter-Reformation 80 county Palatine 75n4, 90n47 Cromwell, Oliver ix Crudor 197–98 Cullen, Patrick 83 Cupid 37, 165

Cymochles 51–52, 153 Cynthia 207, 210 Cyrus the Great 117 Dante Commedia 9n22, 16–17, 19, 21–25, 33–34, 39, 50, 52 Convivio 4, 6, 9, 15–17, 19, 22, 24, 50 letter to Can Grande 22n25 Vita Nuova 15, 50 Deadly Sins 49 Dees, Jerome 57, 65n14 De Man, Paul 10 Derrida, Jacques 129–30 Desmond, Gerald Fitzgerald, Earl of 90n46 Despair 79, 81, 83, 86, 109–10, 112, 115, 119, 132–34 Detraction 52 didacticism 183, 200 Dixon, John 31 Donwallo 159–61 Dragon 34, 37, 64, 70, 86, 88, 93, 112, 116–17, 119, 133–37, 152 Dryden, John 31 Dudley, Robert see Leicester Duessa 52, 57, 64, 66–67, 69–70, 72, 76, 80–81, 83, 93–96, 103, 109, 111, 113–15, 123–25, 128–32, 137–38, 144, 177, 189–90, 195 Dwarf (Una’s) 66 Eden 20–21, 152 Egalitarian Giant 106, 186–88, 191, 212 egalitarianism 188–89 Eliot, T. S. 35 Elizabeth I vii, ix, 31, 41–42, 75, 86, 89–90, 98, 100, 102, 105, 118, 121, 137, 140–41, 158–60, 162, 173, 183–85, 189–90, 194–96, 203, 205–06 enargeia 141–42 England, English 76n4, 160–61, 164, 171, 173, 194, 199 Envy 52 epic 43–46 Epistle of Othea see Christine de Pisan Erickson, Wayne 9 Error 30, 59, 61–62, 68–71, 73, 84, 130, 136 Essex, Robert Devereux, Earl of 88–90

224

Index 116–18, 120, 125–30, 138, 145, 151–63, 166

Eudoxus 106n43, 117, 189 Everyman 40, 42 exemplification 17, 41–43, 47–53 Faerie Queene see under Spenser Fairy Court 52, 82, 108, 115–16, 137, 158, 166–67, 184, 195 see also Cleopolis Fairy Queen see Gloriana Falstaff 123 feudalism vii, 75–76, 87–92, 98, 102, 143, 206 Fidelia 109 Fidessa 67, 113 see also Duessa Fisherman 13 Fitzgerald, Gerald see Desmond Fletcher, Angus 25, 50 Florimell 11–13, 37, 167–68, 171, 178–80, 186–87 Forester(s) 11–13, 36 Francesca da Rimini 16–17, 24 Frazer, Sir James 128n11, 139n32 Frye, Northrop 4, 9, 101, 102n33, 123–24 Furor 26 Gaels 204 Garden of Adonis 149, 168–70 Garden of Eden see Eden Geneva Bible 6–8 see also Bible genocide 194, 198n27, 211 genre 45–46, 202–05, 208 see also chivalric romance, epic, pastoral Geoffrey of Monmouth 159n9 George, Saint 60, 97, 112, 116–18, 133 see also Redcross Knight Geryoneo 194 Glauce 165, 173 Gless, Darryl 83 Gloriana 30–31, 42, 72, 82, 85–88, 91, 93, 97–98, 100, 115, 118, 120–21, 133, 135–37, 140–41, 143, 151–52, 154, 157–58, 160, 164, 166–68, 172, 181, 183, 189, 193, 195 Golden Age 186, 210 Grantorto 185, 188 Greenblatt, Stephen vii, 101, 140 Grey, Arthur, Lord 184–85 Guile 184 Guyon 8, 12, 25–26, 47, 49, 51–52, 94,

Hamilton, A. C. 3, 30, 32, 59 Harvey, Gabriel 41 Hazlitt, William 31 Heale, Elizabeth 83 Helgerson, Richard 86–91, 206 Henryson, Robert 47 Hesiod 210 Hobbes, Thomas ix, 189, 201 Hobbinol 41 Holinshed’s Chronicles 161, 173n13 Hollander, Robert 33 Homer 4, 43–44, 45n18, 153n2, 207 Hooker, Richard 140 House of Holiness 26, 78, 85, 97, 109, 118, 137–39, 141, 158 House of Pride 26, 29, 41, 51, 57n1, 65, 67–68, 71–72, 80, 91, 93, 97–98, 108, 115, 120, 137, 141, 151, 195 House of Temperance 26, 125, 145, 149, 158–59, 163–64 Hughes, John 4n9, 31–32, 45–46 humanism 102, 110, 118, 144, 202 Hume, Anthea 62–63, 82–83 Hurd, Richard 5n10, 32n57 Ignaro 49 Ireland 41, 75, 76n4, 90, 100, 105–06, 121–22, 144, 163, 184, 194, 199, 203–06, 210 Irena 52, 184–85, 193–95, 197, 209 Irenius 90, 106n43 Isidore of Seville 41n7 isotyping 42 James VI of Scotland 161, 163 Johnson, Samuel 45 Jove 207–10 Justin (the historian) 117 Kames, Henry Home, Lord 40, 42, 44n15, 45–46 Kaske, Carol 170 Kilcolman 203 King, John 83 Kouwenhoven, Jan Karel 10

225

Index Langland, William 40 law Biblical (Old and New) 22–23, 29 natural 185–90, 192–93, 208 of the sea 185–87 Leicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of 88–90, 157 Letter to Raleigh see under Spenser Lewis, C. S. 13, 24–25, 30, 32 Livy 162 Lucifera 57n1, 67, 77, 91, 97–98, 106, 108, 119–21, 140–41, 143, 161 Luxon, Thomas 16, 20n19 McCabe, Richard 122n64, 194 MacCaffrey, Isabel 79–80 Machiavelli, Niccolò 77, 140–41, 161–63 Madsen, Deborah 27n42 Maley, Willy 195 Mallette, Richard 76 Malory, Sir Thomas 29n46, 76–78 Mammon 155–56 Marinell 165, 167–68, 170, 178, 187 Marlowe, Christopher 77n8, 140n36 Mary, Queen of Scots 189–90 master code 6, 10 Matilda 200–01 Medina 153–55 Melias, Sir see Quest of the Holy Grail Meliboe 201 Mercilla 189–90, 192, 209 Merlin 164–66, 168, 171, 173, 175, 181 miles Christi 26n38, 28, 86 militarism 153, 157, 202, 205 Miller, Jacqueline T. 94–98, 100, 108–09, 116, 144 Milton, John 40, 43–44, 46 Montrose, Louis A. 203 Mortdant 157 Morte D’Arthur see Malory Mount Acidale 149 Munera 188–89 Munster plantation 203, 210 Muses 210 Mutability 194, 207–11 narrator (of The Faerie Queene) 51, 60–67, 70, 84, 93, 95–97, 103, 112, 119–20, 171, 182, 207, 209–11

Nature 207–09, 211 Nelan, Thomas 80–81 Nelson, William 48, 58n5, 62–63 Neoplatonism see Platonism New English 75, 90, 204, 210 New Jerusalem 49, 116, 138–39, 141–42 new man (Pauline) 134–35, 138–39, 142–43, 197 new men (Elizabethan) 75, 90–91, 204 Numa 161–62 Occasion 26, 49 Old English 90, 204 old man (Pauline) 16, 133–34, 137–38 Orgoglio 49, 62, 72, 82–83, 93, 114–15 Orlando Furioso see Ariosto Ovide Moralisé 4, 7–8, 15–16, 24, 40 Padelford, F. M. 32, 57–59, 62–63, 71, 79–83 Palmer 26, 52, 86, 116–19, 152–54, 156 panegyric 107–09, 116–22, 197, 206 parable 20–21 Paradise Lost see Milton Paridell 167, 170, 178–79 Parker, Pauline 79, 82–83 pastoral 199–206, 210 Pastorella 199–200, 205 Patterson, Annabel 99–101, 104–07, 122, 188 Paul, Saint 16, 78, 134, 138n31 persona 42 personification 39–47, 49–50, 124, 135–36 see also personified abstraction personified abstraction 42, 47, 50, 126–28 Petrarch 6n13, 37n71 pharmakos 123–24, 128–30, 139 see also scapegoat Phedon 153–54 Piers Plowman see Langland Pilgrim’s Progress see Bunyan Platonism 4, 11, 149, 166–71, 207 Plutarch 118 poetic license 107, 120 Praise-Desire 125–26, 129, 132, 155 Protestantism 75–86, 90, 98, 101–02, 109–10, 115, 119, 121, 143, 145, 151, 157 Proteus 13, 167, 172, 181, 186–87 Psychomachia 24–25, 40

226

Index Puttenham, George 9, 40, 41n7 Pyrochles 49, 51–52, 153 Quest of the Holy Grail vii, 27–29, 34, 36–37, 40, 47, 74–77, 85, 125 Quilligan, Maureen 6–7, 32 Radegund 184, 190–93 Redcross Knight 26, 28–30, 34–37, 51–52, 57–145, 149, 151–52, 157–58, 164–66, 172, 184 relativism 91–92, 97–98, 106–08, 120–22, 180–81 republicanism vii, 195 Rheims New Testament 7n16, 80n16 Romance of the Rose 24, 40 Rome 168 Ruddymane 154 Ruskin, John 57, 62–63 Sansfoy 61–66, 68, 84, 131, 136 Sansjoy 51, 59, 62, 64–65, 67, 72, 131 Satyrane 170 Saxons 143, 173 scapegoat 96, 114, 123–45, 195, 210–11 Scudamour 172–73, 177, 179–80, 182 Shamefastness 26, 49, 126–29, 132, 155 Shepheardes Calender see under Spenser Shylock 123 Sidney, Sir Philip 117, 142, 198 Silberman, Lauren 154 Singleton, Charles 15, 19–22, 24, 33 Smith, Sir Thomas 75n4 Spenser, Edmund Amoretti 37n71 Colin Clouts Come Home Againe 203 Complaints 9n23 Faerie Queene (1590) viii, 35, 172–74, 181, 196 Faerie Queene (1596) viii, 99, 172–74, 182, 196 letter to Raleigh 3–5, 8–16, 26n38, 30, 32, 42, 48–52, 74, 85, 97, 112, 119–20, 127, 149–50, 174, 193, 195

Shepheardes Calender 6, 41–42 View of the Present State of Ireland 75n4, 90, 99–100, 105–09, 117–18, 120–22, 173n13, 185, 189, 198–99, 211 Speranza 109 stoicism 153, 157, 178 synecdoche 7 tabula rasa 198, 211 Talus 185, 188, 190, 194–95 Tasso, Torquato 4, 5n10, 15–16, 29–30, 87–89, 91 Telamond/Triamond 174, 180 Temple of Isis 190–92 Temple of Venus 149, 179–81 Teskey, Gordon 9n22, 10, 16–17, 126–27, 144 Theseus 70 Tillyard, E. M. W. 160–61 Timias 36–37, 168, 170 Troy, Trojans 168, 170–71, 173n13 Troynovant 168, 170, 173 Turpine 199 Tuve, Rosemond 26n38, 47 Tyndale, William 133n22 typology 7, 18, 42 Una 30, 36, 52, 61–63, 67–70, 82, 86, 88, 93–96, 103, 109–14, 124, 130–31, 133, 136, 172 Una’s Father 34, 36, 95, 137 Van Dyke, Carolynn 25, 50–51 Verdant 156 View of the Present State of Ireland see under Spenser Virgil 6n13, 33n62, 43, 45n18, 203 Wandering Wood 30, 70, 130 Whore of Babylon 7, 78 Wilson, Thomas 7n18 Wofford, Susanne Lindgren 25–27 Xenophon 117

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Studies in Renaissance Literature Volume 1: The Theology of John Donne Jeffrey Johnson Volume 2: Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry Studies in Donne, Herbert, Crashaw and Vaughan R. V. Young Volume 3: The Song of Songs in English Renaissance Literature Kisses of their Mouths Noam Flinker Volume 4: King James I and the Religious Culture of England James Doelman Volume 5: Neo-historicism: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History and Politics edited by Robin Headlam Wells, Glenn Burgess and Rowland Wymer Volume 6: The Uncertain World of Samson Agonistes John T. Shawcross Volume 7: Milton and the Terms of Liberty edited by Graham Parry and Joad Raymond Volume 8: George Sandys: Travel, Colonialism and Tolerance in the Seventeenth Century James Ellison Volume 9: Shakespeare and Machiavelli John Roe Volume 10: John Donne’s Professional Lives edited by David Colclough Volume 11: Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance Alex Davis Volume 12: Shakespearean Tragedy as Chivalric Romance: Rethinking Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and King Lear Michael L. Hays

Volume 13: John Donne and Conformity in Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit Jeanne Shami Volume 14: A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England Adam Smyth Volume 15: John Bunyan and the Language of Conviction Beth Lynch Volume 16: The Making of Restoration Poetry Paul Hammond Volume 17: Allegory, Space and the Material World in the Writings of Edmund Spenser Christopher Burlinson