Edmund Spenser

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In liuing colours and right hew: The Queen of Spenser's Central Books

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SOURCE: "In liuing colours and right hew: The Queen of Spenser's Central Books," in Critical Essays on Edmund Spenser, edited by Mihoko Suzuki, Prentice Hall International, 1982, pp. 168-82.

[In the following essay, Anderson analyzes the significance of the complex and often critical portrait of Queen Elizabeth in books III and IV of The Faerie Queene.]

Even in the 1590 Faerie Queene, Spenser's reverence for Queen Elizabeth is accompanied by a cautionary awareness of the temptations and dangers of queenly power and by a complementary awareness of the cost—the denial or exclusion of human possibilitiesCan ennobling Idea exacts of its bearer. The one is evident in the House of Pride and Cave of Mammon, and the other in the treatment of Belphoebe. The attainments of Una, the "goodly maiden Queene," are threatened demonically by their perversion in Lucifera, the "mayden Queene" of Pride, and parodied again in Book II by the verbally reiterative image of Philotime.1 Belphoebe, beautiful, inspiring, and goddesslike, is momentarily locked in comic encounter with Braggadocchio in Book II, an encounter which, though it leaves the worth of her ideal essentially untarnished, resembles another famous encounter between honor and instinct: between Hotspur's extravagant idealism, his "easy leap, / To pluck bright honor from the pale-fac'd moon," and Falstaff's unenlightened but earthy sense: "Can honor set to a leg?"2 Specifically aligned with Queen Elizabeth in the Letter to Ralegh and in the proem to Book III, the chaste Belphoebe is in human terms both an aspiration and an extreme, paradoxically both more and less nearly complete than ordinary mortals.

In the 1596 Faerie Queene, while still persuaded of the value of the queenly ideal, Spenser is more disillusioned—or at least less illusioned—with the real Queen and her court. In the notorious proem to Book IV, he complains openly of misconceived criticisms of The Faerie Queene emanating from Elizabeth's court and goes so far as to summon help from Eros for "that sacred Saint my soueraigne Queene." He urges "Venus dearling doue," a benign Cupid, to "Sprinckle" the Queen's "heart, and haughtie courage soften, / That she may hearke to loue, and reade this lesson often." Thus introduced by hope for improvement in queenly attitudes and by implied criticism of her present ones, Books IV to VI are bedeviled by recurrent images of revilement and public infamy: Ate, Slander, Malfont, Envy, Detraction, the Blatant Beast. Most of these glance at the Queen, the Queen's court, or events impossible to dissociate from the Queen without transforming her into a mythic ideal isolated from history-Cat best a hope or an unrealized promise but no longer, by any stretch of the epic imagination, a present reality. In the proem to Book VI—the beginning of The Faerie Queene's end—this is the route Spenser attempts, but with a trail of hesitation, bitterness, and painful reassessment still fresh behind him.

Despite recognition of the poet's cautionary awareness in Books I to III and despite his more open disappointment in Books IV to VI, we have been reluctant to admit their persistence and strength, especially as they touch the Queen. We rightly note the danger to a mere poet of criticizing his sovereign and the real power the cult of the Virgin Queen exerted over men's imaginations. Nothing in this paper denies these realities, but my argument considers them large designs in the poem's fabric rather than its whole cloth.

Reluctance to see the extent to which Spenser criticizes the Queen does him a particular disservice in Books III and IV. Here it obscures the relation of ideal or antique image to the present age, a relation of which the Queen is the measure throughout the poem, and thus it obscures the developing relation of Faerie to history and of fiction to life. Still more serious, to my mind, this reluctance leads us to pretend that the poet did not really mean certain lines or hear certain verbal ambiguities and, in short, was not fully sensitive to his own words or alert to their surrounding contexts.3 My present undertaking is to examine several passages in Books III and IV that involve verbal cruxes, the Queen, and the relation of present age to antique image. These passages indicate that Spenser's depiction of the Queen's bright image is more complexly shaded in Book III than is generally acknowledged and is in Book IV more critical, perhaps shockingly so. In Book IV, something of the nightmare image of the slanderous Beast who bites "without regard of person or of time" at the end of Book VI is already present and implicates the Queen.

I

In the proem to Book III, the poet observes a distinction between present and past and between truth and Faerie image that is absent from the proems to Books I and II, and without them, its significance could easily pass unnoticed. In the first of these proems, the living Queen, "Great Lady of the greatest Isle," is a "Mirrour of grace and Maiestie diuine," and the poem is a reflection, in effect itself a mirror, of "that true glorious type" of the Queen. In the proem to Book II, despite poetic play about the location of Faerie, the Queen is the living reflection of the "antique Image," and so the poem, or Faerie image, is a "faire mirrhour" of her "face" and "realmes." The first two proems present one continuous, unbroken reflection: the Queen reflects Divinity; like the Queen herself, the poem reflects the glorious origins, person, and reign of the living Queen.

Referring to the Queen's face, realms, and ancestry, the final stanza of Proem II offers an apology for the antique Faerie image that is in fact a confident justification of it:

The which O pardon me thus to enfold
In couert vele, and wrap in shadowes light,
That feeble eyes your glory may behold,
Which else could not endure those beames bright,
But would be dazled with exceeding light.

The dazzling brightness of the living Queen is enfolded in shadow to enlighten feeble eyes, enabling them to behold true glory. This veil reveals a single truth instead of obscuring it, and these shadows, unlike those in the second three books, do not splinter truth or transform its character. They do not make true glory truly fictive.

In the proem to Book III, the poem continues to be the Queen's mirror, and although she is now invited to view herself "In mirrours more then one"—that is, in Gloriana or in Belphoebe—both glasses are essentially virtuous and can be seen primarily as an outfolding of the good Queen rather than as a dispersion of her unity. But as I have noted elsewhere, in this proem the present embodiment also begins to vie with the antique image, living Queen with Antiquity, and, indeed, to challenge it.4 Uneasy nuances (not quite tensions) cluster around the word "living." In order to perceive the fairest virtue, chastity in this case, one "Need but behold the pourtraict of her [the Queen's] hart, / If pourtrayed it might be by any liuing art." The poet continues, "But liuing art may not least part expresse, / Nor life-resembling pencill it can paint … Ne Poets wit, that passeth Painter farre." Then comes a plea for pardon that recalls the one in the second proem:

More opaque than the "shadowes light" of Proem II, these shadows testify to the poet's "want of words" and wit more than they serve the purpose of revelation. The poem here becomes a slightly compromised "coloured show" that can only shadow the Queen's "glorious pourtraict" and tailor antique praises to present persons, a "fit" that sounds neither so natural nor so close as the continuity of bright reflections in Proems I and II. The poem becomes the glass through which the living sovereign's true portrait is somewhat obscurely seen.

The difference in tone and emphasis between Proems II and III might, I suppose, be attributed to an unusually severe onset of the modesty topos or, that failing, to one of Spenser's regrettable catnaps, this time right on the threshold of Book III. But if these dismissals of particular significance were adequate, the lines that directly follow Spenser's apology for "coloured showes" and "antique praises" would positively resonate with his shameful snoring. They refer to the depiction of Queen Elizabeth in Sir Walter Ralegh's Cynthia: "But if in liuing colours, and right hew, / Your selfe you couet to see pictured, / Who can it doe more liuely, or more trew … ?" When Spenser thus sets the "liuing colours" and "right hew" of his sovereign, Queen Elizabeth, against his own "colourd showes" and "antique praises," he introduces into the poem a far-reaching distinction between life and antiquity, historical present and mythic past, current truth and Faerie image. Spenser himself glosses and simultaneously reinforces the startling phrases "liuing colours" and "right hew" two lines later: living colors are "liuely" or lifelike, and the right hue is true-to-life or, more simply, "trew."

Referring a true and lively picture of the Queen to Ralegh's Cynthia, Spenser is unlikely to have meant a picture that is merely realistic or unembellished by art. Ralegh's fragmentary Ocean to Cynthia, much of which relates to Ralegh's imprisonment in 1592, a disgrace subsequent to publication of Book III, is the best indication of Cynthia's nature we have, and while Ralegh's voice in it is distinct, individual, and passionate, such highly artificial modes as the Petrarchan ("Such heat in Ize, such fier in frost") and the pastoral ("Vnfolde thy flockes and leue them to the feilds") are also much in evidence.5 The nostalgicCindeed, the bereaved-Cemployment of pastoral in Ocean to Cynthia suggests that the Shepherd of the Ocean's earlier versions of Cynthia, written in less desperate straits, might have been more conventional than less so.6 When Spenser writes of the living colors and right hue of Cynthia, he implies a portrayal that is less hieratic and allegorical but more contemporary and personal than his own. Such a portrayal as Ralegh's might be less universal and more ephemeral, but it belongs more truly to time.

Spenser's reference to Ralegh certainly does not discredit the Faerie image but does limit its authority unless that image itself can be expanded to embrace life more closely. The third proem provides a particularly apt introduction to a book in which time and eternity or present age and ideal image are not so smoothly continuous. Nothing quite like the "heauenly noise / Heard sound through all the Pallace pleasantly" at the betrothal of Una—a noise like the voices of angels "Singing before th'eternall maiesty, / In their trinall triplicities on hye"—reverberates through Book III, and no one quite like the brilliantly winged angel who succors Guyon materializes to rescue its heroes. In fact, the closest we get to an angel in this book is Timias' illusion that Belphoebe is one when he wakens from his swoon to find her ministering to his wounds: "Mercy deare Lord … what grace is this," he asks, "To send thine Angell from her bowre of blis, / To comfort me in my distressed plight?" (v. 35). And even he adds on second thought, "Angeli, or Goddesse do I call thee right?" thereby echoing Virgil's famous lines from Aeneas' meeting with Venus in the guise of Diana's maiden and avouching his perception that this angelic illusion originates in a more worldly pantheon than Una's "trinall triplicities."7

A blushing Belphoebe disclaims the angelic or godly status Timias imputes to her and declares herself simply a maid and "mortall wight" (36). Unfortunately her declaration is exactly what Timias might have longed, but should never have been allowed, to hear, for he falls irrevocably and irremediably in love with her. Belphoebe not only denies him a reciprocal love but also fails to comprehend or even to recognize the nature of his response to her. More than once the poet criticizes her failure as a "Madnesse" that saves "a part, and lose(s) the whole" (43, cf. 42).

While Timias languishes in love's torments, Belphoebe spares no pains to ease him, but still not comprehending his malady, "that sweet Cordiall, which can restore / A loue-sick hart, she did to him enuy," or refuse to give. Few readers or rereaders of these lines are prepared for those that follow, in which "that sweet Cordiall … that soueraigne salue" is suddenly transformed to "That dainty Rose, the daughter of her Morne," whose flower, lapped in "her silken leaues" she shelters from midday sun and northern wind: "But soone as calmed was the Christall aire, / She did it faire dispred, and let to florish faire" (51). As Donald Cheney has suggested, precise equivalents for these lines do not exist. "For her," he adds, "the rose is a rose, not a euphemism."8

But surely not just a rose, either. Belphoebe's dainty blossom soon opens into a flower strongly redolent of myth: "Eternall God," we learn, "In Paradize whilome did plant this flowre" and thence fetched it to implant in "earthly flesh." Soon we recognize the flower as the ur-rose that flourishes "In gentle Ladies brest, and bounteous race / Of woman kind" and "beareth fruit of honour and all chast desire" (52). A truly marvelous hybrid, this is none other than the rosa moralis universalis. It is hardly surprising that one of Spenser's eighteenth-century editors compared the rose to Milton's "Immortal Amarant" in the third book of Paradise Lost, "a flow'r which once / In Paradise, fast by the Tree of Life, / Began to bloom."9

In Belphoebe's transformation from uncomprehending nurse to vestal votaress of the rose, to antique origin and a fructifying virtue undifferentiated by time, person, or place, Timias is forgotten. Her specific relation to him will not align with the general moral statement into which it is transformed. Honor and chaste desire, the fruit of the flower, are indeed virtuous, but Timias' love is honorable in Book III, and his desire, if not virginal, is decent and pure and, in these senses, chaste. The general moral statement not only transcends the particular case but wholly misses it. Timias is one person these antique praises of the flower do not fit, and when we consider that Belphoebe's use of tobacco (v. 32) to heal Timias' wounds signals an obvious allusion to Ralegh, we might also think one "present person."

Having glorified the rose, the poet appears in no hurry to return from antique ideal to the person of Belphoebe. He directly addresses the "Faire ympes of beautie" and urges them to emulate their origin by adorning their garlands with "this faire flowre … Of chastity and vertue virginall." These "ympes" (shoots, scions) of beauty are preeminently the "Ladies in the Court," to judge both from the poet's present address and its resemblance to the final dedicatory sonnet of The Faerie Queen.10 Timias aside, the poet opts for the general application of the antique ideal to his present world of readers. But with the poet's final promise that the flower will not only embellish the ladies' beauty but also crown them "with heauenly coronall, / Such as the Angels weare before Gods tribunall," we might feel for a moment that we have somehow traveled beyond even Timias' first flush of illusion to a still simpler, purer, less earthly vision (53).

The poet's address to the ladies continues in the next stanza, where he now commends to their attention not the beatifying rose, upon which he has spent the mythmaking of the previous stanzas, but Belphoebe herself as true exemplar of its virtue. In effect he returns the rose, but now in its glorified form, to her person. Of particular note in the present stanza are the initial occurrences of the word "faire" and the phrases "none liuing" and "ensample dead," curious phrases whether taken alone, together, or with the "liuing colours and right hew" of the third proem:

To youre faire selues a faire ensample frame,
Of this faire virgin, this Belphoebe faire,
To whom in perfect loue, and spotlesse fame
Of chastitie, none liuing may compaire:
Ne poysnous Enuy iustly can empaire
The prayse of her fresh flowring Maidenhead;
For thy she standeth on the highest staire
Of th'honorable stage of womanhead,
That Ladies all may follow her ensample dead.

The repetition of "faire" is insistent, even anxiously so, but it enforces a link between present persons and Belphoebe. This link, if only a matter of rhetoric and fair appearance, suggests a series of steps from the ladies' "faire selues," surely many of whom were bound to marry; to a generalized "ensample" of purity, to its more exclusive, or higher, form, virginity; and finally to the individual fulfillment of virginity in fair Belphoebe herself, who is found on the "highest staire … of womanhead."11 The poet's conception of a series of steps—that is, a "staire"—becomes additionally significant once we have looked closely at the other verbal oddities in the stanza.12

The first of these, the phrase "none liuing," presumably means "none of you ladies" or "no one living," since the poet here addresses his present audience, "youre faire selues," and compares them to Belphoebe, the exemplar of ideal chastity, to which "none liuing" has yet attained. Alternatively, if we take the word "liuing" to be applicable to Belphoebe, the phrase could mean "no other living lady" except Belphoebe herself. This is the meaning of a remarkably similar claim about chaste Fiorimell earlier in the same canto where her dwarf declares of her, "Liues none this day, that may with her compare / In stedfast chastitie" (v. 8).13 But there are also significant differences between a claim made by a distraught dwarf within the narrative context of Faerie and one made by the poet himself and addressed to an audience outside the poem. We readily see that the loyal dwarf speaks loosely or hyperbolically. He really means no other living lady in all the realm of Faerie is chaster than Fiorimell or simply that she is the chastest lady imaginable. The word "liuing," however, is not so readily defused in relation to Belphoebe, who mirrors the chastity of the living Queen, especially when it occurs in a direct address to the poet's living audience. If in this context we were to consider Belphoebe "liuing," then she seems actually to become the Queen, a development at variance with statements in the proem to Book III and downright embarrassing when we reach "her ensample dead" in the alexandrine of this stanza. Such a radical dissolution of the fictional character of Belphoebe is entirely unexpected and would probably be largely wasted or, worse, misunderstood.

The natural reading of the phrase "none liuing" is, as suggested, the obvious one, "no one living" or simply "no living lady." While this reading does not refer specifically or directly to the Queen, it increases the distance between Belphoebe as a mythic ideal and any living referent, including the Queen, and thus the distance between antiquity and present age. The increased distance reflects the strains between ideal exemplar and human response in the story of Belphoebe and Timias and helps to bring their story to an appropriate conclusion in 1590.

But if the obvious reading of "none liuing" is also the right one, it is designed to give us another, longer pause for thought when we reread the alexandrine that succeeds it: Belphoebe "standeth on the highest staire … of womanhead, / That Ladies all may follow her ensample dead." If Belphoebe is a mythic ideal who has moved farther away from a living referent, what has she to do with death? First she seems to be mythic in this stanza and now to belong to history. The obvious reading of "none liuing" and the alexandrine clearly do not as yet accord.

The phrase "ensample dead," when glossed at all, is taken to be an ellipsis of the clause "when she is dead,"14 and it can be referred to the occurrence of a parallel construction in Merlin's prophecy to Britomart of the child or "Image" Artegall will leave with her when he is dead (III.iii.29):

With thee yet shall he leaue for memory
Of his late puissaunce, his Image dead,
That liuing him in all actiuity
To thee shall represent.

But the phrase "ensample dead" could just as well mean "her dead, or lifeless, example." At first glance, before we are startled into reassessment, this is exactly what it seems to mean, and if this were in fact all it meant, it would serve as a chilling comment on the ideal Belphoebe embodies and, although at a distinctly greater remove than before, on that of the Queen as well. This alternative meaning of "ensample dead" also finds a relevant parallel in an alexandrine of Book III. It occurs when the witch creates false Fiorimell, that parody of coldly sterile, lifeless Petrarchism: "and in the stead / Of life, she put a Spright to rule the carkasse dead" (viii.7). Death is this carcass' present condition (dead carcass), not its future one (when dead).

The occurrence in a single stanza of two verbal cruxes as immediately and obviously related as life ("none liuing") and death ("ensample dead") is unlikely to be adventitious. The reading "dead example"—the more obvious reading of "ensample dead"—accords better with the more obvious reading of "none liuing," since it does not require, as does the alternative "when she is dead," an abrupt and irrational shift from mythic to historical reference and, to put it bluntly, from an ageless Belphoebe to an aging Elizabeth. There is no way for us to cancel the obvious reading of "ensample dead," but perhaps we need not stop with its dispiriting message. In the context of Timias' highly Petrarchan adoration and idealization of Belphoebe, the alternative reading, "ensample [when she is] dead," need not refer to death as an exclusively physical event. It can also be taken in a way that makes sense of the mythic Belphoebe's connection with death and offers the positive reflection on her ideal that balances, though it cannot wholly offset, the negative one.

In its Petrarchan context, the reading "when she is dead" points to the resolution of the conflict between body and spirit that comes with the lady's physical death and spiritual transcendence. The phrase "ensample dead" therefore implies the ideal, the life-in-death, that the deadly carcass, the death-in-life, of false Fiorimell parodies. This reading of the phrase balances the cold reality of human loss—death, denial, lifeless example—with high praise of Belphoebe and of the Queen whose chastity, if only dimly, she still mirrors. At the same time, it continues Belphoebe's movement away from an earthly reality and suggests the only possible solution of Timias' dilemma—and seemingly the destined conclusion of Ralegh's—to be the symbolic or actual transfiguration of Belphoebe into pure spirit.15

Looking back at the same stanza with our Petrarchan reading in mind, we might be struck anew by the phrases "perfect loue" and "spotlesse fame." It suddenly makes more sense that "none liuing" should be perfect or spotless in Book III, where the possibility of a living Una has receded like a setting sun, and that the "highest staire … of womanhead" should be reached with the lady's transformation through death into spirit. Presumably this is also the "staire" on which worthy emulators of the true rose are crowned "with heauenly coronall … before Gods tribunall."

It is even tempting to see a relation between the Petrarchan praise of fair Belphoebe in Book III and the first of Ralegh's commendatory sonnets to accompany The Faerie Queene:

Me thought I saw the graue, where Laura lay
Within that Temple, where the vestall flame
Was wont to burne, and passing by that way,
To see that buried dust of liuing fame,
Whose tombe faire loue, and fairer vertue kept,
All suddenly I saw the Faery Queene:
At whose approach the soule of Petrarke wept,
And from thenceforth those graces were not seene.
For they this Queene attended, in whose steed
Obliuion laid him downe on Lauras herse.

But there is also a significant distance between this vision of Laura's living successor and Spenser's fully idealized Belphoebe, whose rose opens fully only in death. Perhaps because farther removed from it personally, Spenser saw more clearly the temporal, human cost—to Belphoebe and Timias both—of the fully realized Petrarchan vision. By the writing of Book III, he certainly knew that in time Laura's tomb could only be replaced by another's "ensample dead."16

II

When Belphoebe is last seen in Book III, response to her is poised between timeless and temporal truth, rather than being torn apart by their conflict. In Book IV, Belphoebe's next and also her last appearance, this duality of response to her remains, but with a difference. Her estrangement from Timias intersects with his relation to Amoret, Belphoebe's twin sister; and Belphoebe's reconciliation with Timias clashes conspicuously with the abandonment and slander of Amoret. With Timias' reconciliation and Amoret's revilement, duality of judgment and of truth can no longer be contained in a single phrase or image or even in a single character or event. Belphoebe herself—or what she was in Book III, an ideal maintaining some relation to worldly reality—is fractured. The alternatives of love and loss, of timeless and temporal truth, are no longer grasped together, no longer simultaneous and complementary dimensions of awareness, as they were in the phrase "ensample dead." They have become sharply distinct and are in danger of becoming mutually exclusive. The distance between ideal image and present age, antique praises and living colors, is widening rapidly.

The story of Belphoebe and Timias is inseparable from the last stages of Amoret's story in Book IV. Wounded and then tended by Timias, Amoret becomes the unwitting cause of Belphoebe's estrangement from him. She is part of their story, and when she is simply abandoned by them in the middle of it, she becomes, both narratively and morally, a loose end waiting to be woven into the larger design. Amoret's ties with the story of Belphoebe and Timias are also symbolic and thematic. The ruby that helps to bring Belphoebe back to Timias is "Shap'd like a heart, yet bleeding of the wound, / And with a little golden chaine about it bound" (viii.6). A jeweler's replica of Amoret's heart in the Masque of Cupid, this lapidarian heart that Belphoebe once gave Timias alludes to Amoret's real one, suggesting contrast with, as well as resemblance to, it. The twin birth of Belphoebe and Amoret, the complementary maids of Diana and Venus, provides a richly allegorical backdrop to their aborted reunion, and although Amoret is much more complexly human than an abstract conception of Love or Amor, the latter is one kind of meaning she carries when she is wounded, then abandoned, and later reviled. The most provocative imitation of Amoret's thematic congruence with Belphoebe comes when the poet interrupts his narrative during Slander's revilement of Amoret to recall an Edenic age when the "glorious flowre" of beauty flourished, a time when "… antique age yet in the infancie / Of time, did liue then like an innocent, / In simple truth and blamelesse chastitie" (IV.viii.30). Antiquity, ideal image, mythic flower, even chastityCthe poet associates them all now with Amoret or, more accurately, with her revilement.

In addition to the connections between the stories of Amoret and of Belphoebe and Timias sketched above, there are pointed contrasts. The reconciliation of Belphoebe and Timias is extremely artificial, effected through the agency of a sympathetic turtle dove and a lapidary's heart and totally removed from temporal reality. When he is reconciled, Timias' condition anticipates Melibee's self-enclosed vulnerability: he is "Fearlesse of fortunes chaunge or enuies dread, / And eke all mindlesse of his owne deare Lord" (viii.18). Still more noticeable, even while the estrangement of Belphoebe from Timias alludes unmistakably to Ralegh's fall from queenly favor, their reconciliation in Book IV conflicts with the real state of Ralegh's affairs in 1596.17 After Ralegh's secret marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton, one of the Queen's maids of honor, and the consequent imprisonment of them both in 1592, he was, although released fairly quickly from prison, not in fact reconciled to the Queen until 1597. His wife, left to languish in prison longer than he, never returned to favor with the Queen. In the reconciliation of Timias and Belphoebe, artificial thus means twice unreal—unreal at once in manner and in reference.

The abandonment of Amoret contrasts sharply with the artifice of reconciliation. When Arthur finds her in the forest, she is "almost dead and desperate," ingloriously wounded and unromantically in need. In his effort to shelter Amoret (and her less vulnerable companion, Aemylia), Arthur unwittingly takes her to the House of Slander, a foul old woman "stuft with rancour and despight / Vp to the throat" (24). Once they are within her house, an indignant and somewhat bitter poet intrudes at length in the narrative to connect Slander to the present age ("Sith now of dayes") and to oppose this age to the ideal or antique image. Slander's railings therefore have a general historicity or timeliness pointedly attributed to them for which Amoret's own adventures—apart from the topicality of her relation to Timias' estrangement from Belphoebe—fail to account. In short, what befalls Amoret in the two cantos she shares with Belphoebe and Timias looks very much like the other half of their story, the half muted in Belphoebe's withdrawal from Timias and suppressed in her return to him. What befalls Amoret unfolds the "inburning wrath" of Belphoebe (viii.17) and gives tongue to the revilement and infamy that Ralegh's secret marriage incurred.

Writing presumably in 1592 from the Tower, Ralegh contrasted the Queen's formerly gracious favor to him with his present state:

Thos streames seeme standinge puddells which, before,
Wee saw our bewties in, so weare they cleere.
Bellphebes course is now obserude no more,
That faire resemblance weareth out of date.
Our Ocean seas are but tempestius waves
And all things base that blessed wear of late.
[ll. 269-74]

If we remember Spenser's final vision of Belphoebe in 1590, with its series of "faire" steps from living audience to the highest ideal, these words from Ocean to Cynthia have an added edge. But even without this refinement, they afford a commentary on the distance we have seen opening between living Queen and ideal image, in this case, Belphoebe: as the imprisoned Ralegh again observes of this distance, "A Queen shee was to mee, no more Belphebe, / A Lion then, no more a milke white Dove" (ll. 327-28). The extreme artificiality of the reconciliation of Belphoebe and Timias in Book IV bears a similar testimony. As the distance widens, as an ideal Belphoebe becomes further detached from living reference, other kinds of references to the present age build up and push intrusively into Faerie. Their violence and their ugliness, unparalleled by the more controlled images of evil in Books I, II, and even III, do not just threaten the Faerie vision but actually violate it.

The old hag who reviles Amoret, her companion, and her would-be rescuer is nothing short of hideous, as extreme in her violent ugliness as conciliatory dove and ruby-heart are in their artificiality. The poet seems almost unable to put a stop to his description of her. "A foule and loathly creature" with "filthy lockes," she sits in her house "Gnawing her nayles for felnesse and for yre, / And there out sucking venirne to her parts entyre" (23-24). The description continues for another two stanzas with a reiterative emphasis and expansiveness that partial quotation hardly conveys. She abuses all goodness, frames causeless crimes, steals away good names. Nothing can be done so well "aliue"—that is, in life—without her depriving it of "due praise." As the poet continues, castigating the verbal poison Slander spues forth from her hellish inner parts, she becomes an unmistakable precursor first of Detraction and then of that poet's nightmare, the Blatant Beast, "For like the strings of Aspes, that kill with smart, / Her spightfull words did pricke, and wound the inner part."18

"Such was that Hag," the poet concludes, "vnmeet to host such guests, / Whom greatest Princes court would welcome fayne" (27). Then, just before the poet in his own voice breaks into the narrative for five stanzas to decry the distance between antique age and present corruption, he praises the patience of Slander's "guests," who endure every insult she can offer, "And vnto rest themselues all onely lent, / Regardlesse of that queane so base and vilde, / To be vniustly blamd, and bitterly reuilde" (IV.viii.28). Quean, meaning "harlot," "hussy," or in Spenser's case, "hag," is not the same word as queen, and it should be obvious from the poet's virulent description of Slander that she is not an image of the Virgin Queen.19 But the word "queane" in this context is not disposed of so easily, nor is the possibility that for one awful moment the image of the bitter old woman glances at the living Queen.

Philologists have been reluctant to recognize the likelihood of the homonymie pun on quean/queen in Renaissance English that exists in modern English. Kökeritz notes that contemporary philological evidence proves the possibility of such a pun in colloquial speech but doubts that polite speakers would have found the pun readily accessible. Dobson likewise notes the distinction in pronunciation of the two vowels in educated southern speech but allows for vulgar or dialectical variations in which the pun would exist.20 The pun is therefore possible but unlikely or inappropriate in a polite context, an argument that might, indeed, recommend it on grounds of aesthetic decorum—not to say political prudence—for the impassioned description of an impolite hag. The historical imagination is hard pressed to picture a courtier who would be likely to explain such a pun to the Queen or even willing to admit recognition of its presence.

Admitting the pun in Spenser's use of quean, we might regard it as one of the many signs in Book IV that the poem is becoming more private and personal, but we can do so without having to argue that the pun or at the very least the possibility of wordplay would not have been recognized by a number of Spenser's readers. Wordplay on the combination quean/queen has a long history, in part because of its alliterative potential, as, for example, in Langland's lines, "At churche in the charnel cheorles aren vuel to knowe, / Other a knyght fro a knaue, other a queyne fro a queene."21 In passing, I should also note that in an age of printing like the Renaissance the spelling of quean—"queen" and "queyn" in Thynne's Chaucer—was a visual invitation to wordplay, which philology would be inclined to discount.22 Whatever its causes, the pun on quean/queen almost certainly exists in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra when Enobarbus quips that Apollodorus has carried "A certaine Queene to Caesar in a Matris" (II.vi.72).23 The same pun also occurs in Middleton's A Trick to Catch the Old One when WittGood disclaims youth's follies, including "sinful Riotts, / Queanes Evills, Doctors diets" (V.ii. 185-86). The evils of queans are venereal, but highly qualified readers agree that the pun on quean/queen and the consequent play on king's evil (scrofula) is present here.24 Contemporary dramatic use of a pun argues its accessibility to auditors, and a play on diseases dependent on the pun urges this fact.

To my mind, the most illuminating information about Spenser's calling Slander a "queane" is that this is his sole use of the word. Occasion, Duessa, Impatience, Impotence, the witch who creates false Fiorimeli—not a one of these hags wears this common Renaissance label, and we might almost suppose that Spenser was deliberately avoiding it. That he should suddenly have used the word "queane" accidentally or innocently in a context inseparable from Belphoebe, Timias, and the relation of Faerie ideal to present age defies credibility, and does so much more, in view of Spenser's verbal sensitivity, than does the possibility that he alludes momentarily to the Queen.

As with Belphoebe's rose in Book III, there are now no precise or steady equivalents for the figures gathered in Slander's House: Amoret does not equal Elizabeth Throckmorton, Arthur does not equal Ralegh, Aemylia does not equal anybody, and Slander certainly does not equal the Queen.25 In the moments and ways I have suggested, however, what happens to Amoret reflects on one level the scandal, wrath, and disgrace Ralegh's marriage unleashed, and briefly the poet holds up to his sovereign the kind of distorted reflection found in a hideous cartoon. The figures of Lucifera, Philotime, and false Fiorimell bear witness that such a distorted image—such parody—is not entirely alien to the poet's techniques in earlier books, but it recurs here with a difference. Lucifera is not a missing side of Una or of the Queen but a denial of what they truly are. Where she is a possible threat, Slander is a present reality.26 Complex yet still balanced and grasped together in Book III, contrasting violently and centrifugally in Book IV, opposite words, opposite meanings, and opposite realities figure crucially in the troubled process of reassessing the relation of the Faerie vision to the living Queen.

Notes

1The Faerie Queene I.xxi.8, 23; iv.8, II.vii.44-45. All Spenserian references are to Works: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin A. Greenlaw et al., 11 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932-57), cited hereafter as Var.

2Henry IV I.iii.201-02, V.i.131, ed. Herschel Baker, in The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

3 Long since, in an illuminating and liberating article, Louis Martz showed that Spenser was not unaware of comic nuances in his sonnets: "The Amoretti: 'Most Goodly Temperature,'" in Form and Convention in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser, ed. William Nelson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), pp. 146-68. We continue to make progress regarding the poet's control of his meaning elsewhere, but slowly sometimes.

4 This paragraph borrows from my "What comes after Chaucer's BUT: Adversative Constructions in Spens er," in Acts of Interpretation: The Text in Its Context, ed. Mary J. Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk (Norman Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1982), n. 6.

5 "The 11th: and last booke of the Ocean to Scinthia," 11. 69, 497 ff., cf. 29-30, The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, ed. Agnes M. C. Latham (London: Routledge 6 Kegan Paul, 1951). All references to Ocean to Cynthia are to this edition. On the dating of Cynthia, see Latham's introduction, pp. Xxxvi-xl; and Stephen J. Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 12-13.

6 In "Colin Clovts Come Home Againe," Spenser calls Ralegh "shepheard of the Ocean" (1. 66); see also 11. 164, 174-75 in connection with the dating of Cynthia. On possible earlier versions of Cynthia, see Agnes M. C. Latham, ed., Sir Walter Raleigh: Selected Prose and Poetry (London: Athlone Press, 1965), p. 25, and on the style of Cynthia, pp. 210-11. Greenblatt's discussion of Cynthia is invaluable (pp. 77-98); his remarks on pastoral are especially pertinent (pp. 80, 84-85).

7 See Var., 3:245-46 (xxvii ff.), but also 3:247 (xxxv). The Virgilian text is available in Var., 2:219 (xxxii.6-xxxiii.4): "O—quam te memorem, virgo? Namque haud tibi vultus / Mortalis, nee vox hominem sonat; O, dea, certe." Given Spenser's earlier association of this passage with Belphoebe (II.iii.33), its bearing on Timias' lines is unmistakable.

8Spenser's Image of Nature: Wild Man and Shepherd in "The Faerie Queene" (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 102.

9Var., 3:248 (lii). The reference is to Ralph Church's edition, 1758.

10Var., 3:198. The full title of the final sonnet is "To all the gratious and beautifull Ladies in the Court."

11 Cf. Faerie Queene III.v.53: "Of chastity and vertue virginall." Chastity and virginity are not identical in this line.

12OED, s.v. Stair sb, 1: "An ascending series …. of steps"; 2: "One of a succession of steps"; 2d. fig: "A step of degree in a (metaphorical) ascent or in a scale of dignity"; 2e: "A high position."

13 A. C. Hamilton, ed., The Faerie Queene (London: Longman, 1977), p. 354, aligns this claim about Fiorimell with that about Belphoebe.

14 Hamilton, ed., The Faerie Queene, p. 354. Hamilton's sensitivity to the need of a gloss is notable.

15 Cf. Louis Adrian Montrose's highly provocative analysis of Petrarchan sublimation in '"The perfecte paterne of a Poete': The Poetics of Courtship in The Shepheardes Calender," TSLL 21 (1979), 34-67, esp. p. 54 (November Eclogue: Dido/Elissa).

16 In Mirror and Veil: The Historical Dimension of Spenser's "Faerie Queene" (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), pp. 113-14, Michael O'Connell rightly locates a "sense of paradox" in the final stanza of III.v, the result especially of the word "Nathlesse." Although I do not agree with all of O'Connell's views on p. 114, this sense of paradox follows naturally from my own reading of the penultimate stanza ("ensample dead") and fittingly concludes the canto.

17 See O'Connell, Mirror and Veil, p. 116; and A. L. Rowse, Ralegh and the Throckmortons (London: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 164, 204-06.

18 Cf. Faerie Queene V.xii.36, Vl.vi.1.

19OED, s.v. Quean, 1; s.v. Queen (etymology): quean and queen have an ablaut-relationship. Thomas P. Roche, Jr., ed., The Faerie Queene (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1978), p. 1176, glosses quean as hag. This meaning seems obvious from several examples in the OED and is the most appropriate one for Spenser's context.

20 Helge Kökeritz, Shakespeare's Pronunciation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), p. 88; E. J. Dobson, English Pronunciation 1500-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1968), 2:640, 612, n. 2.

21The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman in Three Parallel Texts, ed. Walter W. Skeat (London: Oxford University Press, 1886), C.IX.45-46 (my punctuation). For a concise discussion of Langland's "punning" on quean/queen and its basis in Old English, see Mary Carruthers, The Search for St. Truth: A Study of Meaning in "Piers Plowman" (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 60-61, n. 19. Carruthers discusses a second instance of wordplay in Langland's line "bere nis no quen queyntere bat quyk is o lyue" (A.II.14: George Kane, ed.).

22 Chaucer, Works 1532, supplemented by material from the editions of 1542, 1561, 1598, and 1602 (London: Scolar Press, 1969), fol. 104, verso, Manciples Prologue, 1. 34; fol. 165, verso, column a, 1. 19.

23 From the Norton facsimile of the First Folio.

24 Quotation from Middleton is from Charles Barber's edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); Barber considers the play on king's evil "doubtless." For the same view, see James T. Henke, Renaissance Dramatic Bawdy (Exclusive of Shakespeare): An Annotated Glossary and Critical Essays, Jacobean Drama Studies, 39 (Salzburg: Institut für Englische und Literatur Universität Salzburg, 1974), 2:249.

25 On the presence of Aemylia and other levels of meaning in IV.viii, see my "Whatever Happened to Amoret? The Poet's Role in Book IV of The Faerie Queene," Criticism 13 (1971), 180-200, esp. 181-85.

26 Near the end of the poet's praise of antiquity and denunciation of the present, he first appears to compliment the Queen but does not in fact do so. Instead he speaks with an evasive ambiguity that is to become increasingly characteristic of his compliments to her and, it would appear, of his disillusionment with her. In xxxii.8, "her glorious flowre" is beauty's (1. 1). In xxxiii.5, the word "her," while ambiguous, logically refers to beauty's glorious flower in 1. 6 (chastity, to judge from Book III); from this flower proceed the "drops" or dew or nectar of virtue. The near, but failed, reference of the pronouns in these stanzas to the living Queen is further testimony of the distance between her and the ideal image.

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