SOURCE: "That True Glorious Type," in The Poetry of Edmund Spenser: A Study, Columbia University Press, 1963, pp. 116-46.

[In the following excerpt from a study of Spenser's poetry, Nelson analyzes Spenser's use of allegorical types to convey his meaning. He focuses on Spenser's use of Queen Elizabeth as "that true glorious type" of gentleness and nobility.]

In the strange and various forest of The Faerie Queene many lose their way and succumb at last to the monster Error or, worse still, to exasperation and boredom. Omens for the journey are particularly unpropitious if the traveler enters upon it guided by the Aristotelian dictum that plot is the "first principle, and, as it were, the soul" of an epic poem, for here it will lead him only into a morass. He is better off if he comes armed, like the Red Cross Knight, with faith, faith in the book itself and in the guiding signs within it. By faith in the book I mean a disposition to believe that whatever the history of its composition may have been, the poem as it was presented to Queen Elizabeth is neither an incoherent and improbable tale worth reading only for the charm of its quaint and delicious passages nor a farrago of bits and pieces hastily thrown together to make a volume but, like Spenser's other poems, a carefully considered composition in which theme, rather than fable, is the central structural element. And by faith in its signs, I mean the belief that Spenser's announcements of his intention, both in the text itself and in the letter addressed to Sir Walter Ralegh which was appended to the first edition, are designed to give "great light to the Reader" rather than to mislead him. It would hardly be necessary to make these affirmations were it not for the number of interpreters of The Faerie Queene who begin by denying them. Of course, the reader may conclude (as I do not) that the only order in The Faerie Queene is of the kind imposed by the stargazer upon the scattered lights of the sky, and that the poet's professions of purpose, like those of many a Renaissance author, are no more than a formal bow to the critical dogma of his time. The proof lies in the poem.

The first lines of The Faerie Queene are themselves a sign to the reader, though their meaning is hidden in an obscurity not of Spenser's making. Had he begun with the words "I sing of arms and the man" no reader could doubt that he wished his poem to be recognized as of the genre of the Aeneid. But in Spenser's edition of Vergil's poem, as in all Renaissance editions, the opening words were not "Arma virumque cano" but the following verses, probably Vergilian indeed but rejected by Vergil's first editor, Varius:

Ille ego qui quondam gracili modulatus avena
Carmen, et egressus silvis, vicina coegi

Ut quamvis avido parerent arva colono
Gratum opus agricolis: at nunc horrentia Martis
Arma virumque cano …

The beginning of The Faerie Queene is an unmistakable allusion to these lines:

The poet so announces that his principal model is Vergil's Aeneid.

If Spenser's text of the poem he wished to imitate differs from our own, his understanding of its intention and method differs even more radically. Since he was a man of independence and originality it would be risky to assume that he accepted without question the standard textbook interpretations of Vergil current in his time. Nevertheless, a comparison of his letter to Ralegh with a typical Renaissance introduction to the Aeneid helps to make clear what he meant by beginning as he did. Among the many sixteenth-century editions of Vergil's poems a considerable number are substantial folio volumes in which the text is surrounded by a sea of commentary. Commonly, such editions include the annotations of various scholars, the work of the late classical grammarians Servius and Donatus and of Renaissance humanists. Of the later commentaries that of Jodocus Badius Ascensius, otherwise Josse Bade van Assche, famous Flemish scholar and publisher, is surely one of the most frequently reprinted.¹

After explaining the form of the title of Vergil's poem, Badius announces its purpose as "simul et iucunda et idonea dicere vitae." This is the second line of that distich of Horace's Ars poetica which Ben Jonson translates:

Poets would either profit or delight
Or mixing sweet and fit, teach life the right.²

The poet, Badius declares, undertook the task of teaching "life the right" because he knew that there could be nothing more useful to a commonwealth than to be led by a prince who was clement, prudent, brave, temperate, and endowed with the other virtues. He therefore depicted such a prince in the Aeneid, prophesying that he would be imitated by Augustus, just as Xenophon had portrayed a Cyrus, not exactly as he was, but as he should have been ("ut Xenophon de Cyro fecisse perhibetur, non semper qualis fuit, sed qualem fuisse decuit perscribens"). By this means he suggested to Augustus both the necessity of imitating the ancestor to whom he traced his origin, a man whom he described as most pious, just, brave, temperate, etc., and the disgrace that he would incur if he degenerated from the honorable customs and virtues of his forebears. Besides this general intention which he shares with all good writers, Badius explains, Vergil had a number of particular ones ("speciales atque peculiares"). He wished to crown his poetic career with a work in the grand manner, as he had begun it in his youth with the humble pastoral and progressed in his maturity to the middle style of the Georgics. And since he had equaled Theocritus in his eclogues and Hesiod in his Georgics he desired in his great work to equal that prince of poets and fountain of ingenuity, Homer. Indeed he overwent Homer ("illi praestare demonstrat"). What the Greek poet needed the forty-eight books of his Odyssey and Iliad to express, Vergil said in twelve. For Homer had described the contemplative life in the person of Ulysses and the active life in his account of the Trojan war, while Vergil combined them both in one, treating of the former (which he signified by the word virum in "arma virumque cano") in his first six books and of the latter (arma) in the last six books. Besides considering other "special" intentions of the Aeneid, Badius summarizes the events of its story in chronological or historical order, pointing out as he does so that poetical narration follows a very different sequence.³

Some verbal correspondences between this essay and Spenser's letter are worth noting. Like Badius, Spenser distinguishes between his general intention and "particular purposes or by-accidents." His choice of a historical fiction to embody his meaning he defends as "most plausible and pleasing," and since the word plausible must here have its old meaning of "deserving of approval," the expression translates Horace's "iucunda et idonea."⁴ And like Badius Spenser cites the precedent of Xenophon who "in the person of Cyrus and the Persians fashioned a governement such as might best be." But phrases of this kind are so much the common currency of Renaissance criticism that they demonstrate rather Spenser's familiarity with the tradition than his use of Badius as a "source."

It is in terms of matter and emphasis that Spenser's letter shows itself to be modeled after the kind of introductory essay that is found in sixteenth-century editions of the Aeneid. As Vergil's intention is said to be the portrayal of a virtuous prince, so Spenser begins by asserting his purpose "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline." For the fabulous Aeneas Spenser offers Arthur "before he was king." Arthur cannot serve as a figure for Elizabeth, as Aeneas for Augustus, but Spenser explains that she is "shadowed" in Arthur's beloved Gloriana and in Belphoebe. If Vergil's method is justified by an appeal to the precedents of Homer and Xenophon, Spenser relies for authority upon those two writers, upon Vergil himself, and upon Ariosto and Tasso. Badius' division of the subject of the nature of the hero-prince into the branches designated by virum and arma is paralleled by Spenser's partition into ethice and politice. The list of virtues ascribed to Aeneas is like the list of virtues combined in Arthur and represented separately by the twelve subsidiary heroes; the one catalogue begins with "pius," the other with "Holinesse." And Spenser's letter ends with a summary of the events of his story told, not according to "the Methode of a Poet historical," but in the manner of a historiographer who "discourseth of affayres orderly as they were donne, accounting as well the times as the actions."

For his linking of Ariosto and Tasso with Homer, Vergil, and Xenophon as writers on the theme of the virtuous hero, Spenser had ample authority in contemporary comment on their poems. The editions in which he must have read the Italian poets were supplied with introductions resembling that of Badius to the Aeneid. Tasso himself provided explanatory prefaces to his Rinaldo and his Gerusalemme Liberata, essay on the latter, like the letter to Ralegh, repeats the accepted dogma concerning the division of the great subject:

Of the life of the Contemplative Man, the Comedy of Dantes and the Odysses, are (as it were) in every part thereof a Figure: but the civil Life is seen to be shadowed throughout the Iliads, and Aeneids also, although in this there be rather set out a mixture of Action and Contemplation.⁵

There has been much argument as to whether Tasso's moralizations of his poems reflect his original inten'tion or a more or less grudging concession to the pressures of counter-Reformation critical theory, but the question is irrelevant to the present purpose. Like Tasso's poems, the Orlando Furioso came to Spenser's hands as a work in this didactic tradition. Few readers today will believe that Ariosto's purpose was to portray a prince like Aeneas or Cyrus. But there are a number of plainly moralistic episodes in the Orlando, fully equipped with appropriately named allegorical personages, and the problem of extracting a useful meaning from the rest of the poem was easily within the capacity of the critics of the time. Sixteenth-century editors of the Orlando regularly discovered in it a portrait of the heroic leader, and one of them, Orazio Toscanella, compiler of Belleze del Furioso di M. Lodovico Ariosto (1574), describes Ariosto's method in just the way that Spenser describes his own. Ariosto, he says,

placed several virtues in several individuals, one virtue in one character and another in another character, in order to fashion out of all the characters⁷ a well-rounded and perfect man. A well-rounded and perfect man is one adorned with all the virtues.⁶

Spenser calls this well-roundedness "magnificence …. which vertue …. (according to Aristotle and the rest) … is the perfection of all the rest, and conteineth in it them all."

By Spenser's own account, then, the intention of The Faerie Queene is "to fashion a gentleman or noble person," and this he confirms by announcing in the prologue to his poem that its "argument" is "that true glorious type" of Queen Elizabeth, the type of gentleness and nobility. The word "fashion" in his statement of purpose is open to misconstruction. It may be taken to mean that Spenser proposed to show how experience and training make a truly virtuous man out of one who is only potentially virtuous. But in the present case, Spenser's use of "fashion" echoes a long-established tradition which shows that he must intend by it not "educate" or "train" but "represent," "delineate." Cicero's De oratore introduces its subject with the statement "we have to picture to ourselves in our discourse (fingendus est nobis oratione nostra) an orator from whom every blemish has been taken away." Castiglione makes Sir Frederic propose that one of the company "take it in hand to shape in wordes (formare con parole) a good Courtier," and the author declares his intention to "fashion such a Courtier as the Prince that shall be worthie to have him in his service, although his state be but small, may notwithstanding be called a mighty Lord."⁸ It is in this acceptation that the Oxford English Dictionary understands "fashioning" as it appears on the title page of Spenser's poem: "The Faerie Queene. Disposed into twelve bookes, Fashioning XII. Morall vertues." And in the sentence immediately preceding that in which "to fashion a gentleman" occurs, Spenser explains that the purpose of his letter is "to discover unto you the general intention and meaning, which …. I have fashioned." Furthermore, Spenser goes on to explain that in fulfillment of his design he has labored "to pourtraict in Arthure, before he was king, the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private morall vertues." He does not say that he has shown Arthur in the process of achieving that perfection. Of course, since the "fashion" of a man includes that which determines his character, training and experience enter into it to the extent that one believes them to be effective agents. But Spenser announces here, not that he has written the story of an education, but that, like Badius' Vergil and Toscanella's Ariosto, he has described a man who combines in himself the chivalric and the moral disciplines, a virtuous gentleman. And when he exclaims at the beginning of the last canto of the Legend of Temperaunce,

Now gins this goodly frame of Temperance Fairely to rise

he is saying that he has portrayed the virtue itself, not the growth of that virtue in its champion.

It is difficult for most modern readers to disabuse themselves of the idea that character development must be an essential feature of any extended narrative that pretends to be more than merely an entertainment. Stories in which the growth of the hero is a principal motif are of course not uncommon in medieval and Renaissance literature: Parzifal is a notable instance, and the pro gressive lightening and illumination of Dante's soul is obviously important to the structure of the Commedia. The humanist Christophoro Landino reads the Aeneid as an ascent of the hero from the fleshly concerns of Troy to the purity of the contemplative life symbolized by the conquest of Latium.⁹ But although the question of the role of character in an epic poem was endlessly discussed by Renaissance critics, no writer on the subject with whose work I am familiar recommends the growth or education of the hero as a subject for the narrative poet. Indeed, the Aristotelian principle of consistency ("The fourth point [with respect to character] is consistency: for though the subject of the imitation, who suggested the type, be inconsistent, still he must be consistently inconsistent"¹⁰) and the Horatian emphasis on decorum were read as prescribing stability of character, so that one Italian critic says flatly, "The poet, once he has undertaken to imitate somebody, keeps him always and everywhere exactly the same as he was when first introduced."¹¹ Tasso's God-frey is typical, I think, of the kind of heroic figure envisaged by Renaissance criticism. His victory is achieved, not through the perfecting of his nature, but through the overcoming of obstacles which prevent that nature from exercising its proper functions. These are the victories won by Spenser's gentle knights.

A gentleman or nobleman is distinguished from Everyman by the fact that he bears both a private and a public character. Spenser's use of the words ethice and politice to describe the study of these two aspects of the gentle nature suggests a reference to Aristotle's Ethics and Politics, linked treatises the first of which concerns the good man, the second the state in which men are made good. In describing the Odyssey and Tasso's Rinaldo as concerned with the former, the Iliad and the Gerusalemme with the latter, and the Aeneid and the Orlando Furioso with both, Spenser accepts the conclusions of the criticism of his time. His own work is to deal with "ethics," as portrayed in Arthur before he became king, "which if I finde to be well accepted, I may be perhaps encoraged, to frame the other part of polliticke vertues in his person, after that hee came to be king.'"¹²

The division between the "ethical" and "political" realms needs to be understood as precisely as possible, particularly because Spenser is often accused of abandoning it in the later books. What he has to say about Queen Elizabeth and the role she plays in the poem helps to clarify the matter. After identifying Gloriana as "glory" in his general intention but "the most excellent and glorious person of our soveraine the Queene" in his particular, Spenser continues: "For considering she beareth two persons, the one of a most royall Queene or Empresse, the other of a most vertuous and beautifull Lady, this latter part in some places I doe express in Belphoebe." The poet's language indicates a familiarity with the famous legal doctrine of "the king's two bodies," a doctrine which a recent student describes as "a distinctive feature of English political thought in the age of Elizabeth and the early Stuarts."¹³ The doctrine is carefully set forth in connection with a much-discussed case of the fourth year of Elizabeth. The decision was agreed upon by all of the crown lawyers and reported by the great Elizabethan jurist Edmund Plowden ('"The case is altered,' quoth Plowden"):

For the King has in him two Bodies, viz., a Body natural, and a Body politic. His Body natural (if it be considered in itself) is a Body mortal, subject to all Infirmities that come by Nature or Accident, to the Imbecility of Infancy or old Age, and to the like Defects that happen to the natural Bodies of other People. But his Body politic is a Body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of Policy and Government, and constituted for the Direction of the People, and the Management of the public weal, and this Body is utterly void of Infancy, and old Age, and other natural Defects and Imbecilities, which the Body natural is subject to, and for this Cause, what the King does in his Body politic, cannot be invalidated or frustrated by any Disability in his natural Body.¹⁴

The bodies are joined in somewhat the same way as the membership of a corporation and the corporation itself, or as humanity and divinity in Christ.

Spenser's Gloriana was evidently intended to represent this union and so the necessary connection between The Faerie Queene and that second "polliticke" poem. Often it required great legal subtlety to distinguish between the king natural and the king politic. But Spenser's understanding of the difference appears most clearly, I think, where it has been most often challenged. In the Legend of Justice, Queen Mercilla sits surrounded by the emblems of her regality as presiding officer at the trial of Duessa. But when the court, the body of which she is the head, arrives at its verdict, she does not pronounce it. She does not let "due vengeance" light upon the culprit but

The passion and tears, inevitable and praiseworthy in a virtuous queen natural, are nevertheless the sign of an "imbecility" to which the queen politic, by definition, cannot be subject.¹⁵

The theme of the noble man as "body natural" having been determined, Spenser then chose the "historicall fiction" of Arthur as the most suitable means by which to express it. So, at least, he describes the process. It has been argued most ingeniously that in fact he did not begin in this way at all, that the moral intention came late and was superimposed upon what was originally a romantic narrative.¹⁶ In the absence of unambiguous independent testimony—and it is absent—such an argument cannot be decisive. It may be that in 1589 Spenser himself would not have been able to say whether it was a dream of Britomart or a determination to benefit the commonwealth that led to the composition of his poem. But the question in any case is not directly pertinent to an attempt to understand the meaning of The Faerie Queene, a poem which we read, not as it evolved in the mind of its author, but as it was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth and published in 1590 and 1596.

The choice of Arthur as hero was dictated by a number of considerations, among them those which Spenser mentions: he was "most fitte for the excellency of his person, being made famous by many mens former workes, and also furthest from the daunger of envy, and suspition of present time." Certainly the myth so sedulously fostered by Henry VII that Arthur was of the line of British kings whom the Tudors claimed as their ancestors and a descendant of Vergil's Aeneas also played a part in his election. Spenser recalls the story by deriving the family of Elizabeth from his own fictions, Artegall and Britomart, and so eventually from Aeneas' grandson, Brutus. That the poet placed any credence in the tale of the ancient Trojan ancestry of the Tudors or in the reliability of Geoffrey of Monmouth as a historian is at least doubtful. In a passage in A Vewe of the Present State of Irelande¹⁷ he laughs at the vanity of Englishmen who believe that Brutus was the founder of Britain, and Sidney similarly refuses to take the story seriously.¹⁸ But Spenser was not striving for historical accuracy in The Faerie Queene, and for his poetic purpose the myth of the Tudor descent from Troy, used with deliberate vagueness, provided him with a useful parallel to Vergil's link between Aeneas and Augustus.¹⁹

It is Arthur "before he was king" who is to provide the historical fiction for the delineation of the "private morall vertues." Since the tradition told Spenser very little about Arthur before the beginning of his reign he was free to invent what actions he liked. How he would have adapted the more fully documented story of Arthur the king to an exposition of the politic virtues it is impossible to guess; perhaps he never formulated the plan except in the most general terms. It was this Iliad to complement Spenser's Odyssey, a poem about Arthur as defender and lawgiver of the commonwealth, that Milton intended to write, I think. The scattered references to his proposed "Arthuriad" suggest a matter of battling armies and national crises, the kind of matter that finds no place in Spenser's poem about Arthur as a private man. Milton, it is believed, gave up the idea of an "Arthuriad" because of his doubts as to the historicity of the accounts of ancient Britain. If so, he belonged to that considerable Renaissance school that held that a true poem must be true in its fable as well as in its meaning. Spenser did not.

The Faerie Queene does not pretend to be an account of events that actually took place. We are now so accustomed to the convention of serious fiction that it requires an effort to recapture the attitude that demanded of a writer that he account to the world for his telling of a story palpably false. The argument of Sidney's Apology for Poetry in fact turns upon such a justification: a poem is not a lie, he says, both because the reader is not invited to accept it as history and because it is tied to "the general reason of things" if not to "the particuler truth of things."²⁰ It is this "general reason of things" that Spenser claims to be expressing when he describes his work as "a continued allegory or darke conceit."

In recent years a number of brilliant studies have thrown much light on the use of allegory in the Middle Ages, and that use was surely a powerful influence upon later allegorists. But what may be said of the method of the Divine Comedy, the Romance of the Rose, and Piers Plowman does not necessarily apply to The Faerie Queene. Spenser claims as his models not those poems but the Aeneid, the Orlando, and the Gerusalemme. Whatever allegory may have meant in medieval usage, it had both a particular and a general acceptation in the Renaissance, the particular defined in terms of its nature, the general in terms of its function. The former sense, that given in textbooks of rhetoric from classical times onward, makes allegory a species of metaphor, "a Trope of a sentence, or forme of speech which expresseth one thing in words and another in sense." It is distinguished in its class by the fact that its literal elements and the meanings they signify are multiple rather than single: "In a Metaphore there is a translation of one word onely, in an Allegorie of many, and for that cause an Allegorie is called a continued Metaphore."²¹ The examples of this figure of speech given by the rhetoricians are derived indifferently from prose and poetry, the Bible and secular letters. One writer offers as a typical instance the following line from Vergil's eclogues:

Stop up your streames (my lads) the medes have drunk ther fill

explaining it thus:

As much to say, leave of now, yee have talked of the matter inough: for the shepheards guise in many places is by opening certaine sluces to water their pastures, so as when they are wet inough they shut them againe: this application is full Allegoricke.²²

Spenser's familiarity with this sense of "allegory" is obvious both from his application to the word of the standard epithet "continued" and from his frequent use of such extended metaphors in the poem. Amoret with her heart laid open and bleeding is a figure of speech for a woman tormented in spirit; Orgoglio deflated like an empty bladder tells us that pride is merely puffed up; Arthur's dream of Gloriana is a metaphorical statement of the noble vision of glorious achievement. These are "allegories" within the definition of the rhetoricians and there are many like them in The Faerie Queene. In Spenser's practice they are often presented dramatically or pictorially, a technique resembling that of medieval allegory and of the allegorical pageants, paintings, and "emblems" of the Renaissance. But Spenser says that his poem is an allegory, not merely that there are allegories in it.

It is the functional significance of the word which is uppermost in Spenser's mind. Tasso's explanation of his Gerusalemme Liberata provides the gloss:

Heroical Poetry (as a living Creature, wherein two Natures are conjoyned) is compounded of Imitation and Allegory: with the one she allureth unto her the Minds and Ears of Men, and marvellously delighteth them; with the other, either in Vertue or Knowledge, she instructeth them. And as the Heroically written Imitation of an Other, is nothing else but the Pattern and Image of Humane Action: so the Allegory of an Heroical Poem is none other than the Glass and Figure of Humane Life. But Imitation regardeth the Actions of Man subjected to the outward Senses, and about them being principally employed, seeketh to represent them with effectual and expressive Phrases, such as lively set before our Corporal Eyes the things represented: It doth not consider the Customs, Affections, or Discourses of the Mind, as they be inward, but only as they come forth thence, and being manifested in Words, in Deeds, or Working, do accompany the Action. On the other side, Allegory respecteth the Passions, the Opinions and Customs, not only as they do appear, but principally in their being hidden and inward; and more obscurely doth express them with Notes (as a Man may say) mystical, such as only the Understanders of the Nature of things can fully comprehend.²³

Beyond the vague statement that it is difficult to understand and is expressed by obscure "notes"—a "dark conceit" in Spenser's phrase—Tasso is not concerned with the method of allegory. What is salient for him is its purpose, instruction in virtue and knowledge and investigation of the inward as well as the outward motions of man, the presentation of "the Glass and Figure of Humane Life." Sir John Harington's "Briefe and Summarie Allegorie of Orlando Furioso" shows how such a definition is applied.²⁴ The "two principall heads and common places" of the Orlando he takes to be love and arms. Under the former he expounds the meaning of Rogero's adventures with Alcina, the temptation of pleasure, and Logestilla, or virtue. These episodes are "allegories" in method. But Harington also declares that "the whole booke is full of examples of men and women, that in this matter of love, have been notable in one kinde or other." His exposition of the theme of arms begins with "the example of two mightie Emperours, one of which directeth all his counsels by wisdome, learning, and Religion; But the other being rash, and unexperienced, ruined himselfe and his countrie." These are exemplary fictions, metaphoric only in the sense that their characters are types representative of many individuals, but they find place in the "generall Allegorie of the whole worke" because they contribute to its didactic purpose. Renaissance allegorical explanations of the Aeneid similarly depend indifferently upon the elucidation of "continued" metaphors and the lessons to be learned from the example of the characters of the story. Spenser himself makes no sharp division between allegory and fictional example: although at one point he describes his work as "clowdily enwrapped in Allegoricall devises," at another he declares the method of the Cyropaedia to be doctrine "by ensample" and adds, "So have I laboured to doe in the person of Arthure."

Spenser's method is in fact best disclosed by his practice. The episode of Malbecco, Hellenore, and Paridell, the principal subject of the ninth and tenth cantos of the Legend of Chastitie, serves as a convenient illustration, for while its intention is unmistakable, the rhetorical techniques employed in its telling are marvelously varied and complex. The tale begins as a fabliau of the hoariest type, a comedy involving the miserly, jealous husband, his pretty, wanton wife, and the polished seducer. Such situations are sometimes called "realistic," yet the names of the characters at once give the story a meaning beyond the particular: "Malbecco" is from the Italian becco which means both "cuckold" and "he-goat"; "Hellenore" and "Paridell" are intended to suggest the types of Helen and Paris of Troy. Malbecco's passions for his money and his wife are presented in parallel so that one becomes a figure for the other: he is not properly entitled either to the gold or to the girl, he makes no use of either, he keeps both locked up and fears constantly for their loss. His blindness in one eye serves as a metaphor for the watchful blindness of jealousy, for although he keeps up a sleepless, self-tormenting vigil he is unable to see what goes on at his side, the seduction of Hellenore by Paridell. That affair is described realistically: Paridell "sent close messages of love to her at will"; metaphorically: "She sent at him one firie dart, whose hed / Empoisned was with privy lust, and gealous dred"; and symbolically: "[she] in her lap did shed her idle draught, / Shewing desire her inward flame to slake." That inward flame leads to the fire set by Hellenore to cover her escape, a fire compared with the conflagration which consumed Troy, Helen and Hellenore, wantons both, joying in wanton destruction. Now the realm of realism is left quite behind, for Hellenore, having been abandoned by the rake Paridell, finds refuge as the common mistress of a band of satyrs, halfgoats who herd goats, her sexual passion satisfied at last. And when Malbecco tries to rescue her from her happy predicament, the goats butt him with their horns—give him the "horn" for which he was named at his christening. Finally, consumed by the "long anguish and self-murdring thought" of his jealous nature he is changed into a strange creature with crooked claws dwelling in a cave overhung by a tremendous cliff

There he lives forever, so deformed "that he has quight / Forgot he was a man, and Gealosie is hight."²⁵

This is not a story in the ordinary sense of the word, for the movement is inward, not onward. The transformations of Malbecco and Hellenore are not really transformations at all but revelations of their essence. The poet's purpose has been to lay bare the sterile, destructive, and dehumanizing power of the passions of greed, jealousy, and lust, and to this end he has made use of every means at his command, exemplary tale, myth, metaphor extended and simple, simile, symbol, and direct statement. As narrative, the episode is self-contained, for neither Malbecco nor Hellenore appears earlier or again, but the ideas which it expresses are presented in parallel and contrast, echoed, analyzed, developed, and refined throughout the Legend of Chastitie. To distinguish among the rhetorical tools by which this is accomplished is a task which would require the sharpest of definitions and infinite subtlety in applying them, for the poetical stream flows unbroken from one into another. Fortunately, it is not a task that need be undertaken here, for it offers little help in understanding the poem. Rather, the theme of discourse suggests itself through its repeated statement in a variety of forms, and once manifested reciprocally illuminates the "dark conceits" by which it is expressed.

The models for his method which Spenser acknowledges in the letter to Ralegh include only classical and Renaissance works. He is also indebted, though I think not as profoundly, to specifically medieval traditions. The influence of the morality drama is particularly evident in the Legend of Holinesse. Since the subject of many of these plays is human salvation, their protagonists meet obstacles similar to those which hinder the Red Cross Knight, and like that Knight they must be saved by God's mercy. The central characters of the later moralities—for their popularity persisted well into the sixteenth century—tend to be one or another kind of human rather than Mankind in general, and John Skelton's Magnificence presents a prince, or magnificent man, as its hero. The trials of Magnificence parallel those of St. George. The vicious influences playing upon him are disguised as virtuous ones, just as Duessa poses as Fidessa and Archimago as the Red Cross Knight. As a result of his delusion he falls into the clutches of Despair and is about to commit suicide when Good Hope snatches away his dagger and he is regenerated by Redress, Sad Circumspection, and Perseverance. The influence of the long tradition of medieval allegorical poetry on The Faerie Queene is also clear. Spenser owes to it such devices as the gardens of love, the pageant of the sins, the arms of the Red Cross Knight, the masque of Cupid, and the Blatant Beast. An analogue to the Beast occurs in a late example of such poetry, Stephen Hawes's Pastime of Pleasure,²⁶ a poem which is strikingly similar to The Faerie Queene in general conception, for Graunde Amour, like the Red Cross Knight, is clad in the armor described by St. Paul,²⁷ and his passion for La Belle Pucelle is as much a metaphor for the noble man's hunger for glory as Arthur's love for Gloriana. Indeed, the idea of a quest for a high goal as the central motive is common to medieval story of many kinds, from saints' lives to chivalric adventures. And since a heroic quest is central to the Aeneid also, Spenser found it appropriate to his Vergilian treatment of the matter of Arthur.

But the goal is not Prince Arthur's guide, as the hope of a new Troy is for Aeneas and the conquest of Jerusalem for Tasso's Godfrey. The narrative structure of The Faerie Queene is, in fact, almost frivolously weak. Having fallen in love with the Faerie Queene in a dream, like Sir Thopas in Chaucer's burlesque tale, Arthur thereafter wanders in and out of the poem, rescuing the unfortunate, contending with villains, and chasing the beautiful Florimell. Only a parenthetical observation that he wished his beloved were as fair as Florimell reminds the reader that his romantic attachment persists. The chivalric quests of the titular heroes of the successive books can be taken no more seriously. St. George sets out to kill the dragon besieging the castle of Una's parents and that is all we hear of his interest in the matter until the very end of his legend. In the second book, Guyon's task is to destroy Acrasia's Bower, but he is otherwise occupied for most of his career. Britomart is absent from much of her Legend of Chastitie and she learns of Amoret's imprisonment and undertakes to rescue her only in the eleventh canto. The story of Cambel and Triamond is merely an episode in the Legend of Friendship. Neither the rescue of Irena nor the hunt for the Blatant Beast dominates the action of the last two books, and there is no sign of a champion or of a quest in the fragmentary seventh. There are, to be sure, hundreds of stories in Spenser's poem, many of them brilliantly told, but The Faerie Queene is not, in any significant sense, a story. If plot is soul, the poem cannot escape damnation.

Nor does The Faerie Queene become coherent if the reader seeks for a continuing moral tale of which the literal one is a metaphor. In the first episode of the first book, the Red Cross Knight enters the Wandering Wood and conquers monstrous Error. When he leaves the Wood does he leave Error behind him and thereafter walk in the way of Truth? In fact, he, like all men, spends his mortal life in the Wood battling with the monster. Has he done with despair when he escapes from Despair? Even in his final struggle with the Old Dragon he wishes he were dead. Seduced by Will and Grief, he abandons Una, his true faith. If he is therefore faith-less he is nevertheless able to conquer Sans Foy, or faithlessness. Then he enters Lucifera's House of Pride in company with the figure of Falsehood, Duessa. In this state he fights with Sans Joy and is at the point of defeat when his "quickning faith" rescues him and turns the tide. This happens in Canto v, yet St. George is not reunited with his Faith until the end of Canto viii. By the dwarfs help he escapes from that House of Pride only to be caught in the arms of Duessa by the giant of pride, Orgoglio. Those commentators who read the Legend of Holinesse as a Christian's progress make a difference between Lucifera and the giant; I cannot find it in the text. To be sure, the carcasses behind Lucifera's palace are those guilty ones who have been destroyed by the sin of pride while the bodies on the floor of Orgoglio's castle are the innocents and martyrs who have been destroyed by the sinfulness of the proud. Lucifera, usurping queen of man's soul, is attended by the mortal sins of which she is chief and source; Orgoglio, usurping tyrant of the world, by a seven-headed monster whose tail reaches to the house of the heavenly gods. These are inward and outward aspects of the same sin, that sin of pretended glory which is false at its foundation, as the House of Pride is built on a hill of sand and the great Orgoglio is brought down by a blow at the leg. A recent student of The Faerie Queene analyzes the Legend of Holinesse into ten "acts,"²⁸ but if the episodes are properly so described the whole is scarcely a neatly constructed play.

Confusion also besets the reader who follows the characters of The Faerie Queene in the hope of extracting from their adventures an orderly lesson in morality. In the course of Florimell's desperate flight from her various pursuers she escapes from a horrid spotted beast by leaping into the boat of a poor old fisherman. As she does so she loses her golden girdle. Since in later books we learn that this girdle will not stay bound about ladies who are unchaste we may be led to conclude that Florimell has now lost her maidenhead. One commentator²⁹ accepts this logic and finds confirma tion for it in "the apparently innocent line that she was driven to great distress 'and taught the carefull Mariner to play' (III.viii.20)" although the grammar of the passage in question makes it quite clear that Fortune, who drove Florimell to distress, taught her to play the troubled mariner, not that Florimell taught the fisherman erotic games. Surely, the unhappy girl is here made to lose her girdle only in order that Satyrane may have it to bind the spotted beast, for when the fisherman attacks her she cries to heaven, and not in vain:

See how the heavens, of voluntary grace
And soveraine favour towards chastity,
Doe succour send to her distressed cace:
So much high God doth innocence embrace
(III.viii.29)

Even if God is deluded about Florimell's chastity, it seems unlikely that the poet is also. Yet later in the same canto he exclaims in her praise, "Most vertuous virgin!" The fallacy of reading Spenser's allegory rigidly becomes patent when it is observed that the Snowy Florimell, who is not enough of a virgin to wear the girdle in the fourth book (v. 19-20), has somehow become able to bind it about her waist by the time of her trial in the fifth (iii.24).

Reading the Florimell story as a continued narrative leads to the suggestion that she is a kind of Proserpina, that her imprisonment beneath the sea by Proteus and her eventual betrothal to Marinell constitute a retelling of the vegetation myth.³⁰ Indeed, her flowery name, the icicles on Proteus' beard, and the effect of the warmth of her presence on the moribund Marinell seem to support such a reading. But if this is what Spenser intended by the story taken as a whole, he was perverse enough to addle his readers unmercifully by making the duration of Florimell's bondage not six months but seven.

If Spenser had thought that the greatness of his poem rested upon its fable and its characters, I presume that he would have been careful to make them coherent and consistent. Yet when he came to write the letter to Ralegh he described the beginning of Sir Guyon's quest in a manner directly contradicted by the text he was introducing. He brings Amoret to the point of reunion with her long lost Scudamour only to forget all about her and allow her to drop out of sight. In the space of twenty stanzas "lewd Claribell" unaccountably becomes "good Sir Claribell" (IV.ix.20, 40). Britomart's traveling companion is now called the Red Cross Knight and now Sir Guyon; it does not seem to matter to the author who he is. However Spenser came to make the errors in the first place they apparently did not bring themselves to his attention when he revised. Spenser was no hasty publisher of his works, and he must have read his manuscript through thoroughly before permitting it to assume the immortality of print. What escaped his notice must have been those matters to which he paid little attention.

Sometimes, in fact, Spenser sees fit to introduce a note of burlesque into his narration of even the most heroic and pathetic actions. This should not surprise us, for the combination of jest and earnest is a firm and ancient rhetorical tradition.³¹ Spenser uses humor occasionally only, for in general he strives to maintain the mood of "beautifull old rime, / In praise of Ladies dead, and lovely Knights." But its presence, though often overlooked, should warn us not to read his stories too solemnly. The beautiful and virtuous Serena has been captured by fierce cannibals. After consultation, they decide

And when she is saved by her beloved Calepine she cannot say a word because she is in "so unwomanly a mood." The unhappy wife of Sir Bruin adopts a child rescued from the jaws of a bear, taking it as "her owne by liverey and seisin"^b (VI.iv.37). The heroine Britomart meets an Amazon in mortal battle:

Britomart tilts with Scudamour, and

After Artegall has laid low the immense giant Grantorto at the climax of the fifth book, "He lightly reft his head, to ease him of his paine" (xii.23). Lines of this kind are common enough to qualify the tone of the poem.

Sometimes it is difficult to tell whether Spenser is being intentionally witty or unintentionally absurd, for he does not signal his reader as Ariosto and Chaucer do. No one doubts that Chaucer is mocking a literary convention when he says, in his account of the battle between Palamon and Arcite, "Up to the ancle foghte they in hir blood." But when Spenser tells of the wound inflicted on the Old Dragon by the Knight of the Red Cross,

he is thought to be straining so hard for effect that he falls into nonsense.

Perhaps he is guilty here, though he is so sophisticated a writer that one must suspect the judgment. But it cannot be argued that Spenser's hydraulic metaphor must be taken seriously because the inner meaning of the battle between St. George and the Dragon is deeply in earnest. Such an argument depends upon the critical assumption that in proper poetry the story and its significance must both tend to the same effect. If the assumption is valid—and I am not sure that it is—then Spenser's method is often quite improper. In terms of the narrative, Guyon's faint when he emerges from the Cave of Mammon can arouse only sympathy for his plight—he has been without food and water for three days and the fresh air is too much for him. But the meaning of this swoon is that Guyon is a wicked man, undeserving of his rescue by the freely given grace of God. A monster that vomits up a collection of books and papers is merely ridiculous; as a symbol of the kind of error into which man's blindness leads him she is no laughing matter. There is, to be sure, a point of contact between the mood of these tales and what they signify, for if human weakness is sinful it is also pathetic, and if human error is damnable it is also grotesque. The story may so serve to inflect its underlying meaning in much the same way as a shadow influences the perception of the object which produces it. But one does not confuse shadow and object.

One kind of inconsistency in Spenser's narrative which is sometimes ascribed to changes in his plans and to shifting literary influences upon him is, I think, an essential part of his grand design, although it has not previously been recognized as such. It is apparent and it has often been remarked that the style of The Faerie Queene is not uniform throughout: the Legend of Holinesse is the life of a saint, an imitatio Christi; the Legend of Chastitie is notably in Ariosto's manner; the Legend of Courtesie has the character of pastoral romance. If this is inconsistency, it is of the kind the reader should be led to expect from a consideration of Spenser's practice in his other poems. In The Shepheardes Calender he evidently strives for the greatest possible range of meter, mood, and manner. The four episodes of Mother Hubberds Tale are bound together by a common theme, yet each is handled differently. And the letter to Ralegh makes clear the poet's desire to avoid monotony in The Faerie Queene: "But of the xii. other virtues, I make xii. other knights the patrones, for the more variety of the history."

The varying styles of the successive books of The Faerie Queene serve a purpose of greater weight than the avoidance of monotony. The "patrons" of those books are indeed different from each other and engage in different kinds of action. This is so, I believe, because Spenser intended his readers to recognize in them reflections of particular literary models in just the same way as they recognized in the first half of the Aeneid an imitation of the Odyssey and in the latter half an imitation of the Iliad. The Legend of St. George echoes the saint's life in The Golden Legend. Sir Guyon is a hero of classical epic, like Aeneas and Odysseus. Britomart and Florimell inevitably recall Ariosto's Bradamante and Angelica. The titular story of Cambel and Triamond in the Legend of Friendship is based on Chaucer's unfinished Squire's Tale, and reminiscences of that story and the one told by the Knight recur frequently throughout the book. Artegall is compared directly with Hercules, Bacchus, and Osiris, the mythical founders of civilization. The adventures of Sir Calidore are of the type found in the Greek romances and imitated by Sidney in the Arcadia. The fragmentary Cantos of Mutabilitie clearly imitate Ovid's Metamorphoses. In the following chapters I shall suggest why Spenser may have thought these models suitable to the subjects which he wished to treat. It was surely in his character as a poet not only to seek the greatest variety possible in the general form of the epic poem as he understood it but also to display his technical virtuosity by imitating within the compass of a single work a great range of the literary models available to him and to his contemporaries.

This hunger for complexity, for binding into one the multiple and for revealing the multiple in the one, shows itself in almost every aspect of Spenser's technique. The stanza which he invented for the poem is itself such a various unit. Its closest relatives are the Italian ottava rima (abababcc), rhyme royal (ababbcc), and the stanza used by Chaucer in the Monk's Tale (ababbcbc). In the first two forms the final couplet rhymes independently of the rest; the Monk's Tale stanza lacks a clear-cut conclusion. By adding an alexandrine rhyming with c to this last verse pattern, Spenser introduces metrical variety and at the same time supplies an ending which is linked to rather than separated from the remainder. Stanza is joined to stanza by frequent echoes in the first line of one of the sound or thought of the last line preceding it, and analogous links tie together canto with canto and book with book. To the amalgamation in his stanza of Italian and English forms Spenser adds a Vergilian touch by occasionally leaving a verse unfinished in the manner of the Aeneid.

The invention of the names of the characters of The Faerie Queene betrays a similar habit of mind. They are designedly derived from different languages: Pyrochles is Greek, Munera Latin, Alma Italian (and also both Latin and Hebrew), Sans Foy French, the first half of Ruddymane English. Many of the names are portmanteaus into which Spenser has stuffed a multiplicity of meanings. "Britomart," for example, reminded his Elizabethan readers of Ariosto's heroine Bradamante as well as of Britomartis, the chaste daughter of Carme whom ancient myth identified with Diana,³² while at the same time the etymology "martial Briton" must have been inescapable, for Boccaccio calls Britomartis "Britona, Martis filia."³³

The key ideas of his moral teaching are expressed by as many different symbols as the poet can imagine: the power which binds the disparate or antagonistic is represented by the figure of Concord flanked by Love and Hate; by the hermaphrodite Venus and the snake about her legs whose head and tail are joined together; by the lady Cambina, her team of angry lions, her Aesculapian rod, and her cup of nepenthe. These reciprocal processes of unification and multiplication reflect a conception of the universe which makes it all one, yet unimaginably rich.

There is a plenitude of story in The Faerie Queene, martial, amatory, and domestic; myth, fairy tale, chivalric adventure, and anecdote. Some of these tales Spenser invents himself; others he borrows from biblical, classical, medieval, and contemporary sources. He has no sense of impropriety in setting together the true and the fabulous, the familiar and the heroic, the Christian and the pagan. Rather, he seems to seek occasion to do so, either "for the more variety of the history" or to demonstrate the universality of the theme he is expounding. What he borrows he makes his own, without the slightest respect for the integrity or the intention of the original. His ruthless use of Vergil's story of Dido and Aeneas serves as an example. The words spoken by Aeneas when he meets his mother on the Carthaginian shore are put into the mouth of the buffoon Trompait, while the portrait of Venus is made over into a portrait of the Diana-like Belphoebe. Aeneas' account of his past experiences at dinner with Dido inspires Guyon's table conversation with Medina. Dido's alternate name, Elissa, is given to Medina's morose sister. Dido's dying speech is echoed by the suicide Amavia, and as Iris shears a lock of hair from the one so Guyon does from the other. Again, elements of the legendary story of St. George are used in several ways in Book I, but the incident of George's binding the dragon with a girdle and leading it about as a tame thing is transferred to Sir Satyrane in Book III. Chaucer's Squire's Tale provides the basis for the story of Cambel and Triamond; the episode in which a lovesick bird is restored to its fickle mate "By mediacion of Cambalus" suggests the reconciling of Timias and Belphoebe by mediation of a lovesick bird.

Sometimes Spenser seems almost perverse in the way he turns his borrowed matter upside down. The pathetic interchange between the heroine of Chastity, Britomart, and her nurse Glauce is taken almost verbatim from that between Ciris, or Scylla, daughter of the king of Megara, and her nurse Carme in a poem attributed to Vergil. This is the Carme whose daughter Britomartis once fled from the embraces of Minos into some fishermen's nets at the seashore, like Fiorimeli in Spenser's tale. Ciris, maddened by love for the same Minos who is now besieging Megara, rapes from her father's head the crimson lock which protects the city, and so brings destruction upon her home, her kindred, and herself. She is as bad a girl as Spenser's Britomart is a good one, a symbol of lust as Britomart is of chastity. Arthur's miraculous shield is another instance of imitation by reversal. It was originally the property of Atalanta, in the Orlando Furioso. Sir John Harington explains its principal significance:

In the shield, whose light amazed the lookers on, and made them fall down astonied, may be Allegorically meant the great pompes of the world, that make shining shewes in the bleared eyes of vaine people, and blind them, and make them to admire and fall downe before them … either else may be meant the flaring beauties of some gorgeous women that astonish the eyes of weake minded men.³⁴

But in Spenser's version this trumpery shield becomes the divine power that destroys illusion:

That which hides the truth Spenser turns into that which reveals it.

This reshaping and reworking of borrowed material is neither random nor perverse. Behind it lies the constant determination to make story the servant of intention. The process can be seen clearly in the different coloring given to parcels of a continuous narrative when it is used to express different ideas. The history of Britain from its beginnings in the judgment of Paris and the fall of Troy is told in three installments, in Arthur's book of Briton moniments in Book II and in Merlin's prophecy to Britomart and Paridell's account of his ancestry in Book III. Arthur reads his book in the House of Alma, the house which is well governed because each division of it obeys its mistress. The theme of this part of the history of Britain suits the house in which it is read, for it

Merlin's contribution to the history is a glorious prophecy which interprets and justifies the pain of the lovesick Britomart:

When it is revived by the false lover Paridell, however, that sleeping memory becomes an exemplum of the sterile consequence of the lust of his ancestor Paris:

Urged by Britomart, Paridell remembers that the Trojan line did not altogether die out, for Aeneas, son of "Venus faire," after long suffering married the daughter of old Latinus:

Not Paridell but Britomart celebrates the glory of Rome, the second Troy, and prophesies the rise of that third Troy, Britain,

In the context of Prince Arthur, the history demonstrates the necessity of rule; in that of Britomart, the creativeness of love; in that of Paridell, the destructiveness of lust.

Within The Faerie Queene, the unit is the book or legend. It is made up of episodes and "allegories" invented to illuminate its theme. Typically, a book begins with an encounter between new characters and those of its predecessor, there is a climax or shift of emphasis approximately at midpoint, and the end is marked by some great action. Apart from these loose formal characteristics, however, the constituent elements are not sequential in their arrangement; they are truly episodic, obeying no law of progress or development. Rather, they are so placed as to produce effects of variety and contrast. They are tied not to each other but to the principal subject of discourse, and to this they contribute analytically or comprehensively, directly or by analogy, by affirmation or denial.

In Spenser's poem, intention is the soul, while the stories, characters, symbols, figures of speech, the ring of the verse itself constitute the body:

Only from the made body can the form be inferred, however, and this is the kind of inference that Spenser expects of his readers. One may take hold of the meaning of a book almost anywhere in it, for it is everywhere there. I have entitled the chapter dealing with the Legend of Holinesse "The Cup and the Serpent," the symbol which Fidelia holds, but it might as well have been called "Mount Sinai and the Mount of Olives," "Sans Joy and the Promise," "Hope in Anguish," "The Burning Armor," "Una and the Veil," or "The Tree and the Living Well." Each of these in its own way and with its own inflection is a figure for the paradox of life and death which I take to be central to the book. What that paradox means and how it may be resolved Spenser never says directly. I think it was the nature of his mind rather than the fear of losing his audience that kept him from delivering his discipline "plainly in way of precepts." He could no more state his abstract theme apart from its expression in this world than a painter could draw the idea of a chair. The result is the richness of The Faerie Queene.

Notes

^a battili: become fat and fleshy, as cattle do.

^b by liverey and seisin: legal language for the delivery of property into the corporal possession of a person.

^c lin: cease.

^d blent: hidden from sight.

^e embaste: debased.

¹ I have used the edition entitled P. Virgilii Maronis Opera cum Servii, Donati, et Ascensii commentariis (Venice, 1542) (cited hereafter as Virgilii Opera). Badius' preface to the Aeneid is at fols. 101v-102r. On the subject of Vergil's influence on Spenser see Merritt Y. Hughes, Virgil and Spenser (Berkeley, 1929).

² More properly, the line may be rendered: "Or to speak words at once pleasing and useful to life." But Jonson's version suggests the way in which Renaissance writers understood Horace.

³ "Et hic est ordo rerum gestarum, aut quae pro gestis a poeta recitantur, verum alius longe ordo a poeta observatur."

⁴ Cooper's Thesaurus, the standard Latin-English dictionary of Spenser's time, translates plausibilis: "Receyved with joye and clappynge of the handes: acceptable: pleasaunte: plausible."

⁵Godfrey of Bulloigne, tr. Edward Fairfax (first printed 1600; London, 1687), Sig. A 2 (r).

⁶ Quoted and translated by D. L. Aguzzi, "Allegory in the Heroic Poetry of the Renaissance" (unpublished dissertation, Columbia University, 1959), p. 208. The passage is also cited by Susannah Jane McMurphy, Spenser's Use of Ariosto for Allegory (University of Washington Publications, Language and Literature, Vol. II, 1924), p. 15. G. P. Pigna, in I romanzi (1554), ascribes a similar method rather to the romance than to the epic: "The romances readily devote themselves to several deeds of several men, but … they concern especially one man who should be celebrated over all the others. And thus they agree with the epic in taking a single person, but not so in taking a single action, for they take as many of them as seem to be sufficient. The number is 'sufficient' when they have put the heroes in all those honorable actions which are sought in a perfect knight" (Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance [Chicago, 1961], I, 445-46).

⁷ 1.xxvi.118, tr. E. W. Sutton (Loeb Classical Library, London, 1948). Compare also Cicero's Orator, ii.7: "Atque ego in summo oratore fingendo talem informabo qualis fortasse nemo fuit."

⁸ Everyman's Library edition of Hoby's translation, pp. 16, 29.

⁹ Christophoro Landino, Camaldulenses disputationes (Strasbourg, 1508), Books III and IV.

¹⁰Poetics, xv.4 (tr. S. H. Butcher).

¹¹ Dionigi Altanagi, Ragionamento de la eccelentia et perfettione de la historia (1559), quoted by Weinberg, History of Literary Criticism, I, 458.

¹² By the time Spenser came to write the Amoretti he may have decided to follow Vergil's example in making ethics the subject of the first six books of his poem and politics the subject of the last six. So he seems to say in Sonnet LXXX when he promises to attempt "that second worke" after resting from his labor on "those six books" he had already written.

¹³ Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies, a Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957), p. 42.

¹⁴ Quoted ibid., p. 7.

¹⁵ When Mercilla is at last forced by "strong constraint" to doom Duessa she suffers "more then needfull naturall remorse" (V.X.4).

¹⁶ The case is forcefully presented by J. W. Bennett, The Evolution of "The Faerie Queene" (Chicago, 1942; reprinted New York, 1960).

¹⁷Works, IX, 82.

¹⁸ See T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London, 1950), pp. 128 ff.

¹⁹ Compare the attitude of Ronsard with respect to his story of Francus as he expresses it in the 1587 preface to the Françiade, cited by I. Silver, Ronsard and the Hellenistic Renaissance in France (St. Louis, 1961), pp. 145-46.

²⁰Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford, 1904), I, 164.

²¹ Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593), facsimile reproduction (Gainesville, Fla., Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1954), p. 25.

²² George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (first printed 1589), ed. G. D. Willcock and A. Walker (Cambridge, 1936), p. 187.

²³Godfrey of Bulloigne, Sig. A I (r-v).

²⁴Orlando Furioso in English Heroicall Verse (first printed 1591; London, 1634), pp. 405 ff. Susannah McMurphy (Spenser's Use of Ariosto, p. 15) notes that what commentators on the Orlando Furioso mean by allegory "is often merely the moral lesson that may be derived from the incidents. The characters are not embodied virtues and vices, neither are their actions symbolic of spiritual experiences; they are often only men and women who offer examples of virtue and vice, prudence or folly, from which the observer may derive profit."

²⁵ It has not been remarked, I think, that the transformation of Malbecco is imitated from that of Daedalion in Ovid's Metamorphoses, XI, ll. 338-45:

Effugit ergo omnes, veloxque cupidine leti
Vertice Parnasi potitur. miseratus Apollo,
Cum se Daedalion saxo misisset ab alto,
Fecit avem et subitis pendentem sustulit alis,
Oraque adunca dedit, curvos dedit unguibus hamos,
Virtutem antiquam, maiores corpore vires.
Et nunc accipiter, nulli satis aequus, in omnes
Saevit aves, aliisque dolens fit causa dolendi.

I have previously noted (Modern Language Notes, LXVIII [1953], 226-29) that Spenser drew suggestions for the Malbecco story from George Gascoigne's Adventures of Master F. J., and despite the strictures of Waldo McNeir ("Ariosto's Sospetto, Gascoigne's Suspicion, and Spenser's Malbecco," in Festschrift für Walther Fischer [Heidelberg, 1959]) the conclusion still seems to me valid.

²⁶The Pastime of Pleasure (1509), ed. W. E. Mead (London, for the Early English Text Society, O.S. No. 173, 1928), pp. 192 ff. The name of Hawes's monster is "malice prevy."

²⁷Ibid., pp. 129-30.

²⁸ A. C. Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in 'The Faerie Queene' (Oxford, 1961), pp. 59 ff. For the view that the Legend of Holinesse is not a continued allegorical narrative but is organized in terms of "concepts" according to "the arrangement of Christian doctrines customary in Renaissance theological treatises and confessionals" see Virgil K. Whitaker, "The Theological Structure of the Faerie Queene, Book I," in That Soveraine Light: Essays in Honor of Edmund Spenser, 1552-1952 (Baltimore, 1952).

²⁹ Hamilton, Structure of Allegory, pp. 150-52.

³⁰ Northrop Frye, "The Structure of Imagery in 'The Faerie Queene,'" University of Toronto Quarterly, XXX (1961), 123.

³¹ See the excursus entitled "Jest in Earnest in Medieval Literature" in E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. W. R. Trask (New York, 1953), pp. 417-35. On the subject of Spenser's use of humor see also W. B. C. Watkins, Shakespeare and Spenser (Princeton, 1950; reprinted Cambridge, Mass., 1961), Note I, and R. O. Evans, "Spenserian Humor: Faerie Queene III and IV," Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, LX (1959), 288-99.

³² See the pseudo-Vergilian Ciris, ll. 294 ff.

³³ See H. G. Lotspeich, Classical Mythology in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser (Princeton, 1932), p. 43. Henry Lyte in a curious book entitled The Light of Britayne (1588, reprinted "at the Public Press of Richard and Arthur Taylor," 1814) identifies Britomartis with "Diana of Calydonia sylva" and with Queen Elizabeth, "The bright Britona of Britayne."

³⁴Orlando Furioso in English Heroicall Verse, p. 15.