SOURCE: Fruen, Jeffrey P. “The Faery Queen Unveiled? Five Glimpses of Gloriana.” In Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, Vol. 11; edited by Patrick Cullen and Thomas P. Roche, Jr., pp. 53-88. New York: AMS Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Fruen discusses the place and significance of Queen Elizabeth I in the allgorical scheme of The Faerie Queene.]

In a previous essay I argued that Gloriana, despite appearances to the contrary, is indeed to be regarded as the unifying “argument” (I.Pr.4) of Spenser's narrative, her pivotal importance being obscured only by the “couert vele” (II.Pr.5) of an autonomous but quasi-biblical typology.¹ The question of her allegorical significance I left at that time for later consideration, and a comprehensive treatment I must still postpone, but the preliminary observations that follow point clearly, I think, to a decisive answer. For in what little Spenser does tell us about his elusive heroine we get at least five glimpses of an allegorical characterization that well befits both the poem's “generall end” of “fashion[ing] a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline” (“Letter to Raleigh”) and the scripture-like manner in which its title character is presented.

I. GLORIANA, WISDOM, AND THE ZURICH LATIN BIBLE

Naseeb Shaheen has all but exhaustively cataloged the wealth of biblical allusions in The Faerie Queene through comparisons with the various sixteenth-century English Bibles and the Vulgate.² Yet further research might serve to identify references to the various sixteenth-century Protestant Latin Bibles as well; certainly there is one twice-repeated allusion, bearing on the interpretation of the faery queen herself, that depends on such a text. For both of Spenser's accounts of the vision that inspired Arthur's quest for Gloriana seem distinctly reminiscent of a single verse from the Apocrypha of the Zurich Latin Bible of 1543, and so imply that she is to be associated with the personified Wisdom celebrated there.

Spenser mentions Arthur's vision in two places. In the “Letter to Raleigh” he writes:

… Arthure … I conceiue … to haue seene in a dream or vision the Faery Queen, with whose excellent beauty rauished, he awaking resolued to seeke her out. …

The poem itself is slightly more expansive:

But whether dreames delude, or true it were,
Was neuer hart so rauisht with delight. …
From that day forth I lou'd that face diuine;
From that day forth I cast in carefull mind,
To seeke her out with labour, and long tyne,
And neuer vow to rest, till I her find. …

(I.ix.14-15)

Both of these texts are related to the apocryphal book the Wisdom of Solomon.³ In Wisdom 8:2, as part of an allegorical expansion of the vision described in 1 Kings 3, Solomon is presented as recounting how he came to go in quest of Wisdom, here personified as a visionary mistress. The Zurich version translates:

Hanc ego dilexi & a iuuentute mea quaesiui:
Hanc studui sponsam adiungere mihi,
& pulchritudinis eius amore captus sum.(4)
(Her I loved and from my youth sought out:
I bent my mind to make her my bride,
and with love of her beauty I was ravished.)

Before comparing the Latin text to Spenser's, we may seek to avoid tendentiousness by noting some of the definitions of its key words in Thomas Cooper's Latin dictionary of 1565, a work Spenser would have used extensively at the Merchant Taylors' School.⁵

quaesiui: from quaero “to desire to haue: to seeke for … to labour or trauayle to gette”

studui: from studeo “to applie the minde, or care for a thinge”; cf. studiosus “that setteth his minde to a thinge”; studium “An earnest bending of the minde to any thinge,” “care and studie”

pulchritudinis: from pulcher “beautifull … excellent”

captus: “Rauished … Delighted”

In the case of dilexi, on the other hand, Cooper's “To … loue meanely” does not give a very good idea of the intensity of feeling expressed by diligo in biblical Latin. When we are commanded to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind (Matt. 22:37), for example, the verb in the Vulgate, Zurich, and Tremellius-Junius versions is Diliges, and the bride's “welbeloued” in the Song of Songs is her dilecte; while in the Vulgate the love of bride and bridegroom that is “strong as death” (8:6) is not amor but dilectio.⁶ The word is thus well suited to suggest both profound moral commitment and passionate sexual love.

With these definitions in mind, we can observe the following instances in which Spenser's diction seems to reflect the Latin:

“Letter to Raleigh”:

with whose excellent beauty rauished, [pulchritudinis, captus]

he … resolued to seeke her out … [studui, quaesiui]

I.ix.14.6, 15.5-7:

Was neuer hart so rauisht with delight. … [captus]

From that day forth I lou'd that face diuine; [ego dilexi … a]

From that day forth I cast in carefull mind, [a … studui]

To seeke her out with labour, and long tyne … [Hanc … quaesiui]

The close configuration of “excellent beauty” with “rauished,” “resolued,” and “seeke her out” in the “Letter to Raleigh,” or of “rauisht with delight” with “cast in carefull mind” and “seeke her out with labour and … tyne” in the poem itself, would certainly seem to bespeak a connection with the expressions of the Bible text (pulchritudinis, captus, studui, quaesiui) as one who had learned Latin using Cooper's dictionary would translate them.

And there is ample reason to regard these parallels as more than a matter of coincidence. For one thing, the poet's invocation of Elizabeth as a “Mirrour of grace and Maiestie diuine” (I.Pr.4) has already been shown to establish her “true glorious type” as a counterpart of Wisdom, herself a “mirroure of the maiestie of God” (Wis. 7:26).⁷ And other, more general parallels with the account in I.ix.14-15 are at hand in other biblical Wisdom-quests:

Mine heart reioyced in her … & from my youth vp soght I after her.

(Ecclus. 51.15)

Seke after her, and searche her. …
For at the last thou shalt finde rest in her. …

(Ecclus. 6:28-29)⁸

In addition to the direct parallels between Gloriana and scriptural Wisdom, we may also adduce the strong and long-noted resemblance between Gloriana and the Sapience of An Hymne of Heauenly Beautie, a figure herself known to be derived largely from biblical Wisdom allegories.⁹ Since Sapience recalls both biblical Wisdom and Gloriana, we should hardly be surprised to find that Gloriana herself is presented as a sapiential figure, even if two of the most striking allusions linking the faery queen to Wisdom do depend on expressions peculiar to the Zurich Latin Bible.

For Spenser was not the only Elizabethan on whose mind the Zurich reading of Wis. 8:2 left its imprint. Cicero had quoted Plato as saying that, if only we could behold the face of Virtue, “it would excite a wonderful love of Wisdom” (“mirabiles amores … excitaret sapientiae”).¹⁰ But Sidney in the Apologie, as we now can see, has conflated Cicero's familiar phrasing with Solomon's “pulchritudinis eius amore captus,” leaving us with his own memorable formulation of “the saying of Plato and Tullie”: “who could see Vertue would be wonderfully rauished with the loue of her beauty.”¹¹ However neglected its readings may be in our day, Spenser apparently had good reason to think that his first readers would recognize an allusion to at least this one verse of the Zurich Latin Bible.

II. WISDOM AS THE LIGHT OF NATURE IN CALVIN AND MELANCHTHON

The primary objection to a simple identification of Gloriana's allegorical significance with that of Sapience in An Hymne of Heauenly Beautie has always been that Sapience is a heavenly figure whom “Both heauen and earth obey” (HHB 197), while Spenser's emphatic contrast of Gloriana's city Cleopolis with the New Jerusalem (FQ I.x.55-63) shows that, while Gloriana herself is “heauenly borne” (59), the scope of her rule and the values that she sponsors are earthly and secular.¹² Yet it is not so difficult as it may seem to reconcile this secular characterization of Gloriana's rule with the biblical allusions that characterize her as a sapiential figure; for biblical Wisdom also had a secular significance.

We can begin by clarifying the contrast of Cleopolis with the New Jerusalem, which would seem to be that drawn by A. S. P. Woodhouse between the orders of Nature and Grace,¹³ or by Calvin between “earthly” and “heavenly things”:

I call “earthly things” those which do not pertain to God or His Kingdom, to true justice, or to the blessedness of the future life; but which have their significance and relationship with regard to the present life and are, in a sense, confined within its bounds. I call “heavenly things” the pure knowledge of God, the nature of true righteousness, and the mysteries of the Heavenly Kingdom.

(Institutes II.ii.13)¹⁴

Concerning “the present life,” as Calvin goes on to say, “[t]here is nothing more common than for a man to be sufficiently instructed in a right standard of conduct by natural law” (ii.22), so that “[i]n every age there have been persons who, guided by nature, have striven toward virtue throughout life” (iii.3):

Indeed, I admit that the endowments resplendent in [such persons] were gifts of God and seem rightly commendable if judged in themselves. …

… [Yet] anything in profane men that appears praiseworthy must be considered worthless. … As for the virtues that deceive us with their vain show, they shall have their praise in the political assembly and in common renown among men; but before the heavenly judgment seat they shall be of no value to acquire salvation.

(iii.4)

Most Christians had long agreed that merely to follow “a right standard of conduct by natural law” was “of no value to acquire salvation,” and that to rest confident in natural virtues as if they had such value was positively damnable. But it was also widely agreed that, in Hooker's words, “[w]hen supernatural duties are … exacted, natural are not rejected as needless”; on the contrary, “Scripture [itself] is fraught even with laws of Nature” (Laws I.xii.1).¹⁵ Thus even for Calvin the values we can discover through “the light of reason” have their place, and a place ordained by God, in “civic … order” and “the arrangement of this life” (Inst. II.ii.13); but if considered as either a means or an alternative to “acquir[ing] salvation,” they must be repudiated with vehement contempt.

This relation between “earthly” and “heavenly” values accounts for the way Spenser's Hermit seems to endorse the values of Cleopolis heartily in their own right, while dismissing or even condemning them from the perspective of the New Jerusalem.¹⁶ What remains to be seen is why the same biblical figure who is the basis for Spenser's emphatically heavenly Sapience should also be reflected in his portrayal of Gloriana, whose reign is limited to the decidedly “earthly” Cleopolis.

That personified Wisdom in the Bible was commonly understood by Spenser's contemporaries to image the Logos or “eternal Sonne of God” (Geneva gloss on Prov. 8:22) has long been recognized;¹⁷ less familiar is the fact that other interpretations of the figure were also well-established. Of these, the Wisdom who presides over the “natural” values of “civil life” is presented with particular clarity by one of Gabriel Harvey's favorite theologians, Philip Melanchthon.¹⁸ In the 1555 vernacular edition of his Loci Communes, Melanchthon elucidates the authority of those laws of nature with which, as Hooker says, even the Scripture is “fraught”:

Many ask, what is natural law? The answer is that it is precisely the eternal unchangeable wisdom in God which he proclaimed in the Ten Commandments. … God planted the glory of this, his own unchangeable wisdom, in men in the first creation. …

… External civil life is to be regulated according to this natural light, and note well that this natural light and the Ten Commandments, when truly understood, are one single wisdom, doctrine, and law.

(Art. VII, p. 128)

“External civil life is to be regulated according to this natural light” or “law,” which is also “wisdom.” As we will see, Melanchthon was not alone in treating the “law” and “light” of nature as synonymous. More to the point here is that his “wisdom” is recognizably the personified Wisdom of the Apocrypha. For Melanchthon's identification of Wisdom with the Ten Commandments unmistakably derives from Ecclus. 24:26 and Bar. 4:1 (these will be quoted in due course); and that he is consciously thinking of Wisdom as personified there is confirmed by a number of less emphatic parallels, such as the imperative to “love … this very beautiful wisdom,” which is given as our “light” (Loci 127-28; cf. Wis. 8:2, 7:29, 7:10).

Melanchthon's explicit identification of biblical Wisdom with the natural light might seem to be exceptional, but the same idea can be traced in Aquinas (ST [Summa Theologica] I-II.91.2 is a fitting gloss on Ecclus. 1:10), and in Calvin, who, after referring “the light of men” in John 1:4 to “the light of understanding,” goes on to draw a further connection:

And since this light, of which the Speech [i.e., the Logos] was the source, has been conveyed from him to us, it ought to serve as a mirror, in which we may clearly behold the divine power of the Speech.

(Commentary on the Gospel According to John)¹⁹

This is to say that, as Aquinas puts it, “the intellectual light itself which is in us is nothing other than a participated likeness of the uncreated light” (I.84.5), “wisdom created [being] a kind of participation of the uncreated Wisdom” which is the Logos (41.3). But what is most striking from our point of view is that Calvin's image of the light of understanding as a mirror of divine power derives from the same verse in the Wisdom of Solomon to which Spenser alludes in making Gloriana the “type” of Elizabeth as a “Mirror of … Maiestie diuine” (I.Pr.4)—though to be sure Calvin adopts the reading later reflected in the Authorized Version and takes Wisdom to mirror not the majesty but the “power” (Zurich “virtutis”) of God (Wis. 7:26). And, curiously enough, Calvin and Melanchthon may well have been correct in identifying this goddess-like figure from the Wisdom of Solomon with the light of understanding or agent intellect.²⁰ For one thing, the energeias which the English translators render as “maiestie” or “power” corresponds to the energeia “activity” which Aristotle characterizes as the “essential nature” of the agent intellect or nous poietikos (De Anima III.5).²¹ Even more striking, the philosopher explains that the agent intellect “is what it is by virtue of making all things” in that it recreates them in the possible intellect; and so, as we learn from A Discourse of Ciuill Life by Spenser's friend Lodowick Bryskett, “some haue said this … agent vnderstanding to be the worker of all things” (p. 124).²² What makes this striking is that exactly the same phrase is used apropos of Wisdom:

And all things bothe secret and knowen do I knowe: for wisdome the worker of all things, hathe taught me it.

(Wis. 7:21)

If riches be a possession to be desired in this life, what is richer then wisdome, that worketh all things?

(8:5)

It is with some justification, then, that Calvin, like Melanchthon, recognizes in the Wisdom of the Apocrypha a symbol of the natural light; and he, like Melanchthon, finds that “civic … order” and “the arrangement of this life” are to be “regulated” in accordance with that very “light of reason” (Inst. II.ii.13), since by it human beings discern “the distinction between good and evil” and are “endued with prudence for regulating their lives” (Comm. John 1:5).

Here, then, is a scriptural Wisdom whose influence is emphatically limited to “earthly things.” Though represented as “the brightnes of the euerlasting light” and “mirroure of the maiestie of God” (Wis. 7:26), though “conveyed from [the Logos] to us” and serving as the “mirror” of his “power” (Comm. John 1:4), still it is only “[e]xternal civil life [that] is to be regulated according to this natural light” (Loci 128), which can avail us nothing with respect to “the mysteries of the Heavenly Kingdom” (Inst. II.ii.13). The Gloriana who not only resembles heavenly Sapience but in her own right recalls the Wisdom of the Zurich Latin Bible, the Gloriana who is the “type” of Elizabeth as “Mirrour of … Maiestie diuine” (I.Pr.4), who is “heauenly borne,” and yet who is “soueraigne” only in the “earthly frame” of Cleopolis (I.x.59) and sponsors only that “suit of earthly conquest” which the seeker of heaven must learn to “shonne” (60)—this Gloriana may very fittingly be seen as alluding to a Wisdom so conceived. And it may also readily be seen, given that this Wisdom is the “mirror” and “likeness” of the Logos, why her embodiment in Spenser's poem should be made the focus of an “earthly” typology both distinct from and yet analogous to that which culminates in the Incarnate Logos, Christ.

III. THE LIGHT OF NATURE AND THE QUEST FOR WISDOM

Yet, however fitting it might be in these respects for Gloriana to recall Wisdom as an image of the light of understanding, is it really plausible that a light which was, after all, understood to be a universal endowment, one integral to every human soul, should be imaged in a figure characterized predominantly by absence? For in the poem even her own knights can enjoy her “royall presence” (II.ii.44) only in memory and expectation, while for Arthur she is merely a tantalizing apparition “Whom that most most noble Briton Prince so long / Sought through the world, and suffered so much ill” (I.Pr.2), “Yet no where can her find” (II.ix.7, 38). Can this be an image of the light of nature as personified by Wisdom?

Yes; for the light personified by Wisdom, the “vndefiled mirroure of the maiestie of God” (Wis. 7:26), is not merely the light of nature as men and women commonly experience it. It is, more characteristically, an unusually pristine and radiant illumination, “aroused and … fortified,” one by no means to be enjoyed universally or without intermission.

To a great extent this conception is reflected in the theologians. According to Melanchthon, it will be remembered, “God planted the glory of this, his own unchangeable wisdom, in men in the first creation”; yet “[i]n the wake of sin,” as he goes on to say, “the light in human reason was not as clear and bright as before” (Loci 128), and so it must be “strongly aroused and the sense of it fortified” by our own strivings (xxix).²³ Calvin, as might be expected, lays a greater emphasis on both the severity of its impairment and the necessity of grace for its restoration: “to begin with, God's image was visible in the light of the mind” and “in some part … now is manifest in the elect, in so far as they have been reborn in the spirit” (Inst. I.xv.4); but for humankind in general, “in this corrupted and degenerate nature light has been turned into darkness,” albeit “not wholly extinguished” (Comm. John 1:5; cf. Wis. 7:10, 29-30). Yet Calvin would also seem to allow that the light of nature can shine with more than usual brightness even in those not “reborn.” For it is not only in the arts that the “impious” sometimes reveal an exceptional clarity of reason that serves “to display in common nature God's special grace” (Inst. II.ii.14, 17):

[Other] examples … seem to warn us against adjudging man's nature wholly corrupted, because some men have by its prompting not only excelled in remarkable deeds, but conducted themselves most honorably throughout life. …

… For either we must make Camillus equal to Cataline, or we shall have in Camillus an example proving that nature, if carefully cultivated, is not utterly devoid of goodness. …

Here, however, is the surest and easiest solution to this question: these are not common gifts of nature, but special graces of God, which he bestows variously and in a certain measure upon men otherwise wicked.

(II.iii.3-4)

By clear implication, then, a light of the mind which exceeds the “common gifts of nature,” which goes beyond the “universal reason and understanding by nature implanted in men” (II.ii.14), would nonetheless seem to be available even to “men otherwise wicked.” And it is noteworthy that, between the “special grace” of Calvin and the personal striving called for by Melanchthon (Calvin's “nature … carefully cultivated”), we have precisely the means by which Arthur takes Guyon to have won Gloriana's favor: “gracious lot, and they great valiaunce / Haue made thee soldier of that Princesse bright” (II.ix.5). Not that we are intended to see Gloriana or those who serve her as excluded from salvation: if the pathway to the New Jerusalem “neuer yet was seene of Faeries sonne” (I.x.52), that is simply because no one, insofar as he or she is “borne of the flesh” and not of the spirit, can “se the kingdome of God,” much less “enter into” it (John 3:6, 3, 5).²⁴ Yet the fact that those who seek the New Jerusalem must come to “shonne” the “earthly conquest” she upholds (I.x.60) shows that the service of the faery queen has nothing to do with salvation as such, so that the natural light as she seems to image it, while it may be enhanced by God's “special grace,” cannot be that which Calvin finds only in the elect.

With these distinctions in mind we can more readily identify the similar ones in the Bible's Wisdom allegories, which likewise sometimes specify a “universal” and natural endowment—though, indeed, one so proportioned as to display “God's special grace” in “common nature”—and sometimes one peculiar to the “pious” and “elect”:

He hathe powred her out vpon all his workes, and vpon all flesh, according to his gift, and giueth her abundantly vnto them that loue him. …

… [She] was made with the faithful in the wombe. …

(Ecclus. 1:10, 15)

Most commonly, however, Wisdom—particularly the Wisdom of those texts in which Calvin and Melanchthon recognize her as a symbol of the light of nature—is imagined as the all-but-unattainable object of an effort which takes the form of an erotic quest, a quest in which her prospective lover must undergo the discipline and tribulation of living up to the moral law. For though she may take the initiative in making herself known, to find her again and win “possession” of her “light” (Ecclus. 4:16, Bar. 4:2) is not an easy matter:

For she goeth about, seking suche as are mete for her, and sheweth her self cherefully vnto them. …

For the most true desire of discipline is her beginning: and the care of discipline is loue;

And loue is the keping of her lawes. …

(Wis. 6:16-18)

For first she wil walke with him by croked waies, and bring him vnto feare, and drede, and torment him with her discipline vntil she haue tryed his soule, and haue proued him by her judgements.

Then she wil returne the straight way vnto him, and comfort him, and shewe him her secrets, < and heape vpon him the treasures of knowledge, and understanding of righteousnes. =

(Ecclus. 4:17-18)

Seke after her, and searche her, & she shal be shewed thee; and when thou hast gotten her, forsake her not. …

Let thy minde be vpon the ordinances of the Lord, and be continually occupied in his commandements: so shal he stablish thine heart, and giue thee wisdome at thine owne desire.

(6:28, 38)

Who hathe gone ouer the sea, to finde her, and hathe broght her, rather than fine golde? …

This is the boke of the commandements of God, and the Law that endureth for euer …

(Bar. 3:30, 4:1)

In this “unchangeable wisdom” which God “proclaimed in the Ten Commandments,” Melanchthon recognized the natural light (for “this natural light and the Ten Commandments … are one single wisdom, doctrine, and law”) (Loci 127-28). Yet, while the scripture tells us that Wisdom has been “powred … vpon all flesh,” it also specifies that God, as Calvin says, “bestows [it] variously” (Inst. II.iii.4), “according to his gift” (Ecclus. 1:10). And certainly it is clear that the Wisdom of the passages we have just quoted is not effectively present in every person or at all times. Though she “may first shewe her self vnto … such as are mete for her” (Wis. 6:13, 16), she will also abandon the man would follow her and leave him to wander in “feare, and drede, … torment[ing] him with her discipline,” until she “returne[s] the straight way vnto him” (Ecclus. 4:17-18).²⁵

Such a Wisdom, who appears before her chosen lover long enough to let him know that “desire of discipline is her beginning” and “loue the keping of her lawes” (Wis. 6:17-18), then vanishes “vntil she haue tryed his soule” (Ecclus. 4:17), is scarcely less characterized by her absence from those who would serve her than is Gloriana. In effect, as our quotations from Calvin and Melanchthon suggest, her disciples receive an intimation of what the sin-darkened light of nature was before the Fall, and what in some measure it can be again if enhanced by “special grace” or “aroused and … fortified” by arduous discipline; but they are then left in humanity's accustomed “light [that] has been turned into darkness” to undertake precisely such discipline in the hope of enjoying her resplendent clarity again.²⁶ If the “vndefiled mirroure” that is the most characteristic sapiential version of the light of nature is so nearly inaccessible as this, the very fact that Gloriana's crusading knights do know her presence only in memory and expectation makes her a more fitting image of it. The fact that she appears to Arthur only long enough to entice him to wander “through the world” in quest of her serves not to cast doubt on her association with this sapiential light, but to confirm it. And the fact that Spenser's typology results in her near-total exclusion from his narrative proves to be even more in keeping with her allegorical significance.

IV. THE “IMPERIALL POWRE” OF THE AGENT INTELLECT

Gloriana is thus, with respect to those who have seen and hope to see again “the person of her Maiestie” (II.ii.41), the image of a sapiential light more resplendent than the norm. To Arthur she is

                                                                                                              that Princesse bright,
Which with her bounty and glad countenance
Doth blesse her seruaunts, and them high aduaunce,

(ix.5)

and as such recalls the Wisdom whose reward to her disciple is, in Coverdale's version, to “make him a glad man, … and heape vpon him the treasures of knowledge” (Ecclus. 4:18),²⁷ or who in the Vulgate “[j]ucunditatem et exultationem thesaurizabit super illum” (Douay “shall heap upon him a treasure of joy and gladness”) (15:6). For Guyon, moreover, it would appear that the faery queen's “bountie,” in which he finds “the beautie of her mind,” is all but identical with her “imperiall powre” (II.ix.3); and this recognition of “imperiall powre” as a faculty of mind points us to three particular prerogatives of the intellectual light or agent intellect which Gloriana, like Wisdom, seems to exercise par excellence.²⁸

The role of the agent intellect in human understanding is conveniently explained by Bryskett. From sense impressions the common sense and fantasy abstract the immaterial species of things, which are then received by the conscious or “possible” intellect; but those species would there remain “blind and obscure” if not for the light of the agent intellect, which “worketh the same effect towards things intelligible that the Sun doth towards things visible”:

… for it illumineth those kinds or formes which lie hidden in that part possible, dark and confused, deuoyde of place, time, and matter. … And hence it commeth that some haue said this possible vnderstanding (as we may terme it) to be such a thing, as out of it all things should be made, as if it were in stead of matter; and the other agent vnderstanding to be the worker of all things. … [For by its power] the [possible] vnderstanding, and things vnderstood, become … properly and truly one selfe same thing. …

(pp. 123-25)

In this respect, as Aristotle himself says, “the soul is in a way all existing things” (De Anima III.8): as we think of the world or any part of it, the agent intellect by its sun-like radiance “illumineth” and in that sense recreates it in our minds.²⁹

What does all this have to do with Gloriana or with Wisdom? We have already seen that such “work[ing]” is apparently the source of Wisdom's intellectual bounty:

If riches be a possession to be desired in this life, what is richer then wisdome, that worketh all things?

(Wis. 8:5)

And the fact that Wisdom's illuminating power encompasses the shaping of the entire world shows clearly how it might be taken as imperial:

She also reacheth from one end to another mightely, and comely doeth she order all things.

(8:1)

In each of these respects, accordingly, the imperial sway of the agent intellect over “all things” is reflected in the portrayal of Gloriana. The “Great guerdon” (II.ix.6) she bestows on her servants we have already seen. Spenser does not, of course, make her the creator of his world; she is, after all (or so I take it), not a mere personification but a feigned person, one who figures forth the light of the mind even as the historical Moses was held to figure forth the Law (2 Cor. 3:13 and gloss). The poet does contrive, however, through rapturous hyperbole to make her the illuminator of her world, and even to make her “soueraigne power” that which “sustene[s]” all faery land, just as the agent intellect presumably sustains the world which it creates:

Sunne of the world, great glory of the sky,
          That all the earth does lighten with thy rayes,
          Great Gloriana, greatest Maiesty, …

(VI.x.28)

Whose glory shineth as the morning starre,
And with her light the earth enlumines cleare; …

(II.ix.4)

Great and most glorious virgin Queene aliue,
That with her soueraigne powre, and scepter shene
All Faery lond does peaceably sustene.

(ii.40)

In our first two quotations here, he has even described her in terms belonging more properly to the “euerlasting light” of which Wisdom is the “brightness” (Wis. 7:26):

And beholde, the glorie of the God of Israel came from out of the East, … and the earth was made light with his glorie.

(Ezek. 43:2)

I Iesus … am … the bright morning starre [gloss: “that giueth light to euerie one that commeth into this worlde” (John 1:9)].

(Rev. 22:16)

As to the third quotation, Calvin reminds us that the Logos himself, by whom “all things were created,” is also “said to uphold all things” (Heb. 1:3)—and that the light of understanding is, as we have seen, the “mirror” in which we may behold his “divine power” (Comm. John 1:4).

It is thus the world-making capacity of the agent intellect, essential to all human understanding, which Spenser can most immediately be seen to hint at in the radiance and “imperiall powre” of his heroine, particularly if we identify the latter with her “bountie.” But this is not the only sense in which a capacity of the light of understanding could be called imperial, and certainly not the one most obviously relevant to our poet's “vertuous and gentle discipline.” “External civil life,” as we saw earlier, “is to be regulated according to this natural light” (Loci 128), and so the contrast between Gloriana's capital and the New Jerusalem points up the distinction between the values appertaining to “the arrangement of this life” and those belonging to “the mysteries of the Heavenly Kingdom” (Inst. II.ii.13). In heeding these respective value-systems, we may now go on to observe, our objective was to be the attainment of “two distinct felicities” or “end[s]” (Discourse 22, ST I-II.62.1), both ordained by God;³⁰ and within human society, as Dante explains, “to direct the human race to temporal felicity” is particularly the function of the emperor:

[God's] unutterable providence, then, has set two ends before man to be contemplated by him: the blessedness, to wit, of this life, … and the blessedness of eternal life. …

… [T]o the first we attain by the teachings of philosophy, following them by acting in accordance with the moral and intellectual virtues. …

Wherefore man had need of a twofold directive power according to his twofold end, to wit, the supreme pontiff, to lead the human race, in accordance with things revealed, to eternal life; and the emperor, to direct the human race to temporal felicity in accordance with the teachings of philosophy.

(De Monarchia III.16)³¹

For the supreme pontiff, of course, Spenser had little use. But Dante was an authority of some standing in Elizabethan imperial theory,³² and his words make doubly clear another sense in which that light which is within us the “directive power” to “temporal felicity” can be called “imperiall”: it is both a faculty of mind which a succesful emperor must possess in eminence, and one which serves within every individual as a microcosmic emperor, dictating how “civil life is to be regulated.” Presumably it is to this function of the agent intellect that Guyon is literally referring when he specifies of Gloriana that “the beautie of her mind” lies not only in her “bountie,” but in her “imperiall powre.”

The “imperiall powre” of the agent intellect therefore extends to the faculty by which an emperor is able to propose the laws which enlighten his subjects and hold his polity together (“By me, Kings reigne, and princes decree iustice,” as Wisdom tells us in Prov. 8:15); and in this respect, no less than in creating the world anew within our minds, it could no doubt be said, like Gloriana, “all the earth [to] lighten” and “Faery lond [to] peaceably sustene.” But it is not enough to say that this power enables an emperor to reign, or even that it holds an imperial position within each individual. Rather, just as Gloriana purports to be the “type” or original (I.Pr.4) of that “most royall Queene or Empresse” Elizabeth (“L.R.”), so the “imperiall powre” which ought to reign within each of us could be seen as in its own right “the first and originall mistris” of the world, the prototype of all lawgivers in history. On this view the directives of actual emperors are called for only because, as we have already seen, the light of the mind is for most of us all but “extinguished” (Comm. John 1:4) until it has been “aroused and … fortified” (Loci xxix). As Pierre Charron explains (Of Wisdom, 1601):

[T]his law and light is naturall in vs, and therefore it is called Nature, and the law of nature. … The law of Moses in his decalogue, is an outward and publicke copie, the law of the twelue tables, and the Romane law, the morall instructions of diuines and Philosophers, the aduisements and counsels of lawyers, the edicts and ordinances of Princes are no other but petie and particular pourtrai[t]es thereof. … [Of this] first and originall mistris … all the lawes of the world, are not other but copies and abstracts[;] … [thou] holdest hidden the original, and makest as if thou knewest it not, extinguishing as much as in thee lieth this light, which enlighteneth thee within. …

(II.iii.6)³³

Doubtlesse, Nature in euery one of vs is sufficient, and a sweet Mistris and rule to all things, if we will hearken vnto her, employ and awaken her. …

But we doe not only not hearken vnto it, … we endeauour to auoid it, … louing better … to runne to studie and arte. … [W]e esteeme only that which is bought, which is costly, and is brought from farre. …

(8-9)

In this “sweet Mistris” (evidently she is both prince and paramour), then, we have a “law and light” of nature whose sway is in one sense universal—from her all lesser princes derive all their authority—but which is nonetheless, in its most effectual form, for all practical purposes absent; indeed, due to our suffocating neglect, it is now she who seemingly must be endeavored after and “brought from farre.” Wisdom, too, appears as such a mistress, frankly claiming to be rightful ruler of the world, yet now requiring to be sought out:

My dwelling is aboue in the height, and my throne is in the piller of the cloude. …

I possessed the waues of the sea, and all the earth, and all people, and nacion,

Come vnto me all ye that be desirous of me …

(Ecclus. 24:7, 9, 22)

This Wisdom is a mistress, moreover, of whome we find a “copie” in the Law of Moses:

All these things are … the Law that Moyses

(26)

This is one of the texts that led Melanchthon, as we have seen, to recognize “this natural light and the Ten Commandments … [as] one single wisdom, doctrine, and law” (Loci 128). Its significance for us, like that of the first passage from Charron, is more particular. Both serve to emphasize that, even though the agent intellect as a faculty of the soul exercises its world-making and life-directing powers within each of us individually, there was nonetheless a very cogent sense in which it could be regarded (in its most pristine form at least) as “the first and originall mistris” not of the individual microcosm, but of the external world at large.³⁴

In presenting Gloriana as a “soueraine Queene” and “mightie Emperesse” whose concern is with righting wrongs (V.i.4), as a monarch who “all the earth doe[s] lighten” (VI.x.28) and “Faery lond does peaceably sustene” (II.ii.40), and as one of whom “the beautie of her mind” lies in “her bountie, and imperiall powre” (ix.4), therefore, Spenser is merely reinforcing what we have already seen: the faery queen images the light of nature as it is portrayed in the Wisdom of the Bible. She represents an intellectual splendor which is “the worker of all things,” “[b]y [whom] Kings reigne,” and who once from her throne “possessed … all the earth, and all people, and nacion.”

V. THE COMPASS OF SPENSERIAN GLORY

Gloriana as we have seen her thus far seems eminently suitable as the focal character of a work whose “generall end” is “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline”; but much less clear is the basis on which the poet can claim that “In that Faery Queene I meane glory” (“Letter to Raleigh”). In this essay, accordingly, we need to elucidate Spenser's overall conception of glory as one in which the light of nature is by rights pre-eminent and pivotal. In many respects his conception simply reflects (and presumably derives from) that of Calvin, as a cluster of verbal echoes suggests; but in others he reverts to a view that helps to mark a sharp divergence from Calvin's viewpoint.

Before proceeding to Calvin's own conception of glory, therefore, we need to have some notion of three much earlier (indeed, ancient) developments which it presupposes. The first of these is the impact of the application of the word glory itself to God by the Bible's major prophets; for their usage led to a shift in the semantic ground covered by the word generally. Hebrew kabod had originally denoted “weight,” as Greek doxa had “opinion,” and Latin gloria, “fame”; but with the appearance of the Septuagint and Old Latin versions of scripture, the recurring prophetic conception of God's kabod as a dazzling theophanic splendor carried over to doxa and gloria as the words by which kabod was ordinarily translated. Each word came to have “light” or “splendor” as a key part of its meaning; and this connotation of radiance prevailed even outside of theophanic contexts.³⁵ Thus Paul uses doxa both of the insupportable radiance that manifests the power of God (e.g., 2 Cor. 3:7) and of the purely material splendor of the sun, moon, and stars (1 Cor. 15:41); while by the time of Aquinas “radiance” had come to seem the root meaning of gloria in every sense, including fame:

Glory means a kind of radiance, so that in Augustine's words being the recipient of glory is the same as being radiant with light. Now radiance implies both a certain beauty and its manifestation. So the term glory strictly connotes the manifestation by someone of a thing which in our eyes seems beautiful, whether it is a physical or a spiritual good.

(II-II.132.1)³⁶

“Glory” in the sense of a self-revelatory splendor, though initially attributed only to God himself, thus became the characteristic of any “physical or … spiritual good” whose “beauty” is widely manifested by (or as if by) an inherent radiance. And, as a glance at the relevant entries in Osgood's Concordance will show, this conception was still very much alive in Spenser's time.³⁷

A second key development came with the recognition that examples of this kind of “glory” or splendor among created things could themselves be seen as theophanic: “For by the greatnesse & beutye of the creature, the maker therof maye playnely be knowne” (Wis. 13:5 [Cov.]). This doctrine is most explicitly developed in terms of glory by Sirach, who makes it the theme of several consecutive chapters of Ecclesiasticus. His initial emphasis is on the splendor of the heavenly bodies and other wonders of nature, but even fame is included among those glories of creation which he takes to manifest the glory of God:

The sunne that shineth, loketh vpon all things, and the worke thereof is ful of the glorie of the Lord. …

Oh, how delectable are all his workes …

The one commendeth the goodnes of the other, & who can be satisfied with beholding Gods glorie?

This high ornament the cleare firmament, the beautie of the heauen so glorious to beholde. …

… [T]he Lord hathe made all things, and giuen wisdome to such as feare God.

Let us now commend the famous [Vulg., Trem. “gloriosos”] men. …

The Lorde hathe gotten great glorie by them, and that by his great powre from the beginning. …

(Ecclus. 42:16, 22, 25; 43:1, 33; 44:1-2)

In short, because the workmanship of all things is “ful of the glorie of the Lord,” to gaze upon “the beautie of the heauen so glorious to beholde” is in its own right a way of “beholding Gods glorie”; and even mere earthly fame, like the gift of “wisdome” that secures it, is one of the workings of his “great powre.”

The final development we need to consider before turning to Calvin also takes the splendors of creation to be revelatory of the creator, but emphasizes as specifically moral the content of their theophany. This view is glanced at as early as the Psalms:

The heauens declare his righteousness, and all the people se his glorie.

(97:6)

But it is most conspicuously argued, though without explicit reference to glory, in Paul's Epistle to the Romans. Where Sirach had cited both the visible creation and the “wisdome” bestowed on the pious as revealing God's glory, the apostle instead names both the visible creation and the sense of right and wrong found even among Gentiles as revealing God's law:

For the inuisible things of him, that is, his eternal power and Godhead, are sene by the creation of the worlde, being considered in his workes. …

… [Thus even the Gentiles] knewe the Law [gloss: “Or, righteousnes”] of God. … [Gloss: “Which Law God writ in their consciences, and the Philosophers called it the Law of nature. …”]

(Rom. 1:20, 31)

Thus, as Melanchthon was later to explain, all of nature is replete with “traces of God” (“vestigia Dei”), so that “everything in the universe testifies that there is a God, that there is wisdom, goodness, and justice”; yet the clearest such testimony is to be found in the human mind and in the knowledge of good and evil imprinted on it.³⁸ If this emphatically moral theophany-via-creation were to be put back into Sirachian terms (as theophany via created glory), we would clearly have a conception of glory which not only included the law or light of nature “written in [our] hearts” (Rom. 2:15), but actually recognized a moral force in all created splendors.

Calvin comes very close to formulating this conception. Usually, it is true, he reserves the word glory for the glory of God, declining to apply it directly to God's works. Yet his argument in Institutes I.v. is precisely that the glory of God is splendor, that in beholding created splendors we behold that glory, and that such splendors thereby promulgate the moral law. The emphasis on glory as light in the opening of the chapter is unrelenting:

[U]pon his individual works [God] has engraved unmistakable marks of his glory, so clear and so prominent … [that] the prophet very aptly exclaims that he is “clad with light as with a garment” [Psalm 104:2]. It is as if he said: Thereafter the Lord began to show himself in the visible splendor of his apparel, ever since in the creation of the universe he brought forth those insignia whereby he shows his glory to us, whenever and wherever we turn our gaze. … And since the glory of his power and wisdom shine more brightly above, heaven is often called his palace 39

(Inst. I.v.l)

And what we see “shining in heaven and earth,” as he explains elsewhere, extends even to God's “virtues” (Lat. virtutes, Fr. vertus): “kindness, goodness, justice, judgment, and truth” (x.2; cf. v.10).⁴⁰ Of course, this is not to say that creation's visible splendors afford moral guidance sufficient to direct our lives, since we know that “all mortals ‘became vain in their reasonings’

It is therefore in vain that so many burning lamps shine for us in the workmanship of the universe to show forth the glory of its Author. Although they bathe us wholly in their radiance, yet they can of themselves in no way lead us into the right path.

(14)

Calvin thus makes the point that the moral law is somehow implicit in the visible splendors of creation only to dismiss it as of little practical importance. On the other hand, as we have already seen, he recognizes that the natural light, in earthly matters, often does suffice to “lead us into the right path”: “There is nothing more common than for a man to be sufficiently instructed in a standard of right conduct by natural law” (II.ii.22), so that “[i]n every age there have been persons who, guided by nature, have striven toward virtue throughout life” (iii.3). We need hardly be surprised, then, to find that the natural light holds for Calvin a place of rare distinction among created manifestations of God's glory.

That both the physical and mental attributes of humanity manifest God's glory with unusual clarity is something Calvin more than once is at pains to emphasize. If the most impressive way “to look upon [God's] glory” is to consider the “innumerable and yet distinct and well-ordered variety of the heavenly host” (I.v.2), he maintains, still man is the single work of God in which his glory shines most brightly, being in his own right a “microcosm” and “a rare example of God's power, goodness, and wisdom” (3). Indeed, “each one [of us] undoubtedly feels within the heavenly grace that quickens him,” so that the Psalmist, in praising “the admirable name and glory of God which shine everywhere,” emphasizes especially that “a clear mirror of God's works is in humankind,” while Paul stresses that “by adorning us with such great excellence [God] testifies that he is our father” (3, citing Psalm 8:2 and Acts 17:28). The obvious traces of divinity in man are even cited as evidence for the divine governance of the universe:

[Human beings] have within themselves a workshop graced with God's unnumbered works and, at the same time, a storehouse overflowing with inestimable riches. … Do all the treasures of heavenly wisdom concur in ruling a five-foot worm while the whole universe lacks this privilege?

(4)

In short, as Calvin never tires of repeating, “in forming man and in adorning him with such goodly beauty, and with such great and numerous gifts, [God] put him forth as the most excellent example of his works” (xiv.20).

Yet the part of man in which Calvin finds glory to be most resplendent is precisely that which Spenser images in Gloriana. For while “the likeness of God extends to the whole excellence by which man's nature towers over all the kinds of living creatures” so that “God's glory shines forth in the outer man,” nevertheless from the time of Adam's creation “the primary seat of the divine image was in the mind and heart, or in the soul and its powers” (xv.2-3). And of “those faculties in which man excels, and in which he ought to be thought the reflection of God's glory,” the light of understanding is pre-eminent:

[T]o begin with, God's image was visible in the light of the mind, in the uprightness of the heart, and in the soundness of all the parts. … [Of these John singles out] “… the light of men”

(4)

Prior to the Fall, at least, “the light of the mind”—the same light which Scripture images in Wisdom, and Spenser in Gloriana—was thus for Calvin the single most striking “reflection of God's glory” in all creation. And even though it has been darkened by the Fall, that light remains such a resplendent gift that for once even Calvin is willing to designate a mere created splendor by the name of “glory”:

… God's wonderful goodness is displayed the more brightly in that so glorious a Creator, whose majesty shines resplendently in the heavens, graciously condescends to adorn a creature so miserable and so vile as man is with the greatest glory, and to enrich him with numerous blessings. …

… [For the Psalmist] represents [men] as adorned with so many honours as to render their condition not far inferior to divine and celestial glory …, [chief among them] the distinguished endowments which clearly manifest that men were formed after the image of God. … The reason with which they are endued, and by which they can distinguish between good and evil; the principle of religion which is planted in them; their intercourse with each other, which is preserved from being broken up by certain sacred bonds; the regard to what is becoming, and the sense of shame which guilt awakens in them, as well as their continuing to be governed by laws; all these things are clear indications of pre-eminent and celestial wisdom. David, therefore, not without good reason, exclaims that mankind are adorned with glory and honor. To be crowned [Psalm 8:5], is here taken metaphorically, as if David had said, he is clothed and adorned with marks of honour, which are not far removed from the splendour of the divine majesty.

(Comm. Ps. 8:4-5)⁴¹

Obviously, “all these things”—these “indications of … celestial wisdom” which are also the marks of that “greatest glory” with which humanity has been “adorned”—are the fruits or functions of the natural light, essential as it is to “the arrangement of this life” (Inst. II.ii.13). And if what Calvin takes to be the Psalmist's glorification of this light with its “sacred bonds” seems extravagant with regard to the darkened illumination most of us experience, it would surely have seemed fitting for the restored splendor to be enjoyed by one who has succeeded in the quest for Wisdom:

Then shal her fetters be a strong defence for thee, … & her chaines a glorious raiment. …

Thou shalt put her on as a robe of honour [Vulg., Trem. “gloriae”], & shalt put her vpon thee, as a crowne of ioye.

(Ecclus. 6:30, 32)

Thus Calvin has taken the ancient recognition of created splendors as theophanic “glories” and, while declining to describe most of them as “glorious” in their own right, has both singled out the intellectual light as supreme among such splendors and explicitly recognized in all of them a certain moral force. In so doing, he has prepared the way for Spenser to reintegrate these conceptions and so arrive at a generalized notion of glory which has the light of nature at its core.

For we are now clearly in a position to account for the fact that the faery queen, while said to represent glory, so forcefully recalls Wisdom as a symbol of the light of nature. Like Aquinas, it would appear, Spenser accepts any literal or figurative radiance as being “glorious”; like Sirach, he accepts all created glories as implicit theophanies; and like Paul or Melanchthon or Calvin, he understands the main thrust of such natural theophanies to be the inculcation of the moral law. But the most resplendent of created glories, as Calvin makes clear, and by far the most efficacious in making plain to us the demands of a “vertuous and gentle discipline,” is the light of understanding. The glory imaged in the faery queen is thus simply glory in its most general sense as radiance or splendor, for any God-created splendor tends to promulgate the natural law;⁴² but the ne plus ultra of such glory is the natural light.

In Spenser's allegory, therefore, that quintessence of glory which is imaged in the very person of the faery queen seems to consist entirely of the light of understanding, while the lesser splendors encompassed by the term are presented as her garments. The scope of his conception is articulated in a single stanza:

In her the richesse of all heauenly grace
          In chiefe degree are heaped vp on hye:
          And all that else this worlds enclosure bace
          Hath great or glorious in mortall eye,
          Adornes the person of her Maiestie;
          That men beholding so great excellence,
          And rare perfection in mortalitie,
          Do her adore with sacred reuerence,
As th'Idole of her makers great magnificence.

(II.ii.41)

This stanza abounds with words or concepts we have seen Calvin use repeatedly in describing the glory manifested in humanity: “riches,” “(heavenly) grace,” “great,” “glory,” “adorns,” “majesty,” “excellence,” “rare,” “perfection”; so much so that I presume the recollection of Calvin to be deliberate, though Spenser's application is often different.⁴³ Here, appropriately enough, “the richesse of all heauenly grace” points to the plenitude of the natural light with which God “graciously condescends to adorn a creature so miserable and so vile as man” (Comm. Ps. 8:5), bestowing it even more generously on some by “special grace” (Inst. II.ii.17). That Gloriana's person is “Adorne[d]” with all visible splendors, however, points to the function of that light as “the worker of all things” (Wis. 7:21). According to Calvin, after all, God as creator of the external world is invisible, yet “clad with light” (Ps. 104:2) in the sense that the “visible splendor” of his creation is the “apparel” in which he “show[s] himself” (Inst. I.v.l); by the same token, therefore, it might be said that the agent intellect is clad with the splendors of the universe which its radiance creates anew within the mind. (In that sense “this worlds enclosure bace” extends to “these heauens which here we see,” for even they are “bounded” and “corrupt” with respect to the supercelestial world [An Hymne of Heauenly Beautie, ll. 64-66]). Once it is thus appareled, however, we can see that the intellectual light (especially when enhanced by “special grace”) does indeed exhibit a “great excellence, / And rare perfection in mortalitie”; for in it we see not only the “excellence by which man's nature towers over all the kinds of living creatures” (Inst. I.xv.3)—itself the result of “God's singular grace”—but an approximation of “the perfect excellence … which shone in Adam before his defection” (4). We may even recognize this light as worthy of our “sacred reuerence,” and not only for its “rare perfection,” nor even because it promulgates God's law, so that Guyon can say “To her I homage and my seruice owe” (II.ii.42). Rather it may also be revered as constituting, in a dual sense, “th'Idole of her makers great magnificence”: for it is not merely the single most glorious work of God's “great power” (Ecclus. 44:2; Vulg., Zur. “magnificentia”), but is also in its own right a great maker, being the mirror of his “power” or “maiestie” (Wis. 7:26) and so “the worker of all things” (7:21) within the intellect, even as God himself is “the worker of all things” tout court.

Of course, Gloriana is also explicitly associated with glory in the sense of fame. Whether Spenser considered this to be a conspicuous part of the glory actually imaged in his heroine, however, seems to me uncertain. Sirach, as we have seen, does regard glory even in this sense as theophanic (Ecclus. 44:1-2); but in Spenser such glory is not something which the faery queen can be seen to represent, but something she bestows (I.x.59). In this respect, as in so many others, she has been made to resemble Wisdom:

Length of daies is in her right hand, & in her left hand riches and glorie.

(Prov. 3:16)

Exalt her, and she shal exalt thee: she shal bring thee to honour, if thou embrace her.

(4:8)

As Spenser's contemporary Peter Muffet says in paraphrasing these verses, “wisdom, as a bountiful queen, giveth to those who obey her, not only long life, but worldly wealth, and earthly glory,” so that “if thou shalt exalt and entertain wisdom, she as a queen will make thee honourable, and as it were a knight” (A Commentary on the Whole Book of Proverbs [?1596]).⁴⁴ Such a figure is less suited to represent fame itself than to image the natural light, which fame is to be sought by heeding.⁴⁵

If the high regard for fame which he shares with Sirach further aligns Spenser with the Bible's Wisdom allegories, however, it no less clearly marks his divergence from the thought of Calvin, whose nod to “common renown among men” is not so much grudging as disdainful (Inst. II.iii.4; cf. III.xiii.2, xiv.16). Up till now the reader may have felt that Calvin as he appears in this essay sounds suspiciously like Hooker in the respect he seemingly accords to the autonomy and dignity of human reason in the wake of the Fall. This is partly because the differences between Calvin and Hooker on this point are more a matter of emphasis than is always recognized (least of all by Calvin's Elizabethan followers, who often seem determined to out-Herod Herod, as Hooker himself points out [Laws V.app.i.6]). Mostly, though, it is because I have been using Calvin to elucidate Spenser's thinking rather than his own. Spenser limits the denigration of Gloriana's values to a few stanzas (I.x.58-62) in a poem which is designed to celebrate them, and makes her the presiding spirit of all the “priuate morall vertues” (“Letter to Raleigh”) while relegating “Holinesse” to a single (albeit pivotal) book; in Calvin the proportions are reversed. While Spenser may have relished the opportunity to turn Calvin's eloquence to his own purpose, then, he generally prefers to go like Melanchthon or Hooker on his own more or less Thomistic way.⁴⁶ “When supernatural laws are … exacted,” Hooker tells us, “natural are not rejected as needless” (I.xii.1), but rather “laws of nature … are … necessary also even in themselves” (V.app.i.7); and thus “when we extol the complete sufficiency of … the Scripture, … the benefit of nature's light [must] not be thought excluded as unnecessary” (I.xiv.4). In his exaltation of Gloriana, Spenser does more than merely anticipate Hooker's characteristic emphasis on the authority of reason. By making her the focus of a Bible-like typology, he in effect puts his poem forward as a complementary scripture in its own right, one dedicated to “the benefit of nature's light” just as the Bible is dedicated to “salvation through Christ” (ibid.). That nature's light is itself a “mirror” of the power of the Logos (Comm. John 1:4) would scarcely have seemed to Calvin to justify such huge audacity.

Even for Calvin, of course, the natural light and created splendor in general have their role in “the arrangement of this life.” But not even Aquinas, Melanchthon, and Hooker, not even the Cambridge Platonists, go so far as Spenser in magnifying the autonomy and prestige of the light of nature and its attendant glories. What even the Bible's Wisdom allegories exult in over the space of only some dozen scattered pages, Spenser makes the “argument” of a vast heroic poem intended to rival Homer. What Charron aggrandizes in a few short chapters, what Melanchthon honors in a few short paragraphs, what Calvin enthuses over in the occasional odd sentence, Spenser makes the culmination of a laudatory typology like the biblical typology that culminates in Christ. Yet, if we remember how extraordinary were the prerogatives ascribed to the Bible's (and Melanchthon's) Wisdom, to Charron's “mistris,” and even to Calvin's “greatest glory”—and if we remember that for Spenser this quintessential “glory” is enhanced by “special grace,” as Gloriana's very name suggests⁴⁷—we may come to the view that his “generall intention” in the faery queen was not entirely unfitting.⁴⁸ We may come to the view that what the poet tells Burleigh concerning the apparently “ydle rimes” of The Faerie Queene in general is particularly true of those “rimes” pertaining to its heroine:

          Vnfitly I these ydle rimes present,
          The labor of lost time, and wit vnstayd:
Yet if their deeper sence be inly wayd,
          And the dim vele, with which from common vew
          Their fairer parts are hid, aside be layd,
          Perhaps not vaine they may appeare to you.

(Ded. Son. to Burleigh)

When the veil is laid aside from his accounts of Gloriana, we find a life-directing glory truly integral, on Spenser's terms, to the poem's “generall end” of “fashion[ing]” its readers “in vertuous and gentle discipline.”

Notes

1. Jeffrey P. Fruen, “‘True Glorious Type’: The Place of Gloriana in The Faerie Queene,” Spenser Studies, VII (1987), 147-73; on the typological thrust of the “vele” with respect to Gloriana, see pp. 161-64. All quotations from Spenser are from the one-volume Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912). My title also throws a cautionary sidelong glance at the overweening of “C” in “The ‘Faerie Queene’ Unveiled,” N & Q ser. 3, 4 (1863): 21-22, 65-66, 101-103; partially reprinted in The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw, et al., I (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932), 451-52.

2. Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in “The Faerie Queene” (Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1976).

3. All Latin and English Protestant Bibles of the sixteenth century included the Apocrypha. The Geneva Bible of 1560, while of course denying them canonical authority, does refer to them as ‘“scriptures” (headnote to the Apocrypha) and even “Holy Scriptures” (general title page); and the books of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus, which chiefly concern us here, are so frequently cross-referenced with the Old and New Testaments that the essential soundness of their theology can hardly have seemed doubtful. See The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, with an introduction by Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). Except where otherwise noted, all of my biblical references are to this edition. (In the Geneva translation of Ecclesiasticus, passages recognized as interpolations are included in square brackets; I change these to pointed brackets to distinguish them from my own alterations or additions.)

4. The Zurich Latin Bible of 1543 was perhaps the most influential Protestant Latin Bible during Spenser's years at the Merchant Taylors' School and Cambridge (1561-76), being superseded only by the Tremellius-Junius version as it appeared (NT 1569, OT 1575-79). In 1545, Robert Estienne reprinted it, identified only as a “new” version, in parallel columns with his own critically restored text of the Vulgate. See The Cambridge History of the Bible, ed. S. L. Greenslade, III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 65-66, 71; and The New Catholic Encyclopedia, 1967, s.v. “Bible,” II, 455. My quotations are from Estienne's edition: Biblia. Quid in hac editione praestitum sit, vide in ea quam / opere praeposuimus, ad lectorum epistola. / Lutetiae / … Roberti Stephani … / M.D. XLV. In all of my quotations from sixteenth-century texts, contractions are expanded, long-s changed to s, and ligatures omitted. In this case, for clarity of reference, I have also restored the poetic verse-lineation ascribed to the text by modern scholars.

5. Thomas Cooper, Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae, 1565; facsimile reprint (Menston: Scolar Press, 1969). The definitions I cite come not only from Cooper's main entries, but also from the translations given with his contextual quotations. On the use of Cooper at Merchant Taylors', see T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere's Small Latine & Less Greeke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), I, 421.

6. Often-reprinted versions such as the Vulgate I quote variously from whatever editions come first to hand (the Douay and Authorized Versions are also in this category). The Tremellius-Junius version is quoted from the London edition of 1585: Testamenti Veteris / Biblia Sacra / Sive / Libri Canonici / Prisce Iudaeorum / Ecclesiae a Deo Traditi, / … / … Immaneuele / Tremellio & Francisco Junio / … / Londini, / Excudebat Henricus Midletonus, / … / M.D. LXXXV.

7. Thomas E. Maresca, Three English Epics: Studies of “Troilus and Criseyde,” “The Faerie Queene,” and “Paradise Lost” (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), p. 62; see also Fruen, p. 158. In the sequence of the poem, Gloriana is the “type” of Elizabeth in the quasi-biblical sense that Elizabeth as addressed in the proems is “the first draught and purtrait” of Gloriana, “the liuelie paterne to come” (gloss on Heb 10:1)—“paterne” here being picked up from the last half of Heb. 8:5, where it translates “typon”; see Fruen, pp. 159-61.

8. While the Wisdom allegories in the first nine chapters of Proverbs are also relevant, those in Wisdom (ch. 6-9) and Ecclesiasticus (ch. 1, 4, 6, 14-15, 24, 51) are particularly significant here. And Spenser may not have thought himself the first author to use these biblical materials in a faery mistress story. When Arthur of Little Britain tells his friends of the dream in which his own visionary mistress appeared to him in the form of an eagle, his phrasing comes almost as close to that of the biblical texts quoted here as it does to Spenser's:

   And euer syth I woke my herte and loue hath ben so set on that egle that I can not draw my herte fro her. For I loue her so entyerly that as longe as I lyue I shall neuer cease to trauell & labour tyll I haue founde her.

   See Arthur of Brytayn: The hystory of the moost noble and valyaunt knyght Arthur of lytell brytayne, trans. John Bourchier, Lord Berners (London: Robert Redborne, [ca. 1550]), cap. xvi, fol. xiii^v. The influence of this episode on Spenser was first noted by John Colin Dunlop, History of Prose Fiction (1814), rpt. as History of Fiction (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1896), I, 260. Perhaps less striking in terms of verbal parallels is the encounter with the faery mistress in Syr Lamwell, the form in which Spenser presumably knew Marie de France's Lanval: “Lamwell behelde that lady bryght / Her loue hym rauysshed anone ryght.” See the appendix of Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript: Ballads and Romances, ed. John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall (London: Trubner, 1867), I, 525. On the other hand, as the poet who treats “Medway” as a form of “Medua” (IV.xi.8, 45), Spenser may well have recognized that “Lamwell” is a form of “Lamuell,” a name which in turn reflects the “Lamuel” of Prov. 31:1 in the Vulgate (see A. J. Bliss, “The Hero's Name in the Middle English Versions of Lanval,” MAE, 27 [1958], 82 and n.); and that regal figure, according to the Geneva gloss, is really Solomon himself, the Bible's pre-eminent quester after Wisdom.

9. See especially FQ II.ii.41, ix.3, 5 and HHB 242-48, 253-59. The virtual identification of Gloriana with Sapience was first made by Jefferson B. Fletcher, “A Study in Renaissance Mysticism: Spenser's Fowre Hymnes,” PMLA, 26 (1911), 474-75, and most recently restated by Douglas Brooks-Davies in his Introduction to Spenser, The Faerie Queene: A Selection (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, Everyman's Library, 1976), p. x. Especially intriguing applications of this view are those by Josephine Waters Bennett, “Spenser's Muse,” JEGP, 31 (1932), 217, and Janet Spens, Spenser's “Faerie Queene”: An Interpretation (London: Edward Arnold, 1934), pp. 50, 112, 113, 114. The biblical provenance of Sapience was first thoroughly (though not exhaustively) documented by Charles Grosvenor Osgood, “Spenser's Sapience,” SP, 14 (1917), 167-77.

10. Latin quoted from Cicero, De Officiis I.v, trans. Walter Miller, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1913); alluding to Plato, Phaedrus 250d.

11. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetry (ca. 1583), in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904), I, 179; emphasis added to the final phrase. Raleigh, in 1590 a confidante of Spenser's for a relatively short time, may intend this identification of Cicero's Virtue with the Bible's Wisdom in referring to “true vertues face” in his second commendatory poem (Spenser's Poetical Works, p. 409). For that matter, Spenser himself may be making the same identification in FQ III.iii.1, again reflecting Wis. 8:2, but taking diligo in its other sense as synonymous with deligo “to choose”: “that doth true beautie loue, / And choseth vertue for his dearest dame” (cf. Zurich pulchritudinis, amore, dilexi, sponsam).

12. See Isabel E. Rathborne, The Meaning of Spenser's Fairyland (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), 17-19; and Robert Ellrodt, Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Spenser (Geneva: Librairie E. Droz, 1960), 50, 58. Also relevant in establishing the purely secular values of Cleopolis are Thomas P. Roche, Jr., The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of “The Faerie Queene,” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 38-43; and Carol V. Kaske, “Spenser's Pluralistic Universe: The View from the Mount of Contemplation (F.Q. I.x),” in Contemporary Thought on Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard C. Frushell and Bernard J. Vondersmith (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975), 130-41.

13. A. S. P. Woodhouse, “Nature and Grace in The Faerie Queene,” ELH, 16 (1949): 194-228; “Nature and Grace in Spenser: A Rejoinder,” RES, n.s. 6 (1955): 284-88; “Spenser, Nature and Grace: Mr. Gang's Mode of Argument Reviewed,” ELH, 27 (1960): 1-15. I am indebted to the third essay for a number of my citations from Aquinas, Calvin, and Hooker. The unfortunate personal animus of this third essay may be what has kept it from being reprinted, but Woodhouse's impatience seems even more understandable in retrospect, for dismayingly few of the many who have offered to challenge or correct his original argument show much sign of having read it carefully. In her chapter “Nature and Grace Reconsidered,” for instance, Anthea Hume is right to insist that Guyon is a Christian and so cannot be a “natural man” as Woodhouse defines the term, but this has virtually nothing to do with Woodhouse's overriding question of whether temperance as Guyon exemplifies it is natural or supernatural in its “motivation and sanction.” See Anthea Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 59-71.

14. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, tr. Ford Lewis Battles, Library of Christian Classics, vols. 20-21 (London: SCM Press, 1960); henceforth cited in the text as Inst. Calvin's distinction (see also II.ii.12) is surprisingly close to that of Aquinas, as in The “Summa Theologica” of Saint Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, revised by Daniel J. Sullivan, in Great Books of the Western World, vols. 19-20 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1952), I-II.62.1, 63.4; 109.2; II-II.23.7. Where not otherwise noted, all references to Aquinas are to this selection, cited in the text as ST.

15. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, in The Works of that Learned and Judicious Divine Mr. Richard Hooker, arranged by John Keble, revised by R. W. Church and F. Paget, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), vols. I-II.

16. Kaske does an especially good job of bringing out this contrast, though it is hardly necessary to conclude that in drawing it Spenser “contradicts not only Christian tradition but himself” (p. 135). On the contrary, such ambivalence was an integral feature of Christian tradition, clearly reflected in the distinction between Nature and Grace which Woodhouse documents in figures ranging from Augustine to Aquinas to Calvin to Hooker (“Spenser, Nature and Grace,” 3-6). The tension, indeed, had been built into Christianity by no less a figure than St. Paul. Having established that the moral content of the Mosaic law corresponds to what pagans call the law of nature (Rom. 1:31 and gloss, 2:14-15), the apostle repeatedly denounces trust in that law as a means of seeking salvation: it is merely “the strength of sinne” (1 Cor. 15:56) and serves us only “vnto death” (Rom. 7:10), bringing a spurious righteousness worth no more than “dongue” (Phil. 3:8). Yet, for all this, we must nonetheless strive to adhere to it: “Do we then make the Law of none effect through faith? God forbid: yea we establish the Law” (Rom. 3:31). (See also Rom. 3:20, 24, 27, 28; 6:14-15; 7:6; 10:3; 1 Cor. 6:9-10; Gal. 2:16, 3:10-11; Eph. 2:8-9; Phil. 3:6). Adherence to the law thus corresponds to Spenser's “earthly conquest,” which we are duty-bound to pursue in this life and yet must “shonne” altogether at the end of life when we can turn all our hopes to heaven (I.x.60).

17. See the Spenser Variorum, VII (1943), 561, 564.

18. On Harvey's esteem for Melanchthon, see Virgil K. Whitaker, The Religious Basis of Spenser's Thought, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1950), 66. The influence of Melanchthon in Elizabethan England is also noted in H. S. V. Jones, “The Faerie Queene and the Mediaevel Aristotelian Tradition,” JEGP, 25 (1926): 292-98, and in the preface to Philip Melanchthon, Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine: “Loci Communes” 1555, trans. Clyde L. Manschreck, introduction by Hans Engelland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), xx-xxii. Except where otherwise noted, all quotations from Melanchthon will be from Manschreck's translation, cited in the text as Loci.

19. John Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel of John, trans. the Rev. William Pringle, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1847); henceforth cited in the text as Comm. John.

20. Spenser may have thought that Aristotle got the idea from the author of Wisdom, since there were purportedly at least thirty passages in which Plato could be seen to be “imitat[ing],” “paraphras[ing],” and “all but translating” texts from the Hebrew Scriptures; see Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, trans. Edwin Hamilton Gifford, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903), books XI-XIII, passim.

21. Aristotle, De Anima, trans. J. A. Smith, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941); the Greek is quoted from Aristotle, De Anima, trans. R. D. Hicks (Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1965).

22. Lodowick Bryskett, A Discourse of Ciuill Life (1606); facsimile reprint in Literary Works, ed. J. H. P. Pafford (London: Gregg International Publishers, 1972); henceforth cited in the text as Discourse. See also chapter 4, below.

23. The last phrase quoted is not from the 1555 Loci, but from the 1543 version as quoted in Hans Engelland's Introduction.

24. For a different view, see Kaske, pp. 131-32.

25. I take it that “the straight way” here means “by the straight way,” as at 1 Sam. 6:12; cf. the Douay version. Whether Arthur and Gloriana would have been similarly reunited if the poem had been completed is something the Wisdom analogues do not enable us to decide, since many of them leave the love-quest still in progress. My own inclination is to agree with Rathborne (p. 233) that Arthur and Gloriana, like Redcrosse and Una, would have been allowed a brief time together before Arthur was summoned to manage the cares of his own kingdom; but it is certainly possible that our expectation of finally encountering the faery queen in Book XII was to be rewarded only with the recounted memory of her feast, which is all that the “Letter to Raleigh” promises.

26. Hence the thematic fitness of Arthur's tirade against Night at III.iv.55-60; stanza 58 is based in part on Job 24:13-17, where what the “rebelles Lumini” resist, according to Spenser's old schoolfellow Lancelot Andrewes, is the light of nature: see A Preparation to Prayer (1611), Sermon 2, p. 15; reprint appended to The Morall Law Expounded (London: Sparke, Milbourne, Cotes, and Crooke, 1642). Arthur himself is clearly subject here to the “vnreasonable affections” that “darken the light of reason” (Bryskett, Discourse, 190), though less so than some critics would have us believe: in an outlaw-infested wilderness where no unarmed person is safe without an armed escort, he is more than justified in trying to catch up to Florimell to offer his protection, as her own servant gratefully attests (v.10-11).

27. The Holy Scriptures, trans. Myles Coverdale (1535; rpt. London: Samuel Bagster, 1838). I have not been able to check the readings of the Great or Bishops versions.

28. On this “bountie” and “imperiall powre” as a political prerogative of Elizabeth, see David Lee Miller, The Poem's Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 “Faerie Queene” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 155-57. A fully-rounded critique of Gloriana would of course show how the poet accommodates his overriding “generall intention” in the faery queen to his “particular” intention to “shadow” Elizabeth (“Letter to Raleigh”), and vice versa; but this “generall intention” has been so generally neglected that for the moment it requires our full attention. We might also remember that even those aspects of Gloriana that seem to point directly to Elizabeth ultimately have a different origin:

    [O]n those islands which I have called Fortunate there was a queen of surpassing beauty, adorned with costly garments and ever young, who still remained a virgin, not wishing for a husband, but well contented to be loved and sought. And to those who loved her more she gave a greater reward. …

    This is not Spenser or Sidney or Lyly currying favor with Elizabeth, but Cardinal Bembo allegorizing the beauty of God. See Pietro Bembo, Gli Asolani (1505), trans. Rudolf B. Gottfried (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1954), 184-85; the passage is cited in connection with Gloriana by Merritt Y. Hughes, “The Arthurs of The Faerie Queene,” EA, 6 (1953): 195. Abetted by Leone Ebreo's identification of the divine beauty with Wisdom and the Logos (see Ellrodt, 183-93), Bembo's queen “adorned with costly garments” becomes Spenser's Sapience “Clad like a Queene in royall robes” (HHB 185); and since even Scripture is wont “in one text to speak of the Wisdom begotten and wisdom created” (ST I.41.3), the same imagery of a “virgin Queene” enthroned “in widest Ocean” (FQ II.ii.40) can be applied with equal fitness to the light of nature.

29. That faery land is “enlumine[d]” (II.ix.4) by the faery queen may therefore suggest a putative etymology of faery from Gk. phaeos “light” and Fr. faire “to make.” That Gloriana images a supercelestial Neoplatonic sun of intelligibility is more or less clearly suggested by both Spens, p. 112, and Brooks-Davies, Spenser's “Faerie Queene”: A Critical Commentary on Books I and II (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), 3, 127.

30. See Roche, pp. 39-43.

31. In A Translation of the Latin Works of Dante Alighieri, trans. A. G. Ferrers Howell and Philip H. Wicksteed (London: Dent, Temple Classics, 1904), 277-78.

32. See Frances Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 41, 45-47.

33. Pierre Charron, De la Sagesse (1601, 1604); quoted from Of Wisdome, trans. Samson Lennard (before 1612); facsimile reprint (Amsterdam and New York: Da Capo Press, 1971).

34. The faery land Gloriana illumines is thus what Coleridge calls “mental space” only in that it represents the external world as experienced and dealt with by us internally as moral agents; I am not claiming that events in The Faerie Queene take place as psychomachia within an individual or typical personality.

35. Up to but not including the citation from Aquinas, this paragraph is based on A. J. Vermeulen, The Semantic Development of Gloria in early-Christian Latin (Nijmegen, Netherlands: Dekker and van de Vegt, 1956), pp. 5, 6, 9, 12-16, 18, 22-23, 26-27.

36. Quoted from Summa Theologiae: Latin Text and English Translation, vol. 41, trans. T. C. O'Brien (New York: Blackfriars with McGraw Hill, 1972).

37. Charles Grosvenor Osgood, ed., A Concordance to the Poems of Edmund Spenser (Washington: Carnegie Institute, 1915). The OED and the concordances to other Elizabethan authors tell a similar tale.

38. From the 1535 Loci, in Corpus Reformatorum 21:369; I follow the translation and paraphrase in Carl E. Maxcey, Bona Opera: A Study in the Development of Philip Melanchthon (Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1980), 137.

39. That Spenser knew this chapter and was influenced by it in An Hymne of Heauenly Beautie has been recognized since 1914, when it was pointed out by F. M. Padelford; see Variorum VII, 555. I have changed the square brackets used by Calvin's editor or translator to pointed brackets in order to distinguish his inserted scriptural references from my own references, additions, and alterations.

40. In view of the attributes listed, Battle's translation of “virtutes” as “powers” seems rather beside the point. For the Latin and French I cite Iannis Calvini, Institutio Christianae Religionis (Berolini: Gustaum Eichler, 1834); and Jean Calvin, Institution de la Religion Chrestienne (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1957), respectively.

41. John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms, trans. the Rev. James Anderson, 5 vols. (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1849). Here “the principle of religion” refers of course to natural religion, not the true “mysteries of the Heavenly Kingdom” (Inst. II.ii.13).

42. The qualification “God-created” is essential, for one of Spenser's recurring themes is the danger presented by fraudulent or disproportionate glories, seen with particular clarity in his accounts of Lucifera (I.iv.8-9) and Philotime (II.vii.44-46). On the other hand, the more vivid among God-created glories can justly be used to figure forth such purely intelligible splendors as might otherwise remain obscure, and the attempt to do so is a hallmark of Spenser's poetic practice. Compare Sidney's agenda for the poet in the Apologie, in Smith, I, 165, 179.

43. Similar language—along with “magnificence”—appears in Calvin's preface to the New Testament, in Commentaries, trans. Joseph Haroutunian with Louise Pettibone Smith, Library of Christian Classics, vol. 23 (London: SCM Press, 1958), 58-60. Jan Karel Kouwenhoven, Apparent Narrative as Thematic Metaphor: The Organization of “The Faerie Queene” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), offers a very different interpretation of Spenser's stanza (pp. 22-23) and of his notion of glory (passim), one avowedly Calvinist (p. 27) and yet not remarking any verbal parallels.

44. Peter Muffet, A Commentary on the Whole Book of Proverbs (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1868), 19, 24. I rely on the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature for the date of 1596; this reprint purports to be from a second edition of 1594. For Muffet, personified Wisdom includes any of “the means and instruments which th[e] eternal Wisdom useth to lighten men by” (p. 8).

45. On the other hand, Petrarch's personified Glory in Rime Sparse 119 (Canzone 12 in vita) is clearly modeled on biblical Wisdom (cf. lines 1-21, 26-28 of the canzone with Wis. 7:29, 8:2, 6:16-17, 8:13, Ecclus. 4:11, 17-18). This Glory (= Fame) makes vivid the nature of her invisible twin sister, Virtue—whom Cicero, as we saw, identifies with Wisdom. And Raleigh, at least, does take pains to evoke the Rime Sparse in connection with Gloriana, his commendatory sonnet (Spenser's Poetical Works, p. 409) harking back to RS 186-87 (Sonnets 153-154 in vita).

46. That “Spenser emerges as the religious fellow of Hooker” is Whitaker's conclusion (p. 69), though it may be noted that to agree with Calvin against Hooker is not necessarily to swerve from a basically Thomistic viewpoint. For example, the distinction between natural and supernatural values seen in the contrast between Cleopolis and the New Jerusalem is less close to Hooker's version of that distinction than to that of either Calvin or Aquinas, both of whom explicitly distinguish natural values as those pertaining solely to human society on earth from supernatural as those proportioned to divine society in heaven (see chapter 2, above, and the citations in n. 14). Yet Spenser's emphasis on the indispensability of natural values even for those guided by the values of heaven is much closer to either Aquinas or Hooker than to Calvin.

47. How much Hebrew Spenser remembered from the Merchant Taylors' School is unclear, but the Geneva Bible's “Brief Table of the Interpretation of the Propre Names … in the Olde Testament” makes plain that “Hanna” (listed s.v. “Anah”) means “gratious or merciful.” Since “Tannakin” was a nickname for “Ann” (see the OED), Gloriana's other name of Tanaquill may also suggest this secular grace; or tana- might be associated with Titan as a name for the sun (see C. Bowie Millican, “Spenser's and Drant's Poetic Names for Elizabeth: Tanaquil, Gloria, and Una,” HLQ, 2 [1939]: 255), or with Hebrew tanna “teaching.” Since the meaning of English quill “feather” was regularly extended to “wing” in one direction and “pen” in the other, the possible significances for Tanaquill become numerous: to name only two, it may point to the natural light as a gracious sun with wings (mirroring the divine sun of Mal. 4:2), or as the pen that inscribes the teaching of the law on our hearts (Rom. 2:15).

48. Harvey, despite initial misgivings, certainly seems to have come around to this view. The Commendatory Verses by H. B. (Spenser's Poetical Works, p. 409) show that their author had at least an inkling of Gloriana's sapiential significance, since the reference to “that most princely doome, / In whose sweete brest are all the Muses bredde,” recalls The Teares of the Muses, where those goddesses “in the bosome of all blis did sit” (308) as “the brood of blessed Sapience” (72), the latter phrase apparently being equivalent to “The golden brood of great Apolloes wit” (2). The link between this “Sapience” and Apollo is noteworthy in view of Harvey's complaint in 1579 that The Faerie Queene as it existed then was “Hobgoblin runne away with the Garland from Apollo” (Spenser's Poetical Works, p. 628). In his 1590 Commendatory Verses to the poem (p. 409), however, he not only picks up on the relation between Gloriana/“Sapience” and the Muses, but shows himself both knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the significance of her world-illumining “imperiall powre” as we have explored it in chapter 4:

    And fare befall that Faerie Queene of thine[:]
    Subiect thy dome to her Empyring spright,
    From whence thy Muse, and all the world takes light.

    Since all identifications of the seemingly well-informed H. B. remain conjectural, a further conjecture may as well be added: that H. B. is either simply a misprint or a compositor's misreading of L. B., Lodowick Bryskett, H and L being quite similar in the secretary hand.

    Note: Despite the coincidence of our titles, Francesco Perez's La Beatrice Svelata (Palermo, 1865) came to my attention too late to affect this essay. For him, it is Dante's heroine who recalls, partly by way of apocryphal Wisdom, that “eternal empress” the agent intellect; but he means the external, unitary agent intellect of the Arab Aristotelians.