SOURCE: "1590: The Poem to the Poem," in Praise in "The Faerie Queene," University of Nebraska Press, 1978, pp. 37-57.

[In the following excerpt from a study of praise in Spenser's Faerie Queene, Cain presents the poem as a tribute to Queen Elizabeth.]

The Muse of "The Faerie Queene"

Ariosto invokes no muse in the Orlando (although the third canto invokes Apollo). But stanzas 2-4 of Spenser's proem invoke the Virgin Muse, Cupid, and the deified queen. Their insistent structural logic appears from the first words of each stanza: "Helpe then, O holy Virgin"; "And thou most dreaded impe"; "And with them eke, O Goddesse." This triple invocation facilitates encomium, for it greatly expands the idea of the poet's inadequacy, suggests the strategy of the hymn, and implies that the subject is three times greater than any attempted before. The muse invoked in stanza 2 particularly fits the encomiastic intention.

Whether the muse invoked as "holy Virgin chiefe of nine" is Clio, muse of history, or Calliope, muse of epic, depends on whether one considers The Faerie Queene history or epic. On this basis F. M. Padelford argued for Calliope and Josephine Waters Bennett for Clio. H. G. Lotspeich admitted possible ambiguity but felt "fairly certain that Clio was intended." But D. T. Starnes's evidence from sixteenth-century dictionaries such as those of the Stephanus family shows that Spenser's muse is Calliope. He argues effectively that Spenser's contemporaries clearly recognized the poem as heroic; that invocation of the epic muse is hence natural; and that Renaissance lexicographers knew Calliope as "'praestantissima,' the most excellent of the Muses"Chence Spenser's "chiefe of nine."¹³ Starnes's argument is convincing. But no writer on Spenser's muse has noticed that he particularly associates the epic muse Calliope with encomium.

The confusion between Clio and Calliope arises from misinterpretation of Spenser's use of "historicall" in the Letter to Raleigh, and from the similar attributes of Clio and Calliope in The Teares of the Muses. When in the Letter Spenser speaks of the "historicall fiction" of his poem, he means heroic narrative and not history in our sense, as he makes clear by claiming to "have followed all the antique Poets historicall" and their successors, and then naming the epicists Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, and Tasso. Spenser also distinguishes between the chronological method of the historian and the artificial method of the heroic poet: "For the Methode of a Poet historicall is not such, as of an Historiographer. For an Historiographer discourseth of affayres orderly as they were donne, accounting as well the times as the actions, but a Poet thrusteth into the middest, even where it most concerneth him, and there recoursing to the things forepaste, and divining of thinges to come, maketh a pleasing Analysis of all."¹⁴ The idea is a commonplace among sixteenth-century Italian literary theorists: that history's natural, chronological, ab ovo order distinguishes it from heroic poetry's artificial, plotted, in medias res order.¹⁵ By claiming to begin in medias res, Spenser declares that The Faerie Queene is not history as the historiographer would write it but a historical fiction proper to the epic poet. His muse should thus be Calliope. In The Teares of the Muses (1591), Clio and Calliope have similar functions and attributes. Both claim to immortalize men's deeds through the articulation of praise; both have the trumpet as their proper symbolic instrument; both focus on celebration of "auncestrie" (genus); and both use epideictic terms to voice the familiar humanist complaint of the neglect of poets and scholars, Clio speaking of blame and Calliope of praise. But only Calliope fuses the ideas of praise and epic, as when she speaks of great men "Whose living praises in heroick style, / It is my chief profession to compyle" (431-32). The phrase "living praises in heroick style" adapts "Carmina Calliope libris heroica mandat" ("Calliope commits heroic songs to writing?) from De inventis musarum, in Spenser's time considered Virgilian and hence of great authority.¹⁶ These mnemonic verses list the Muses' names and functions in an order Spenser follows in The Teares. By adapting Calliope's line to construe "Carmina" as "praises," Spenser deliberately makes Calliope the muse of encomiastic epic—exactly the kind of poem he announces in the first stanza of his proem. For, in spite of qualities common to Clio and Calliope in The Teares, only Calliope claims "heroick style." (In De inventis as in The Teares Clio is in no way associated with epic.) Hence, the muse invoked in stanza 2 of the proem is Calliope.

Spenser's references to Calliope in Aprill (100) and June (57) show his awareness of the tradition which acknowledges her as supreme muse and muse of encomium. Both references foreshadow The Faerie Queene. But because Spenser twice invokes Clio in that poem it is important to understand her interaction with Calliope. In general, the muse in charge remains Calliope unless Spenser announces a shift to Clio for material arranged in the ab ovo manner proper to the historiographer.

The first invocation of Clio prefaces Merlin's account of "My glorious Soveraines goodly auncestrie" (III. iii. 4). This chronicle-history proceeds "by dew degrees" from Britomart to Elizabeth, realizing the encomiastic topos genus while exactly following what Spenser describes as the historiographer's method. But the reiterated imperative "Begin, O Clio" makes it clear that another muse has heretofore been in charge. This invocation denotes a temporary shift in encomiastic method—from heroic praise to historiographical praise—without implying any change in the poem's generic status as encomiastic epic. Significantly, Spenser embeds this excursus into chronicle-history in that section of The Faerie Queene (i.e. III.i-iii) which is most unmistakably organized by the heroic principle in medias res.

That Calliope is in charge of the larger poem is apparent from the Arlo digression in Mutabilitie where Spenser again invokes Clio to tell how an Irish locus amoenus "Was made the most unpleasant, and most ill. / Meane while, O Clio, lend Calliope thy quill" (VII. vi. 37). While the syntactical ambiguity makes it unclear who is lending a quill to whom, the context removes all ambivalence. Spenser explicitly tells how Arlo declined from "Whylome" (ii. 38) down "to this day" (vi. 55)—i.e. the historiographer's arrangement. So the muse of The Faerie Queene is Calliope, who here defers to Clio for a pseudohistorical digression. There can be no doubt that it is Calliope whom Spenser reinvokes at the end of the digression as "thou greater Muse" (vii. I), the muse traditionally "praestantissima," "chiefe of nine," and hence greater than Clio.

Spenser's precedent here may be Statius, whose Thebiad invokes both Clio and Calliope. In the Aeneid, however, Virgil invokes Calliope once (9. 525), Erato once (7. 37), but elsewhere simply a muse or muses (1. 8, 7. 641, 10. 163). Similarly, Spenser twice invokes an unnamed muse (I. xi. 7; IV. xi. 9) but Calliope is presupposed. These multiple invocations work tactically to make his poem resemble the Aeneid, just as Tasso's make Gerusalemme liberata fit his concept of neoclassical epic. At the same time, when we recall the single invocation in Orlando furioso—Apollo solicited to facilitate praise of the Este dynastyCthen Spenser's reinvocations appear as part of the stratagem insinuating the superiority of The Faerie Queene as encomium.

Elizabeth Virgo-Venus as Muse

As well as Calliope, the poet also invokes the subject of praise, the queen herself—explicitly in stanza 4 and implicitly by figure in the invocations of Calliope (st. 2) and Cupid (st. 3). In fact, the three invocations proceed calculatedly from implication to revelation.

The liturgical language of invocation in stanza 2—"Helpe then, O holy Virgin chiefe of nine, / Thy weaker Novice to performe thy will"—indicates the device of transferring the Virgin's epithets to the Virgin Queen. In fact, Spenser places the invocation to parallel Tasso's in the corresponding second stanza of the Gerusalemme:

The attributes of heavenly choirs and crown of stars indicate that Tasso's muse is not, as some editors suggest, Urania (inescapably one of the Heliconian nine), nor a hypothetical "Christian muse," but specifically the Virgin Mary in her state of assumption. The fifteenth-century Speculum humanae salvationis explains that the attributes of the Virgin of the Assumption are those of the Woman Clothed with the Sun in the Apocalypse, who conquers the dragon and ascends to heaven; the half-moon beneath her feet symbolizes the transitory things of this world (Tasso's "fading bays") and her crown of stars is the twelve apostles.¹⁷ Spenser adapts Tasso's Virgin muse to the cult of the Virgin Queen by a matching invocation. The adaptation implies that the poet who announces himself as Virgil and overgoes Ariosto means as well to overgo Tasso. As a stratagem of propaganda the invocation asserts the superiority of the poet of the Protestant Virgo to the chief poet of the Counter Reformation.

In this light, the epithet "chiefe of nine" becomes ambiguous: as well as chief among nine, Calliope as leader of the Muses, it can also mean as chief over nine, the Virgin Queen herself as tenth muse. One recalls the woodcut of Eliza presiding over the Muses in Aprill, just as in its text she adds a fourth to the three Graces. In deliberate contrast to Tasso's Virgin who stands aloof from the Muses, her brows never crowned with Helicon's fading laurels, Spenser's "holy Virgin, chiefe of nine" makes all the ancient poetic forces extensions of her power to inspire. The paradox of the Virgin Queen with the Muses in her train who is simultaneously Calliope, the muse who praises the queen, is of a piece with the Aprill paradox where Eliza both creates and receives her own praise.¹⁸

Encomium of Elizabeth was a political act. In his adversion to Tasso's invocation, Spenser develops an image of the Virgin Muse's "everlasting scryne" (Latin scrinium, chest or coffer) that is both political and encomiastic. For when he asks her to "Lay forth out of thine everlasting scryne / The antique rolles, which there lye hidden still" containing the ancient matters of Faery and Britain, he catches at the canonical formula used to epitomize the papal claim to absolute authority, in particular over the emperor: in scrinio pectoris omnia ("all things are in the chest of his breast"). This formula was well-known in sixteenth-century polemic. In his Delle Allusioni, imprese, et emblemi sopra la vita di Gregorio XIII libri VI, an emblem book praising the great pope who presided over the mission to England, Principio Fabricii depicts a winged dragon (Gregory's personal device) with books falling from a cavity in its breast (i.e. scrinium pectoris…). But Elizabeth's religious settlement depended on the Henrician Act of Supremacy and its assertion of the supremacy in England of monarch over pope. Its defenders advert sardonically to the in scrinio tag in their polemics, the official Anglican apologist John Jewel, for instance, scorning the notion "that all law and right is locked up in the treasury of the Pope's breast."¹⁹ Spenser's appropriation of the formula is also polemical and asserts the Virgin Queen's authority against the pope's. To make her scrinium "everlasting" is to dismiss the papal claim as innovative. In fact, this is the first instance in the poem of the antipapalism that colors Books I and V. It is important to remember, however, that the formula is also part of the invocation of the Virgin Queen as muse where the poet appears as a "Novice" just beginning to study antiquities of Faery and Britain that have always existed in her everlasting scrinium. (In the chronicle materials in II. x and III. iii Elizabeth is both temporal goal and simultaneously present from the beginning and so indeed contains all of British-Faery history inside herself.) By implicitly twisting the formula into in scrinio pectoris poesis, Spenser makes it cooperate in the by now familiar paradox of the Faery Queen creating The Faerie Queene.

A similar paradox pervades the invocation of Cupid in the proem's third stanza, where Elizabeth again is subliminally present.

While Cupid impels the hero toward Gloriana, he is also the erotic force emanating from her. In fact, Spenser does not call him Eros or Cupid but "Faire Venus sonne." Together the two invocations of stanzas 2 and 3 express the Virgo-Venus paradox well-suited to the Virgin Queen who controlled great courtiers like Leicester and Hatton with amatory manipulations; who made marriage negotiations the successful instrument of a foreign policy designed to prevent alliance of the Catholic powers France and Spain; and who, even more, was a Virgin Queen mystically married (in the words of a broadsheet of 1571) to "My dear lover England."²⁰

By uniting "triumphant Mart" with Venus "After his murdrous spoiles and bloudy rage allayd," Spenser may have incorporated into stanza 3 a timely allusion to the victory over the Armada. The national euphoria that followed the victory naturally found expression in increased adulation of Elizabeth: for instance, on 24 November 1588 she entered London formally in a triumph; and her Accession Day (17 November) became a major annual festival.²¹ In a national poem in her praise an allegory of the Armada's defeat would be encomiastically invaluable. It would be particularly apt in Book I, because the English, with an eye to propaganda as well as piety, carefully attributed their delivery to a clearly Protestant God: "God breathed and they were scattered" was the motto of one of Elizabeth's Armada medals.²² But the sixteen months between the victory and Ponsonby's entry of The Faerie Queene in the Stationers' Register on 1 December 1598 would scarcely have given Spenser time to redesign Book I so as to include such an episode. He could easily introduce an Armada allusion into the proem, however, without disturbing the poem's structure, as he may have done with the image of triumphant Mars led by Venus and Cupid. If so, the invocation of stanza 3 presents an anti-Spanish Venus, served by Mars, to complement the antipapal Virgin of stanza 2.²³

In stanzas 2 and 3 we see Spenser managing his words to gain a secondary set of meanings that insinuate a sense of Elizabeth's immanence and anticipate an encomiastic technique in the poem at large. For, besides representing the queen through fictive genus and protagonists who befigure her by res gestae and comparatio, Spenser also often maneuvers otherwise apparently incidental details into connotative positions where they give off momentary reflections of the queen and imply that she is the principle informing the world as well as the poem.

Stanza 4: An Orphic Hymn

The last stanza of the proem follows the two-part structure of the hymns attributed in the Renaissance to Orpheus: praise by accumulated epithets, then petition, to which Spenser adds in the alexandrine a votum, or gesture of offering. There are three such epithets. The first, "O Goddesse heavenly bright," practices the strange veneration of Elizabeth as quasi-divine. The cult was not merely poetic. Roy Strong has pointed out that the queen's image was held to be genuinely sacral and mysteriously expressive of the monarch herself, even by Anglican apologists who otherwise rejected images as Romish superstition; and that people of all classes wore her image on medals and cameos for its beneficent effects.²⁴ The first epithet not only expresses the cult of diva Elizabetha but, through "heavenly bright," also especially associates her with Astraea stellified as Virgo (under which sign, almost too appropriately, Elizabeth was born) and with the Venus Coelestis of the Neoplatonists.

The three epithets progress from the deified to the more nearly human. The second, "Mirrour of grace and Majestie divine," establishes the divine empress's proper relation to God: she makes visible his two main attributes of grace and majesty (analogous to the more usual mercy and justice). The mirror image occurs in all three proems of 1590. The second and third declare that the poem provides mirrors of the queen's realm and person. But in the first, she is the mirror—a mediatrix who communicates the divine ineffability to human perception. This Christ-like role expresses the Protestant cult of Elizabeth as national savior.

The third epithet brings us from goddess and mirror to localized national "Lady": "Great Lady of the greatest Isle, whose light / Like Phoebus lampe throughout the world doth shine." Here, Spenser appropriates the motto of Philip II's impresa Iam illustrabit omnia ("Now he will illumine all things"); which depicted Apollo driving his sun-chariot over land and sea,²⁵ and so asserts that Philip's claim to world domination and championship of the true faith properly belong to Elizabeth. The allusion is apt as a post-Armada gesture, transparently promoting anti-Hispanic imperial ambitions, and turning the outdoing topos to propaganda.

Together these three epithets form a triad typical of Renaissance Neoplatonism, in which the middle term serves to mediate between the two otherwise potentially opposed terms. Here, Elizabeth contains all three elements of the triad in herself. While apotheosis as goddess allies her with God, her intermediate function as a mirror allows her divinity to become visible in the human queen of a real isle. Because she mirrors God's attributes of grace and majesty, to see her is, in some sense, to perceive God himself.²⁶ That Elizabeth bridges the potentially opposed realms of heaven and earth is an idealistic conception essential to Spenser's encomium as presented in 1590. By defining a real monarch, it avoids the traditional Augustinian dualism between the Cities of God and This World that would set heaven and England at odds and that would place a low valuation on human achievement in the service of the state. In fact, Spenser's poem of 1590 implies as enthusiastic an estimate of human capability at its best as can be found in Renaissance humanism. Because Elizabeth is a goddess, Gloriana's knights can pursue their quests in this world, secure in the knowledge that the good they achieve in her service will be recognized in heaven. And the poet can sing her praise, knowing that it will be in harmony with the angels' hymns. Thus, the triad whereby Elizabeth unites heaven and earth must necessarily begin the first overt piece of her encomium in The Faerie Queene.

The hymn of stanza 4 balances on its fifth line—"Shed thy faire beames into my feeble eyne"—which, like the stanza, is in one half devoted to the queen, in the other to the poet. This line marks the typical division of an Orphic hymn into praise and petition. In the stanza's second half, the poet petitions the goddess for inspiration to "raise my thoughts too humble and too vile, / To thinke of that true glorious type of thine." The inability topos is prominent here, and the adjectives applied to the poet—"humble," "vile," "afflicted"—have their Latin senses of physical lowness. But the extremes of exaltation and abasement and the idea of a humble poet who may be raised to behold a celestial mirror recapitulate Piers's vision of Colin's ascent in October. The parallel reminds us that the poet's self-abasement effects advertisement. Indeed, the last two lines bring the paradox into the open, the eighth with its "argument of my afflicted style" still bespeaking inability and the passive poet's dependence on inspiration from the potentially creative goddess if the poem is to come into existence, while the alexandrine—"The which to heare, vouchsafe, O dearest dred awhile"—presents the poem as fait accompli and the poet as active creator, with the queen now the passive receptor. Because the queen is a goddess the poem is made possible, but the articulation of her true glorious type depends on the hymnic powers of the English Orpheus.

Epic as Hymn

As an Orphic hymn, the fourth stanza implies that the epic it prefaces is also in some sense a hymn. Indeed, at the beginning of Book I the poet confirms his identification with the hymnist Orpheus by a judiciously placed tree catalog. A. C. Hamilton has suggested that "contemporary readers would have responded" to this catalog "as an imitation by which the poet reveals his kinship with Orpheus who first moved trees with his song."²⁷ The main poets to make the tree catalog conventional are in fact precisely those antecedent to Colin in the Calender: Chaucer, from whose tree catalog in the Parliament of Fowls >(176-82) Spenser borrows details; Virgil, in Eclogues 8. 61-68; and, most important, Orpheus himself, whose song Ovid describes as convoking a mixed grove of trees and making them dance (Met. 10. 90-104). As a result, the catalog appears as a signature of the poet who fulfills Orpheus's hymnic role. Prominent in the list of trees is "the Laurell, meed of mightie Conquerours / And Poets sage" (1. 9). Its epithets not only hint at an equivalence of heroes and poet as figures in the poem, but also pointedly imply that Spenser expects official recognition as national epicist; "meed" inevitably suggests pecuniary as well as honorific reward.

By making an Orphic hymn its immediate preface, Spenser imputes a hymnic cast to The Faerie Queene, its "argument" said to be the goddess's true glorious type. The imputation finds raison d'être in Renaissance literary theory, where the hymn was affirmed the oldest kind of poem and, in accordance with the principle of decorum, often declared the highest: gods supersede princes. The revival of the literary hymn by Pius II, Pontano, Marnilo, Vida, Scaliger, Ronsard, and Spenser in Fowre Hymnes is in part a humanist response to the Homeric, Orphic, and Callimachan hymns and in part an effort to provide modern examples to fill a gap at the apex of the hierarchy of kinds.²⁸ But when the Virgilian career-model made epic the highest ambition of Renaissance poets, the theoretical supremacy of the hymn was rather awkward. In his Poetices (1. 3), for instance, Scaliger acknowledges this supremacy, but he repeatedly proclaims the Aeneid the greatest of poems. Similarly, Sidney agrees that the hymnic poets were "chiefe both in antiquitie and excellencie," yet asserts that among the genres "the Heroicall …. is not onely a kinde, but the best and most accomplished kinde of Poetry."²⁹

But the epideictic view of literature avoids the inconsistency by emphasizing that hymn and epic are similar: the fact that the Callimachan and longer Homeric hymns were mainly laudatory narratives of the god's deeds made them appear as divine equivalents to the epic conceived of as encomiastic biography of a hero. Puttenham, whose theory of literature is clearly epideictic, properly distinguishes hymn and epic according to decorum as highest and second-highest kinds but then somewhat blurs divine and princely matters by making them "all high subjects, and therefore are delivered over to the Poets Hymnick & historicall who be occupied either in divine laudes, or in heroicall reports." And he straddles the genres by using heroic terms to describe "all your Hymnes & Encomia of Pindarus & Callimachus, not very histories but a maner of historicall reportes."³⁰ If we note that the Orphic and shorter Homeric hymns apostrophize the god (usually by a series of epithets or attributes) and close with a prayer and that the Callimachan and longer Homeric hymns augment these two features with a long narrative, we begin to see that there is a spectrum of hymnic genres, moving from the paeanic Orphic hymn to the longer narrative hymn to the hymnic or encomiastically conceived epic. Because of the veneration of the Aeneid, the literary hymn, in spite of its position in theory, was in practical terms simply not credible as supreme genre and the epic was. But the epideictic theorist's approximation of hymn and epic bridges the impasse by allowing epic to take on a hymnic function (at least abstractly) and so assert its de facto supremacy without undue threat to the hierarchic scheme of the genres.

At this point, it is worth turning back to the first alexandrine of The Faerie Queene: "Fierce warres and faithfull loves shall moralize my song." The syntax here seems perverse: one expects the line should say that "fierce wars and faithful loves are moralized in my song"—that is, allegorized heroic and erotic narratives make up the poem. But Spenser instead insinuates that "my song" has priority over both narrative and allegory, that epic is subordinate to carmen. If we read "song" as meaning hymn or encomium, we can see that, given the theoretical concept of hymnic epic, Spenser has designed the line to say that his poem is essentially a hymn and secondarily an allegorical epic. And, in fact, a little less than a year after The Faerie Queene appeared, he describes it as a set of hymns to Eliza who "hath praises in all plenteousnesse" showered on her by "Colin her owne Shepherd. / That her with heavenly hymnes doth deifie" (Daphnaida, 227-30).

Thus, if we see in The Faerie Queene only an allegorized romantic epic, we resist Spenser's assertion that it is encomium. In the epideictic categorization of genres, the epic is by nature encomiastic. What Spenser's first proem tells us is that, in his epic, encomium takes precedence over events. It will be easier to see how the episodes of the poem are encomiastic if we realize that when Spenser associates his epic with Virgil's he assumes that the Aeneid is a panegyrical biography (the Fulgentian view, explained in chapter 1); that each of Aeneas's acts bespeaks his praiseworthy mastery of one of the virtues proper to a hero; and that praise of Aeneas implies praise of his supposed descendant, Augustus. Similarly, in The Faerie Queene each successful episode in a knight's quest redounds to Gloriana's praise, and each unsuccessful episode falls short of contributing to that praise, though it cannot detract from it. Thus, Elizabeth, through her fictional "true glorious type," not only originates the quests and receives their achievement as a sacrifice to her glory, so that the quests are ultimately hers; but she is also the criterion by which each knight's degree of success or failure is measured. For the demigoddesses who preside over the ideal forms of each virtue (like Caelia and Alma) are types of Elizabeth, as Spenser eventually tells us.³¹ The knights' goals are consequently identical with the queen herself, just as the goal of the quest that coordinates the others, Arthur's, is the Faery Queen. Hence, her panegyrical biography is made up of their efforts to achieve the virtues which she embodies and which she inspires. Thus, in a broad sense, each book of the poem can be considered an act of encomium—one of the "heavenly hymnes" that "deifie" her.

But there are also passages, episodes, and especially figures in The Faerie Queene that express Elizabeth's praise in more specific ways. Spenser draws our attention to several of these in the proems to Books II and III. An investigation of some of these notably encomiastic features in the poem of 1590 is the subject of the next three chapters.

Notes

…¹³ The arguments of Padelford and Bennett are summarized in Variorum F.Q., I: app. 9. Lotspeich, Classical Mythology in Spenser's Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1932), pp. 84-85. Starnes, "Spenser and the Muses," TSLL, 22 (1942): 31-58. Patrick Spurgeon, "Spenser's Muses," Renaissance Papers 1968, ed. G. W. Williams, Southeastern Renaissance Conference (Columbia, S.C., 1969), pp. 15-23, argues that both muses are involved.

¹⁴ This follows Boccaccio on the same subject almost verbatim: "For poets are not like historians, who begin their account at some convenient beginning and describe events in the unbroken order of their occurrence to the end …. But poets, by a far nobler device, begin their proposed narrative in the midst of the events, or sometimes even near the end; and thus they find excuse for telling preceding events which seem to have been omitted." Genealogiae 14. 13; trans. Charles G. Osgood, Boccaccio on Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1930), pp. 67-68. Boccaccio notes the tradition describing Lucan's Pharsalia as versified history rather than epic because of its chronological organization. Among the numerous anomalies of the Letter to Raleigh in relation to the poem it purports to describe is that whatever sense we may have of in medias res organization in F.Q. I and II is stimulated by the Letter and not the poem. Curiously, the Letter makes nothing of the unmistakable in medias res order of the first three cantos of Book III which mirror the device exactly as it appears in its locus classicus, Aeneid 1-3.

¹⁵ See Weinberg, Literary Criticism, pp. 41-42, 724.

¹⁶ In his April and November glosses E. K. accepts De inventis as Virgil's, although Robert Stephanus had correctly attributed them to Ausonius. Starnes, "Spenser and the Muses," p. 40.

¹⁷ Louis Réau, Iconographie de l'art chrétien, 2 vols. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1955-59), vol. 2, pt. 2, p. 617. Tasso's invocation alludes to Petrarch's famous canzone to the Virgin (Rime, 366) where the Woman Clothed with the Sun is clearly one of her types: "Vergine bella, che di sol vestita, / coronata di stelle." Strong, Portraits, p. 42, points out that the veneration of Elizabeth after her death as "Saint Elizabeth" and as the second Virgin in heaven uses the image of the queen as "a portent in the skies, arrayed in the attributes of the Virgin as the Woman of the Apocalypse."

¹⁸ The difference between the two poets in these parallel passages points toward a broader contrast between their epics: Spenser's patriotism leads him to daring forms of the Christian-humanist synthesis; Tasso, alert to Tridentine strictures, is wary of heterodoxy. He seems to have altered his initial invocation at least three times: see Robert M. Durling, The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965,), pp. 195-96.

¹⁹Delle allusioni (Rome, 1588), 3. 4. 2 (p. 176). Jewel, An Apology of the Church of England, ed. J. E. Booty, Folger Documents of Tudor and Stuart Civilization (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963), p. 41; and ibid., Introduction, p. xv, for Alexander Nowell's use of the formula. I am grateful to Barbara Bernhart for drawing my attention to this formula and Fabricii's use of it.

²⁰ Quoted by Jenkins, Elizabeth, p. 158, and by Wilson, England's Eliza, p. 4.

²¹ Roy C. Strong, "The Accession Day of Queen Elizabeth I," JWCI, 21 (1958): 92-93 and n. 48.

²² Garrett Mattingly, The Armada (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), p. 390.

²³ Cf. the curious reinvocation at I. xi. 5-7 that plays down Redcrosse's fight with the dragon in favor of some later "worke …. of endlesse prayse" that will depict the war "Twixt that great faery Queene and Paynim king." This seems to be another allusion to the Armada.

²⁴ Strong, Portraits, pp. 39-40. This phenomenon in the Middle Ages is the subject of Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).

²⁵ On the impresa and its relevance to Book V, see Aptekar, Icons of Justice, pp. 82-83, and René Graziani, "Philip II's Impresa and Spenser's Souldan," JWCI, 27 (1964): 322-24.

²⁶ On triads in Spenser, see Alastair Fowler, "Emanations of Glory: Neoplatonic Order in Spenser's Faerie Queene," in Judith M. Kennedy and James A. Reither, eds., A Theatre for Spenserians (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), pp. 53-82. On intermediaries in the triad, the Renaissance locus classicus is Ficino's Commentary on the Symposium, 6. 1-6. The only complete translation is Commentaire sur le Banquet de Platon, trans. Raymond Marcel (Paris: Société d'Edition "Les Belles Lettres," 1956).

²⁷ "Spenser and the Common Reader," ELH, 35 (1968): 618.

²⁸ On the genre in the Renaissance, see Philip Rollinson, "The Renaissance of the Literary Hymn," Renaissance Papers 1969, ed, G. W. Williams, Southeastern Renaissance Conference (Columbia, S.C., 1970), pp. 11-20. On elements of royal praise in Fowre Hymnes, see Elliott M. Hill, "Flattery in Spenser's Fowre Hymnes" WVUPP, 15 (1966): 22-35. Also, but more obliquely, Jon A. Quitslund, "Spenser's Image of Sapience," SRen, 16 (1969): 181-213; and Sears Jayne, "Attending to Genre: Spenser's Hymnes" a paper read at the 1971 Modern Language Association meeting and summarized in SpN, 3 (1972), no. I, pp. 5-6.

²⁹Prose Works, 3:9-10, 25.

³⁰Arte, 3. 6; 1. 19; ed. Willcock and Walker, pp. 152, 41.

³¹ See F.Q. VI. x. 28 where Colin apologizes to Gloriana for omitting her from the central role in the vision of ideal courtesy. The apology indicates the presence of a royal type in each core canto in the preceding books.