2.     Ovidian Baptism in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene

Critics have long disputed the meaning of baptism in the Nymph’s well episode in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene, but none have explored the racial implications of Spenser’s treatment of theological controversies.1 As I illustrated in the previous chapter, the Church of England’s theology of infant baptism and salvation encouraged English Protestants to conceive of Christianity as a racial identity, a hereditary or blood trait passed from parents to children. Book 2 of The Faerie Queene reflects this outlook in its epic project of national self-definition, rejecting the infidel-conversion motif and aligning religious identity with concepts of race that were gaining influence in Reformation England.

But to see how Spenser’s poem aligns religious and racial identity, we must first understand the way in which Book 2 provides thematic and interpretive guidance to readers. In the proem to Book 2, the narrator highlights the elusive nature of the poem by drawing attention to the fact that readers may have difficulty locating Faeryland:

Where is that happy land of Faery,

Which I so vaunt, yet no where show,

But vouch antiquities, which no body can know.

But let that man with better sence advize,

That of the world least part to us is red:

And dayly how through hardy enterprize,

Many great Regions are discovered,

Which to late age were never mentioned.

Who ever heard of th’Indian Peru?

Or who in venturous vessell measured

The Amazons huge river now found trew?

Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever vew?

Of Faerie lond yet if he more inquire,

By certaine signes here set in sundry place

He may it find; ne let him then admire,

But yield his sence to be too blunt and bace,

That no’te without an hound fine footing trace.

And thou, O fairest Princesse unde sky,

In this fair mirrhour maist behold thy face,

And thine owne realms in lond of Faery,

And in this antique Image thy great auncestry.

(2.Proem.2–4)2

The inability to locate Faeryland does not consign it to an imaginary realm; rather, it points to the limits of human knowledge, understanding, and sensory perception. Understanding, or “better sence,” comes through charting previously unknown and foreign territories—and here the narrator links Faeryland not with Englishness but with foreignness.3 Although the narrator eventually tells us that it can be found if the reader “more inquire” into “certaine signes here set in sundry places,” the word “certaine” exemplifies Spenser’s characteristic duplicity. On the one hand, there are sure signs that will lead us to Faeryland, but on the other there are likely numerous signs in the poem that lack this surety, signs that may purposely lead a reader astray. Even so, the narrator provides an interpretive crutch for those with “sence … too blunt and bace.” The attempt to understand Faeryland and Spenser’s project is then likened to using a hunting hound that uses its sense of smell to locate a missing object that leaves a “trace” of its whereabouts.4 The reader of The Faerie Queene, much like the hound, may often need to hunt for something that is absent and search for a “trace” that will lead to understanding.

Following this meditation, and within the same stanza, the poet apostrophizes Queen Elizabeth as the “fairest Princesse unde sky,” claiming that the poem acts as a mirror for the queen to “behold [her] face, / … [her] owne realms in lond of Faery,” and her “great ancestry.” Yet the narrator has already suggested that Faeryland can be found only through difficult, diligent searching for traces; seeing the queen’s image and ancestry requires a similar process.

The Proem, I believe, brings into focus The Faerie Queene’s poetics of absence and traces, a poetics that governs Spenser’s self-conscious use of allegory and his disavowal of romance’s power to transform racial and religious identities. Conspicuously absent from Spenser’s poem are moments of infidel conversion. Despite Spenser’s indebtedness to Ariosto and Tasso, especially in the 1590 Faerie Queene, in which there are so many traces of them, the conversion and incorporation of the infidel is noticeably absent. Not only that, Spenser explicitly rejects the infidel-conversion motif in Book 2, canto 8, when the Saracen knight Pyrochles refuses to “renounce [his] miscreaunce” (8.51.6). In addition to Pyrochles, Acrasia is left unredeemed at the end of Book 2; her fate is very different from that of her literary predecessor, Armida, who, in the final canto of Gerusalemme liberata, yields to Rinaldo’s will and faith.5 Through searching for traces of the absent infidel-conversion motif in Book 2, we find our way to seeing the image of Elizabeth, her kingdom, and her “great ancestry,” a project that points to Spenser’s indebtedness to Ariosto as well; he proposes to do for Queen Elizabeth just what Ariosto did for the Estes. But unlike the Este’s genealogy, there is no converted Saracen in the queen’s and England’s imaginative ancestry, as the genealogies in Books 2 and 3 prove. This notable absence provides Elizabeth and England with racially and religiously pure origins.6

Although Spenser excludes the infidel-conversion motif, baptism—the sacrament featured so prominently in both Ariosto’s and Tasso’s infidel conversions—remains important to the poem’s construction of Englishness and Christian identity. Yet baptism, as it is figured in the Nymph’s well episode, is not linked to a Christianized, magical power that transforms and incorporates desirable Muslims like Ruggiero and Clorinda in Ariosto’s and Tasso’s poems, but to Ovidian metamorphosis and to Acrasia. The question then becomes, why does Spenser compare baptism to Ovidian metamorphosis? In Metamorphoses, metamorphosis often produces bodily change, announced by the poet at the beginning of the poem, when he “speaks now of forms changed / into new bodies” [In nova fert animas mutatas dicere formas / corpora] (1.1–2).7 This is not to say that other types of change—epistemological or psychological, especially in the multiplicity of meanings for “animas”—do not occur as well, only that they remain in the body; as Leonard Barkan has taught us, “often the business of metamorphosis … is to make flesh of metaphors.”8 At the same time, individuals in Metamorphoses are seldom transformed into something completely new. Metamorphosis leaves intact a trace of the former identity, and it creates a correspondence between a character’s internal state and his or her external form. In the comparison of baptism and metamorphosis in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene, then, Spenser points to the limited power of baptism, its inability to produce the bodily changes that would create the internal and external unity of Ovidian metamorphosis, and highlights the retention of original identity in both baptized and metamorphosed individuals. Through comparing baptism and metamorphosis, we also see why Spenser’s Faerie Queen must reject romance telos, the itinerary from transformation to incorporation. The poem denies the magical transformations of romance and the infidel-conversion motif because baptism, Ovid, and even the allegorical mode prove unable to erase all traces of originary identity: racial, bodily, and literal.

Sacramental Theology and Sacramental Allegory

I am not the first to read The Faerie Queene as a poem that both thematizes and comments on its own poetics. Nor am I the first to establish links between Spenserian allegory and reformed sacramental theology.9 But in line with these critical traditions, I suggest that the poem’s self-referential quality is all the more appropriate in a book that explores theological questions surrounding baptismal theology, religious conversion, and racial identity. I also hope to draw attention to the importance of difference and disunity in reformed sacramental theology and the allegorical mode.

Spenser’s poetics is undoubtedly informed by English Protestant sacramental theology, especially that which employed the authority of the early Church fathers who used linguistic and poetic theory to explain the sacraments. For example, John Jewel used Church fathers in extended discussions of sacraments, signs, and figures of speech. He emphasizes what he sees as the absurdity of Catholic sacramental theology and linguistic theory: “These men have sought to make up a kind of figure, such as neither grammarian, nor rhetorician, nor divine ever understood before.” Using Church fathers to bolster his argument, he writes in A Defence of the Apologie of the Churche of Englande (1567),

How much better were it for those men to speak so as the old learned fathers were content to speak? St Augustine saith: De signis disserenes hoc dico, ne quis in eis attendant, quod sunt, sed potius quod signa sunt, hoc est, quod significant: “Reasoning of signs, I say thus: Let no man consider in them be, but rather that they be signs, that is to say, that they do signify.” Again he saith: Cavendum est, ne figuratam orationem ad literum accipias … Ad hoc … pertinet, quod apostolus ait, Litera occidit: “We must beware that we take not a figure of speech according to the letter. For thereto it appertaineth that the apostle saith ‘The letter killeth.’ ” St Hierome saith: Quando dico tropicam [locutionem] doceo, verum non esse, quod dicitur, sed allegoriae nubile figurate. “When I name a figure of speech, I mean, that the thing that is spoken is not true but under the cloud of allegory.” Likewise Chrysostom: Non alienum oportet esse et veritas ipsa foret: “The figure may not be far off from the sign; otherwise it were no figure; neither may it be even, and one with the truth; otherwise it would be the truth itself,” and so not a figure.10

The essence of Jewel’s theology is expressed in his juxtaposition of Augustine, Jerome, and Chrysostom. Because sacraments are signs, they must signify and point toward something other than themselves. Moreover, although sacraments are figures of speech that are “not true but under the cloud of allegory,” there still must remain a close connection between the sacrament or sign and the truth that it represents. At the moment a sign collapses into the truth, however, it ceases to operate through the principles of figurative language; Protestants characterized Catholic sacramental theology as enacting such a collapse. Protestant sacraments require allegoresis, an allegorical reading of signs that insists that they be viewed “non verum esse.” Or, as Maureen Quilligan states it more emphatically, “Allegoresis, elder cousin to allegory, begins by saying that texts are, superficially, lies; they must be interpreted, or ‘allegorized’ into telling the truth.”11 Despite the inherent closeness of the sign and the truth, for Protestants like Jewel disunity between sign and truth is essential to their sacramental theology.12

Just as poetic theory helped to explain the Church of England’s sacraments, so too the English Church’s sacramental theology influenced English poets. Regina M. Schwartz has shown how sacramental theology, especially regarding the Eucharist, developed a theory of signs and signification that was adopted by post-Reformation English poets: “As sign-making characterizes the sacrament of the Eucharist, it also does poetry, which is similarly engaged in making present that which is absent—not just in figures of speech, like prosopopoeia, but in the very poetic enterprise.”13 Schwartz maintains that sacramental poetics—rather than Protestant sacraments themselves—can make present the absent, invisible, and unseen. Spenser’s poem, however, is more ambivalent about sacramental poetics: The Faerie Queene thematizes the problematics of reading and interpreting “certaine signs.”14

Spenser first exhibits concerns about signs and signification in the letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, acknowledging “how doubtfully all Allegories may be construed.”15 This doubtfulness may result from the fact that allegory, or “other speaking” as the Greek roots of the word suggest, is built upon principles of both sameness and difference between the literal image and the allegorical interpretation of that image.16 George Puttenham, after all, labels allegory “the figure of false semblant or dissimulation” in The Arte of English Poesy.17 Like the Protestant sacraments described by Jewel, allegory entails an equation between the literal and the figurative while also requiring discernible differences between the two.18

Consequently, allegory, as Angus Fletcher has observed, is a figure of inherent dualism and conflict: It produces and is indeed produced by “the radical opposition of two independent, mutually irreducible, mutually antagonistic substances.”19 Harry Berger has described a very similar conflict in Spenserian allegory:

It seems inevitable that Spenser’s allegorical method should create diversions from the poem’s argument, from its fable and from its allegory. Though Image A is introduced into the fable to illustrate Idea B, the image has its own concrete character. The relationship between A and B is therefore one of similarity rather than identity, and it must include unlike elements; these differences between A and B constitute the body of irrelevance in the poem, the ornament which critics either praise or damn. Now clearly the irrelevance is in the poem and cannot be washed away.… In any analogical differences between Image A and Idea B, Spenser is likely to exploit the differences between the two.20

Berger goes on to explain that differences between “Image” and “Idea” necessitate holding the two side by side and considering their merits independently; in doing so we gain a better picture of the meaning Spenser intends to portray. The relation of Belphoebe to Elizabeth illustrates his point: Although there are instances of correspondence between Elizabeth and Belphoebe, whom Spenser’s explicitly names as a figuration of the queen in the letter to Raleigh and the proem to Book 3, there is much in the description of Belphoebe—“certaine signes,” if you will—that cannot or should not be read back into Elizabeth. There is not a perfect correspondence between the image, Belphoebe, and the idea, Elizabeth.21 As Spenser’s narrator tells Elizabeth, “In this faire mirrhour maist behold thy face”; Elizabeth’s gaze into Spenser’s mirror would reveal to her images of herself that, as allegorical dissimulations, are not entirely herself.22 Allegory produces excess or waste material (and here we might recall Berger’s language of allegorical irrelevance that “cannot be washed away”) that inheres in the disunity between the literal image and the figurative meaning. Thus virginal Elizabeth, like Belphoebe, her chaste avatar, embodies absolute wholeness, a unity and purity of identity that contrasts with the doubled, veiled, or disguised selves who populate the poem. Both she and her image resist sacramental poetics that Schwartz describes—allegorical representation and interpretation that would transform them into other than who they are.23 They prove unable to incorporate the kinds of disunity, difference, and otherness that allegories produce and require.

Despite the “darke conceit” that defines the occult nature of Spenser’s allegory, copies need not be exact or literal reproductions of originals to harness their power. From the field of cultural anthropology, Michael Taussig provides another way to understand the power of mimesis. He notes that copies often gain their magic not through exact replication but rather through “contact” with the original. In its simplest form this contact is produced through the copy containing a piece of the original (hair, fingernail, bodily fluid, and so on). But it can also be obtained through a past physical contact that leaves its mark: Taussig gives the example a hoof print left in the mud by a horse.24 This latter form of contact, in which the original (though now absent) leaves its mark or trace, is most relevant for this discussion of Spenser’s poem; here we should recall the reader/hound who searches for traces of something now absent. (And certainly Spenser hopes that his poem will gain power from contact in the form of patronage from the queen.) Even if the poem proves unable to replicate the queen’s image, in this construction of mimetic relationships contact with the original, the absent queen herself, gives the poem its political power and its power to “fashion a gentleman” and a nation. Allegory as a mode nevertheless attempts to occlude the original and the literal in order to promote figurative readings. The poem thus speaks out of both sides of its mouth, at once denying the usefulness of allegory because neither the queen nor her and England’s ancestry can be figured through the otherness inherent to the allegorical mode, while upholding the power of figurative interpretation to point toward them.

My hope is that this brief consideration of sacramental theology and allegory clarifies the importance of considering literal images and absence in Spenser’s poem, as well as its use of the literal and the absent to fashion Elizabeth and Englishness. Although there is nothing new in reading the presence of the absent Elizabeth in the poem, I wish to draw attention to a specific consideration of Book 2, where the poetics of the absent—one different from the kind that Schwartz describes—and the literal are prominent. Again, there are various absences that might be considered in Book 2, but the absence of the transformative power of baptism is most conspicuous in a poem that contains so many traces of Ariostean and Tassean sources. Spenser’s poem gains artistic credibility and power through its mimetic relationship to its Italian sources, even as absences of Ariosto’s and Tasso’s infidel conversions in Book 2 point toward the poem’s rejection of otherness in its attempts to fashion the queen, her ancestry, and Protestant England.

Rejecting Conversion: Race and Original Sin

Nowhere do Spenser’s engagements with figurative language, allegorical transformation, and the theology of baptism converge more clearly and explicitly than in the Nymph’s well at the beginning of Book 2. We first learn of the well’s mysterious qualities in canto 2, when Guyon attempts to wash Ruddymane’s hands:

Then soft himself inclining on his knee

Downe to that well, did in that water weene

(So love doth loath disdainfull nicitee)

His guiltie hands from bloudie gore to cleene.

He washt them oft and oft, yet nought they beene

For all his washing cleaner. Still he strove,

Yet still the little hands were bloudie seene;

The which him into great amaz’ment drove,

And into diverse doubt his wavering wonder clove.

He wist not whether blot of foule offence

Might not be purgd with water nor with bath;

Or that high God, in lieu of innocence,

Imprinted had that token of his wrath,

To shew how sore bloudguiltinesse he hat’th;

Or that the charme and venim, which they druncke,

Their bloud with secret filth infected hath,

Being diffused through the senselesse truncke,

That through the great contagion direfull deadly stunck. (2.2.3–4)

Guyon’s response and Spenser’s image of a blood-guilty babe allude to numerous theological controversies surrounding the effectiveness and necessity of infant baptism. As the well “into diverse doubt his wavering wonder clove,” the episode enacts in Guyon’s own mind the kinds of theological “wavering” and divisions that “clove” English Protestant opinions about the sacrament. We see Guyon’s divided opinion about what has (or has not) taken place when Ruddymanes is washed in the fountain, and he offers three possible explanations: one, that water cannot cleanse the “blot of foule offence”; two, that God will not allow the “token of his wrath” to be removed with water; and three, that the blood itself cannot be removed because his parents’ blood was “infected” with “charme and venim.” The first two questions speak to theological debates outside the poem, whereas the third looks ahead to the charms of the Circean enchantress and to the magic Guyon will confront in the Bower of Bliss.

The first two theological questions concern the efficacy of baptism and whether it erases original sin, questions that were answered explicitly by the Church of England in Article IX of the “Thirty-Nine Articles” (1563), “Of original or birth-sin”:

Original sin … is the fault and corruption of the nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam; whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil.… And this infection of nature doth remain, yea in them that are regenerated.… And although there is not condemnation for them that believe and are baptized, yet the apostle doth confess, that concupiscence and lust hath of itself the nature of sin.25

The language of “original,” “infection,” “concupiscence,” and “lust” will bear on Spenser’s treatment of the Nymph’s well, as we will see later. Here, however, Article IX makes clear that original sin, a kind of genealogical and racial characteristic that is passed down from Adam to all of humanity, persists after baptism. This theological position made sense given the explanation of baptism in the “Thirty-Nine Articles,” in Article XXVII, “Of baptism”: “Baptism is not only a sign of profession, and mark of difference, whereby Christian men are discerned from others that be not christened, but it is also a sign of regeneration or new birth, whereby, as by an instrument, they that receive baptism are rightly grafted into the church.”26 Although baptism is described as “an instrument,” suggesting that the sacrament might have some power to create Christian identity, the insistence that baptism is a “sign” conversely indicates that the sacrament may only make visible—or “mark”—invisible election.

Summarizing the Church of England’s view of baptism and its Calvinist underpinnings, David Cressy writes, “The baptismal water signified forgiveness and regeneration but did not automatically ensure it.”27 Baptism was most likely to be effective, then, when it was linked with correct belief in the sacrament and in Christ, and in being born into the race of Christians. This theological position was adduced by asking what would happen if Jews or infidels were baptized, as seen in John Frith’s A myrroure or lokynge glasse wherin you may beholde the sacramente of baptisme described (1548):

The signe in Baptisme is the ploungyng downe in the materiall water and lyftyng up agayne by the which as by an outward badge we are knowen to be of the number of them which professe Christe to be redeemer and Saviour.

This outward signe doth neyther geve us the spirite of God; neyther yet grace that is the favoure of God.… That every man receyveth not thys treasure in baptisme is evident, for be it the case that the Jewe or an infidel should say that he dyd beleve and beleved not in ded, and upon his wordes were baptized in ded (for no man can judge what his herte is, but we must receive him into baptism if he confesse our fayth and with his mouth al beit his herte is farre from thence) thys miscreant nowe thus baptized hath receyved this outwarde signe and Sacrament, as well as the mooste fayfuthfull man beleavyng. Howe be it he neyther receyveth the grace of God, neyther yet anye grace but rather condemnation.28

Again we find an emphasis on baptism as an “outward sign.” Yet what is most telling here is the illustration Frith uses to support his position; the “Jew or an infidel,” not an unbelieving Englishmen, provides what he seems to believe is the most obvious support for the idea that baptism is only a sign. This understanding contradicts the Catholic (and Lutheran) belief that baptism was efficacious in and of itself. In fact, baptism was held to have so much power in medieval Catholic belief that it was thought to be able to cleanse Jews of the foetor judiacus, an odor that Jews were said to emit.29 Baptism was once believed to have miraculous effects on the body and even erase markers of racial difference. But what Frith implies here is a distrust of the sincerity of Jewish and infidel conversions, and Reformation theology concerning the inefficacy of baptism in effecting either spiritual or bodily transformation in no way assuaged this suspicion.30

In light of the theological debates surrounding baptism, it is no wonder that the events of canto 2 send Guyon into “great amaz’ment.” But unlike the first two questions Guyon poses, the third speaks directly to plot elements in the poem through the “cup thus charmed” (2.1.55) that Acrasia gives to Mordant. Before we are told of the well’s magical quality, we learn about Ruddymane’s parents, that “Their bloud with secret filth infected hath.” This “secret filth” that infects his parents’ blood can be better understood with the help of Patricia Crawford’s analysis of blood in the early modern period. She argues that blood stood “symbolically for a line of descent,” so well understood that it could also invoke a “ ‘natural’ kinship link” even where one did not exist.31 If this is true, Spenser’s image of filth that resides in blood has important resonances with the language of Article IX, recalling infection and filth as markers of kinship and the common fallenness of humankind. Additionally, the stanzas also recall the causal relationship between original sin and concupiscence that is expressed in Article IX—we must not forget that the whole episode is the result of Mordant’s illicit escapades with Acrasia, who is associated with excessive concupiscence in canto 12.

Mordant’s sexual liaison with Acrasia suggests that he is already infected with the concupiscence that is the result of original sin and that he has further been infected through having sex with her. The sexual contact leaves Mordant in an altered form, as noted by Amavia in canto 1 when she describes seeking him in the Bower of Bliss:

Him so I sought, and so at last I found,

Where him that witch had tralled to her will,

In chaines of lust and lewd desires ybound,

And transformed from his former skill,

The me he knew not, neither his own ill. (2.1.54)

Sex with Acrasia has deprived Mordant of self-knowledge and autonomy: he is “tralled to her will” and ignorant of “his own ill.” Amavia is able to recover Mordant temporarily, however: She “recured him to a better will, / Purged from drugs of foule intemperance” (2.1.53). Mordant’s “infected will” (to borrow the famous phrase from Sidney’s Defense of Poetry that implies spiritual depravity), is replaced with a “better will” through the purgation of “drugs of foule intemperance.”32 This language of purging and drugs points to the centrality of the body in Book 2 and the poem’s equating of sexual relations with Acrasia with magic and “charms,” infection and “venim.” Amavia may temporarily recover Mordant, but the body remains susceptible to infection because, as she herself puts it, “all flesh doth frailtie breed” (2.1.52).

The body is indeed a problem in Spenser’s poem. As Michael C. Schoenfeldt has shown, one of Book 2’s primary investigations is “the relationship between physiology and morality, between matters of the body and conditions of the spirit,” and in a book dedicated to temperance and the ability to manage bodily inclinations, “Spenser investigates the close relationship between bodies and souls.”33 I would add to Schoenfeldt’s important insight that there are different types of bodies in Book 2, and specific bodies, like Acrasia’s (and Pyrochles’ and Cymochles’), are racially and religiously marked.

The language of infection used by Amavia also connotes racial and religious otherness. Racial markers in particular might be understood in terms of infection, as exhibited in Spain in its obsession with limpieza de sangre, and in England in George Best’s description of the origins of blackness: “Blacknesse proceedeth of some naturall infection of the first inhabitants of that Countrey, and so all the whole progenie of them descended, all still poluted with the same blot of infection. Therefore it shal not be farre from our purpose, to examine the first originall of these blacke men, and how by lineall discente, they haue hiterto continued thus blacke.”34 Best then goes on to recount what had become a common argument, that God cursed Ham’s son, Cush (Chus in Best’s text), and his descendents with blackness.35 He thus concludes, “And of this blacke & cursed Chus came al these blacke Moores which are in Africa … the cause of the Ethiopians blacknesse, is the curse & natural infection of bloud, & not the distemperature of the clymate.”36 Blackness is a bodily, genealogical, and spiritual condition. Moreover, that a racial marker like blackness is caused by “natural infection of bloud,” a concept that was quite common in the medieval and early modern periods and not limited to Best, overlaps tellingly with Spenser’s language and with early modern understandings of original sin as a genealogical trait that too is an infection of the blood. According to William Perkins, an Anglican clergyman often characterized as a moderate Puritan, original sin may be a symptom of the corrupted nature of the body: “The propagations of sin from parents to children is either because the soul is infected by the contagion of the body … or because God, in the very moment of creation and infusion of souls into infants, doth utterly forsake them.”37 Perkins was a proponent of double predestination, which explains the second part of this statement. As for the first part, we see again the language of contagion and the idea of hereditary sinfulness. Racial characteristics and original sin, indeed, work quite similarly.

Acrasia, Pyrochles, and Cymochles are also infected with racial and religious difference through literary imitation and romance. Not only is Acrasia modeled after Tasso’s Muslim enchantress, Armida, but, as Benedict S. Robinson notes, Pyrochles and Cymochles are two of those “paynim” knights of romance.38 I will say more about Acrasia below, but the importance of Pyrochles’ and Cymochles’ religious identities is highlighted in canto 8, in which they are associated thirteen times with non-Christian and at times Islamic identities: For example, they are called “Paynin,” “Pagan,” and “Sarazin,” and they swear by “Termagaunt,” “Mahoune,” and their “Gods” (2.8.10, 22, 49, 30, 33, and 37). The brothers’ religious identity is clear, but their racial identity is less so until we consider what is often considered their allegorical signification. Pyrochles and Cymochles are conventionally read, respectively, as allegorical representations of wrath and lust, the two character traits that were most closely associated with Turks and the Moors in early modern texts. If, in the early modern imagination, as Nabil Matar suggests, “The ‘Turk’ was cruel and tyrannical, deviant, and deceiving” and “the ‘Moor’ was sexually overdriven and emotionally uncontrollable, vengeful, and religiously superstitious,” there is actually little need to read the brothers allegorically.39 Pyrochles and Cymochles do not appear or act as other than the “paynims” that they are. Their literal characters are not transformed by the allegory into representations of wrath and lust; instead, they merely act out racialized character traits. That Spenser was invested in racial characterization is clear in A View of the Present State of Ireland, in which Irish behavior is presented as a consequence of Scythian ancestry.40 As such, in The Faerie Queene the two brothers simply act out the dictates of their racialized bodies and wills. They should be read as beholden to the type of antiallegorical and antisacramental poetics and unity of character that I earlier attributed to Spenser’s Elizabeth.

The Faerie Queene’s project of unifying racial and religious identity does not allow characters that exist within antisacramental poetics to be transformed, either literally or figuratively. I am not suggesting that The Faerie Queene is largely nonallegorical, though there is a tradition of reading Spenser as rejecting allegory in later books of the poem.41 The polysemy that allegory allows is certainly at times integral to a political project, and Spenser’s “Letter to Raleigh” and explicit moments of allegory throughout the poem make it nearly impossible not to read everything in the poem as calling for allegoresis.42 Additionally, The Faerie Queene operates on more than one level of allegory: The poem contains allegories within allegories. Thus, while there is no need to see the Saracen brothers as allegorical figurations of wrath and lust, their nonallegorical status as racialized subjects furthers the poem’s allegorical project of anatomizing and racializing the English Protestant religious body. Consequently, there are instances in the poem where allegorical transformation would conflict with the poem’s ideological and allegorical constructions of identity, namely in its attempt to create unity of identity by conjoining religion with race.

In Spenser’s poem, then, race does not figure religion; race is religion. Arthur offers Pyrochles the opportunity to convert:

Yet if wilt renounce thy miscreance,

And my trew liegman yield thyself for ay,

Life will I graunt thee for thy valiaunce,

And all thy wrongs will wipe out of my souenaunce. (2.8.51)

But the Saracen must refuse: “he so willfully refused grace” (2.8.52). Although his refusal might be connected to the personal cost of conversion, yielding to a feudal servitude that inextricably links conversion to subjugation, Pyrochles’ willful rejection of grace gains further significance when we recall Schoenfeldt’s argument that Book 2 often locates spiritual conditions in the body. Pyrochles’ embodied will—not explicitly connected to his body here, though one that we might consider as located in his body in light of Schoenfeldt’s argument—leads to his destruction. Arguably, then, Pyrochles’ will itself is racialized because it is embodied in a Saracen’s body. Regardless, in this explicit rejection of the infidel-conversion motif, The Faerie Queene denies the possibility that characters can transform their embodied religious identities—and even more so because baptism, with its questionable power, is unable to assure that a Saracen like Pyrochles will become a Christian.

Ovidian Baptism, Originary Identity, and Figurative Unity

If baptism cannot produce real transformation within the epic’s project of creating the English Protestant race, perhaps Ovidian metamorphosis can, especially if it is able to do what neither baptism nor allegory can by changing forms “into new bodies.” Ovid enters the scene when the Palmer attempts to answer Guyon’s third question. Before the Palmer provides details about this particular well, however, he has something to say about the very nature of water:

Ye bene right hard amated, gratious Lord,

And of your ignorance great maruell make,

Whiles cause not well conceiued ye mistake.

But know, that secrete vertues are infusd

In euery fountaine, and in euery lake,

Which who hath skill them rightly to haue chusd,

To proofe of passing wonders hath full often vsd. (2.2.5)

The Palmer first comments on Guyon’s “ignorance” and “great maruell”; perhaps Guyon’s struggle to understand correctly is similar to that of the readers whom the narrator describes in the proem. The Palmer provides a reading that stands in opposition to Guyon’s, and, as Maurice Evans noted more than fifty years ago, he sets himself up as an interpretive guide who will help Guyon read and understand the world in which he travels.43 Whether or not Guyon should follow his lead is another question, and various critics have questioned the fitness of the Palmer as reader and guide.44 Nevertheless, the Palmer explains that Ruddymane’s hands cannot be cleansed because of the virtue of the water itself, and he then relates that Guyon (and the reader) needs to “But know, that secrete vertues are infused / In euery fountaine, and in euery lake.” In a surprising revelation, we learn that “euery” body of water seems to have some sort of magic.45 Spenser could have drawn an understanding of the magical nature of water from several kinds of narratives, from travel narratives describing magical waters that were discovered in the New World, to folklore concerning the magical wells that dotted the English landscape.46 Along with these, the Metamorphoses provided Spenser with numerous tales of water’s magical power.

Whether it is Actaeon, who is splashed with water by Diana after encountering her bathing and then transformed into a stag, or Hermaphroditus, who is grasped by Salmacis in a fountain and then changed into the hermaphrodite, Ovid’s many fountains and springs produce physical transformations that are memorialized on the poetic landscape. Spenser follows Ovid closely in this regard, in the Palmer’s description of a well that has traces of multiple Ovidian tales:

Such is this well, wrought by occasion straunge,

Which to her Nymph befell. Vpon a day,

As she the woods with bow and shafts did raunge,

The hartlesse Hind and Robucke to dismay,

Dan Faunus chaunst to meet her by the way,

And kindling fire at her faire burning eye,

Inflamed was to follow beauties chace,

And chaced her, that fast from him did fly;

As Hind from her, so she fled from her enimy.

At last when fayling breath began to faint,

And saw no meanes to scape, of shame affrayd,

She set her downe to weepe for sore constraint,

And to Diana calling lowd for ayde,

Her deare besought, to let her dye a mayd.

The goddesse heard, and suddeine where she sate,

Welling out streames of teares, and quite dismayd

With stony feare of that rude rustick mate,

Transformd her to a stone from stedfast virgins state.

Lo now she is that stone, from whose two heads,

As from two weeping eyes, fresh streames do flow,

Yet cold through feare, and old conceiued dreads;

And yet the stone her semblance seemes to show,

Shapt like a maid, that such ye may her know;

And yet her vertues in her water byde:

For it is chast and pure, as purest snow,

Ne lets her waues with any filth be dyde,

But euer like her selfe vnstained hath beene tryde. (2.2.6–9)

Ovid’s myths of Daphne and Apollo and Arethusa and Alpheus are invoked first and foremost. Daphne, Arethusa, and Spenser’s Nymph are all imitative of Diana:

Daphne calls it joy

to roam within the forest’s deep seclusion,

where she in emulation of the chaste

goddess Phoebe, devotes herself to hunting (1.658–61);

Arethusa “travers[ed] / the mountain pastures or setting out snares for small game” (5.779–80); and the Nymph “the woods with bows and shafts did range, / The hartless Hind and Robucke to dismay.” It is Ovid’s and Spenser’s cruel irony that women who devote themselves to hunting and virginal chastity become hunted and chased by would-be rapists. In an epic simile, Ovid later writes that Apollo initially pursues Daphne “as a Gallic hound / chasing a rabbit through an open field; / the one seeks shelter and the other, prey” (1.736–38). Moreover, in Ovid’s tale, Apollo then appropriates the metamorphosed object as the symbol of poetic triumph. Poetry and metamorphosis are linked in Ovid, for metamorphosis is both the subject and structuring principle of the poem, as one tale transforms into another through narrative entrelacement. Thus, both Ovid’s and Spenser’s readers, similar to Apollo, Alpheus, and Dan Faunus, are often pursuing that which is fleeing and on the verge of transforming itself in the hopes of escaping capture. Spenser’s poem often purposefully eludes readers—as the proem to Book 2, I have suggested, makes clear—just as Ovid’s chaste damsels attempt to escape those who would pollute them and use them to fulfill selfish desires.

More ironic still is the fact that metamorphosis becomes the means to maintain an originary identity, since metamorphosis keeps the women (and, perhaps, Spenser’s poem) from being grasped and allows them to retain their chaste identities. For Ovid’s nymphs who desire perpetual virginity, metamorphosis provides a potential solution. Daphne seeks the assistance of her father, the river god: “Help me, dear father! If your waters hold / divinity, transform me and destroy / that beauty by which I have too well pleased” (1.751–53); Arethusa cries to Diana, “Aid your armoress, Diana—to whom you have often / entrusted your bow, along with your quiver of arrows” (5.796–97); and Spenser’s Nymph asks Diana “to let [her] dye a maid.” These maidens find themselves in similar predicaments, but the means by which they are rescued are quite different. Daphne asks to be transformed by the power of her father’s water, though the decision to transform her into the laurel appears to be her father’s. Arethusa and Spenser’s Nymph, in contrast, ask only for Diana’s assistance; they simply find themselves being transformed into a fountain and a rock in a spring. Arethusa does not express her feelings about her metamorphosis, whereas Daphne, we might assume, is at least somewhat content because her father has followed her wishes—or perhaps the poem needs to silence her protest because she is to become the crown of poets.47 We might even assume the same of Arethusa, even though her myth reveals that metamorphosis, paradoxically, only aggravates the problem. Diana attempts to conceal Arethusa by transforming her into a spring:

Even so, [Alpeus] recognized me,

his darling there in the water, and promptly disregarded

the human form he had assumed for the occasion,

reverting to river, so that our fluids might mingle. (5.814–17)

Because Alpheus still recognizes Arethusa, Diana must intervene one more time; this metamorphosis would allow a more complete sexual mixing to occur between Arethusa and Alpeus in their watery forms. (Arethusa eventually falls into a hole in the ground that Diana produces.) Water may not have been the best solution, but it was a fitting one because it captures the moment of emotional distress.48 Arethusa turns into a spring because, as she narrates it, “icy sweat thoroughly drenched the limbs that he looked for” (5.810). Although Barkan has taught us that Ovidian metamorphosis enacts the loss of the self, in this instance, and in many other instances in Ovid, metamorphosis does not produce a complete change.49 Instead, metamorphosis allows the retention of an originary self.

Spenser’s Nymph hopes to die in order to maintain her virginity, but she is instead “dismayd” by metamorphosis and a Spenserian pun—that is, her maiden state is seemingly undone because she finds herself in a state of dismay, suggesting that this metamorphosis enacts and then freezes in time what Dan Faunus could not.50 In her reading of the scene, Susanne Wofford notes that “here to be ‘saved’ is to be petrified, in an Ovidian transformation that renders eternal the Nymph’s grieving state: her fear is ‘stony.’ ”51 Moreover, as Carole V. Kaske notes, “Preservation is also the goal of the Nymph’s metamorphosis.”52 Indeed, as both Wofford and Kaske suggest, metamorphosis indefinitely captures, perpetuates, and memorializes her fear of losing herself. In metamorphosis there is a correlation between interior feeling and external form.

This reading of metamorphosis, I hope, makes clear just how precisely the poem uses Ovid to engage theological questions about baptism. Spenser, in using Ovid to provide a pointed engagement with baptismal theology, does not merely echo theological controversies. He presents a theological statement about baptism and religious conversion: that both lack Ovidian power. Indeed, Ovidian metamorphosis is more powerful than baptism, but even it is unlikely to produce the kind of total transformation that would allow a Saracen’s racialized body to become a Christian body. The limitations of Spenser’s Ovidian baptismal font, moreover, raise questions about romance transformations. Spenser’s baptism and his Ovid prove unable to alter blood-guilt or interiority, aspects of identity that persist after transformation.

Although Spenser uses Ovid to reveal the inefficacy of baptismal transformations, metamorphosis nevertheless may be preferable to baptism in projects of national, racial, and religious identity formation because it envisions a unity of interiority and physicality that baptism and religious conversion could never guarantee. To be sure, as scholars who work on literary representations of “turning Turk” have illustrated, economic and political interactions between European Christians and Muslim Turks and Moors in the early modern period fostered an awareness of diverse religious identities in differing political, economic, and geographical environments.53 In this context, the religion individuals professed often had nothing to do with their religious convictions and inward beliefs—Frith, we should recall, raises specific concerns about the true beliefs of infidels who appear to convert to Christianity. Ovidian metamorphosis can produce an imaginative solution to this cultural anxiety by making interiority physical and visible.

Spenser’s poem employs Ovid to illustrate the persistence of originary identity, for the Metamorphoses is also a poem about origins and causes. Ovid’s waters thus provided Spenser with a topos for examining the problem of origins and sources. Discussing the connection between origin tales, literary sources, and poetic authority in the Nymph’s well episode, John Guillory argues, “Fountains in The Faerie Queene are usually reservoirs of energy, sources of power.”54 Guillory goes on to note, however, that “the Nymph’s fountain seems to be reduced to a negative image of a true source” because of the fountain’s “secondariness”—that is, it is a source that itself draws from a more preeminent source, Dame Nature.55 This reading of the Nymph’s well opens up the possibility that the hunt for sources and origins leads to an infinite regress in which the narrative locates an original cause that only turns out to be another narrative, a literary source with its own origins. Originals too have their origins, which is perhaps why the Palmer eventually rejects the lengthy Ovidian tale—and Ovidianism itself, I would suggest—that he first used to explain Ruddymane’s condition. In the end, his reading of Ruddymane’s condition has very little to do with the Ovidian history he tells:

From thence it comes, that this babes bloudy hand

May not be cleansed with water of this well:

Ne certes Sir striue you it to withstand,

But let them still be bloudy, as befell,

That they his mothers innocence may tell,

As she bequeathed in her last testament;

That as a sacred Symbole it may dwell

In her sonnes flesh, to minde reuengement,

And be for all chaste Dames an endless monument. (2.2.10)

Origins are just too difficult to locate, and thus the Palmer abandons this search altogether in favor of reading the babe’s bloody hands in a way that calls for forward action—the regressive search for origins and Ovidian digression impede epic telos.

The Palmer attempts to privilege a very particular reading of the events, and Kaske has observed that the Palmer’s reading conflicts with Guyon’s more spiritual readings; she suggests that the Palmer’s is an allegorical reading of a classical myth, whereas Guyon reads the scene as a theological allegory.56 The Ovidian history describes causation and adequately explains why the hands remain stained, but the Palmer’s “But” conflicts with his earlier Ovidian history. Through the Palmer the poem uses Ovid to criticize allegory, baptism, and romance, and afterwards rejects him. This rejection, however, does not negate the earlier critique of baptism through Ovid; rather, it highlights the incompatibility of all these transforming projects—allegorical, baptismal, romantic, and Ovidian—with the epic’s project of racial and religious formation.

Instead of an Ovidian explanation, the Palmer chooses to read the bloody hands as a “Symbole.” This decision to read symbolically is difficult to parse given the long critical debate about the differences between allegory and symbolism. Following the Romantics, however, the symbol has been understood as holding a greater figurative unity than allegory. Gordon Teskey describes this quite poetically: “The symbol is raised up out of the inhuman otherness of figurative language by means of schematic ordering, polysemy, that is based on the assumption of a single, underlying truth.”57 Also suggesting as much is the Greek etymology, as Jeremy Tambling notes: “From the Greek ‘symballein,’ ‘to throw together, to bring together, to collect, to compare.’ ”58 “Symbole” thus appears to differ from allegory because it may be able to forge the kind of unity between image and idea that Book 2 strives for. Nevertheless, Guyon accepts the Palmer’s symbolic reading as truth and gives the child up to his reading: “He harkened to his reason, and the childe / Uptaking, to the Palmer gaue to beare” (2.2.11). In accepting the Palmer’s reading, Guyon also accepts his call for “reuengement.”

The Palmer may also reject Ovid because metamorphosis, in fostering ontological unity, also leads to figurative disunity. Wofford explains: “Ovid’s method of detailing the stages of metamorphosis might be read as a literalizing of the method of metaphor: a natural simile would work by claiming that a character is like a tree, while a metaphor says that a given character is a tree.”59 If metaphor, as Judith H. Anderson remind us, “carries two terms which are and/or are not alike: X=Y and/or X does not =Y,” then even Ovidian metamorphosis proves unable to confer the unity required for the poem’s construction of religious identity.60 Although metamorphosis can create unity of being by establishing correspondence between interior and exterior, it can also reveal, paradoxically, the kinds of transformations and losses that metaphorical and allegorical figuration necessarily entail in creating such correspondences; Ovid’s nymphs may maintain their chaste identities, but they still lose their bodies. Even Ovidian metamorphosis proves too problematic because it simultaneously and paradoxically maintains and destroys.61 Neither baptism nor Ovid are allowed to have complete transformative effects in the poem, but following the Palmer’s interpretation of the infant’s bloody hands and his rebuff of Ovid assures that Guyon will reject a romance narrative that could have had at least partially transformative and redemptive power.

We should not be surprised that Spenser turns to—but eventually rejects—Ovid in a book about the transformative power of romance. Syrith Pugh discusses the close affinities between Ovid and romance, and she notes that romance moments in The Faerie Queene often allude to the Metamorphoses.62 Moreover, Daniel Javitch has illustrated that sixteenth-century Italian critics—Cinthio being the first—defended Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso by linking it to the Metamorphoses, which provided a classical alternative to sixteenth-century neo-Aristotelianism; Ovid’s poem became the classical model for romance’s inclusion of multiple plots and digressions.63 Javitch illustrates that Ovid was read as a type of romance, and indeed we find in the Metamorphoses tales imbedded within tales that seem to be digressions from the topic at hand.64 Moreover, as a poem that defies Aristotelian unity, the Metamorphoses is commonly viewed as a counterpoint to the Aeneid and the Augustine imperial politics that are upheld in Virgil’s epic.65

Although Ovid can be read as casting a critical gaze at both imperial and proto-imperial projects, it may not be possible to make this same generalization about early modern romance.66 If romance has any affinity with Ovid’s project, however, it resides in its ability to uncover digressive counternarratives that are just as important (or perhaps just as attractive) as the goals of epic; all errant knights have a primary goal, even if various adventures and erotic enticements are temporarily more appealing than the pursuit of that goal. Hence the incorporation of Ovid into a narrative that has transformed romance digression into epic telos (Rinaldo’s romance-like digression with Armida in Gerusalemme liberata becomes the concluding quest for Guyon when he encounters Acrasia) may seem contradictory.67 We might expect Spenser to use the similarities between romance and Ovid to provide an alternative to epic telos and to criticize an English imperial fantasy. Spenser does no such thing. Instead, he uses Ovid in the Nymph’s well episode to criticize the transforming impulses of romance and allegory. Neither romance, because of its dependence on the sacrament of baptism, nor allegory, because of its stubborn persistence of the literal, prove able to alter indelible marks of originary identity.

Reading Literally in the Bower of Bliss

Numerous events occur between Guyon’s departure for the Bower of Bliss and his arrival there. Even so, I would like to turn to the end of the book and consider the consequences of the Palmer’s reading for Acrasia and the end of Book 2. Surprisingly, though the Nymph’s well and Bower of Bliss have been discussed at great length and for a variety of purposes, critics have tended not to read the beginning (especially its engagement with theological issues) and end of Book 2 in relation to each other.68 It is well known that Spenser draws from Homer, Ariosto, and Tasso to create his Acrasia, but I suggest that he also draws from Ovid’s Circe in Book 14 of the Metamorphoses, which provides a potential backstory that would explain why the Palmer and Guyon feel the need to bind Acrasia and destroy her bower.

In Book 14 Macareus narrates the familiar Homeric tale of Circe’s magic and her ability to transform men into animals. What is less familiar is the story that follows: Picus’s metamorphosis into the woodpecker. The nymph tells Macareus to pay special attention to this tale: “ ‘Listen to this, Macareus … / and learn how powerful my mistress is; / apply yourself to what I have to say’ ” (14.542–44). The tale that follows, though seemingly just another recounting of Circe’s ability to transform men into beasts, yields a fresh insight into the true nature of Circe’s power for both Macareus and Homer’s readers. After Circe transforms Picus, his men demand that Circe return him to his human state:

Instead, she sprinkled them

with noxious drugs and poisonous concoctions,

and summoning up Night and all his gods,

that dwell below in Erebus and Chaos,

she called upon the goddess Hecate

with long-drawn ululations.

Astonishing

to say it, but the woods leapt from their place,

the earth shuddered, the nearby trees turned white,

and clumps of grass were stained with blood;

stones seemed to bellow and wild dogs to bay,

the earth appeared to writhe with poisonous serpents,

and ghostly forms flutter all around.

Astounded by these monstrous apparitions,

his comrades turned into a fearful mob;

she touched their faces—trembling, terrified—

with the magic wand by which these youths were changed

into a great variety of beasts;

and not a one of them kept his old shape. (my emphasis, 14.570–87)

So that we do not miss what the tale has to teach us, the nymph draws our attention to the “Astonishing” nature of the tale (a “dictum mirabile” in the Latin [14.406]), and Picus’s men are “Astounded” by Circe’s magic as well, as she touches their “mirantia virga” (14.413). Acrasia’s magic, like Circe’s, comes from drugs and charms, but it is in her alteration of the landscape that she reveals the true depth of her power; the land reacts physically and affectively to her magic—it “shudders” [ingemuitque solum] (14.407) and is “stained with blood” [sanguineis maduerant] (14.408). Ovid’s Circe can conjure fear and loathing from the earth.

Circe is especially troubling in her ability to produce affect; the affective responses of her victims (topographical and human) enact metamorphosis. Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of the tale illustrates this point clearly, as Golding translates Ovid’s “dictum mirabile” as “a woondrous thing to tell.”69 He later translates the response of Picus’s men and their transformations as “woonderous” as well:

The folke were flayghted at theis syghts.

And as they woondering stood amaazed, shee strokte her witching wand

Uppon theyr faces. At the touche wherof, there out of hand

Came woondrous shapes of savage beastes uppon them all. Not one

Reteyned still his native shape.70

There are affinities among the wondrous nature of the tale, Circe’s wondrous magic within the tale, their “woondering,” and the “woondrous” shapes into which they are transformed. Their emotional transformation is replicated in their bodies, much in the manner of Arethusa and Spenser’s Nymph. Again, metamorphosis produces a physical representation of emotional distress; it materializes and makes visible inward feelings.

Although Acrasia seems similar to Ovid’s Circe because they both produce wondrous topographies, there are significant differences between Circe’s magic and Acrasia’s. They both turn men into beasts, but they have very different effects on the landscape. Both landscapes are dangerous in their power to summon affect, but Acrasia’s is perhaps more dangerous because it is appealing and able to distract Guyon from his purpose. The Palmer, after all, rebukes Guyon for his “wandring eye” (2.12.69) when he catches him looking at the two “wanton Maidens” (2.12.66) bathing in a fountain. The significance of this visual wandering is heightened by this fountain’s location at the center of the Bower of Bliss: “In the midst of all,” the narrator tells us, “a fountaine stood, / Of richest substaunce, that on earth might bee, / So pure and shiny.…” (2.12.60). Surprisingly, Spenser portrays the fountain positively, emphasizing its purity and clarity: “through the waves one might the bottom see” (2.12.62). The language of clarity and purity highlights the fountain’s transparency and thus links it to the Nymph’s well in canto 2. As the maidens exhibit, the fountain leaves nothing to the imagination—there is nothing hidden, nothing to wonder at.

This is not to say that Acrasia’s creations are benign, for they may lead epic and romance knights astray; Guillory has suggested that “the strongest temptation to which the heroes of The Faerie Queene are subject is denominated in the medieval system of vices as accidie, sloth. The temptation is simply to rest, in its most radical form, to give up.”71 Acrasia, then, like Duessa before her, leads knights away from both epic telos and romance wandering, for although she may be encountered through error, she then calls knights to stasis—to remain in a perpetual present in her carpe diem lyric in stanzas 74 and 75. And if she calls errant knights to stasis, she also calls them to get lost in a lyrical moment from Gerusalemme liberata; it is well known that Spenser’s carpe diem lyric imitates the bird’s song in Armida’s locus amoenus.72

Guyon must reject this Italianate lyrical moment, and at the end of canto 12 Guyon and the Palmer not only destroy the location that produces such lyricism but they also attempt to restore those who have been seduced by it—the Palmer restores Acrasia’s victims after Guyon destroys the Bower. These acts of restoration and destruction are undermined, however, by the emotional responses of the restored men and by Grill, who are all very unhappy with Guyon and the Palmer:

Streight way he with his virtuous staffe them stroke,

And straight of beasts they comely men became;

Yet being men they did unmanly looke,

And stared ghastly, some for inward shame,

And some for wrath, to see their captive Dame:

But one above the rest in speciall,

That had an hog beene late, hight Grille by name,

Repinded greatly, and did him miscall,

That had from hoggish forme him brought to naturall.

Said Guyon, See the mind of beastly man,

That hath soone forgot the excellence

Of his creation, when he life began,

That now he chooseth, with vile difference,

To be a beast, and lack intelligence.

To whom the Palmer thus, The dongill kind

Delights in filth and foule incontinence:

Let Grill be Grill, and have his hoggish mind,

But let us hence depart, whilest wether serves and wind. (2.12.86–87)

Quilligan notes, “here there are limits to the transforming powers of good.… The proper response to Grill’s choice is not to force his conversion, however, but to let him be.”73 Although Quilligan is not interested in religious conversion, her reading of Grill and her use of the word “conversion” is worth considering. Conversion, of course, can never be forced officially in a Protestant context, especially because the emphasis placed on faith and race stripped baptism of its power to transform. Consequently, no act of will or force can transform Grill.

The inability to transform Grill has further spiritual implications if, as Darryl J. Gless suggests, the image has affinities with the Calvinist doctrine of predestination:

… “the dunghill kind” suggests that some are “by kind” incorrigible.… A reader inclined to apply Protestant notions of causality to such reflections could easily … share the palmer’s dismissive view because people who resist moral rectification.… provide more than usual evidence of their reprobation. As Reformed dogma insists, however, such people willingly “choose” the viciousness to which they are predestined, and are appropriately left to work out their own damnation.74 (186)

I would add that in this episode reprobation is made visible through the incomplete transformations: though “they comely men became, / Yet being men they did unmanly look.” Here there is a tension between what they “became” and how they “look” because the Palmer has rejected Ovid and the kinds of unity metamorphosis might have allowed. That said, because the poem has already used Ovid to suggest that metamorphosis creates unity between the internal and the external, it is likely that these men’s initial transformations into beasts by Acrasia—who harbors Ovidian power—were the mere outward manifestation of an already-present internal unmanliness. The unmanly looks that remain are thus likely an expression of the very unmanliness they had before Acrasia transformed them, even if it is an unmanliness that she herself creates in her ability to inspire lust—in a manner similar to Circe’s creation of affect in Ovid.

It is likely within the symbolic economy of Ovidian poetics that Grill, too, became a hog because he already had a “hoggish mind.” Moreover, it is Grill who most explicitly manifests a resistance to redemptive transformation. The Palmer tells us Grill’s name, but it is Guyon, not the Palmer, who, as the allegorist, tells us how to read Grill’s resistance. At the same time, this reading, like the allegorical readings before it, hopes to obscure the more obvious fact that Grill and his comrades like being Acrasia’s pets. In the end, all the Palmer can say is “Let Grill be Grill”; he urges Guyon to leave the island and to let Grill remain there. Grill represents transparency, like the well at the center of the Bower, and resistance to transformation through his transparency: Grill is simply Grill, embodying the stubborn persistence of the literal.75

The binding of Acrasia and the destruction of her bower, then, is on the one hand an attempt to bind the remaining element of Ovidian metamorphic power, and on the other a final rejection of romance transformation and elements of the poem’s Italian sources. This is all the more true if, as John Watkins argues in reading Acrasia in relation to Dido, “Book II of The Faerie Queene reestablishes epic as a genre valorizing the surrender of whatever one holds most alluring and precious. Its cataclysmic denouement indicates the clemency of Italian romance as a deviation from the ‘rigour pittilesse’ with which Virgil exhorted his readers to self-denial.”76 Watkins’s reading stems from his earlier observation that in Book 2 what is romance digression in Tasso is epic telos in Spenser (it also relies on a common reading that situates romance in opposition to epic).77 It is true that Tasso’s readers may sympathize with Armida after Rinaldo leaves her, but romance, like epic, is unwilling to leave its heroes stranded in love affairs that might divert from the ideological concerns of the poem—in Tasso’s poem Rinaldo must initially leave Armida because he is a Christian knight and she is a Muslim, and their final reunion is predicated upon her implied conversion to Christianity. Moreover, Ovid and romance cannot be excised completely from Spenser’s rewriting of Tasso’s story of Armida and Rinaldo. In his unwillingness to allow for conversion, transformation, or restoration, and in his unwillingness to allow his hero to reconcile with Acrasia, Spenser explicitly rejects a moment of romance in Tasso’s epic, but the effects of Acrasia’s Ovidian magic persist beyond the conclusion of Book II, as Guyon and the Palmer leave Grill being Grill. Like the well at the center of her garden, Acrasia is fully sexualized, anti-Protestant, and nonallegorical. She and everything in her Bower appear exactly as they are; they resist any other use than simple, present pleasure.

The unwillingness to convert Acrasia at the end of the poem, moreover, cannot be separated from the racial and religious difference she inherited from her original, Armida, in Tasso’s poem; her racialized and religiously marked body necessarily presents itself as a site of anxiety. Because racial and religious difference, marked as an “infection” just like original sin, persisted after baptism, we see the power of racial markers themselves to contaminate religious identity. From a different religious and national context, the Spanish terms moriscos and conversos illustrate this point; the pre-Christian identity is captured in the postconversion nomenclature, revealing either suspicion that these converts may not be fully Christian or at the very least that their non-Christian past remains part of their identities. Perhaps this is because racial markers, whether registered through skin color, social customs, or genealogy, have always been more conspicuous identifiers than inward faith. Spenser’s theology only reifies this belief, maintaining that the transformed and converted necessarily retain a part of their original identity (original sin or race, both of which are passed down genealogically). Neither Spenser’s poem nor baptism could ever assure that infidels become true Christians when they convert, and in The Faerie Queene we see a version of the theory of blood purity that appeared in Spain under a completely different set of theological and historical circumstances. Baptism, conversion, and romance prove unable to transform and cleanse the “bloud [that] secret filth infected hath.”

Nevertheless, Spenser remembers that the British have not always been Christians. In the “Briton monuments,” the narrator apostrophizes the queen and tells her of her “realme and race” (2.10.4).78 Here she also learns about “good Lucius / That first received Christianitie, / The sacred pledge of Christes Euangely” (2.10.53). But this recollection is first encountered and then left behind in a “chamber [that] seemed ruinous and old,” and is kept by “an old old man, halfe blind” (2.9.55 & 57). England’s pre-Christian history is kept hidden away, scarcely visible, an archived and fading cultural memory. Even so, it is important that this history of Briton is located in the House of Alma, commonly read as the human body itself. The body retains this history of conversion, a history that Spenser acknowledges but one that proves secondary to present religious concerns about infidel conversion and racial and religious purity.

Race, Ovid, and Purity Beyond Book 2

Given the problems surrounding the allegorical, Ovidian, and baptismal transformations in Book 2, it is hardly surprising that metamorphosis is equally undesirable in Book 3, especially because Britomart manifests a poetic unity between herself and the virtue of chastity, of which she is the knightly champion. But Britomart, too, has to confront Ovidian challenges, which in Book 3 are connected to anxieties about racial and religious miscegenation. Anxiety that Britomart’s desire may be tainted with a transformative Ovidianism is most explicitly addressed after her encounter with Merlin’s mirror. Glauce hopes that Britomart’s love “Be … worthy of [her] race and royal seed” (2.32.4). She fears, however, that Britomart may suffer from a desire that is “Of filthy lust, contrary to kind” (ii.40.4), that it may be similar to the transgressive desire typified by Ovidian heroines: “Not so th’Arabian Myrrhe did set her mind; / Nor so did Biblis spend her pining hart, / But loved their native flesh against all kind” (2.41.1–3).79 Glauce expresses a concern that Britomart’s desire be of the right “kind” and fitting of her “race.” Her obsession with race and kind also points to a concern for the stability of categorical distinctions made problematic by incest and metamorphoses.80

But if incest blurs differences of “kind,” the poem asserts other kinds of distinctions with Britomart’s rejection of desires that are marked as foreign; she rejects the “Arabian” desire of Myrhha as contrary to kind as well.81 The poem creates a distance between Britomart and Ovidianism that captures, Cora Fox argues, “pagan emotional states that lie outside the prescribed limits of Elizabethan and Protestant experience.”82 Instead, Britomart’s desire is directed toward Artegall, and Merlin points to the fitting nature of the match:

The man whom heavens have ordayne to be

The spouse of Britomart, is Artegall:

He wonneth in the land of Fayree,

Yet is no Fary borne, ne sib at all

To Elfes, but sprong of seed terrestiall,

And whilome by False Faries stolne away,

Whiles yet in infant cradle he did crall;

Ne other to himself is knowne this day,

But that he by Elfe was gotten of a Fay.

But soothe he is the sonne of Gorlios,

And brother unto Cador Cornish king,

And for his warlike feats renowmed is,

From where the day out of the sea doth spring,

Untill the closure of the Evening.

From thence, him firmly bound with faithfull band,

To this native soyle thou backe shalt bring,

Strongly to aid his countrey, to withstanad

The power of forrein Paynims, which invade thy land. (3.3.27–27)

Merlin has much to say about Artegall’s lineage: First we learn that he is not a fairy but a changeling; second we learn that he is Cornish. The fact that Artegall is of “this native soyle” also gives rise to a difference between Britomart’s future desire for Artegall and that of Bradamante (her literary progenitor) for Ruggiero in Orlando Furioso; it is a love that precedes his conversion to Christianity but is consummated after it. Merlin attempts to ground Britomart’s desire locally, for although Britomart goes to Merlin to see whether her love lies “beyond the Afrik Ismaell, / or th’Indian Peru” (3.6.7–8), she learns that her lover is not from such foreign locations—and in noting “Africk Ismaell,” the poem forecloses the possibility that Britomart would be in love with someone like Ruggiero. The poem acknowledges that Britomart’s love could have been similar to that of Bradamante for the North African, Muslim Ruggiero, but it rejects this possibility by insisting that her love interest springs from her and the poem’s native soil. The poem is quick to distance Britomart, and consequently Elizabeth as her descendent, from contaminative miscegenation, thereby sparing Britomart the fate of desiring a foreigner, as Artegall may be suspected of doing in his relationship with Radigund in Book V.83

Indeed, Book 3, canto 3, illustrates its own obsession with origins. Before Merlin reveals Britomart’s genealogy to her, he says, “For so must all things excellent begin” (3.3.2). Excellent progeny, in this case Elizabeth, must have excellent genealogical origins. When the poem takes an interest in Elizabeth’s purity, it again rejects allegory by insisting instead on a racial or genealogical connection between image and idea, thus creating a racial rather than an allegorical connection between Britomart and Artegall and Elizabeth.

The Faerie Queene’s concern with racial and religious purity is fulfilled in Britomart’s desire for Artegall. His purity and the purity of his and Britomart’s lineage are connected to what canto 3 portrays as a continual battle with non-Christian forces: Repeatedly in canto 3, Merlin notes Britomart’s and Artegall’s progeny fighting “paynims.” Artegall in particular will defeat the “forrein Paynims, which invade thy land.” In the context of this Protestant and often anti-Spanish epic, it is likely that Spenser is registering widespread fears of a Spanish invasion in the 1590s, as well as a past anxiety about the Queen’s marriage proposals from the Duke of Anjou and Phillip II (the latter allegorically portrayed as the Souldan in Book 5). These potential marriages were causes of concern because they would compromise English Protestant identity. Even so, we cannot ignore the racial and religious differences that reside in these figures of the paynims and the Souldan. By creating a literal conflict between Britomart and Guyon’s progeny and paynims, the poem imagines an England and a Protestantism that are genealogically resistant to Islam.