The last book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation, rife with political implications and the source for much Christian theology, exerted a powerful influence upon the arts in Elizabethan England. As Harvey writes tellingly to Spenser (Three Letters 3, Var Prose p 471),
I hearde once a Divine, preferre Saint Johns Revelation before al the veriest Maetaphysicall Visions, and jollyest conceited Dreames or Extasies, that ever were devised by one or other, howe admirable, or superexcellent soever they seemed otherwise to the worlde. And truely I am so confirmed in this opinion, that when I bethinke me of the verie notablest, and moste wonderful Propheticall, or Poeticall Vision, that ever I read, or hearde, me seemeth the proportion is so unequall, that there hardly appeareth anye semblaunce of Comparison.
For Harvey, the Apocalypse is a good pattern to set before English poets, and it had come to Spenser's attention early: for Theatre for Worldlings, he translated four Visions from Revelation which center on St John's visions of the beast with seven heads, the great whore riding that beast, the Word of God riding a white horse, and the New Jerusalem. Almost all of van der Noot's commentary that accompanies Theatre refers to these Visions. However Spenser may have regarded Theatre, it clearly held great sway over him, perhaps by awakening his interest in visionary literature, and almost certainly through the example it provided for crossbreeding sacred prophecy with contemporary history and for intermixing dreadful visions with irenic ones. Theatre turned Spenser's attention to the Apocalypse.
Paraphrases of and quotations and echoes from the Apocalypse have been observed and tabulated in Amoretti, Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, Daphnaïda, Epithalamion, Hymne of Heavenly Beautie, Hymne of Heavenly Love, Prothalamion, and Complaints (Shaheen 1976). In The Shepheardes Calender, Spenser first emerges as a Revelation-like poet by tuning his pastoral in an apocalyptic key; but it is The Faerie Queene that most fully manifests the influence of the Book of Revelation, with Spenser repeatedly echoing that book by appropriating its imagery and its themes (especially of worldly appearances versus spiritual realities, and of providence as the sovereign control of history), by employing its strategies, recasting its visions and then using them as a medium for reflecting upon current affairs and as a metaphor for English history. The largest group of scriptural echoes in The Faerie Queene is to Revelation, with over 40 clustering in Book I, in addition to the 13 in Book II, 9 in III, 4 in IV, 8 in v, and 5 in VI (Shaheen 1976:181). Thus the influence of the Apocalypse is felt throughout the entire poem, which presents a characteristically Protestant exposition of the salient apocalyptic themes.
So conspicuous is the apocalyptic element in The Faerie Queene that Thomas Warton objected in the mid-eighteenth century to the blending of sacred mysteries with secular allegories, and to the interweaving of apocalyptic with romance elements (Var 1:368). But that objection was countered a century later by John Wilson, who found in The Faerie Queene ‘the sublime application by a poet of a prophet's verses’ (Var 1:370):
It is not too bold to say that Edmund Spenser borrows the pen of St. John—and that the two revelations coincide—or rather that there is but one revelation—at first derived from heaven, and then given again—in poetry, which, though earth-born, claims kindred with the issue of the skies. Of old—and why not now?—it was allowed—as Cowper finely says—that ‘the hallowed name/Of prophet and of poet were the same.’
Spenser may not be the inaugurator of a new prophetic vision, but he is a partaker in John's, recognizing in current history the Revelation archetype and therefore viewing that history as approaching ever nearer to the apocalyptic consummation.
Both Warton and North were preceded in their perception of Spenser's indebtedness to St John by Henry More, who proposed the Apocalypse as sourcebook and model for one episode in FQ I vi: ‘Methinks Spencer's description of Una's Entertainment by Satyrs in the Desart, does lively set out the condition of Christianity since the time that the Church of a Garden became a Wilderness’ (Sp All p 249). Even earlier, John Dixon, a contemporary reader of The Faerie Queene, correlated several episodes with passages in the Book of Revelation. In his annotations to the 1590 edition, he presents Elizabeth as the great protagonist of history, and FQ I as an allegory of the Reformation, in this way linking both the historical and moral allegory of the poem with the visionary drama of John's prophecy (Hough 1964).
Modern criticism, however, has extended The Faerie Queene's parallels with Revelation beyond Book I to the poem as a whole, and beyond imagery and themes to such matters as strategy, structure, and genre as they involve the entire poem (see Bennett 1942, Hankins 1971, Kermode 1971, O'Connell 1977, Sandler 1984, Wittreich 1979). The whole of The Faerie Queene, therefore, can be seen as a revelation in itself—a series of theophanies, a Tudor Apocalypse (Williams 1975).
We now know that the Book of Revelation is an intricate prophetic structure whose features were individually isolated in the sixteenth century and then synthesized in the seventeenth century within elaborate structural analyses such as those of Joseph Mede and Henry More. Structural synchronism, typological patterning, vision enfolding itself in commentary, text enthralling its audience and becoming involved in numerical systems of threes, sixes, and sevens these were (and continue to be regarded as) the distinctive features of a prophetic structure that presents a gathering self-awareness within the gradual unfolding of vision. With this refined conception of the structure of apocalyptic prophecy, we may now examine its bearing on The Faerie Queene.
The Renaissance was bent upon subordinating history to some general scheme, some keys to which were to be found by relating the Book of Revelation to the chronicles (Levy 1967:5, 89). At least up to the time of John Bale, historiography stressed the idea of six ages of history followed by a seventh or sabbath age. According to Bale's Comedy Concernynge Thre Lawes (c 1548), the seven ages of the world—the first six ages extending from Adam to Christ, the seventh from Christ to the end of the world— encompass another historical pattern: three periods respectively, of nature, bondage, and grace (Firth 1979:38–9). Satan's release from bondage, moreover, was expected to result in the trial of the last days which was said to correspond with the final centuries of papal domination of the church.
Spenser's Letter to Raleigh, which projects two poems, each in twelve books, is responsible for the notion that The Faerie Queene is composed of the free-standing walls of a much larger, uncompleted structure. A poet who follows Chaucer might be expected, almost by design, to promise more than he delivers and might even be thought to employ poetic fragments deliberately, using them to sanction the possibility that his poem is more a plan than a ruin—a calculated, coherent, but still incomplete form with its own internal structure and external abrasions.
If endings matter in poetry, each half of The Faerie Queene ends in the same way, with the binding and unleashing of the beast—an event, which takes its symbolic point from the whole tradition of Revelation commentary, is part of a fourfold pattern: releasing virtuous prisoners, freely binding oneself to virtuous service, binding evil, and avoiding bondage by evil (see Gray 1975, Firth 1979). Put another way, the middle and end of The Faerie Queene are congruent. Indeed, this single structural feature raises still other possibilities: that Bale's conceptualization is a paradigm for the total structure of The Faerie Queene; that the fragmentary Book VII is Spenser's way of pointing out that his age has entered a crucial phase in the seventh period of history; that, as a fragment, Book VII emblematizes the incompleteness of history itself; and that its three cantos—vi, vii, and viii—are a way of focusing a pattern of nature, bondage, and grace folded into the corresponding cantos of virtually every other book in the poem.
Merlin's prophecy (which comes near the beginning of FQ III and is thus foregrounded in the central books) repeats in miniature this tripartite pattern of the poem as a whole: under the rule of nature, Britain is reduced to disorder; next, under the rule of law, history is reorganized by a vengeful god; finally, after a succession of woes, the nation is returned to order and peace through an act of grace and by the agency of a Virgin Queen. Merlin's prophecy affirms the apocalyptic notion that history is a great map of providence and that prophecy itself is the chief evidence of providence in the world. It is ‘the streight course of heavenly destiny,/Led with eternall providence’ that guides history and brings things to pass, that moves history ‘by dew degrees and long pro tense...unto her [ie, Elizabeth's] Excellence.’ Eventually a universal peace will confound all this civil jar: ‘Then shall a royall virgin raine... But yet the end is not’ (in iii 24, 4, 49–50). In this last line, Merlin divests secular prophecy of the apocalyptic element which he is credited with having introduced to the tradition. Here he quiets millennial expectations and dampens apocalyptic fervor.
Furthermore, in the midst of his prophetic utterance, Merlin is ‘stayd,/As overcomen of the spirites powre,/Or other ghastly spectacle dismayd’ (50). Prophecy comes into the present but does not go beyond; history is continuous, and those who hear this prophecy are cheered with heavenly comfort and renewed with hope as they return to Fairyland. One must finish forging the godly nation, Spenser implies, and in this joins the company of certain of his contemporaries who, within the context of the Apocalypse, maintained a distinction between variable England and invariable Jerusalem, between the world of men and the angelic company, between an earthly paradise and the heavenly kingdom.
The Faerie Queene epitomizes the apocalyptic thinking, tentative and guarded, of Spenser's own time, even as it confirms in certain of its details the contention that the sabbatical numbers, six and seven, appear to be deliberately chosen so that the Cantos of Mutabilitie participate in the poem's numerical system as a fraction rather than as a fragment (Nohrnberg 1976:85). The poem itself moves through and then out of history into the sabbath of eternity: there are three books, then another three, and then the Cantos themselves form a cluster of three parts. Overlaying this pattern of threes is a structure of six books followed by a fragmentary seventh that fulfills itself only in the final lines of a final fractional canto. The theme of bondage is at the center of each book of the poem, but at the center of each of its twin halves, FQ II and v, emphasis shifts from bondage (Guyon in the house of Mammon) to release from the captive state (Artegall's liberation from thralldom). And at the very center of this apocalyptic poem, as a shrill trumpet sounds (III xii 1), the themes of redemption and deliverance come to the fore in the story of ‘Amoret in caytive band...these seven monethes’ being delivered by Britomart (xi 10).
Such a pattern is contained in the individual books as well. If the sixth and seventh are cantos of nature and bondage, the eighth is regularly the canto of grace—thus in Book I, ‘heavenly grace doth him uphold’ (viii 1); in Book II, ‘th'exceeding grace/Of highest God’ sends ‘blessed Angels...to and fro’ (viii 1); and in Book IV, ‘goodly grace she did him shew’ (viii 6). However muted the threefold pattern of nature, bondage, and grace may be in certain of the books, Book VI gathers it into focus through the Hermit's place in canto vi, the bound squire in vii, and Serena in viii, who led ‘by grace of God’ (38) is freed by Calepine.
In Christus triumphans (1556), Foxe provides a probable conceptual and structural analogue for Spenser's poem, dramatizing Revelation in a way that focuses its last act upon the Reformation and thereupon narrows its allegory to England. Foxe's play is ‘unfinished, as the drama of history is.’ The proposed conclusion to what Foxe calls his apocalyptic comedy, ‘the wedding, lies just beyond the point at which the action stops; or just so the coming of Christ lies just beyond the point which the drama of history had reached in 1556’ (Bauckham 1978:79). Accordingly, ‘the Red Cross Knight's story ends with a prophecy of apocalypse, and Arthur, if the poem had been completed, would have been united with the Queen whom he had previously experienced in his vision. It is a definition of apocalypse that in it vision and reality become one’ (I.G. MacCaffrey 1976:92); and, we might add, it is a definition of an apocalyptic poem that until history is complete the poem cannot be complete. In Spenser's poem, Nature's concluding words are of apocalypse, though Nature's are not the poem's final words; and even in the very first book, the most apocalyptic in the entire poem, the ending is tentative, a new beginning rather than a determinate conclusion, with the movement toward revelation and apocalypse interrupted by a counterturn, a regression (P.A.Parker 1979:55, 69, 75–6, 80).
If Foxe may be said to domesticate the Apocalypse, Spenser, in turn, contributes to its secularization by tracking its reference points to the spiritual history of mankind. In the very act of postponing apocalypse, Spenser implies that the beast still rules history because it is still enthroned in man and so continues to manifest itself both there and in the world.
Harvey once chided Spenser for not recognizing that the golden age is now. Yet Spenser's objective in The Faerie Queene is not to further the Tudors’ messianic pretensions but to scrutinize them. In the process, he resists the expectations of his own time by distancing apocalypse into the future and by making the development of the individual a prelude to the apocalypse in history. Spenser seems to be recognizing two separate aspects of the apocalyptic vision: a panoramic apocalypse set in the future near the end of time that itself may be the type of the other apocalypse, the one that really matters—the present-tense apocalypse realized first in the individual and then perhaps in history (see Frye 1982:136–7).
The Faerie Queene is finally not an historian's or a theologian's but a poet's Revelation. For Spenser, the cosmic struggle of the Apocalypse was a matter not for scholarly erudition but for human engagement. Here was being played out the great epic of history and the essential drama of human life; here, to appropriate words from Shakespeare's Sonnet 107, is to be found a mirror on ‘the prophetic soul/Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come.’ (See also *eschatology, *oracles, *prophecy, *visions.)
John Bale 1548 The Image of Bothe Churches (Antwerp; rpt Amsterdam and New York 1973); John Foxe 1556 Christus triumphans (London); Foxe 1583 Actes and Monuments (London); Joseph Mede 1643 The Key of the Revelation tr Richard More (London); Henry More 1669 An Exposition of the Seven Epistles to the Seven Churches (London); More 1680 Apocalypsis apocalypseos (London).
Bauckham 1978; Bennett 1942:111, 114–15; Firth 1979; Frye 1982; J.C.Gray 1975 ‘Bondage and Deliverance in the “Faerie Queene”: Varieties of a Moral Imperative’ MLR 70:1–12; Hough 1964; Frank Kermode 1967 The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York); Kermode 1971:39–44; Levy 1967; Sandler 1984; Shaheen 1976; Kathleen Williams 1975 ‘Milton, Greatest Spenserian’ in Wittreich 1975:25–55; Wittreich 1979.
The deceptiveness of outward appearance in Spenser's poetry must be set in the context of the biblical injunction, ‘Judge not according to the appearance’ (John 7.24), and Erasmus’ complaint that the ‘stupid generality of men often blunder into wrong judgements, because they judge everything from the evidence of the bodily senses, and they are deceived by false imitations of the good and the evil’ (‘Sileni Alcibiadis’ Adages 3.3.1; tr in M.M.Phillips 1964:276). The traditional Silenus-figure illustrates his point: the box shows a small, ugly image of the foolish god Silenus but when opened reveals a god hidden within.
In The Faerie Queene, the full congruence of appearance and reality may be a mark of simple truth, reflecting the commonplace belief in the unity of truth found in the philosophical and homiletic literature of the period (eg, I xii 8; see Fowler 1964:5). Falsehood is double and therefore duplicitous, a want of such congruence. Outward appearances are often the means of an intentional dissembling: apparent semblance serves only to define real dissemblance. To the extent that Fidessa resembles a virtuous lady, she also resembles Una; but the apparent resemblance of the two shows their lack of resemblance, and, thus, the truth of the one and the falseness of the other. In the same way, Corceca's semblance of holiness is simultaneously her dissembling of holiness, the virtue fully manifest in Caelia. In some instances, the outward appearance of a specific character is falsely duplicated: Archimago assumes the appearance of the Red Cross Knight so totally that the reader is warned that ‘Saint George himself ye would have deemed him to be’ (I ii II), as does Una (iii 26–40). Archimago is not Redcrosse, but then the Redcrosse who is about to encounter Sansjoy and Despair is not a ‘jolly knight’ either. Other instances include the real Una and the dream Una created by Archimago, and the real and snowy Florimells.
This manner of moral definition is not restricted to persons: the outward appearance of the house of Pride glittering with gold foil hides the ruinous condition beneath it. The house of Holiness, by contrast, plainly manifests what it is. ‘What is excellent in any way is always the least showy,’ comments Erasmus (in Phillips 1964:274); a similar distrust of the showy pervades The Faerie Queene. (Show as a noun is generally negative in Spenser's usage; cf his positive use of the verb show meaning ‘make manifest.’) The real danger of the Bower of Bliss is hidden (and, for the reader, indicated) by its gorgeous but factitious beauty. As visual delights become more appealing, the possibility of deceit becomes greater. Duessa poses a subtler threat to Redcrosse than Error, Sansfoy, or Orgoglio since her danger is less easily recognized. Similarly, the Bower of Bliss is a subtler test of Guyon's virtue than the house of Mammon, the danger of which is readily perceived.
The moral imperative of the narrative is the biblical injunction to ‘judge righteous judgement’ (John 7.24). There is no guarantee, however, that we will not be misled by our senses: insight must be added to sight. As the most rational of the senses in the Platonic hierarchy, sight is less misleading than the others—thus its great importance in The Faerie Queene. But, by itself, sight cannot penetrate to the hidden reality. Plato denies that we can truly know the contingent phenomena of our empirical world, which is one of becoming and seeming, and therefore imperfect, mutable, delusive; true knowledge is possible only of the perfect unchanging world of rational ideal forms, the world of being (Phaedo 65). In biblical terms, only God is capable of righteous judgment because ‘God seeth not as man seeth: for man loketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord beholdeth the heart’ (I Sam 16.7). Guided by reason and sight, however, we may obtain some access to the world of truth and reality beyond that of changeable phenomena.
The need to distinguish between appearance and reality is also shown in the narrative as unveiling or unmasking. Once Redcrosse has achieved his quest and restored Una to her rights, her real beauty and truth, veiled earlier, are revealed. Archimago's disguises are similarly revealed, and the nature of his duplicity declared. The most dramatic instance of unmasking occurs when Duessa is stripped: beneath the splendor of her outward appearance is revealed her real physical grotesqueness, a metaphor of her duplicity and moral repulsiveness. Here, falsehood is confronted by simple truth, in the form of Una. All is apparent; the figures are what they appear to be, seeming is being, and thus a measure of knowledge of truth and reality has been won, against all odds, from this deceptive world of appearances: ‘Such then (said Una) as she seemeth here,/Such is the face of falshood, such the sight/Of fowle Duessa, when her borrowed light/Is laid away, and counterfesaunce knowne’ (I viii 49).
Disguise is allowed only for virtuous ends, as when Britomart resolves to hide her sex in male armor ‘and plaine apparaunce shonne’ (III i 52), or Artegall disguises himself as one of the Souldan's knights in order to capture Adicia (v viii 26), or Calidore disguises himself as a shepherd to free Pastorella (VI xi 36–51). Appearance is an important motif in Spenser's ‘darke conceit’ praising Elizabeth whose beauty can be revealed only by being reveiled: ‘O dred Soveraine/Thus farre forth pardon, sith that choicest wit/Cannot your glorious pourtraict figure plaine/That I in colourd showes may shadow it’ (III proem 3).
Spenser follows tradition in frequently associating apples with temptation and love. They are tempting pastoral delicacies: Colin Clout, the witch's son who dotes on Florimell, and Faunus all offer varieties of them as gifts or bribes (SC, June 43–4; FQ III vii 17, VII vi 43). Their proverbially beautiful color and shape figure in several descriptions of feminine beauty which are ultimately indebted to the Song of Solomon. In Epithalamion, for example, the bride's cheeks are like red apples (173). Belphoebe's breasts swell beneath her thin garment like ‘young fruit in May’ (presumably apples yet to mature) (FQ II iii 29; cf Amoret-ti 76). In Amoretti 77, the beloved's breasts are described emblematically rather than realistically as ‘twoo golden apples’; and their ‘price’ is measured by their superiority to apples coveted in classical mythology—those taken by Hercules from the Garden of the Hesperides and those which tempted Atalanta in the race against her suitor (cf FQ II vii 54; from Conti Mythologiae 7.7, according to Lotspeich 1932:69).
In classical mythology, apples are usually associated with temptation and moral danger. The ‘glistring’ but deadly fruit which Mammon offers Guyon in the Garden of Proserpina (FQ II vii 54–5) recalls the golden fruit with which Pluto tempts Proserpina (Claudian Rape of Proserpina 2.290–3). Mammon's tree is described as the source of all the fateful fruit of mythology: the Hesperidean apples, those with which Atalanta was outwitted, the apple with which Acontius tricked Cydippe into vowing marriage to him (Ovid Heroides 20, 21), and that which Ate used to provoke the quarrel of the goddesses which was judged by Paris (cf FQ IV i 22, VI ix 36).
The diversity of these myths and of their Renaissance interpretations makes their significance hard to define. Some myths are associated with avarice: Conti links the Hesperidean apples and those of Atalanta with wealth, and interprets Tantalus (who reaches for them in II vii 58) as an emblem of avarice. All the apples from Mammon's tree have been seen as emblems of blasphemous ambition of divine knowledge (Kermode 1960:161–5). They may also be emblems of fleshly lust, particularly because Hercules’ theft of the apples of the Hesperides was a common sexual metaphor (see Marlowe Hero and Leander 2.297–300, Shakespeare Love's Labor's Lost IV iii 336–7). Yet one cannot identify the symbolic meanings of these apples too specifically, for they indicate generally worldly goals, the gaining of which may bring grief or disaster.
Elsewhere apples are associated with true beauty and healthy life. Those which grow in abundance can suggest vigor and strength, as in the image of the withered apple tree reviving to bear fresh fruit, which describes Cambell rejuvenated by his magic ring (IV iii 29). In particular, Mammon's tree parodies the biblical Tree of Life whose fruit and balm preserve Redcrosse (I xi 46–8). These have a natural beauty: they are ‘rosie red’ (their color may also suggest redemption through Christ's blood; Hankins 1971:118). Unlike the fruit of the nearby Tree of Knowledge which brought death, they give ‘happie life to all.’ Their connotations of beauty, vigor, fertility, and divine grace are Spenser's most comprehensive and elaborate example of the apple as an image of goodness and life. As a poet, he would have appreciated Proverbs 25.11: ‘A worde spoken in his place, is like appels of golde.’
Born c AD 125 in Madaura, North Africa, Apuleius was a Latin writer of considerable interest to Spenser and his contemporaries. As a Neoplatonist and rhetorician, he was approved as a rich stylist by the humanist educators Erasmus and Vives; his work was ransacked for plots, images, and motifs by dramatists, including Shakespeare.
Apuleius’ masterpiece, the Metamorphoses, translated into English by William Adlington in 1566 as The Golden Asse, is a comic ‘novel’ involving the often bizarre adventures of Lucius, a man transformed into an ass as punishment for his curiosity about witchcraft. Adlington defends the work as ‘a figure of mans life [which] toucheth the nature and manners of mortall men, egging them forward from their Asinall forme, to their humane and perfect shape’ (ed 1915: xvii). Spenser may also have known De deo Socratis, a declamation on the daimon or genius of Socrates; the Apologia, a self-defense against the charge that he had gained his bride by magic; and the Florida, a miscellaneous collection of topics for declamation. One of these topics treats the supremacy of hearing over seeing as a means to truth, a latent theme in The Faerie Queene; another interprets Hercules’ triumphs as external versions of inner spiritual victories (see Dunseath 1968:53–4). In De deo Socratis, Spenser would have found the Platonic view that not only is each man given a genius to guide him through life as a kind of objectified conscience (see Lewis 1964:42; cf Guyon's Palmer), but also that all men are protected by a genius whose concern is the universal ‘care/Of life, and generation of all,’ like Agdistes (FQ II xii 47; see Lotspeich 1932:62). The conclusion of De deo Socratis presents a moral summary of the career of Ulysses and his constant companion, Wisdom, who descend into the underworld and return without being transformed by the cup of Circe; these passages are analogous to Guyon's narrow escape from the house of Mammon with its Garden of Proserpina and his Ulysses-like triumph in the Bower of Bliss (II vii, xii). The Apologia provides a brief excursus on Venus as a binary deity, both vulgar (producing the common passions of love and lust in man and beast) and heavenly (leading the soul to purest love free from physical desire). Some incorporation of this double Venus may lie behind Spenser's frequent allusions to Venus and her diffraction into various female figures in The Faerie Queene and the Fowre Hymnes.
At the center of The Golden Ass (Books 4–6) is the story of Cupid and Psyche, a narrative of sin, suffering, and redemption, or (less religiously) of error, separation, and reunion. Psyche undergoes her trials with patience and resourcefulness, qualities which, together with the grace of divine intervention, bring about her marriage and apotheosis. From the sixth century on, this tale had been allegorized as a story of the soul and heavenly desire or, according to Boccaccio, of the soul and pure Love (Genealogia 5.22; see Lotspeich 1932:104). Spenser refers explicitly to the tale in Muiopotmos (see D.C.Allen 1968:26–31), and was fascinated by it primarily because it embodies problems of sexuality, male power and female fear, and the resolution of these tensions in the ritual of marriage. Psyche's experience is a rite of passage to a more responsible and sexually awakened level of womanhood (Katz 1976). She is thus an appropriate teacher of ‘true feminitee’ to Amoret, making her daughter Pleasure Amoret's companion (FQ in vi 50– 1). The trials of separation and the tensions of sexual passion and their transcendence in marriage are the chief contributions of Apuleius’ Psyche to the character of Britomart and also to the facets of her womanly development in Belphoebe, Amoret, and Florimell (Hamilton 1961a:138–69).
Since Apuleius’ tale of Cupid and Psyche seems to epitomize the larger pattern of his story, Spenser may have drawn on other parts of Lucius’ adventures in order to illustrate the twists and turns of passion. Socrates’ mutilation by the sexual sorceress Meroe resembles the wounding of Amoret by the sorcerer Busirane (III xii 20–1). Pastorella's capture by bandits (VI x 43) finds analogies in the career of Charite, another suffering heroine (whose career interested Ariosto), to whom the tale of Cupid and Psyche is told. Most important, Spenser's account of Britomart's visit to Isis Church (v vii) may borrow details from the description of Cupid's palace in Adlington's translation of Apuleius; and his story of her relation to Isis may be modeled in part on Lucius’ commitment to that goddess, whom Apuleius also associates with equity (Graziani 1964a:378). (See also *demons.)
Apuleius ed 1915 (Loeb Classical Library) is a rev ed by S.Gaselee of Adlington's translation of The Golden Ass. The Apologia and Florida appear together in the translations of H.E.Butler 1909 (Oxford). P.G.Walsh 1970 The Roman Novel (Cambridge) has the best discussion of Apuleius. He is treated as an allegorist in the iconographical tradition by E.H.Gombrich 1972 Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London) pp 34–5, 46–55; and Wind 1958:19, 61–2, 236–8. The fullest discussion of the religious aspects of the conclusion of the novel is in Apuleius ed 1975. See also Phyllis B.Katz 1976 ‘The Myth of Psyche: A Definition of the Nature of the Feminine?’Are-thusa 9:111–18; and Alexander A.Scobie 1978 ‘The Influence of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses in Renaissance Italy and Spain’ in Aspects of Apu-leius’ ‘Golden Ass’ ed B.L.Hijmans, Jr, and R.Th.van der Paardt (Groningen) pp 211–30. For the English tradition, see J.J.M.Tobin 1984a ‘Apuleius and Milton’ RPLit 7:181–91; and Tobin 1984b Shakespeare's Favorite Novel: A Study of ‘The Golden Asse’ as Prime Source (Lanham, Md).
(c 1225–74) Spenser locates the moral argument of The Faerie Queene within the philosophical system of ‘Aristotle and the rest’ (Letter to Raleigh), thereby testifying to the continuity of the tradition of scholastic Aristotelianism. Although new commentaries on the works of Aristotle appeared throughout the course of the sixteenth century, the old commentaries by Thomas Aquinas were repeatedly printed. Aquinas’ continuing high reputation, unmatched by that of any other medieval commentator on Aristotle, derives from that exceptional lucidity and precision which earned for him the title ‘Expositor’ and gave rise to the adage that where Thomas was silent, Aristotle was mute.
Recent scholarship has shown that scholasticism and humanism are not essentially opposed. Scholasticism not only survived the impact of humanism in the 1520s and 1530s but subsequently experienced a strong revival. In England, this revival is reflected in the theology studied at Cambridge, which was at once scholastic and Protestant. One consequence was the increased authority of Aquinas’ Summa theologiae (1265–73). It became a central part of the philosophical tradition on which Spenser draws, and it sheds light on several problems in the moral design of The Faerie Queene: holiness as a moral virtue, the moral range of temperance, the identity of justice and courtesy, and constancy as a culminating virtue.
Holiness or religion is the first of Spenser's moral virtues because faith is the foundation of virtue (ST 2a2ae 161.5 ad 2) and religion is a confession of faith through certain external signs (2a2ae 94.1 ad 1). Holiness is said by Aquinas to be essentially identical with but notionally distinct from religion, the most excellent of the moral virtues (2a2ae 81.6, 81.8). The distinction corresponds to that between the elicited and commanded acts of religion (2a2ae 81.4 ad 2). By the virtue of religion is strictly understood the elicited acts of religion, whereas holiness includes the acts commanded by religion as well (and, especially in the Legend of Holiness, acts of fortitude).
Spenser's notion of temperance distinguishes between a specific virtue (ie, one determined by its own special object, as temperance by the desires and pleasures of touch) and a general virtue (ie, one possessing a quality that is common to virtue in general, as the moderation that is signified by temperance is common to virtue in general; ST 1a2ae 61.4). Within the specific virtue of temperance, Aquinas classifies twelve distinct virtues: shamefastness, the sense of honor (both integral parts of temperance), continence, gentleness, clemency, humility, studiousness, modesty in outward bodily movements, modesty in dress (seven potential parts of temperance), abstinence, sobriety, and chastity (three species or subjective parts of temperance; 2a2ae 143). These virtues together constitute the moral subject matter of the Legend of Temperance.
At the meeting of Artegall and Calidore, Spenser writes that They knew them selves’ (FQ VI i 4). The mutual recognition of his knights of Justice and Courtesy expresses the essential identity of the virtues they represent, for legal justice is virtue complete in relation to one's neighbor, and courtesy or honestas is virtue complete in itself (ST 2a2ae 58.5, 145.1).
In Book vii, Spenser proceeds to constancy, and thus to the summit of moral virtue, for constancy is included by Aquinas under the Ciceronian magnificence (ST 2a2ae 128 ad 6). By the virtue of constancy, Spenser understands that the perfection of virtue in performing great deeds lies in planning them and carrying them through with firmness of purpose to the end.
Milton said of Spenser that he was ‘a better teacher then Scotus or Aquinas’ (Sp All p 215). It is no idle comparison, for the poetic aptness of Milton's words is matched by their philosophical relevance.
Aquinas ed 1964–81; William T.Costello 1958 The Scholastic Curriculum at Early SeventeenthCentury Cambridge (Cambridge, Mass); F.Edward Cranz 1978 The Publishing History of the Aristotle Commentaries of Thomas Aquinas’ Traditio 34:157–92; Kristeller 1956; Kristeller 1974; Moloney 1953; Gerald Morgan 1981 ‘Spenser's Conception of Courtesy and the Design of the Faerie Queene’ RES ns 32:17–36; Morgan 1986a The Idea of Temperance in the Second Book of The Faerie Queene’ RES ns 37:11–39; Morgan 1986b ‘Holiness as the First of Spenser's Aristotelian Moral Virtues’ MLR 81:817–37; Charles B.Schmitt 1975 ‘Philosophy and Science in Sixteenth-Century Universities: Some Preliminary Comments’ in The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning ed John Emery Murdoch and Edith Dudley Sylla (Dordrecht, Holland) pp 485–537; Schmitt 1983a; Schmitt 1983b.
(Gr ‘spider’) In Muiopotmos, Spenser rewrites Ovid's story of the tapestry-weaving contest between Arachne and Minerva (Metamorphoses 6.5–145) to explain the hereditary hatred that the spider Aragnoll has for the butterfly Clarion. In Ovid's version, the tapestry of Minerva (Pallas Athena) is a vision of the order, dignity, and justice of the gods. It shows her victory over Neptune in a contest to determine the name of Athens; the contest is judged by a council of gods headed by Jove, and the olive tree that signals Pallas’ victory is a symbol of peace and harmony. In the corners of the tapestry she weaves four stories that exemplify divine justice, as warnings to those who, like Arachne, challenge the authority of the gods and are transformed as punishment. Arachne's tapestry, by contrast, presumes to challenge the authority of Pallas and to indict the gods for sexual riot and injustice. In her tapestry Jove, Neptune, Phoebus, and Saturn undergo a series of metamorphoses to deceive, seduce, or rape various mortals. As an artist who refuses to acknowledge her debt to the goddess Pallas, Arachne asserts a human perspective; and the spider into which she is transformed becomes an ironic symbol of the autonomous imagination spinning its works out of itself.
Spenser's Arachne is a ‘presumptuous Damzel’ who ‘rashly dar'd’ to defy Pallas (269–70). This characterization is like Ovid's and is typical of allegorizations of the story since the fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé. Arachne is one of the defeated proud whose likeness Dante sees in the pavement of Purgatory 12.43–5. Reversing Ovid's order, Spenser begins his story with a description of Arachne's tapestry. He follows Ovid closely in picturing Europa's abduction by Jove in the form of a bull (the only one of Arachne's stories he keeps), but adds details from Ovid's earlier, fuller account of Europa (Met 2.873–5). Although he closely translates Ovid in portraying Pallas’ story of her contest with Neptune, he omits the warning stories she weaves into the corners of her tapestry. Instead, he has Pallas weave among the olive leaves a picture of a butterfly of such delicacy and verisimilitude that Arachne immediately knows she has lost the contest. This butterfly in effect replaces Pallas’ stories of divine justice in Ovid's poem, but it reminds us ironically of Venus’ unjust transformation of the innocent Astery into a butterfly earlier in Spenser's poem (Brinkley 1981); it also anticipates the final element in Spenser's tapestry, the view of Clarion trapped in Aragnoll's web, ‘His bodie left the spectacle of care.’ Perhaps not by coincidence, Astery is also the name of one of Jove's victims in Arachne's tapestry (Met 6.108).
Ovid's contest has no clear winner. Pallas, angry at Arachne's success in portraying the gods’ misdeeds, rips Arachne's tapestry, strikes her head with a shuttle, and then in pity transforms her into a spider as she tries to hang herself. In Spenser's poem Arachne's own envy poisons her and induces her metamorphosis: ‘Yet did she inly fret, and felly burne,/And all her blood to poysonous rancor turne’ (343–4). Ovid describes Arachne's metamorphosis objectively; Spenser stresses the repulsive and venomous qualities of the spider: ‘And her faire face to fowle and loathsome hewe,/And her fine corpes to a bag of venim grewe’ (351–2).
Spenser translates Ovid's comment that neither Pallas nor Envy could find a flaw in Arachne's tapestry (6.129–30), but he adds a significant detail about Envy's venom: ‘Such as Dame Pallas, such as Envie pale,/ That al good things with venemous tooth devowres,/Could not accuse’ (301–3). Although it is somewhat illogical to say that Pallas could not fault Arachne's work, this characterization of Envy anticipates the description of Arachne at the moment she is metamorphosed and echoes the account of her offspring Aragnoll, whose ‘bowels so with ranckling poyson swelde,/That scarce the skin the strong contagion helde’ (255–6). The poisonous envy of Arachne and Aragnoll relates them to the personification of Envy in the house of Pride, who chews ‘Betweene his cankred teeth a venemous tode,/ That all the poison ran about his chaw’ (FQ I iv 30), and to the ‘Venemous despite’ of the Blatant Beast (VI xii 41). Envy and the Beast are both backbiters of poets; by extension, so are Arachne and Aragnoll.
Envy plays a pivotal role in Muiopotmos (Bond 1976). Ladies of the court envy Clarion's beautiful wings (105–6), which are themselves the result of the nymphs’ envy of Astery for her skill in gathering flowers (124). The nymphs slander her by telling Venus that Cupid has secretly aided her; Venus, anxiously remembering Cupid's secret love of Psyche, transforms Astery into a butterfly whose wings have the colors of all the flowers she once gathered. The narrator comments ironically that ‘none gainsaid, nor none did...envie’ Clarion's feeding on the pleasures of the fields (152). In fact, Clarion is caught in an overdetermined web of ironies, cosmic and otherwise (Anderson 1971a). He is unaware that his ‘cruell fate is woven even now/Of Joves owne hand’ (235–6), and that Aragnoll's web of envy and hatred is already waiting for him in the garden. Spenser explicitly associates fate with the spider's web in The Faerie Queene when Agape visits the house of the Fates and is dismayed to see her sons’ ‘thrids so thin, as spiders frame’ (IV ii 50). Later, the personified Detraction, companion of Envy, ‘faynes to weave false tales and leasings bad’ (v xii 36).
Muiopotmos has been interpreted as ‘an allegory of the wandering of the rational soul into error,’ with Aragnoll as the satanic figure traditionally associated with the spider (D.C.Allen 1968:31). In such a reading the web is an image of the fallen human condition, thematically similar to the ‘wandring wood’ at the threshold of The Faerie Queene (I i 13). The web-net is a recurrent image in Book II, explicitly associated with Arachne in the house of Mammon and the Bower of Bliss. Early in the book Archimago plots against Guyon: ‘Eftsoones untwisting his deceiptfull clew,/He gan to weave a web of wicked guile’ (i 8). Archimago's ‘clew’ is perhaps ‘an allusion to the ball of thread which led Theseus out of the labyrinth. Instead of a guide through a maze, Archimago's untwisted clew forms a web to enclose the knight’ (Hamilton in FQ ed 1977:172). As a version of that labyrinth which is a central archetype in The Faerie Queene (Fletcher 1971:24–34), Arachne's web seems to have for Spenser the same ambivalence as the labyrinth: threatening and entrapping, but also artistic and beautiful.
Both allusions to Arachne in FQ II have ominous connotations, but they differ in tone. The web that hangs from the arches in Mammon's ‘house of Richesse’ is obviously sinister: ‘Arachne high did lift/Her cunning web, and spred her subtile net,/Enwrapped in fowle smoke and clouds more blacke then Jet’ (vii 28). The web suggests a satanic trap ready to ensnare anyone who reaches for the house's gold; it is like the fiend who follows Guyon with claws held ready to kill him if he transgresses the Stygian laws (27). The smoky, dirty web may imply that the gold is never used, and it reminds us of the earlier description of Mammon himself, dressed in ‘coate all overgrowne with rust’ and ‘darkned with filthy dust’ (4). Personifying the spider as Arachne evokes the contest with Pallas and reminds us of her traditional association with pride and envy. Arachne is an appropriate emblem for the tempter Mammon.
The association of Acrasia's veil with Arachne's web is equally sinister in implication, but it also creates a sense of extraordinary beauty: ‘More subtile web Arachne cannot spin,/Nor the fine nets, which oft we woven see/Of scorched deaw, do not in th'aire more lightly flee’ (II xii 77). The veil in which she is ‘arayd, or rather disarayd,’ both conceals and reveals. A similar ambiguity appears in the texture of the tapestry in the house of Busirane, where the gold interwoven with the silk both hides and shows itself (III xi 28). The gold-snake simile at the end of the stanza is as sinister as the allusions to Arachne, but the dominant impression created by Spenser's treatment of the tapestry is his admiration of its art. He never forgets that Arachne was a superb artist, and it may have pleased his etymological fancy to note the derivation of both text and textile from the Latin texere (Bond 1976:149). Perhaps he saw Arachne's web as an image of his own poem.
Yet the veil-web comparison in the Bower, beautiful as it is, implies that Acrasia is ‘the spider in the web’ (Hamilton in FQ ed 1977:296). The labyrinth is often symbolized by a web with a spider at its center, and the spider is one of the images of the ‘Terrible Mother’ archetype (Neumann 1963:177, 233). This negative version of the Great Mother figure is often represented as a witch or enchantress with the power to fetter, emasculate, or transform men. Homer's Circe, for example, one of Spenser's models for Acrasia, first appears singing and moving to and fro before a great web (Odyssey 10).
The Palmer counters Acrasia's Arachnean web with his own ‘subtile net’ (II xii 81), analogous to the net with which Vulcan trapped Venus and Mars, and which Ovid says surpasses the art of the spider's web (Met 4.178–9). Spenser reverses Ovid's comparison when he says in Muiopotmos that not even Vulcan's net can match Aragnoll's ‘curious networke’ (361–74).
Erich Neumann 1963 The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype 2nd ed (New York).
Virgil mentioned the Greek province of Arcadia in only two of his Eclogues (7.4, 26; 10.26, 31–3), but it became identified almost immediately as the generic site of pastoral poetry (Snell ed 1953:281–309). Combining the historical Arcadia with the ideal landscape of Greek pastoral poetry (as in Theocritus’ Idylls), Virgil created an extremely malleable fiction capable of reflecting both the negative results of contemporary political policies (Eclogues 1 and 9) and the messianic prophecy of an imperial golden age (Eclogue 4). Moreover, he extended Arcadia's political implications to other literary forms. In his Georgics, he suggests that social ideals can be achieved only through systematic effort analogous to farming; in the Aeneid (8.313–27), the Arcadian king Evander lays the symbolic foundation of the Augustan empire by establishing the citadel of Rome, and provides a model for Aeneas in the story of Saturn's Golden Age.
In the Neo-Latin eclogues and vernacular pastoral of the Middle Ages, allusion to Eden and the parable of the good shepherd reinforced Virgil's practice, turning social commentary in the direction of dream vision or satire. By the sixteenth century, pastoral's ‘representative anecdote’ (Alpers 1982)—the shepherd piping while his sheep graze— was a utopian image as well as a literary stance, generically defined by pastoral poetry but not limited to it in application (Frye 1970:109–34, Levin 1969). In Elizabethan England, it accommodated the contemporary political situation of a peaceful empire, agrarian economy, and female ruler while reinforcing Protestant rhetoric (Montrose 1983). Thus the relatively ‘feminine’ language of pastoral tended to displace the traditionally martial political idiom (Yates 1975). Pastoral infiltrated the Petrarchan lyric, epic, romance, and drama; and the political significance of the fiction of Arcadia was evident in public pageants and royal entertainments (eg, Sidney's Lady of May), which transformed the gardens of the nobility's great houses into models of the state.
Sidney's New Arcadia integrated myth, literary convention, and pageantry to define the pastoral community's potential for political anatomy; Spenser's more fragmentary use of the Arcadian fiction parallels Sidney's. The Shepheardes Calender and later Colin Clouts Come Home Againe recall different versions of the pastoral world to satirize church and state, to dramatize an ideal relationship between ruler and country, to reflect Colin Clout's psychological condition, and to comment on the ethical and social functions of poetry. In Colin Clout and The Faerie Queene, Spenser adopts the naive persona of shepherd-poet to create an illusion of external and objective observation of the epic world; the result is typically Arcadian, an ambivalent mixing of encomium and criticism (Cain 1978). There is only one explicit recreation of a shepherd society in The Faerie Queene, but some version of Arcadia also forms the thematic, symbolic, or narrative focus of each book of the epic: Eden (I xi–xii), the Bower of Bliss (II xii), the Garden of Adonis (III vi), the garden of true friendship at the Temple of Venus (IV x 21– 8), the Golden Age (v proem 1–9), Meliboe's community of shepherds and Colin Clout's retreat at Acidale (VI ix–xi), and finally Arlo Hill (VII vii) with its pageantry of cosmic politics. These provide paradigms for the operation of the larger fiction, in which Fairyland represents—simultaneously or in sequence—contemporary or histori-cal England, romance world, or allegorical landscape (Iser 1980). They define emblematically the goal of each separate heroic quest, and more important, they define ‘by ensample’ the utopian ‘governement such as might best be’ which is a stated goal of the poem (Letter to Raleigh). (See also *Faerie Queene, geography of.)
Paul J.Alpers 1982 ‘What is Pastoral?’ CritI 8:437–60; Curtius ed 1953:183–202 ‘The Ideal Landscape’; Wolfgang Iser 1980 ‘Spenser's Arcadia: The Interrelation of Fiction and History’ Center for Hermeneutical Studies, Protocol 38 (Berkeley); Montrose 1983; Panofsky 1955:295–320 ‘Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition’; Shore 1985; Bruno Snell 1953 ‘Arcadia: The Discovery of a Spiritual Landscape’ in Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought tr T.G.Rosenmeyer (New York) pp 281–309.
Most speakers of the language even today have on call a number of words known to be ‘old’ and felt to have a special dignity—words such as forsake ‘desert’ or tide ‘time’ which have somehow escaped the taint of modern life and are set apart for the more solemn occasions and for the expression of elevated thoughts. The literary device of archaism draws its strength from this common feeling about language, though the forms it takes and the purposes it has been made to serve vary from writer to writer. Of all English poets, Spenser is the best known for his archaizing, and words such as eath and forworn are still to be found in dictionaries of modern English with the label ‘Spenserian.’ They are kept in the dictionaries because Spenser is generally (and rightly) thought to have given us much of what we recognize as the traditional diction of older English poetry. One of the pleasures of reading his works is to see how and why he weaves in the old with the new, though we need always to remember that many words which seem archaic now were not so then: emprise, guerdon, wain—these and many others like them may have seemed quite ordinary to the sixteenth-century reader.
The deliberate use of ‘old’ words is not uniform throughout Spenser's poetry. They are, for instance, common enough in The Faerie Queene and are especially conspicuous in parts of The Shepheardes Calender; but they contribute less to the distinctive style of certain other poems such as the Amoretti, where Spenser hardly goes further than did some of his contemporaries in drawing on the verbal effects of earlier poets. In the rural dialogues of The Shepheardes Calender, the obsolete language has the dramatic function of suggesting a rough, unhewn simplicity in the characters even though their speech is not devoid of learned terms. E.K. observes that ‘olde and obsolete wordes are most used of country folke’ (SC Epistle), and it is hard now to distinguish archaism and dialect on philological grounds (though some scholarly attempts have been made at doing so). In their literary effect the two things conveniently combine in the context of the pastoral poem: then, as now, the countryman's ways of speech were felt to be both pure and ‘old.’
In The Faerie Queene, the effect of the old language is quite different: it serves not to suggest rugged honesty and earthiness but rather to evoke an ideal world of the past which is the setting of the poem. E.K. again provides evidence when he says that old and obsolete words also ‘bring great grace and ...auctoritie to the verse’ (SC Epistle). The more technical terms of chivalry belong here since inevitably these had become antiquated with the waning of courtly customs, and words such as gage, joust, and ventail are old in a quite different sense from that in which rural dialect is old. But Spenser also draws on the language of English medieval writings (especially the romances) for many words of more general meaning which had already been replaced or were at least going out of fashion in his day. Some of the commonest are dight ‘adorn,’ eftsoons ‘at once,’ eke ‘also,’ hight ‘is called,’ list ‘desire,’ mote ‘must,’ stour ‘conflict,’ weet ‘know,’ welkin ‘sky,’ whylome ‘formerly.’ Such words later came to be associated with the elevated themes of romance and poetry. They have served the imagination of generations of readers by giving an instant verbal access to an idealized past.
The question of how accurately Spenser has followed his medieval exemplars is of more than philological interest. Some later archaizing poets (Chatterton is the bestknown example) indulge in pseudo-archaic forms, even creating spurious ‘old words.’ At times Spenser misinterpreted the language of older writers: he uses yede as an infinitive (‘to go,’ eg FQ II iv 2) when it was really a past tense; dernely, which he uses in the sense ‘dismally’ (at II i 35), properly meant ‘secretly’ in Middle English (cf III xii 34). Yet such genuine errors must seem few when we recall that there were as yet no scholarly texts of early English writers, and that reliable dictionaries or other etymological aids to them were nonexistent.
Spenser's archaism is not merely a matter of opting for an outdated vocabulary: spelling, inflection, and grammar play their part too. English orthography was in an unsettled state in the sixteenth century; and in the texts that we have, it is hard to know how much of the spelling represents his preferences, and how much is merely the printer's habit. But the variable state of English spelling meant that a writer could, if he wished, give a whole range of words an antique look: an example is the occurrence of Germanic-type spellings in the Spenser text even for words patently of French origin (despight, quight, etc).
In its inflections, too, the language was in a state of flux. Spenser can, for instance, equally well write ‘he thinks’ or ‘he thinketh’; and though we can now say which one of these was to survive as the modern form, it is uncertain whether thinketh was felt to be archaic or specially poetic in his time. With other inflections there can be no doubt. The normal infinitive and presenttense plural form of the verb to know was then know or knowe (with the final -e not pronounced). In using the form knowen, Spenser restores a typical Chaucerian ending, and at the same time helps himself to an extra syllable to make his verse scan. This typical Middle English -n inflection is often attached (quite unhistorically) to foreign loanwords, as in atchieven, displeasen. The best known of all his archaizing devices, the past participle prefix y- (going back to an Old English ge-), is also found with foreign as well as native stems: yclad, yglanced, ymet, ytold. Outdated inflectional forms serve to help him in his rhyme scheme; for example, he uses the old uninflected plural form brother to rhyme with another, and the form skyen ‘skies’ to rhyme with shyne. Metrical reasons may often be found for other obsolescent forms in his text: muchel ‘much,’ n'ould ‘would not,’ sith and sithens ‘since,’ withouten, and so on.
Lines such as ‘Fast did they fly, as them their feete could beare’ (v viii 39) show patterns of inversion which we should now associate with an older poetic style; but they may well have seemed to be within current verse conventions to Spenser's contemporaries, and not markedly old-fashioned. There are other grammatical patterns which certainly would have looked archaic, such as ne...ne ‘neither...nor,’ and the use of gan with the infinitive (gan look ‘began to look,’ or simply ‘looked’). In some phrases, such as ‘one the truest knight alive’ (I iii 37), there may even be a conscious embedding of Chaucerian syntax.
In following his models Lydgate and Chaucer (repeatedly identified by E.K. as a source of old words), Spenser was felt by Sidney to have gone too far in his experiments (ed 1973b:112); and the famous rebuke by Jonson, that ‘Spencer, in affecting the Ancients, writ no Language’ (ed 1925–52, 8:618), expressed a distaste for Spenserian devices felt by some writers in the earlier part of the seventeenth century who (outside the pastoral at least) had come to prefer a poetic style closer to the common usage of their own day.
But Spenser's archaism is no doubt in part a deliberate tactic. The glosses to The Shepheardes Calender serve to advertise as well as explain the old words in it. Spenser was living at a high season of experiment in the vernacular when the English language was generally admitted to stand in need of enrichment. One way of achieving this was to draw on its past, and there was a role for the poet in thus making the language anew. Similar experiments were taking place in France (with the poets of the Pléiade) and in Italy, and justification for retaining obsolescent words was to be found in the theory of du Bellay as well as in the practice of Virgil. Yet any such conscious experimenting with language on Spenser's part comes second to an instinctive imitation of admired masters—the very popularity of Chaucer had kept near-obsolete words alive in poetry. Spenser did not distort the language by favoring the forms of the past, but his archaism served to perpetuate an already traditional vocabulary.
Poets of later generations were to make grateful use of what was old in Spenser's language. Milton uses characteristically Spenserian items such as areede ‘counsel,’ beldame, maugre, unweeting, and yclept, especially in his early poetry, though he passes by the more extreme forms of dialectal archaism, and the older morphological and syntactical oddities which Spenser had pressed into service. The 1679 folio edition of Spenser's works appends ‘A Glossary, or An Alphabetical Index of Unusual Words Explained.’ From the selection of words felt to be in need of explanation in eighteenthcentury editions of Spenser's poetry (baleful, bevy, doughty, seare, etc), we can know that, for the common reader at least, the comprehensibility of his language was by then on the wane. For instance, the introduction to The Second Part of Mr. Waller's Poems (London 1705) contrasts the language of Spenser and Edmund Waller (who wrote some 60 years after) by saying that Waller's ‘Language, like the Money of that time, is as Currant now as ever; whilst the other's words are like old Coyns, one must go to an Antiquary to understand their true meaning and value’ (Atkinson 1937:189). But this increasing unfamiliarity with Spenser's language provides in turn the necessary background to the deliberate and widespread revival of Spenserian (and pseudo-Spenserian) words and spellings by Keats, Coleridge, Byron, and other writers of the Romantic period.
John W.Draper 1919 ‘The Glosses to Spenser's “Shepheardes Calender”’ JEGP 18:556–74; Gans 1979; Bernard Groom 1955 The Diction of Poetry from Spenser to Bridges (Toronto); Ingham 1970–1; R.F.Jones 1953; Johan Kerling 1979 Chaucer in Early English Dictionaries (Leiden); McElderry 1932; Partridge 1971; Pope 1926; Renwick 1922; Rubel 1941; Spenser SC ed 1895; Wrenn 1943; S.P.Zitner 1966 ‘Spenser's Diction and Classical Precedent’ PQ 45:360–71. See also lists in Atkinson 1937:203– 6 and Carpenter 1923:295–8.
This evil magician of FQ I and (briefly) II first appears after, and symbolically out of, the defeat of Error. Initially he is an emblem of hypocrisy, with his book, rosary beads, and the appearance of piety implied in his knocking of ‘his brest’ in imitation of the penitent publican of Luke 18.13 (I i argument, 29; Ripa 1603:200 Hippocresia ‘Hypocrisy’). Part of his larger significance is explained by his name, revealed at 43: he is the arch image-maker, the fabricator of dreams, also the arch-magus or primal magician. Since Renaissance magi operated largely through their own and their subjects’ imaginations, however, these two roles in fact merge: he is the magician who induces images of delusion within the imaginations of all fallen human beings, reminding us of the idolatry of the natural imagination (Nohrnberg 1976:126–7, 130; D.P.Walker 1958). Thus, as a supposed hermit, he ‘lives in hidden cell’ (30), where cell suggests the cellula phantastica, the front ventricle or compartment of the brain which was understood to house the imagination or fantasy (II ix 50–2).
The quality of Archimago's magic emerges at I i 36, where he seeks from ‘His Magick bookes...mighty charmes, to trouble sleepy mindes,’ curses heaven, and invokes terrible Daemogorgon (see Var 1:190–2). In consequence of his ‘spelles,’ ‘Legions of Sprights ...like little flyes’ emerge from the nether world. The word Legion is chosen advisedly, to allude to the man possessed with demons, whose ‘name is Legion’ (Mark 5.2–13; in 1629, Francis Quarles refers to ‘accursed Archimagoes booke/(That cursed Legion)’ Sp All p 179). While the simile of the flies, which harks back to Error's brood who are compared to gnats at i 23, reminds us that flies were emblems of the deceptive power of the imagination (II ix 51), it also identifies Archimago in passing with ‘Beelzebub the prince of devils’ (Matt 12.24) and lord or ‘master of flies’ (‘A Brief Table of the Interpretation of the Propre Names’ appended to 1560 Geneva Bible). Significantly, Archimago selects ‘the falsest twoo’ spirits to aid him in his intention to ‘abuse [Redcrosse's] fantasy’ (I i 38, 46), for the evil dyad denies Una's integrity and makes Archimago the begetter of Duessa-Fidessa, who appears in the narrative at ii 13 as an indirect consequence of Redcrosse's dreams. Archimago's books of black magic with their spells are symbolically linked with Error's ‘vomit full of bookes’ (i 20) as the opposite of Fidelia's Bible ‘Wherein darke things were writ, hard to be understood’ (x 13). With her ‘larger spright,’ Fidelia can move mountains (20). Spenser here touches on the difference between magic and miracle and between black magic and white magic, which was fundamental to Reformation theological polemic and led inevitably to the association of Roman Catholicism with black magic. More particularly, the fact that popes were identified as necromancers suggests that Archimago is a necromantic papal Antichrist. Pathomachia (1630; STC 19462; Sp All p 180) contains a passing reference to ‘Archimago the Jesuite.’ Hence his appearance as a fatherly ‘aged Sire, in long blacke weedes yclad’ (i 29) parodically anticipates that of the faithful and virtuous Palmer of II i 7, in part a white magician.
As an heretical Catholic enchanter with hints of the papal necromancer about him, Archimago is descended from the Simon Magus of Acts 8 and the miracle-working false prophet who opposes Christ, the knight ‘Faithful and true’ of Revelation 19.11–20. But as the arch image-maker, the grand hypocrite rejoicing in his deceptions, he is the offspring of Satan, who ‘in several shapes...goeth about to seduce us...and is so cunning that he is able, if it were possible, to deceive the very elect’ (Burton Anatomy of Melancholy 3.4.1.2; see Mark 13.22). It is fitting that the arch dissembler should present such a plurality of personae and possess so many literary antecedents. To the sources already named should be added the magician hermit of Ariosto's Orlando furioso 2.12–15 and the enchanter Ismeno from Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata. To the list of his personae should be added that of Una, one of whose colors, black, he appropriates as he also appropriates her sadness (I i 29; cf 4); and also that of Contemplation. It is aged Contemplation, who also lives in a hermitage (x 46; cf i 34), who finally displaces Archimago's illusions and evil spirits with a vision of angels and the heavenly Jerusalem (x 55–7). Also, Archimago's hermitage is near a crystal stream ‘Which from a sacred fountaine welled forth alway’ (i 34); this stream is all too seductively proleptic of the enervating fountain and ‘streame, as cleare as cristall glas’ of vii 6 as well as being a parody of Fidelia's ‘Christall face’ (x 12) and the ‘river of water of life, cleare as crystal’ in the heavenly Jerusalem (Rev 22.1). In the poem's overall structure, Archimago's dwelling is answered by the hermitage of VI v 34–5.
Archimago's role as deceiver is elaborated further in I ii II where he adopts Redcrosse's attire for his own, ‘so pretending to a faith he has not’ (Nelson 1963:175) and recalling the papal ‘beast [from] out of the earth’ disguised as the Christological lamb (Rev 13.11 and Geneva gloss). At ii 10, he also becomes Proteus, simultaneously the emblem of man's almost infinite power over his mortality through celebrating his mutability (Pico, Orphic Conclusiones 28: ‘Whoever cannot attract Pan approaches nature and Proteus in vain’ ed 1572–3, 1:107) and the wily, sophistical sea god, magician of chaos. Archimago's Protean metamorphoses into bird, fish, fox, and dragon suggest his magical command over the four elements of air, water, earth, and fire. The fox and dragon are traditionally Satanic, too, though Ovid observes that Proteus can change himself into a serpent (anguis, Metamorphoses 8.734), as does Virgil (draco, Georgics 4.408). Guileful Malengin is similarly Protean at FQ v ix 17.
Archimago appears before Una disguised as Redcrosse at I iii. His allegorical identity as the principle of lawlessness is confirmed, however, when he succumbs in battle to lawless Sansloy (35–9). A simile identifies Archimago with ‘fierce Orions hound’ (31), the destructively scorching Dog Star, associated with Proteus by Virgil in Georgics 4.425–7. (Paradoxically, Orion itself is the constellation of winter storms: Aeneid 1.535, Geneva gloss to Job 38.31). Having established his world of delusive images—a world which has more than a passing similarity to that of the ‘daedale’ poet himself— Archimago officially disappears from the action of Book I, leaving his work to be done by the surrogates he has generated. When he reappears at I xii 24 as the messenger bearing Fidessa/Duessa's letter of accusation, his disguise is swiftly penetrated. At the beginning of Book I, he could successfully create an illusion of marriage (i 48). Now, at this moment of betrothal which has its source in the marriage of Revelation 21, we enter a period of apocalypse where evil itself is unmasked and comically and festively bound (xii 35–6; see also Rev 20.1–3).
Yet Archimago rebounds in Book II, for evil will finally be defeated only at the end of time, and Spenser's land of faerie is rec-ognizably our fallen world in which That cunning Architect of cancred guile... work[s] mischiefe’ (i 1–2), by deceiving temperate Guyon with an apparently violated Duessa and inducing him to fight Redcrosse. Specifically, Archimago releases wrath in Guyon just as he had induced rage in Redcrosse (I ii 5; II i 13, 25), though temperance is victorious over Archimago's mischief and the Palmer, who has been displaced temporarily by the enchanter, returns (II i 31).
Archimago's other appearances in Book II are less significant. Trompart and Braggadocchio deceive him with their boasts of prowess, and he flies away to obtain Arthur's sword for the braggart knight (iii 11–19; in 19, Archimago is compared to ‘The Northerne wind’ since the north is connected with evil: Isa 14.13, Jer 1.14). At vi 47–51, he again parodies the Palmer's gravitas and good counsel (cf Ripa 1603:85–6 Consiglio) as he stands by the Idle Lake of accidie (sloth) ‘in an auncient gowne’ with his ‘hoarie locks [crowned with] great gravitie’ and cures irascible Pyrochles’ burning by the application of ‘balmes and herbes’: ‘And him restor'd to health, that would have algates dyde.’ Thus he preserves the principle of wrath and discord and mimes the infernal Aesculapius’ attempt to cure Sansjoy at I v 36–44, though in fact Archimago saves Pyrochles only in order that he might be destroyed by Arthur (II viii 18–52). In this canto, Archimago actually confronts his benevolent double the Palmer and, bearing Arthur's sword, parodies the solar prince himself. His moment of glory is, however, as brief as it is illusory. After the deaths of Pyrochles and Cymochles and the consequent restoration of Guyon and Guyon's reunion with the Palmer, Archimago flees, fittingly accompanied by discordant Atin. We never meet him again, though he is mentioned at III iv 45; he is dispersed into the other evil characters, and especially evil or ambivalent magicians, part of the ‘eternal invisible powers’ operating throughout the poem (I.G.MacCaffrey 1976:32). This dispersal was recognized, for instance, in 1609 by Joseph Wybarne, who saw the Antichrist ‘figured’ in The Faerie Queene by ‘Archima-gus, Duessa, Argoglio the Soldane and others’ (Sp All p 120).
Brooks-Davies 1977; Brooks-Davies 1983; Giamatti 1968; Giamatti 1975; Hamilton 1961a; Kermode 1964–5; Nelson 1963; Nohrnberg 1976; D.P.Walker 1958; Waters 1970.
Spenser's treatment of buildings is never really pictorial; he never seems to have set out to imagine structures that are visually or even conceptually coherent or historically accurate. Hence when Scudamour and Glauce approach the house of Care, they see ‘a little cottage, like some poore mans nest’ (FQ IV v 32). Inside, however, they find a place big enough for seven giant smiths to labor at a giant forge. It would seem that Spenser first invented characters and actions, and then supplied building features to accommodate them. For his details, he calls on the tradition of architectural description that begins in Homer (especially Odyssey 7, describing the palace of Alkinoos), and runs through Virgil and Ovid and the romances of the Middle Ages to Boiardo, Ariosto, Marot, du Bellay, and Sidney. In this tradition, authors use architectural details—often directly imitating or alluding to earlier works—to convey social, moral, or psychological information about the characters who inhabit the buildings. Particular details in Spenser's poetry have been traced to medieval and Renaissance sources, and to the Bible (especially the Temple of Solomon, and the New Jerusalem of Rev 21), but the tradition encourages an eclectic approach, and none of his structures owes its essential character to any single source (Hard 1934).
Most of Spenser's architectural details are medieval, a fact that may express a conscious archaism (Girouard 1963), but also reflects the actual world in which he lived. For centuries the building practices passed on from master to apprentice changed little, so that the houses of ordinary people retained similar characteristics whether built in 1350 or 1550 (Mercer 1975). In any case, Spenser gives few details about such buildings as Corceca's ‘cotage small’ (FQ I iii 4) or Meliboe's ‘cottage clad with lome’ (VI ix 16); they have doors, roofs, and rooms—and that is all we know. Since virtually no churches were constructed in sixteenth-century England (Summerson 1953:99–100), the ecclesiastical architecture Spenser saw was overwhelmingly medieval. But he does not specify individual features of most of the churches and chapels in The Faerie Queene; when he does, they are usually too general to be stylistically significant. Isis Church, for instance, is ‘Borne uppon stately pillours’ and ‘arched over hed’ (v vii 5); whether the pillars are classical or Gothic, the arches round or pointed, he does not say. The chivalric character of the poem means that many of the buildings are castles, most fully represented by the house of Alma (II ix). For all the anthropomorphic symbolism which makes it an allegory of the human body, it has the main features of traditional fortified dwellings: wall, gate, porch, portcullis, barbican, hall with kitchen and storage areas (‘offices’ in the usage of the time) on one side and private apartments (‘solar’) on the other.
Change did occur in the houses of the gentry, extensively remodeled or built new in great numbers during the sixteenth century. Although Henry VII and Henry VIII commissioned important building projects, during the rest of the century royal patronage was scanty, and the important work was done for great courtiers and entrepreneurs. The transfer of patronage may be reflected in Mother Hubberds Tale: the upstart Fox ‘lifted up his loftie towres’ while ‘the Princes pallaces fell fast’ and the ‘auncient houses’ and ‘olde Castles’ of the traditional peerage decayed (1173–9).
The most ubiquitous development, an emphasis on façade and in particular on external symmetry, occurred as the shift from feudalism toward capitalism changed the manor house from a place for defense to a place for show, expressing economic and social rather than military power. Of this change there is no unequivocal sign in Spenser's work, unless perhaps in the account of the house of Pride, with ‘goodly galleries farre over laid,/Full of faire windowes’ (I iv 4). Abundant glass was a feature of most of the new Tudor houses, from Henry VII's Richmond onward; for this reason, suggestions that in Pride's palace or Panthea's ‘bright towre all built of christall cleene’ (I x 58) Spenser has some specific model in mind—Hampton Court, Burghley House, Wollaton—seem doubtful (Hard 1934:306, McClung 1977:103). Galleries, long well-lit rooms used for recreation and to display pictures and other possessions, were also included in many new houses and added to existing houses like Penshurst and Haddon. It may be significant that in The Faerie Queene these items of conspicuous consumption appear only in the homes of dangerous women such as Lucifera, Malecasta, Radigund. We cannot be sure because any particular architectural detail will take its moral tone from its context. Lucifera's ‘loftie towres’ (I iv 4) symbolize pride, as many other elements of the passage make clear. The ‘stately Turret’ of the house of Alma reaches equally high but expresses only a legitimate aspiration: it ‘likest is’ to the ‘heavenly towre’ God built for his own dwelling (II ix 47). Similarly, the most up-to-date kind of architectural décor in the poems—the Manneristic tapestries and wall-paintings like those which Tudor patrons bought or commissioned from continental artists—mostly ornament Spenser's morally dubious rooms. But the moral differences between the murals in the house of Alma (II ix 53) and the tapestries of Busirane (III xi 28–46) arise from subject matter, not style or medium.
Spenser's use of architecture is epitomized in the Temple of Venus (IV x). The ensemble (moat, bridge, fortified gate, gardens, and temple proper) derives from the Romance of the Rose and other medieval dream visions, and most of the terms (‘Corbes,’ ‘pillours,’ ‘roofe’) are stylistically neutral. The significant exception is the ‘Doricke guize’ of the bridge's pillars (stanza 6). This may refer to the English enthusiasm for the classical orders articulated in John Shute's First and Chief Groundes of Architecture (1563) and widely expressed in building of the time through the application of classical pillars and pilasters to otherwise non-classical structures. The temple itself is compared (x 30) with the Temple of Diana at Ephesus and with the Temple of Solomon (given a generally classical appearance in the illustrations of the Geneva and other sixteenth-century Bibles, but depicted as Gothic in many prints and paintings); its ‘hundred marble pillors’ (37) could come from Vitruvius, but also from medieval romance, the Hypnerotomachia poliphili, or Winchester Cathedral. Although the flavor is generally pagan, no particular style or even form can be envisaged because Spenser nowhere supplies the necessary visual pointers, does not tell us whether the pillars are columns or pilasters, fluted or smooth, skinny or fat, whether the building is round or square or rectangular. The effects are achieved more by the accumulation than by the logical interrelation of the details, and while those may be less exotic than some specified in Orlando furioso or Huon of Bordeaux, the whole does not finally give more ‘sense of the actual’ (Hard 1934:302) than do the medieval and classical authors on whose architectural descriptions Spenser modeled his own.
Alan T.Bradford 1981 ‘Drama and Architecture under Elizabeth I’ ELR 11:3–28; Buxton 1963; Dundas 1965; Mark Girouard 1963 ‘Elizabethan Architecture and the Gothic Tradition’ ArchitHist 6:23–39; Girouard ed 1983; Hard 1934; William A.McClung 1977 The Country House in English Renaissance Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles); Eric Mercer 1962; Mercer 1975 English Vernacular Houses (London); Summerson 1953.
The Court of ancient Athens, the name was adopted by what seems to have been an informal Elizabethan literary coterie centered around Philip Sidney. Its members included Grevilie, Dyer, Harvey, Daniel Rogers, Thomas Drant, Spenser, and perhaps others. Little is known about their meetings.
In a letter to Harvey of October 1579, written from Leicester House (Two Letters I in Var Prose p 6), Spenser announced that
the twoo worthy Gentlemen, Master Sidney, and Master Dyer, [who] have me ...in some use of familiarity...have proclaimed in their areiōi pagōi, a generall surceasing and silence of balde Rymers, and also of the verie beste to: in steade whereof, they have by authoritie of their whole Senate, prescribed certaine Lawes and rules of Quantities of English sillables, for English Verse: having had thereof already greate practise, and drawen mee to their faction.
Harvey replied enthusiastically on October 23, ‘Your new-founded areion pagon I honoure more, than you will or can suppose: and make greater accompte of the twoo worthy Gentlemenne, than of two hundreth Dionisii Areopagitae’ (2 Lett 2 in Var Prose p 442). Spenser had stressed the very strong recommendation he had given to Sidney and Dyer of Harvey's abilities, and Nashe later allowed Harvey membership in the Areopagus, though suggesting he was a latecomer: ‘that same Areopage...a forreyner newe come over’ (Nashe ed 1904–10, 3:43). On 14 January 1579, Daniel Rogers sent a poem to Sidney in which he describes Sidney's friends as ‘a happy band of like-minded fellows [iucunda caterva sodales], from whose close friendship a pious love is generated. Among them in holy virtue Dyer excels, steward of judgment and butler of talent; next comes Fulke, dear offspring of the House of Greville. With them, when leisure hours permit these pious studies, you discuss the ultimates of the law, of God and of the good’ (Latin text in van Dorsten 1962:179). Rogers seems to have been seeking admission to this clearly informal group and may well have been associated with it for a brief period.
This Areopagus was not an academy in the formal European sense, like the various French or Italian literary and scholarly academies, or even an informal though recognized group like the Pléiade (the group of French poets which included Ronsard and du Bellay). Although Sidney and Harvey knew of these institutions and their purposes, the Areopagus seems rather to have been an literary gathering of poets and patrons who met to share common ideas, probably including ideas for revitalizing English poetry. It existed, if at all, for only a short time. The group may have first come together around October 1579. Rogers, who by September 1580 was a captive in Germany, and who was in Ghent in January 1579 (van Dorsten 1962:68, 179), may have visited London in mid-1579; Greville was in Ireland by II May 1580 (Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts [1575–88] 2:254); Spenser left London for Ireland around 9 July 1580 (Judson 1945:72); and Harvey left London (in disgrace) to return to Cambridge in January 1581 (Harvey ed 1913:39–40). The members of the Areopagus, then, could have met regularly only for about nine months.
In describing the objectives of the group, Spenser implies that they had adopted Drant's rules for quantitative verse. Those rules are lost; but his scheme appears to have been based, at least in part, on principles borrowed from the rules of classical prosody, whereas Harvey advocated working out a system based upon actual English pronunciation. While these various schemes no doubt encouraged writers to look more closely at English prosody, none was successful. The Areopagus’ interest in classical meter, however, suggests a wider purpose. To judge from the writings of those apparently associated with the group, they were in favor of an enhanced status for the doctus poeta (the learned poet), they approved of the position of the poet as ‘senator’ or legislator of literary taste, and they were enthusiastic about all experiments to relate the modern poet to classical antiquity. Their interests were consonant with E.K.’s elaborate commentary on The Shepheardes Calender, which creates an image of Spenser as the new Virgil, worthy of full-scale philological and critical annotation.
For a history of the notion of the Areopagus—for which extravagant claims have been made in earlier scholarship—see Howard Maynadier 1908–9 The Areopagus of Sidney and Spenser’ MLR 4:289–301; and Var Prose pp 479–80. The fullest discussion is in the unpublished PhD diss of W.R.Gair ‘Literary Societies in England from Parker to Falkland (c 1572– 1640)’ (Cambridge Univ 1969).
Twin sister and brother giants, children of the incestuous relationship of Typhoeus and his mother, Earth; while still in the womb, the two ‘In fleshly lust were mingled both yfere,/And in that monstrous wise did to the world appere’ (FQ III vii 48). Typhoeus is identified by Thomas Cooper (1565) as ‘a great gyaunt, the sonne of Titan...so a great puissant wynde: a whirlwynde,’ which suggests the union of Aeolus and Earth that produced Orgoglio, another figure associated with lust (I vii 9).
Argante is the first to appear in the poem: at III vii 37, she is seen carrying the Squire of Dames, ‘Whom she did meane to make the thrall of her desire.’ When Satyrane attempts to rescue him, he is himself overcome and borne off by her. Later both are rescued by a knight who has been pursuing her and who is identified as the martial maid Palladine. At xi 3–6, Ollyphant is seen pursuing an unidentified young man with similar intent of ‘beastly use.’ Again, it is not Satyrane whom the giant fears, but the chaste Britomart, ‘For he the powre of chast hands might not beare,/But alwayes did their dread encounter fly.’ In pursuit of him, Britomart comes to a fountain where she finds the despairing Scudamour (xi 7).
Argante is an alternate name for the lustful Morgana of romance; it may derive from Greek argos ‘shining’ or ‘swift,’ with a suffix underscoring her gigantism; hence the references to her ‘firie eyes,’ ‘sun-broad shield,’ and ‘lustfull fyre’ (vii 39, 40, 49). Ollyphant appears as ‘a greet geaunt’ in Chaucer's tale of Sir Thopas. The 1590 Faerie Queene identifies him as one ‘that wrought/Great wreake to many errant knights of yore,/Till him Chylde Thopas to confusion brought’ (vii 48); in 1596 the reference to Thopas is dropped. The name, which means ‘elephant’ and was applied specifically to an elephant's tusk (Roland's horn was named Olifant), seems evocative of phallic grossness: Lust in IV vii has comparably elephantine features.
The two giants, representative of monstrous sexual practices, are consistent with Spenser's general depiction of giants as rebels against established order (Lotspeich 1932:63). Virtuous female knights, directing their sexual energies properly, prove the most effective deterrent against them; knights who love frivolously, like the Squire of Dames, or who possess merely natural heroism, like Satyrane, are no match for them.
Daughter of Minos, King of Crete, Ariadne helped Theseus escape the labyrinth after he had killed the Minotaur, then sailed with him to Naxos where he deserted her. She was found by Bacchus, who married her, giving her the crown of Thetis which he later made into her constellation, the Corona Borealis (Randall 1896).
In Ovid, Theseus’ desertion of Ariadne shows the indifference of heroes to the victims incidental to their careers (Met 8.172–82). The abandoned Una in FQ I iii has been seen as an abandoned Ariadne: compare her lament that the lion is less cruel to her than her knight, and the ass ‘More mild in beastly kind, then that her beastly foe,’ Sansloy (4, 44), and Chaucer's Ariadne: ‘Meker than ye fynde I the bestes wilde!’ (Legend of Good Women 2198; Nohrnberg 1976:271–2). Spenser directly mentions Ari-adne only once, when her crown becomes a simile for a ‘precious gemme,’ Colin Clout's love, encircled by the garland of dancers on Mount Acidale (FQ VI x 13); like this vision, Ariadne's crown presents an ideal of order.
Spenser conflates the myth of Ariadne with the battle at the marriage of Hippodamia and Pirithous between the Centaurs and Lapiths, in which Theseus participated. In Spenser, the battle occurs at the wedding of Ariadne and Theseus—which he seems to have invented—and Ariadne's crown, perhaps now a gift from Theseus, becomes a token of their union.
Spenser's revision makes Theseus a true lover and the heroism which disrupts the wedding an instance of those ‘fierce warres’ which accompany ‘faithfull loves’ in the poem. An ideal, the marriage of Theseus and Ariadne occurs only in the elusive context of Colin's art as Calidore observes it. When Calidore steps forward to examine Colin's ideal more closely, the vision vanishes; presumably the fiction of a wedding between Ariadne and Theseus must vanish as well, leaving heroic strife in its place. Like Ariadne's crown, their union remains the kind of happy ending which can never be fully sustained in a narrative where the contingencies of heroic strife provide the vehicle for allegory.
(1474–1553) In the long history of Italian chivalric literature, which developed among the populace and was finally converted in the Renaissance to courtly uses, Ariosto's Orlando furioso was the second poem by a Ferrarese aristocrat to glorify the Este lords. Based directly on Orlando innamorato, by the Count of Scandiano, Matteo Maria Boiardo, a work truncated in its sixty-ninth canto by its author's death in 1494, the Furioso was begun around 1505 and reached its final form as a poem of 46 cantos in 1532. In adopting but transforming Boiardo's characters and providing complexly interwoven conclusions to his aborted actions, Ariosto brought to a climax a centuries-old fascination with Carolingian and Arthurian narrative. Boiardo had cast the chaste Orlando—the stalwart Roland of the chanson de geste—in the role of inf atuated lover of the enchantress Angelica, strikingly uniting two of the great repositories of narrative in the Middle Ages: the martial Matter of France, associated with Charlemagne's wars, and the romantic Matter of Brittany, associated with Arthurian knighterrantry and enchantments. In plunging the hero into madness resulting from sensual love, Ariosto capped his predecessor's innovation by linking the medieval hero with the Hercules furens of classical literature. By repeatedly evoking this third great repository of narrative, the so-called Matter of Rome, and particularly by the seriousness with which he absorbed and domesticated Virgil's Aeneid, Ariosto redirected the course of chivalric poetry, effecting a wedding of classical epic and medieval romance. Orlando furioso provided Spenser with his most proximate model for The Faerie Queene; the continual presence in his imagination of the older poem is readily discernible to any reader who knows both.
The Furioso occupies a position of pivotal importance in the transmission and development of epic, particularly Virgilian epic, from the classical period to the Renaissance. Nevertheless, since Boiardo's poem remains relatively unknown to English readers, and since it provides the very foundations upon which Ariosto built his own poetic edifice, a brief look at the Innamorato becomes essential. Apart from the novelty of Orlando as lover, Boiardo effects a second important innovation in chivalric romance: he provides a contrast to the undignified portrait of Orlando by inventing another more acceptable hero, the young warrior Ruggiero, son of a Christian mother and infidel father. Though the youth is brought to France as an Achilles-like talisman during the invasion of Charlemagne's realms by Agramante of Africa, he is fated to be converted to Christianity and to marry Bradamante, who is the sister of Rinaldo, Orlando's cousin and rival in love. Here the strain of dynastic praise in Virgilian epic is suddenly renewed in chivalric form, for the fated pair, providentially chosen to initiate a splendid new civilization in northern Italy, will found the Este family. As mythical archetypes of the members of that ducal house, Ruggiero and Bradamante function as romantic equivalents of Aeneas and the much more shadowy Lavinia. Before the Innamorato breaks off, the pair have met by chance on a battlefield, fallen in love and plighted their troth, been abruptly separated, and come to the verge of a series of chivalric adventures in a world of magic and marvels.
Boiardo is ultimately responsible for the assimilation, within a fundamentally comicromantic-chivalric poem, of an Aeneid-like strain of dynastic praise that runs through Renaissance epic thereafter. He is also the immediate source of other elements characteristic of the Furioso, chiefly the multiplicity of its narratives and the vast array of characters. From Boiardo, Ariosto inherits not only the straggling, extensively elaborated tale of the rivalry of Orlando, Rinaldo, Sacripante, and Ferraù for the love of the perpetually elusive Angelica, and the equally long and populous tale of the pagan invasion by Agramante and Rodomonte, but also the barely initiated story of the two dynastic lovers, to which he immediately gives an independent development and a central prominence. As mythical archetypes of the Estensi, Bradamante and Ruggiero are fundamentally Ariostan creations, and they function as literary ancestors of Spenser's Britomart and Artegall, who are types of the Tudors.
Ordered multiplicity is the keynote of the Furioso's beginning. In his opening stanzas, Ariosto at once synchronizes and redevelops the three main narratives that the less artful Boiardo had introduced randomly and in succession. He also gives them an epic resonance deriving from Homer and Virgil, marking a clear break from the medieval tradition in which Boiardo worked. Addressing his patron, Cardinal Ippolito d'Es-te, Ariosto announces his own manipulation of the triple subject: Agramante's wrath (ire) and his pursuit, amid wars and loves (l'arme, gli amori), of his war on the Emperor; the madness of Orlando, resulting from sensual fury; and the heroic acts (gesti) of Ruggiero, destined to be Ippolito's ancestor. The implication of the initial four stanzas is that the defeat and expulsion of the infidel and the conversion and marriage of Ruggiero are concomitant and ultimately successful labors.
Ariosto's perspective is without precedent in chivalric romance, and is indeed more proper to epic. He works at once in two distinct times, the chivalric era of Charlemagne and his own newly imperial age of the sixteenth century; his artistic purview captures in a single glance the prophetic past and the accomplished fruits of his own contemporary civilization, which he often praises by direct address, deliberately interrupting his romance narrative. The historical intrusions are part of a conscious artistic procedure, introducing a specifically Virgilian element almost entirely absent from Boiardo and characteristic, within this romance tradition, only of Ariosto.
The complexity of his handling of the interwoven narratives is reinforced by the complexity of his historical vision, in which the Carolingian myth is buttressed by contemporary reality. Past and present interact continually in the Furioso: the fiction provides both a matrix and a mirror of future events, and the poem, ultimately societal in its orientation and address, opens its final canto by hailing the great and learned individuals who compose the poet's audience. Ariosto's continual sense of history climaxing in a transplanted but now flourishing and splendid, if threatened, civilization is evoked repeatedly in The Faerie Queene.
The pressure of this background on Spenser contributes not only to the way his poem appears on the page, but to some of its innermost workings as an extended narrative in which heroic, romantic, chivalric, comic, historical, dynastic, and allegorical elements are freely combined. The very shape assumed by The Faerie Queene derives ultimately from these developments in Italian narrative of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As in Orlando furioso, which Spenser is recorded as having wanted to ‘overgo’ (Three Letters 3, Var Prose p 471), The Faerie Queene's action is narrated in cantos and stanzas rather than in the blank verse that, since the time of Surrey's translation of Books 2 and 4 of the Aeneid, was the obvious equivalent to the unrhymed hexameters of the ancient epic poets. This verse form represents the survival into learned poetry of popular traditions of medieval Italian narrative, in which the tale is spoken by a minstrel to an audience of townspeople gathered in a public place, the variable length of the delivery being determined by the length of time the auditors could be expected to attend the recital of one of the canti or songs. Another line of continuity with change is established by the reflective, hortatory, moralizing, or lyrical proems with which Spenser opens his books. Like Ariosto's, these proems are a survival in highly artistic form of the minstrel's opening invocation of the saints or the Virgin. Significantly, Spenser uses his first proem to invoke Venus and Mars, asserting that his poem will be ‘moralized’ by fierce wars and faithful loves. This deliberately recalls Ariosto's opening statement which, by linking ‘arms’ and ‘loves,’ adds a romantic dimension to Virgil's ‘arms and the man I sing.’
The plurality of actions announced here once again links The Faerie Queene to the intermediate heroic tradition of the Renaissance rather than directly to its classical ancestors. In contrast to classical epic, with its action centered largely on a single dominant figure like Achilles, Odysseus, or Aeneas, Spenser opts for the simultaneous multiplicities of romantic epic as handled by Ariosto, and (in Books in and IV, at least) for a narrative technique imitated from his Italian model. Derived from medieval French narrative, and masterfully adopted by Ariosto, who describes it (2.30, 13.81) by a metaphor of weaving, the technique of entrelacement or ‘interlace’ involves interleaving separate stories and maintaining them in a state of suspension and incompletion by constantly cutting from one to another at climactic points. Spenser's Faerie Queene might be considered one vast interlace, inasmuch as the six completed books are begun on successive days at Gloriana's court and are (ideally) simultaneous and concurrent. A realistic chronology based on the Letter to Raleigh would have each action beginning a day later than its predecessors but running for many days thereafter, during which the other adventures would be simultaneously proceeding. Yet by the time we finally see Guyon, Redcrosse's adventures are over and done with, and the notion of interlace posited by the Letter is modified or perhaps even canceled.
In a further complication, however, The Faerie Queene is arranged not only into Ariostan cantos but also into a proposed twelve books in imitation of Virgil's twelve— books, moreover, that celebrate different virtues in different narrative modes through the actions of a number of different heroes and heroines, who embody those virtues as they are being formed. Characters endowed with particular personalities (Redcrosse characteristically sad and solemn, Britomart humorously impetuous and fiery) are thus vehicles of ideas in ways both similar to and different from those of Ariosto. Here some contrasts are necessary. Ariosto keeps a whole vast world, global in extension, deliberately suspended and incomplete until two main objects have been achieved: the liberation of Paris after the final defeat of the pagans, and the celebration of the dynastic marriage, with which the Furioso concludes. In contrast, Spenser begins afresh with every book except the fourth, providing a fundamentally new cast of characters, as well as a new set of actions dictated by the allegory appropriate to the virtue being fashioned. In this tendency to proliferating multiplicity and open-endedness (Arthur's marriage to Gloriana is an endlessly receding objective), The Faerie Queene seems closer to romance and its ‘sub-generation’ of allegory—its tendency to create a constant supply of surrogates for the main characters—than to epic. At the root of this tendency undoubtedly lies the medieval reading of epic characters as allegorical figures, a technique that divides and subdivides a human personality into many ‘characters’ who represent different, warring aspects of that one personality. Hence, the pressure exerted by classical epic is towards unity of action and character, while the tendency of medieval romance and allegory is towards multiplicity and dispersion; The Faerie Queene maintains a perpetual tension between the two.
Renaissance epic is distinguished from its classical ancestors not only by its chivalric dress but predominantly by its tendency to overt allegory. For all their abundance of personality and richness of event, Ariosto's main narrative lines, constantly broken and indefinitely prolonged but ultimately coordinated and congruent, are fewer and more distinct than Spenser's, since they are headed by three heroes to whom the poem's episodes are attached throughout. Orlando heads one narrative line and Ruggiero another; in the third, Ariosto finds a new use for a wise fool, Orlando's cousin Astolfo, who represents the greatest of the poet's triumphs, in turning to allegorical account a simple comic stock character of Carolingian fiction. The resulting triadic plot structure corresponds to Ariosto's initial announcement of his triple subject: first, an intractably sensual lover (Orlando) whose reward at the poem's midpoint is madness; second, a more recognizably human type (Ruggiero) who gains a bride and a new territory in Italy; and finally, a converted buffoon (Astolfo), a wise lunatic of another kind than Orlando, who alone of the poem's characters looks down on the poem's various madnesses from the lunar height of canto 34, and whose leisurely but directed errancies, in counterpoint to Orlando's and Ruggiero's erratic voyages, are ultimately central to the defeat of Agramante. The underlying impulse to unity in the Furioso comes from this triadic organization, manifested most clearly in the poem's frequent contrasts among the three male figures. Allegorically, they function on a hierarchical scale of love, love understood in its widest sense; the various rhetorical modes in which their adventures are cast are appropriate to their places on the scale. On an essential level, the Furioso contrasts animal, human, and transcendent love in an art based on the Horatian ideal of laughing seriousness.
Undoubtedly, Spenser was capable of finding meaning for himself in the organization, language, and varying narrative modes of Ariosto's poem. Nevertheless, the Furioso came to him, through an intervening critical tradition, as a work interpreted both morally and allegorically, though in ways that failed signally to show how it established its meaning and values through laughter. Various Italian critics interpreted the poem in two ways. The first involved discrete, localized moralizations of characters and episodes; these summary interpretations, obvious and often absurd, appeared at the head of the cantos in various editions from 1542 onwards, and were of an easily dismissable type, often using events and characters as examples to imitate or avoid. The second type, represented by the work of Simone Fornari, was found in independent volumes of interpretation which provided learned and exhaustive, if tediously detailed, readings of such matters as Ruggiero's love for the enchantress Alcina or Astolfo's voyages. These more learned interpretations differ from the former in at least attempting to pursue allegory into the form and structure of the poem, and to reveal it operating on an extended level. Harington gives evidence of knowing both kinds, both in his translation of the Furioso and in his appended commentary. Generally speaking, the allegorists may have performed two main services: they revealed Ariosto as operating within a context of learned allegory (which Spenser knew from other sources), and they pointed to his transformation into allegorical symbols of comic and romantic paraphernalia from Boiardo, thereby providing Spenser with a model for his own further transformations of Ariosto. In fact, Ariosto ranged as freely and independently in the Innamorato as Spenser did in the Furioso; neither of them felt any compulsion to re-create his predecessor's meaning or structure, but each used and recombined elements of the model at will for his own very different artistic purposes. Ariosto's absorption and domestication of the Innamorato, a subject to which criticism has been curiously inattentive for centuries, provides an instructive example for the ways in which later epic poets, imbued with their source, absorb Ariosto. But until Ariosto's true relationship to Boiardo is clarified, criticism will continue to assert that Spenser allegorized the romantic epic, a statement that radically falsifies the development of the form and Ariosto's role as an artist within the tradition. Though Spenser and Ariosto wrote very different kinds of allegory, both of them were fully aware that it was in allegory that the epic was essentially rooted.
Alpers 1967b:160–99; Durling 1965; Giamatti 1966; Greene 1963; Marinelli 1987.
The authority of Aristotle in the Western world did not end with the Middle Ages, though it became less central and comprehensive. His writings remained an important part of the body of classical learning that Renaissance humanists sought to know more accurately and completely. It is true that his treatises on logic lost some prestige with the rise of rhetorical humanism in the fifteenth century and after the reforms of Lefevre d'Etaples in 1492 and Peter Ramus in 1543, and his scientific writings were largely discredited by the attacks of Bruno and Bacon and the rise of experimental science in the seventeenth century. But his moral-philosophical writings retained much of their former importance.
Two of them, the Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics, underpinned inherited social and religious dogmas and were at least starting points for serious Renaissance thinkers. The Ethics held an honored place in Protestant humanistic education beginning with Philipp Melanchthon whose Enarrationes synthesized the Ethics with the Ten Commandments. In England, the Aristotelian ethical tradition culminated in Book I of Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593), a work almost as central to the Anglican theological tradition as Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologiae (also founded on the Ethics) was to the Roman Catholic. These and other treatises of Aristotle continued to furnish a map of knowledge for Western Europe. Philosophy continued Aristotle's division between the natural sphere, treated in the Physics and other works, and the moral, treated in the Ethics and Politics. The latter works divided moral philosophy into the ethical and political spheres.
In literary criticism, Aristotle's influence began rather than ended or diminished with the Renaissance. The Poetics, available in Latin translation in 1498 and in Greek in 1508, became well known with the publication of Francesco Robortello's text, Latin translation, and commentary in 1548. Thereafter the Poetics, accommodated to Horace's Ars poetica and somewhat to Plato, came to dominate Renaissance critical discussion. Modified and systematized by the Italians, the teaching of Aristotle regained in neoclassical literary theory much of the authority it had acquired in all areas of secular knowledge, after similar adjustments, during the late Middle Ages.
In Spenser criticism, claims for Aristotelian influence on The Faerie Queene have undergone the same correctives as have those for Plato's influence. J.J.Jusserand, John Erskine, Viola Hulbert, Josephine Waters Bennett, and particularly Rosemond Tuve were less willing to assume Spenser's direct indebtedness to Aristotle than were William Fenn DeMoss, who read The Faerie Queene as a kind of versified Ethics, and Ernest Sirluck, who so read Book II (Var 2:414–26; Tuve 1966, ch 2; Sirluck 1951–2:73–100). The Aristotelian ethical tradition was not the only one in the Middle Ages. Platonic and Stoic traditions had eclipsed the Aristotelian before the Christian era, and through the writings of Cicero and the Church Fathers were well established in medieval ethical thought long before the mid-twelfth century, when Greek texts of Aristotle came to the West from Constantinople and Latin translations of Arabic texts and commentaries from Moorish Toledo reached Paris and other European intellectual centers. The patristic assimilation of Plato and the Stoics to Christian dogma began almost a millennium before the efforts of the Franciscan Alexander of Hales and the Dominicans Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas to fuse church teaching with Aristotle.
The work of these syncretists was encouraged by a papal edict of 1231 allowing the use only of those works of Aristotle purged of error, thus relaxing a recent edict of the Paris Council of 1210 which had banned his natural philosophy entirely. The most important of these, Thomas Aquinas, wrote not only theological treatises but also commentaries on Aristotle's works, including the Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics, De anima, Posterior Analytics, and part of De interpretatione. Intent on purifying Aristotle textually as well as theologically, Aquinas gained the services of the young Flemish Dominican scholar William of Moerbecke, who translated almost all of Aristotle's works from the Greek into Latin. William was indebted in turn to the examples of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, translator of the Ethics, and his student Roger Bacon. The three centuries separating Aquinas and Spenser yielded hundreds of commentaries on the Ethics alone.
In the commentaries, the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues blends with the Platonic-Stoic tradition of the four cardinal virtues and their branches descending from Cicero through Macrobius, Martin of Braga (Pseudo-Seneca), Alanus de Insulis, Aquinas, the anonymous Speculum morale, and scores of lesser medieval theorists, When Spenser in the Letter to Raleigh cites ‘Aristotle and the rest’ in support of his treatment of magnificence as a subsuming virtue (see *magnanimity), he is acknowledging his indebtedness to what he regarded as a coherent tradition of ethical thought deriving ultimately from Aristotle but augmented and refined by many learned successors. For Spenser, among the most important contemporary interpreters of moral philosophy were the Italian syncretists Giraldi Cintio and Alessandro Piccolomini. Cintio's Tre dialoghi della vita civile (prefixed to part 2 of De gli hecatommithi 1565) and, to a much lesser extent, Piccolomini's Della institutione morale (1560) were the sources of Bryskett's A Discourse of Civill Life (written c 1586, pub 1606), in which Spenser appears as an interlocutor and which is perhaps the most illuminating contemporary discussion of the ethical theory found in The Faerie Queene.
In literary criticism as in moral philosophy, the assumption that modernity had inherited from the ancient world a coherent body of knowledge led some Italian scholars to conclude that contradictions between classical thinkers were only apparent. Accordingly, they set to work reconciling Aristotle with Plato and both with Horace, whose authority in literary theory antedated that of the Greeks in medieval thought. Averroes’ twelfth-century Arabic commentary on the Poetics, translated by Hermannus Alemanus in the thirteenth century and published in Venice in 1481, omits crucial passages and garbles others, assigning to poetry a didactic function and rhetorical method foreign to Aristotle. This function and method, however, were quite in keeping with what the Middle Ages had drawn from Horace, whose Ars poetica assigned to poetry rhetorical aims (pleasure and profit) and criteria (credibility and decorum).
Despite Hermannus’ effort, the Poetics remained virtually unknown until the sixteenth century, when major commentaries appeared in Latin, by Francesco Robortello (1548), Vincenzo Maggi (1550), Pietro Vettori (1560), and Antonio Riccoboni (1584), and in Italian, by Lodovico Castelvetro (1570) and Alessandro Piccolomini (1575). This succession of commentaries shows, in general, a growing maturity of perception and, correspondingly, a willingness to differ with Aristotle on particular points. The same increasing independence of view appears in eclectic arts of poetry by Antonio Sebastiano Minturno (1559), Julius Caesar Scaliger (1561), and Francesco Patrizi (1586), as well as in polemical discourses on the implications of the Poetics for the modern genre of the romance by Cintio (1549), Giovanni Pigna (1554), and Torquato Tasso (1587). The discourses on the romance provided Spenser with theoretical justification for the hybrid form of The Faerie Queene. (See Weinberg 1961 for the Poetics in Renaissance Italy.)
In England, references in Ascham's Scholemaster and in the correspondence of Sir John Cheke indicate some acquaintance with the Poetics at Cambridge by the 1540s. Other references appear in the writings of continental scholars residing in England during the 1550s. Aristotle's ideas receive passing notice in critical treatises by Thomas Lodge (1579), William Webbe (1586), and George Puttenham (1589). His authority in criticism was attacked by Bruno in lectures at Oxford in 1583 and in Eroici furori in 1585. Sidney's Defence of Poetry (1583?) was the first treatise in English to make substantial use of the Poetics. Identifiably Aristotelian ideas in the Defence include the imitative function of poetry, its superiority to history, its concern with universals rather than with particulars, and the pleasure deriving from the imitation even of unpleasant subjects. Sidney's discussions of the unities and of catharsis, however, show that he did not rise above his Italian contemporaries in his understanding of Aristotle. In a letter to Spenser of 7 April 1580, Harvey remarks that at Cambridge Aristotle is ‘muche named, but little read’ (Three Letters 2, in Var Prose p 460). Few Elizabethan allusions to Aristotle's critical ideas prove more than a second-hand acquaintance with the Poetics (Herrick 1930:8–34).
Among the features of The Faerie Queene commonly attributed to Aristotle's influence, the most obvious occurs in the Letter to Raleigh, in Spenser's division of the extended poem into twelve books on the ‘private morall vertues’ and twelve more on the political, according to the standard division of moral philosophy based on Aristotle's Ethics and Politics. In the Ethics, however, eleven or thirteen private virtues may be found, but not twelve. This discrepancy has been accounted for in several ways: by adding Arthur's virtue of magnificence to the Spenserian total of twelve to produce an Aristotelian total of thirteen (DeMoss 1918–19); by seeing it as reflecting the strong tradition of twelve Aristotelian virtues among the successors of Aquinas, who divides justice into internal (circa passiones) and external (circa operationes) to form a total of twelve (Hulbert in Var 1:354–6); or by defining ‘the twelve private morall vertues, as Aristotle hath devised’ as simply such virtues as Aristotle would call private moral (Renwick in Var 1:361). The objection that Spenser's inclusion of justice in the first six books as a private moral virtue violates the private-political dichotomy announced in the Letter would have little weight to the educated Elizabethan, who would recall that Aristotle formally treats justice in the Ethics (Book 5!) rather than in the Politics and that his justice is both personal and political. Likewise, Spenser's assigning magnificence to Arthur as an inclusive virtue ‘according to Aristotle and the rest’ was evidently not the result of a misreading of the Ethics but a choice based on firm medieval precedent (Tuve 1966).
Reflections of Aristotle occur frequently in the text of The Faerie Queene. The Aristotelian concept of good as single and of evil as manifold (Ethics 2.6) is allegorized in the first episode of Book I, when Una, with Redcrosse, gazes in amazement at the multitudinous cannibalistic brood of the slain Error (i 25–6). With the exception of justice in v ix, temperance is the only virtue of Spenser's series treated in anything like an Aristotelian way as a mean between extremes. The golden mean is implicit in the episodes of Medina's castle (II ii), the castle of Alma (ix 33–44), and the voyage to the Bower of Bliss (xii 2–9), and explicit in occasional expository comment (i 58, ii argument, xii 33). Bryskett, following Cintio, attempts to reconcile the idea of the medial as morally normative with the Christian obligation to abstain from evil: ‘And therfore Aristotle said right well that the meane of vertue betweene two extremes, was a Geometricall meane which hath a respect to proportion, and not an Arithmeticall meane which respecteth equall distance: so as you must understand that vertue is not called a meane betweene two extremes, because she participateth of either of them both, but because she is neither the one nor the other’ (ed 1970:155). Still, the virtuous mean of Spenserian temperance is not, in its moral aspect, Aristotle's balance point between excess and defect but the rejection of Satanic temptation such as Christ's in Matthew 4.1– 11, an incident reflected in Guyon's experience in the house of Mammon (II vii) and given epic treatment by Milton in Paradise Regained. In its psychological aspect, Spenserian temperance conflates the Aristotelian mean with the Thomistic counterpoising of the irascible and concupiscible passions, in which the passions form a discordia concors under the rule and arbitrament of reason (cf II i 58 and Summa theologiae la 81.3). Spenser's and Aquinas’ concept of the harmonious personality derives less from the Ethics than from De anima (the primary source of Elizabethan faculty psychology) and Plato's Republic (4.441–2, 9.580–1). It is true that Aristotle, like Spenser, remarks in the Ethics on the greater difficulty in combatting pleasure than pain (2.3; cf FQ II vi 1). Also, the names Phaedria, Philotime, and Acrasia have been attributed to the Greek of the Ethics (Var 1:356; 2:241, 262). Braggadocchio is, among other things, perhaps a counterfeit of Aristotle's magnanimous man (Ethics 2.7, 4.3; FQ II iii 10). Nevertheless, Spenserian temperance is indebted not so much to the Ethics, which applies the mean to all the virtues, as to the tradition of the cardinal virtues, which restricts it to temperance and assimilates the classical perspective to the Christian.
The description of the Garden of Adonis is probably indebted to De anima (2.2) and the Physics (1.9) regarding the cooperation of matter and form (Var 3:258, 260). Spenser's treatment of the virtue of friendship parallels a long passage in Bryskett that synthesizes Cicero, Plato, and Aristotle (Ethics 8.1) on the subject (Var 4:291, 293). Spenser's placing of the Book of Friendship immediately before the Books of Justice and Courtesy perhaps reflects Aristotle's conception of friendship as the basis of society, as the principle of concord in the state (Ethics 8.1).
Spenser echoes Aristotle's praise of justice as the chief virtue (FQ v proem 10). The organization of FQ v reflects his division of justice into personal and political, distributive and corrective, and voluntary and involuntary modes, and his distinguishing between law and equity as kinds of justice and between force and fraud as forms of injustice (Ethics 5.1–2). The golden mean is reflected in the trial of Duessa at Mercilla's court, where Artegall appears excessive in zeal but deficient in pity and Arthur excessive in pity but deficient in zeal (FQ v 9). The Cantos of Mutabilitie may owe something to Aristotle's account of changeless bliss (Ethics 7.14). Of the minor poems, the Julye eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender has been thought to teach the mean of moderation in religion, what will later be called the via media of Anglicanism (DeMoss 1918–19); but the allegory can be interpreted more naturally as favoring Puritan lowliness.
Although almost all these reflections of Aristotle's moral philosophy may be attributed to medieval and Renaissance intermediaries, Spenser's direct acquaintance with the Ethics may be assumed. The same may not be said of the Poetics. A phrase such as ‘Distraught twixt feare and pitie’ (Time 579) reflects Aristotle's doctrine of catharsis, but this was a critical commonplace available from any number of contemporary sources. Incidents such as Artegall's discovery of the female identity of Britomart (IV vi) or of the spurious identity of Braggadocchio (v iii) are too common in romance narrative to prove direct indebtedness to Aristotle's discussion of recognition. Spenser's literarycritical Aristotelianism was likely secondhand and, like his Aristotelian moral philosophy, adulterated by syncretists and systematizers. Most of it derived from the practical application of Aristotle's ideas to the defense of Ariosto's Orlando furioso. Sixteenth-century Italian critics, interpreting the Poetics as a prescriptive document, had extended Aristotle's ‘rules’ for tragedy to comedy and epic. Enthusiasts for the new vernacular literature rose to defend Orlando furioso, Dante's Divine Comedy, and Guarini's Il pastor fido against the neoclassical purists, who acknowledged only those genres mentioned by the classical authorities. Ariosto's sprawling poem was vulnerable to the Aristotelian critical criteria of unity and probability, as then understood, and to the Horatian criteria of moral utility and decorum. In this stormy controversy which lasted from about 1550 to 1583, the most significant participants for Spenser were the moderates Giraldi Cintio and Giovanni Pigna, who quarreled but came to similar conclusions, and the elastic traditionalist Alessandro Piccolomini, whose vernacular translation and commentary marked a gain in accuracy over those of Castelvetro and his predecessors.
The defense of romance, though ostensibly Aristotelian, was conducted ultimately on Horatian principles. The diffuseness of romance seemed to violate the Aristotelian requirement of unity. Its use of the marvelous seemed to violate Aristotelian probability. The solution was that Horace had admitted pleasure as one of the aims of poetry. Cristoforo Landino in his edition of Horace's Opera (Florence 1482) had declared that variety is a means of pleasure in poetry. Consequently, Cintio could justify the episodic structure of romance narrative—its multiple plots, digressions, disjunctions—as a means of fulfilling this purpose of poetry (Discorso intorno al comporre dei romanzi 1549). Furthermore, episodic structure need not, said Pigna, be construed as conflicting with Aristotle's statements about plot if episodes be regarded as separate from the plot proper—as ‘accidents’ rather than ‘essence’ of the narrative (I romanzi 1554). Heroic poetry permits many actions of many persons (Cintio), especially if, as in the case of the epic, it focuses on the actions of one man (Pigna). Variety, in any case, is more important than unity (Castelvetro). Aristotle's comparison of the poet to the historian was also much quoted in support of the poet's freedom of narrative method (eg, by Minturno, Cintio, and Pigna), as was Horace's observation that the poet may begin his story in the middle of the chronological sequence of events for greater economy and focus.
In defending the use of the marvelous, apologists for romance contended less with Aristotle than with his misconstruction by Italian neoclassical commentators. The latter interpreted Aristotle's definition of poetry as imitation to mean that it imitates previous writers rather than nature and construed his requirement of probability as fidelity to nature (verisimilitude) rather than as internal consistency, which was subsumed under the Horatian doctrine of decorum. Pigna defended the credibility of supernatural elements that agree with the beliefs of the audience. The Christian miraculous, he argued, is acceptable in a Christian era, the pagan in a pagan. Cintio allowed the fabu-lous in digressions if the main action were true. But the central vindication of the marvelous, as of diffuseness, was that it is pleasurable and that, on Horatian authority, pleasure is a legitimate purpose of poetry.
In the introduction to his Discourse, Bryskett admits that he envies ‘the happinesse of the Italians’ who have popularized moral philosophy by translating and commenting upon Plato and Aristotle (ed 1970:21). Obviously, Aristotle had not been entirely displaced by Plato and Cicero in the intellectual hierarchy of Renaissance moralists but, assimilated with these and other authorities, had taken on new life.
A standard modern translation is in Aristotle ed 1984. Schmitt 1983a and Schmitt 1983b give valuable background. F.Edward Cranz 1984 A Bibliography of Aristotle Editions 1501–1600 rev ed Charles B. Schmitt (Baden-Baden) is the standard guide to the texts in all languages. For a summary of editions published in England, see STC (752ff). See also O.B.Hardison, Jr 1970 ‘The Place of Averroes’ Commentary on the Poetics in the History of Medieval Criticism,’ in Medieval and Renaissance Studies ed John L.Lievsay (Durham, NC) pp 57–81; Herrick 1930; E.N.Tigerstedt 1968 ‘Observations on the Reception of the Aristotelian Poet-ics in the Latin West’ SRen 15:7–24; Weinberg 1961.
On Spenser, see Bennett 1942:229–30; William Fenn DeMoss 1918– 19 expanded in DeMoss 1920 The Influence of Aristotle's ‘Politics’ and ‘Ethics’ on Spenser (Chicago); Erskine 1915; Viola Blackburn Hulbert 1931 ‘A Possible Christian Source for Spenser's Temperance’ SP 28:184– 210 (rejects Aristotle); H.S.V. Jones 1926 (on Melanchthon's Enarrationes and Aristotelianism in Spenser); Jusserand 1905–6; Jerry Leath Mills 1977 ‘Spenser's Letter to Raleigh and the Averroistic Poetics’ ELN 14:246–9 (refers ‘Aristotle and the rest’ to the Averroistic Poetics rather than to the true Poetics or the Ethics); Sirluck 1951–2; Tuve 1966 (shows how what has been identified as ‘Aristo-telian’ can also be found in common medieval sources).
The location of the debate between Mutabilitie and the gods before ‘great dame Nature’ in the Cantos of Mutabilitie; the last of the major settings for moments of mythical and philosophical condensation in The Faerie Queene. Spenser introduces Arlo Hill as ‘the best and fairest Hill/That was in all this holy-Islands hights,’ and goes on to tell ‘how Arlo through Dianaes spights ... Was made the most unpleasant, and most ill’ (VII vi 36– 55). His account subtly interweaves native Irish and pagan classical materials.
The geographical original of Arlo Hill is Galtymore, the last and highest peak in a range of mountains that begins two miles north of Kilcolman Castle in County Cork and extends eastward about thirty miles through County Limerick into County Tipperary. The western part of this range is called the Ballahoura Hills, the eastern part the Galty Mountains. Spenser refers to the entire range as ‘old father Mole’ and seems to expect his readers to recall that he had already done so in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (57, 104–5). With an elevation of 3018 feet, Galtymore rises well above the surrounding Galtys and Ballyhouras; it is clearly visible from Kilcolman, some twenty miles away, which has an elevation of only 329 feet.
(See Arlo Hill Fig 1.)
Arlo Hill takes its name from the glen of Aherlow (commonly called ‘Arlo’ or ‘Harlo’ by English writers) immediately below Galtymore. The slopes of the mountain are now precipitous and barren, although they may once have featured that ‘grove of Oakes’ which Spenser tells us crowned the ‘two marble Rocks’ from which the river Behanna (Spenser's Molanna) is said to spring. The top of Galtymore is divided into two peaks about a quarter of a mile apart, with a relatively level space between them; it is here that Judson would locate the gathering of all ‘heavenly Powers, and earthly wights,/ Before great Natures presence’ (Judson 1933:53). The traditional associations of Galtymore in Irish folklore conflict with its historical associations in ways which Spenser found significant. While Galtymore figures prominently in native legend and epic as a traditional haunt of old Irish gods and fairies (Joyce 1878:330–1), the glen of Aherlow was a notorious resort of outlaws in Spenser's day (see Renwick in Var Prose p 288). In Vewe of Ireland (Var Prose pp 56–7), Irenius names Arlo as one of the fertile lowlands controlled by English landowners but taken over during the War of the Roses by ‘the Irishe whom before they had banished into the mountaines.’ These negative associations are presumably behind Spenser's reference to ‘fowle Arlo’ in ‘Astrophel’ 96. They are implicitly transferred with the name Arlo to the otherwise noble and pleasant mountain in FQ VII.
Spenser superimposes an intricate Ovidian significance on the native identity of Aherlow and Galtymore in his etiological account of how the mountain came to be cursed and abandoned by Diana. The story of how Diana was spied upon by the ‘Foolish God’ Faunus while bathing in Molanna's ‘sweet streames,’ and her subsequent punishment of both the woodland god and the river nymph who had been bribed to help him, combines elements from three episodes in the Metamorphoses: Actaeon's accidental sight of the naked Diana (3.138–252), Diana's punishment of the nymph Callisto after Jove had seduced her (2.401–507), and the river Alpheus’ union with the nymph Arethusa (5.572– 641). In addition, Spenser may have been influenced by Ovid's account of Faunus’ discovery and ridicule when he attempted to rape Omphale (Fasti 2.267–358). Each of these Ovidian episodes takes place in a pastoral setting relevant to Spenser's treatment of Arlo Hill. Jove sees Callisto as she is roaming the slopes of Mount Maenalus, and the pregnant Callisto is eventually banished by Diana from a secluded pool located in this same region. More tellingly, it is in the vale of Gargaphie, located near a mountain stained with the blood of animals killed in the hunt, that Actaeon happens to see Diana bathing in her shaded grotto. Gargaphie is typical of those secluded, deceptively idyllic settings which become locations for passion, violence, and suffering in the Metamorphoses.
The story of Diana's curse on Arlo Hill functions simultaneously at several levels within larger patterns of meaning in the Cantos of Mutabilitie. Most important, it presents an ostensibly digressive and tonally contrasting minor narrative with complicated thematic and symbolic links to the main narrative of Mutabilitie's challenge to the gods (eg, Faunus’ insult to Diana parodies Mutabilitie's insult to Cynthia). In this respect, Arlo's mythical identity is central to Spenser's response to, and revision of, Ovid throughout FQ VII (see esp R.N.Ringler 1965–6, Holahan 1976).
The minor narrative in canto vi is also an inventive mythopoeic account of an Irish landscape that mattered deeply to Spenser: the story of Molanna and her eventual marriage to Fanchin accurately describes the river Behanna as it flows down from Galtymore and joins the river Funsheon. Although Spenser may have been influenced by myths of locality in Italian Renaissance literature, he was probably also familiar with Irish geographical legends and folk tales (see Gottfried 1937, R.M.Smith 1935a). His tale of Diana's abandoning Arlo Hill and leaving it to ‘Wolves and Thieves’ (55) also has historical and political implications about unrest in Ireland. If Arlo Hill represents a fallen Eden, it also represents ‘an Irish paradise lost’ (Holahan 1976:259).
How does the implied victory of mutability on Arlo Hill at the end of canto vi relate to Nature's judgment against Mutabilitie on Arlo Hill at the end of canto vii? Arlo may instance Spenser's way of including change, contradiction, and loss within a larger providential order (see Herendeen 1981); or the tale of Arlo's decline may be a deliberately inadequate and archaic pagan perspective on issues which can be resolved only within the medievalizing Christian perspective of canto vii. Yet the irony of Spenser's setting Mutabilitie's trial in a place which undergoes striking change, along with his complicated rhetorical relation to his reader here—the ambiguous tone of ‘(Who knowes not Arlo-hill?)’ in vi 36, the extravagant occupatio in 37 (‘A speaker emphasizes something by pointedly seeming to pass over it’ Lanham 1968:68)—remain enigmatic features of the Cantos of Mutabilitie.
Arms and armor figure prominently throughout The Faerie Queene, though most is barely identified. Despite his knowledge of Elizabethan warfare, Spenser rarely attempts detailed description of historically authentic armor except that worn in tournaments: his vocabulary suggests instead the common currency of romance. Since symbolic armor was an established convention—visual and literary, classical and modern, pagan and Christian—his sparing references have a disproportionate resonance. Spen-ser's age witnessed a self-conscious neomedievalism, expressed in art, architecture, public ceremony, and literature; the chivalric paraphernalia of earlier times was resurrected, but also codified and amplified, latterly much aided by the growth of a sophisticated antiquarianism led by Camden. Much of the symbolic lore concerning armor was clustered around the two principal chivalric ceremonies, the creation of a knight and (in rare cases) his degradation. The symbolism was further developed and refined in the ceremonies of the specific orders of knighthood: the Order of the Garter, for instance, had detailed meanings attached to its insignia in the Henrician revision of its statutes and register, the Liber niger.
Spenser was not the only Renaissance poet to use symbolic armor. Boiardo (Orlando innamorato), Ariosto (Orlando furioso), and Tasso (Gerusalemme liberata) drew on the Christian, medieval, and chivalric symbolism of arms and on the epic tradition. From Homer onwards, the equipment of heroes and gods had been described and allegorized. So the reader of The Faerie Queene on encountering Arthur's great shield made by Merlin looks back to Arthurian legends, to the shields of Atlante (Orlando furioso) and Aeneas (Aeneid), and to Achilles’ divine arms made by Hephaestos (Iliad). The symbolic meaning of such armor came through late classical and medieval authors such as Fulgentius and Prudentius, and was expanded and elaborated in books of hieroglyphs and emblems. The armor found in contemporary literary works was accorded the same interpretative treatment in explications by Fornari and (in English) Harington of Atlante's shield in Orlando furioso. Through classical and medieval mythographers, Spenser and his contemporaries were also aware of the association of armor with virtue.
Among the conditions governing the presence of arms and armor in The Faerie Queene is Spenser's freedom to draw eclectically upon chivalric, scriptural, and literary conventions through which the equipment of his knights constituted a symbolic language. The poet could be confident that his readers would understand his references and appreciate his refinements, modifications, and conflations of their shared inheritance, most notably in the armor of God.
Although Britomart is not obviously a miles Christi, when she removes her armor in Castle Joyous and is subsequently wounded (FQ III i 58, 65), we recognize in her lack of foresight an error akin to that of Redcrosse before Orgoglio's castle (I vii 2). She too learns the lesson: later in Dolon's castle, she remains fully armed and alert (v vi 23). Similarly, the lack of virtue in knights who have surrendered to vice is portrayed in their abandonment of their armor, for example, Cymochles and Verdant (II v 28, xii 80). In Book VI, knights are divested of their armor in dubious moral situations: Aladine enjoying his love (ii 18), Calepine with Serena (iii 20), and Calidore taking off his armor on entering the pastoral life (ix 36) but later concealing it under his ‘shepheards weeds’ to rescue Pastorella (xi 36).
The traditional meanings associated with armor are important for an understanding of many of the arms of Spenser's characters. The description of Arthur's ‘glitterand armour’ seems to gather to itself the symbolism of Ephesians 6, of virtue, and of the perfect knight and hero (I vii 29–37). The plumes of his helmet suggest the rituals of antique triumphs as well as proclaiming Christian hope in the Resurrection and his quasi-sacerdotal role. Its dragon-crest appears to allude to the traditional iconography of the legendary King Arthur, to the heraldic Dragon of Cadwallader and thus to Wales and the Tudor dynasty, and by the same token to the descriptions of heroes in the epic tradition. Equally potent are the internal resonances: the dragon-crest anticipates ‘that old Dragon’ encountered by Redcrosse in canto xi. Arthur's shield possesses a wide and rich range of allusions, despite its lack of device: it differs from Atlante's magical shield in Orlando furioso in being composed not of carbuncle but of diamond, which is superior in hardness and according to symbolic and hieroglyphic texts suggests divine grace. It petrifies and annihilates his enemies, corresponding to the powers of Minerva's shield. As with other arms, the shield may allude to classical mythology and literature: in disarming, Britomart is compared to Minerva leaving aside her ‘Gorgonian shield’ (III ix 22). That both Arthur's and Britomart's shields are related to Minerva's suggests the richness of internal correspondence between shields within the poem; similarly, the actions involving Arthur's shield in the battle with Orgoglio recall (but also significantly differ from) those involving Redcrosse's shield.
Weapons such as the spear also relate characters to literary and legendary precursors. Britomart is again connected with Minerva (identified also by her spear) in being ‘term'd Knight of the Hebene speare’ (IV v 8), though the use of ‘Hebene’ for ebony also associates her with Hebe, goddess of spring and fertility. That her spear is ‘enchaunted’ (III i 7) makes it a symbolic weapon like Arthur's shield. Britomart acquires her armor from trophies hanging in her father's church, and the description of the spear as by ‘Bladud made’ (iii 60) links it with the king said to be a particularly wise and potent peacemaker.
Similarly, the arms said to be ‘Achilles armes, which Arthegall did win’ (III ii 25) link Artegall not only with Achilles but also with other classical heroes, such as Odysseus, who wins Achilles’ arms from Ajax, and Mandricardo, who gains Hector's arms in Orlando innamorato. In Satyrane's tournament, Artegall appears in ‘armour...With woody mosse bedight,. and all his steed/With oaken leaves attrapt, that seemed fit/ for salvage wight,’ the poem's only instance of the ‘quyent disguise’ of tournament armor (IV iv 39), which in the late sixteenth century had become increasingly exotic, matching in its exuberance the elaborate neo-medieval plots and characters adopted by the participants (Nashe's superb satire in The Unfortunate Traveller ed 1904–10, 2:271–8 exaggerates, but not by much). Here both armor and shield contribute to the image of the Salvage Knight.
Spenser takes advantage of the tradition of decorating shields with symbolic images or devices. These include the ‘shield of love’ won and borne by Scudamour (IV x 3), which plays on his name and relates him both to the traditions of amatory literature and to other images of Cupid within the poem. Some devices possess several different, but related, meanings: St George's red cross is symbolic both of Christ and of England, it recalls both the Crusaders and the Order of the Garter, and it may also gesture topically to Elizabethan armies in Ireland. Some devices still elude convincing interpretation, such as that on the shield of the unnamed discourteous knight: ‘A Ladie on rough waves, row'd in a sommer barge’ (VI ii 44).
Some weapons are individualized, such as Arthur's sword Morddure (II viii 21) and Artegall's Chrysaor (v i 9), where the naming of the weapon and explanation of its characteristics and origins adds to our understanding of its possessor's role in the poem. Sometimes Spenser requires the reader to select from a range of possible meanings the one appropriate to a particular character or situation: Cupid, Belphoebe, Maleger, and Gardante all wield bows and arrows; and while a common theme may be detected, the particular meaning depends upon our understanding of the whole character. When Trevisan flees with his head ‘unarmd’ (I ix 22), the absence of the helmet, which is associated with the ‘hope of salvation’ (I Thess 5.8), shows that he is almost overcome by despair. During her adventures, Britomart may remove her helmet as sanctioned by medieval and mythographic traditions concerning the association of love and armor, but when she utters her complaint at the long search for her future husband (III iv 7–11), the removal of her ‘lofty creast’ symbolizes both love and despair.
Arms and armor possessed further meanings associated with chivalry. Turpine's unfitness as a knight is first signaled by his forsaking ‘Both speare and shield’ (VI iv 7), and the Salvage Man's inherent nobility is first indicated by his taking them up as he leads Calepine and Serena to safety (iv 13). The spear and shield as tokens of knighthood are also used to describe Britomart's arming and assumption of the role of a knight (III iii 60). The shield was accorded preeminent status by writers on chivalry, because ‘The shelde is gyven to the knyght to sygnefye the offyce of a knyght’ (Lull ed 1926:81–2). As a result it was regarded as ‘the principall part of Armes’ (Favyn ed 1623:13). In The Faerie Queene, this significance can be seen, for example, in Artegall's seizure and Talus’ subsequent defacement of Braggadocchio's shield when the false knight is revealed as such (v iii 37–9; see *baffling), and in Artegall's condemnation of Burbon for surrendering improperly his ‘honours stile, that is your warlike shield’ (v xi 55). Unchivalric weapons such as clubs and maces tend to be wielded by figures either evil (eg, Argante, in vii 40, and Lust, IV vii 25) or for other reasons beyond the pale of civilized, knightly conduct: Talus’ ‘yron flale’ (v i 12) has an antecedent in the club of Hercules but becomes an instrument befitting remorseless and somewhat inhuman absolute justice.
Berman 1983; Favyn ed 1623; Allan H.Gilbert 1942 ‘Spenserian Armor’ PMLA 57:981–7; Leslie 1983; [Liber niger] 1724 The Register of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, from Its Cover in Black Velvet, Usually Called the Black Book tr and ed John Anstis, 2 vols (London); Ramon Lull 1926 The Book of the Ordre of Chyvalry tr William Caxton, ed Alfred T.P.Byles, EETS os 168 (London); Strong 1977.
A biblical symbol drawn from Ephesians 6.10–17 and related texts (esp I Thess 5.8 and Rom 13.12, 14), and prominent in FQ I. As Spenser describes the origins of the Red Cross Knight's quest in the Letter to Raleigh, the hero begins as a ‘clownishe young man,’ but once he puts on the armor brought by Una—‘the armour of a Christian man specified by Saint Paul v. Ephes.’—he suddenly seems ‘the goodliest man in al that company.’ That armor, which shows the ‘cruell markes of many a bloudy fielde,’ displays ‘a bloudie Crosse’ on breastplate and shield (I i 1–2), features which suggest that The Faerie Queene plans to exploit the biblical significances of the Pauline armor.
Renaissance commentators note that Ephesians begins with a summary of Paul's doctrine of salvation, which insists that, according to his eternal plan, God has ‘chosen us in him, before the fundacion of the worlde, that we shulde be holie’ (1.4). In him introduces an idea central to Ephesians, to the Reformed Protestantism dominant in Spenser's England, and to FQ I. To achieve holiness, Christians must be incorporated by divine grace into the body of Christ. Then they may participate in his perfect righteousness and so be justified, receiving salvation by grace alone and cooperating with grace in order to achieve good works.
The insistence that these processes can occur only ‘in Christ’ bears implications important for FQ I. Existence in Christ is expressed metaphorically in numerous scriptural references to the ‘putting on’ of the Saviour or of garments which symbolize him (eg, Matt 22.11–13, Rom 13.14, Gal 3.27, Eph 4.22–4, Rev 7.9). The armor of God’ is a military version of this theologically significant metaphor of clothing. As in Paul's exhortation that the faithful ‘put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousnes, and true holines’ (Eph 4.24), the clothing metaphor insists on both the graciously determined and the humanly willed elements in the life of holiness. Like a garment, holiness represents God's perfect righteousness, applied from without to cover man's radical imperfection. Spenser's contemporary Henry Smith declares that the phrase ‘put on Christ’ (Rom 13.14) signifies that he covers us like a garment to hide ‘our unrighteousness with his righteousness’ (1593).
As Smith also explains, however, the exhortation to ‘put on the armour of light’ (Rom 13.12) stresses Christ's actions to assist the elect in their active struggle to achieve sanctification or holiness of life, an endeavor in which human will cooperates with grace. Treating Ephesians 6, Calvin and others add that ‘the shield of faith’ (6.16) defends Christians from diabolic assault on actual, not imputed, holiness, while ‘the sworde of the Spirit, which is the worde of God’ (6.17), allows them to slay the enemy (ed 1948:339). Moreover, because ‘the armor of God’ refers primarily to the grace which sanctifies, Reformed theologians may (without contradicting their belief that saving grace can be neither resisted nor lost) complain of man's failure to employ his armor properly. Commenting on Ephesians 6.11, ‘Put on the whole armour,’ Calvin remarks that men are all careless in using the graces God offers. We are commonly, he says, like soldiers who are about to meet the enemy yet foolishly remove their armor (ed 1948:339; cf FQ I vii 2–15).
These theological contexts suggest that Redcrosse's armor may represent or call attention to the mystical incorporation in—or putting on—of Christ which effects and signifies justification; the contrast between God's purity and power and man's total corruption and impotence; the cooperation in which human will abets yet resists the effects of sanctifying grace; and related operations of grace—afflictions, solicitations, impulsions, and even apparent absences—that oblige the elect to recognize their need for divine aid or that induce or empower them to cooperate, by means of a renewed if frail and mutable will, in their sanctification.
Redcrosse's sudden transformation, recorded in the Letter, suggests his justification, his calling to the service of God, and the imputed goodness that calling entails. His investment in the armor depicted at I i 1–2 likewise indicates his justification. His subsequent adventures therefore explore the experience of one who is numbered among the elect, to whom righteousness is imputed, and who must labor to achieve the actual holiness that results from sanctification. Within a few stanzas, his conflict with Error highlights the contrast between divine strength and human impotence, for the armor, not the knight's virtue, allows him to view the enemy plainly (i 14, contrast 12). Although he defeats Error through grace (‘more then manly force’ 24), ‘force,’ not faith, predominates in his mind (19.6–7, 24.1–5; contrast 19.3). Then Una declares, ‘Well worthy be you of that Armorie,/ Wherein ye have great glory wonne this day’ (27). These ironic contradictions help to define holiness: the pure operations of grace are corrupted by the channel, the human will, through which they work. This implication persists even in the final battle in canto xi, where Redcrosse's repeated ‘falls’ carry their usual theological or moral implication: to fall before this Satanic dragon is to fall into sin. Again the knight displays his old penchant for despair and again desires to remove his armor (26–8). As with all sins of the elect, providential ordinance, experienced sometimes as fortune or chance, renders these lapses profitable (29, 45).
These moments show too that the armor sometimes inflicts torment: That erst him goodly arm'd, now most of all him harm'd’ (27). Later, the shield does not protect Redcrosse from the Dragon's sting: The mortall sting his angry needle shot/Quite through his shield, and in his shoulder seasd’ (38). Such details become explicable when the reader recognizes that the life of faith includes suffering and sinfulness as parts of purification and strengthening. As the Geneva commentators remark, one operation of faith is to effect ‘a wounding of the heart’ (gloss to Ps 51.17). This can sometimes work through the agency of Despair, whose accusing ‘speach...as a swords point through [Redcrosse's] hart did perse’ (ix 48), and so functions like the ‘worde of God ...sharper then anie two edged sworde...a discerner of the thoghtes and the intentes of the heart’ (Heb 4.12).
These negative functions of the armor suggest the severity that grace imposes in a regimen finally beneficent, one in which Redcrosse's weapons, rather than the knight himself, gain ultimate victory (xi 53). The overall emphasis of the armor of God in The Faerie Queene is therefore powerfully optimistic; the armor manifests joyous triumph over the forces of darkness and chaos. This theme appears with special buoyancy when Arthur first enters the poem, his divine armor shining ‘farre away,/Like glauncing light of Phoebus brightest ray’ (vii 29–36). (See also *armor, *nature and grace, *predestination, *Reformation.)
John Calvin 1948 Commentaries on the Epistles of Paul to the Galatians and Ephesians tr William Pringle (Grand Rapids, Mich); Richard Greenham 1612 Works (London; rpt Amsterdam and New York 1973) fols Dd5v-Ee3r; Latimer ed 1844–5, 1:26; Henry Smith ed 1593.
Cullen 1974:21; Hankins 1971:109; Leslie 1983:104–17, 128–31; Upton in Var 1:176.
The name of Artegall (usually spelled Arthegall in the 1590 FQ), knight of Justice and hero of FQ v, may be construed as ‘[thou] art equal’ (Fr égal fair, equitable, just, impartial), and as ‘equal [to] Arthur’ (who is in fact identified as Artegall's maternal half-brother, III iii 27). Artegall is also related to Britomart as her prophesied spouse (26) and by the syllabification of their names (Britomartegall), a coincidence implying both concord in their eventual union and androgynous potential within each individually: Britomart in armor brandishing a phallic lance, Artegall ‘in womanishe attire’ ‘twisting linnen twyne’ (v v 22, vii 37). Variously theirs is a potential for balance and synthesis or for imbalance and antithesis.
As Arthur's destined mate, the Fairy Queen, first appears to him in a dream, so Britomart's appears first to her in a vision. In III ii 24–5, Britomart falls in love with a perfected image of Artegall, an ideal that he approaches but never fully achieves in the poem. This image features centrally the inscription’ Achilles armes, which Arthegall did win.’ Like most things that bear on his figure, this syntactically ambiguous description (Artegall as possessor of arms or as possessed by them) resonates with ambivalence. It recalls at once Achilles’ prowess and epic heroism but also his vulnerability, effeminacy, and wrath. Since Achilles’ armor was awarded to brainy Odysseus rather than to brawny Ajax, the inscription hints further at the interior content of justice—for ‘in the mind the doome of right must bee’ (v ii 47)—and at the danger, in applying justice, of a strain between interior judgment and physical force, with the result that might is right. In addition to the ascription of Artegall's arms to Achilles, his heraldic device is an ermine, both a symbol of chastity (and as such, an icon used by Queen Elizabeth and applicable to Britomart here) and an animal associated with Hercules, a justicer like Artegall and like him associated with the powers and weaknesses of Achilles (Dunseath 1968:48–59, Aptekar 1969:153–71).
After Britomart's vision, Artegall first appears in IV iv 39, on the third day of Satyrane's tournament, disguised in woody moss and oak leaves and bearing on his shield the motto Salvagesse sans finesse (wildness, savagery, or incivility without refinement, sensitivity, or art). Here, unrecognizable as either Artegall or knight of Justice, he hews and slashes with his sword, the ‘instrument of wrath.’ ‘No lesse then death it selfe,’ he overbears others and ‘tyrannize[s]’ in ‘his bloodie game,’ until ‘in middest of his pryde’ he is struck by Britomart's spear and slides, in comic relief, ‘Over his horses taile’ to the ground, ‘Whence litle lust he had to rise againe’ (41–4). With the effect of the spear compared to a cooling and recomforting shower of rain (crudely put, a well-timed bucket of cold water), his encounter with it suggests the meeting of Typhonic passion with Diana's formidable yet fertile purity. More complexly, this encounter symbolizes the meeting of male force and form with female force and form—of two sets of terms, rather than of two terms simply, as is the case on other occasions of disguise by the principal couple (and principle of coupling) in The Faerie Queene.
Artegall, assuming that his defeat has deprived him of the false Florimell, leaves the tournament in foul temper, allies himself with Scudamour, and plots vengeance on the unwitting Britomart. Finding and attacking her, he soon again finds himself on the ground at the end of her enchanted spear; but this time, like the hound on the undisguised Artegall's helmet (III ii 25), he thrusts at her from below—as if ‘an eger hound’ were thrusting ‘to an Hynd within some covert glade’—delivers ‘her horses hinder parts’ a deadly wound, and thus compels her to battle foot-to-foot with him (IV vi 12–13). The erotic nature of this second encounter in the flesh is even more obvious and violent than the first.
But the eventual outcome of the second is reconciliation or loving ‘accord’—heartfelt harmony, to gloss Spenser's own word etymologically and phonologically (41). When in the course of conflict Artegall suddenly views Britomart's face, her ‘divine’ beauty first numbs his cruel and vengeful purpose and then evokes his wonder and reverence (21–2). She responds similarly to the sight of his face: her hand falls down, refusing longer to wield her ‘wrathfull weapon’ against him (27). Their mutual responses testify to the loveliness of beauty and to the power of love. Through this power, the ‘salvage knight’ assumes his actual name and implicitly his destined identity (28, 31). While this identity promises marriage with Britomart and royal descendants, it impels him first to Book v and the quest of justice. FQ IV thus suggests that Artegall's accord with Britomart enables his quest, yet FQ v begins as if Britomart had never existed. That his love does not accompany him and is absent even as a memory during the first third of Book v casts in a glaring light the special nature of justice and the oddities of Artegall's figure in its early cantos.
Justice, defined as a social rather than a private virtue, is distinguished by the objectivity, exteriority, and impersonality of its concerns. In theory, it deals with things external to the Justicer and to those to whom he ministers justice; it is no respecter of persons. Whether in classical or Christian theory, the Justicer himself is seen as an animation or personification of justice—as an embodied abstraction rather than as a self. By the nature of justice, then, the absence of Britomart from Artegall's quest makes sense: his personal concerns are, properly speaking, irrelevant to it (Anderson 1970c).
But Spenser's portrayal of Artegall in v i–ii strongly suggests that such theoretical irrelevance translates in practice and in human actuality into oversimplification, insensitivity, and simple inhumanity. Framed by quixotic fanfare (v i 1–2, 30, ii 1), Artegall's first exploit imitates the Old Testament judgment of Solomon but in doing so leaves unresolved what to do with the dead lady's head and her murderer. Resourcefully, Artegall determines that the murderer's penalty should be to bear with him his victim's head. As the comparison of the murderer to a ‘rated Spaniell’ suggests, Artegall's justice is appropriate to a barnyard, where wayward farm dogs are similarly disciplined; yet, ‘Much did that Squire Sir Artegall adore,/ For his great justice’: Spenser's tone is decidedly parodic (i 29–30).
Artegall's second exploit, the dismemberment of Lady Munera, and his third, the leveling of the leveling Giant with the scales, indicate still more brutally the reductive inhumanity of his justice. At the same time and increasingly, he responds to the objects of his justice as if he were two beings. While intending the slaughter of Munera, he pities her; later, he disputes rationally and at length with the Giant before Talus summarily settles the matter by shoving the Giant over a cliff. Artegall's dual responses suggest a growing strain between romance knight and virtuous abstraction, between the private man and the animation of justice, between Artegall's personal nature and needs and those of his exteriorized and impersonal ideal. The Justicer's disguising himself in order to participate in the romance world of Marinell's spousals further dramatizes the strain between the two sides of his identity in Book v.
This strain reaches a crisis in canto v, where Artegall battles with the Amazon Radigund, who subdues men, dresses them like women, and compels them shamefully to spin. Artegall first overcomes her, but as he stoops to behead her he discovers in her face the ‘miracle of natures goodly grace’; suddenly he perceives ‘his senses straunge astonishment’ (12), as he earlier did in his battle with Britomart. Caught all too humanly between unacceptable alternatives—insensitive cruelty, the vice corresponding to justice, and vain pity, the vice corresponding to mercy (13)—he willfully and wrongly abandons his sword, the symbol of his justice, and surrenders to her. The differences between this surrender, with its consequences, and his earlier experience with Britomart are instructive. Where earlier his senses overrode his intention and his hand dropped the ‘cruell sword’ of its own accord, here he makes a sudden, rash decision to fling away his sword. Where earlier Britomart's response accorded with his generosity, here Radigund swoops down on him like a bird of prey, exulting in her unearned victory and imprisoning him.
Had Artegall beheaded the beautiful Radigund, his act would have appeared maliciously cruel—personal, hence far more vicious than the extermination of Lady Munera. (Talus, not Artegall, executes justice on Munera; and Radigund conspicuously lacks the ambiguously dehumanizing details of Munera's golden hands and silver feet, of her metal or bejeweled extremities, which recall those of Langland's Lady Meed.) Yet Artegall's surrender to Radigund is hardly right, either. At this point in the poem, however, although Spenser offers insistently ironic reflections on Artegall's ‘goodwill’ (v 17), he offers no dramatically meaningful alternative to the ‘wilfull’ choice Artegall makes. Nor does history. Artegall falls here because after five cantos of dispensing impersonal justice he acts like a private and sentient human being. His choice has much in common with that of Milton's Adam.
Not surprisingly, the first references to Artegall's ‘true love’ (v 57; cf 38, 56)— referring both to his fidelity or ‘trouthe’ and to Britomart, his beloved—occur soon after this fall into a recognizably human context; and love is in time the principle that comes to his rescue. Trapped in Radigund's Rade-gone, the state of an exclusively self-centered woman, Artegall, fallen but paradoxically faithful, images fallen man waiting for mercy, itself an expression of love. Paradoxically too, the state into which he falls, though an unhealthy extreme, operates as a curative balance to the equally extreme impersonality and exteriority of his actions in the opening two cantos of Book v. Only in falling does he find enough awareness of self to remember Britomart, or enough interiority to be mindful of love. His female dress suggests not only his humiliation but also his acquisition of ‘the softer qualities’ proper to a courteous knight or to ‘a civilized and well-balanced person’ (K.Williams 1966:134). His rescue by Britomart suggests, moreover, the internalized transformation of justice through love—that is, the charging of justice with a significance that is fuller, deeper, and more specifically Christian.
On release from Radegone, however, Artegall separates again from Britomart and accompanied only by Talus returns to his quest for justice, which remains a social virtue committed to an exterior world. His challenge is now to realize his internally enriched virtue in a world distinct from the private and privileged concerns of the self. The Justicer himself might have improved as a human being; but the need to channel this change into Tudor history or, in the poet's case, into an objectively (hence, a justly) historical narrative collides with the intractable facts of history itself (cf O'Connell 1977:149–56).
Leaving Radegone, Artegall first encounters then allies himself with Arthur, now his equal; together they move into a landscape increasingly saturated with references to contemporary history. These include the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (Duessa), Henri de Navarre's apostasy to gain the French throne (Burbon and Flourdelis), and the plights of the Netherlands (Belge and her seventeen sons) and Ireland (Irena's island). In reality this is a landscape of moral compromises, disappointments, and failures at least as much as one of absolute truths and achieved ideals. At the end of FQ v, the only sounds Artegall hears will come from Envy, Detraction, and the Blatant Beast.
For a single reason—Artegall's alliance with Arthur—his fortunes on leaving Radegone are better, but only for two cantos. The formation of this alliance in v viii and its subsequent modus operandi suggest why. At first and from the outside, Arthur mistakes Artegall for the pagan he has been pursuing, rectifying his misjudgment only when the Lady Samient (sameness, togetherness) intervenes to stop their fighting and each raises his ventail and exposes to view the face beneath the helmet and thus the person within the armor. Motivated by affection in this recognition scene, Artegall gives himself—more emphatically, his ‘selfe’—to Arthur, best and most Christian of princes; and Arthur, apologizing that he mistook ‘the living for the ded’—the redeemed for the lost—enters into an ‘accordaunce,’ or accord, with Artegall, each swearing faith to the other and ‘either others cause to maintaine mutually’ (viii 12–14). This whole encounter could hardly be designed more clearly to testify to the internalized and transformed value of Artegall's virtue after Radegone or, more specifically, to introduce his cooperation with Arthur in subsequent cantos (Anderson 1976:167–73).
So long as they remain together, the quest for justice they share runs smoothly. Together they overcome the Souldan, a powerful and ungodly tyrant, and Adicia, the principle of injustice the Souldan has wed; then they outmaneuver Malengin, a diabolically rapacious thief and the principle of Guile itself. Finally, during the trial of Duessa, they stand like the two scales of a balance on either side of Mercilla, Arthur feeling compassion for Duessa's ‘dreadfull fate’ and Artegall bent against her ‘with constant firme intent,/For zeale of Justice’ (ix 37, 46, 49). Variously but consistently, their actions complement and complete one another. Because Arthur responds with ‘ruth’ to Duessa, Artegall does not need to. In contrast to his earlier encounters with Munera and Radigund, Artegall is spared a contradiction between passion and abstraction or love and justice.
When Arthur and Artegall separate, however, contradiction closes in upon him with a vengeance. Finding Burbon and Flourdelis besieged by an unruly mob, Artegall swings abruptly back and forth between the responses of a courteous knight and those of an unyielding Justicer. Alternately he sees Burbon's shield as an instrument of war and as a defining moral and religious emblem, and alternately he regards Burbon himself as a fellow knight beset and as a reprehensible apostate (xi 44–57). There is no uncompromising way either to assist Burbon and Flourdelis or to abandon them. He is now caught between the conflicting demands of virtue and history.
Having made the more generous choice of aiding Burbon and thereby through further delay having further endangered Irena, Artegall resumes his primary mission barely in time to stay her execution. But once in her land, he overcomes her oppressor Grantorto (illegal possession on a grand scale), thus freeing her, and then turns his attention to a thorough, radical reform of her rebellious country. In the midst of this reform, however, he is recalled ‘To Faerie Court,’ and on his way there reviled by Envy, Detraction, and the Beast: ‘And still among most bitter wordes they spake,/Most shamefull, most unrighteous, most untrew’ (xii 27, 42). It is fitting that the last bitter words addressed to Artegall should be syntactically ambiguous, the second line here representing either the very words spoken or the poet's indignant judgment on them. In his fate at the end of Book v, Artegall is like—in fact, equal to—Arthur, Lord Grey de Wilton, to whom Spenser was secretary in Ireland and to whom Artegall's figure in v xii alludes. In bleak and deliberate contrast to the idealized reading of history afforded Arthur in Belge's land (x–xi), Artegall's ending, like Grey's, testifies loudly and personally to the frustration, disillusionment, and injustice of an objective and exterior world.
Anderson 1970c; Anderson 1976; Aptekar 1969; Dunseath 1968; O'Connell 1977; K.Williams 1966.
The figure of Arthur—Spenser's ‘image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private morall vertues’ and his proposed hero, both public and private, of The Faerie Queene— elicited a complex cultural and literary response from Elizabethan readers. For them, Prince Arthur was not only Spenser's representation of moral and theological concepts but also the ancient British ‘Arthure, before he was king,’ a figure highly esteemed for centuries. Thus it is important to consider the external political and literary values involved in Spenser's decision to use an ancient British hero whose history was long and complex.
Arthur was primarily an historical figure, the greatest of the British monarchs. Although his career had been extravagantly embellished by enthusiastic chroniclers and writers of romances, it was firmly established in the early histories of the nation and had been elaborately reworked in both literary and political mythology. These histories began with Nennius’ Historia Brittonum (c 800) in which Arthur, a sixth-century dux bellorum, successfully led the British (Celts) against the encroaching Anglo-Saxons in twelve battles. According to the Annales Cambriae (c 950), his career ended in 537 when he was killed at the Battle of Camlann.
By the high Middle Ages, this tradition was well established and had been embellished with folktale and myth. The reputable historian William of Malmesbury, in his Gesta regum anglorum (1125), accepted an historical Arthur, one proclaimed in true histories although his tomb could not be found. While acknowledging that ‘ancient dirges still fable his coming,’ William was careful to separate fact from the fables that had accumulated around Arthur, especially stories of his expected return in order to revive the fortunes of his people.
Few glimpses remain, however, of this folklore Arthur. In one early story, The Spoils of Annwfn (c 900, collected c 1275), Arthur rides to the Celtic Otherworld in his ship Prydwen and returns with a magic cauldron (apparently a cornucopian precursor of the Grail). In another, Culhwch and Olwen (about 1100, included in the Mabinogion), he has acquired a court and has conquered lands beyond Britain; he has a resident magician, famous weapons all with names, a queen named Gwenhwyvar, a nephew Gwalchmei (Gawain), and the loyal retainers Bedwyr (Bedivere) and Kei (Kay).
By about 1139, Geoffrey of Monmouth had completed his Historia regum Britanniae, an account of the history of the Britons on which many later histories are based. Arthur figures as a glorious British monarch and, at the height of his career, Emperor of the West. According to Geoffrey, he was conceived when his father Uther Pendragon, with the aid of Merlin's magic, tricked his mother Igerne (‘the Lady Igrayne’ in the Letter to Raleigh) by taking the form of her husband. Raised in secrecy away from his father's court, Arthur succeeded to Uther's throne at the age of fifteen; he then subdued the Saxons, expanded his control over Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, Gothland, and the Orkneys, and established peace for a period of twelve years. When Roman ambassadors arrived demanding tribute, he rejected them and set sail for Europe to confront the Roman forces, leaving his nephew Mordred as vicegerent Having conquered them, Arthur was about to cross the Alps when word arrived that Mordred had usurped the throne. The king returned to Britain and finally killed his nephew in Cornwall; but during this final battle he was seriously wounded, whereupon he was taken to the Isle of Avalon to be healed.
Later historians such as the Norman poet Wace (Roman de Brut 1155) and his English translator and adaptor, Layamon (Brut c 1200), accepted Geoffrey's history though other historians were skeptical. Reputable clerics such as William of Newburgh in his Historia rerum anglicarum (c 1196–8) condemned Geoffrey for passing off fabulous tales as history, for pretending that the ravings of an unknown magician (Merlin) were actually prophecy, and for writing in Latin to make everything look honest.
In Geoffrey's hands, however, Arthur is both an ‘historical’ imperialist and a potential hero of romance. He fights giants, distinguishes himself in single combat, and dispenses aid and honor from his court—a fusion of ‘history’ and romance that became fertile ground for the development of Arthurian legend in the Middle Ages.
Late in the twelfth century, Chrétien de Troyes produced five Arthurian romances. Influenced chiefly by Geoffrey and Chrétien, later writers created an intricate Arthurian empire, filled with chivalry, courtly love, and the remnants of primitive myth, in which Arthur's knights undertake numerous quests to defeat those hostile to the Round Table and its values. While for Chrétien Arthur is at times a figure of some scorn (Erec et Enide, Lancelot), in later romances such as the Didot Perceval (c 1200) he is portrayed as an established king of renown and the paragon of chivalry, from whose court individual knights emerge on adventures, the most important of which is the quest for the Grail. This mysterious vessel, first described by Chrétien in Perceval, rapidly became identified (following Celtic myths) as the chalice of the Last Supper, guarded by a Grail King who traced his descent from Joseph of Arimathea.
In this continental tradition, Arthur had varying degrees of political significance; hence the geography of these romances, much like Spenser's Fairyland, tends to be ambiguous, with the action placed in a dreamlike landscape in which moral, spiritual, and cultural questions can be explored and, at times, resolved. In some romances, like Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival (c 1205), the quest for the Grail spiritualizes the Arthurian world; in others, like the Vulgate La Queste del saint graal (c 1215–35), the Grail calls into question the values of the Round Table as its Arthurian knights are forced to confront the secular codes by which they live, and often to reject them if they are to achieve salvation.
Malory's Morte Darthur (pub 1485), the version of Arthurian romance most readily available to Spenser's readers, can be (and was) read either as endorsing or as condemning the Arthurian world. It is often considered a nostalgic romance of peace written during the Wars of the Roses, depicting the evolution of moral, social, and eventually spiritual order (symbolized by the Round Table) in a politically chaotic world. Yet it may be argued that the romance reveals a world controlled by a revenge code based on an inordinate sense of personal honor, a world that collapses because of an act of incest committed by Arthur himself, an adulterous affair between his Queen Guinevere and Lancelot, and the helplessness of the knights in the face of sin and guilt. In its later episodes, as in the Vulgate Queste, the quest for the Grail confronts certain knights, particularly Lancelot and his son Galahad, with the need to reject secular values and engage in spiritual battle against sin.
Sixteenth-century readers disagreed about the value of Arthurian romances like Malory's. Ascham denounced them in his Scholemaster (1570) as tales of ‘open mans slaughter, and bold bawdrye’ (ed 1904:231). Erasmus thought them nonsense. Nashe considered them ‘fantasticall dreames of those exiled Abbie-lubbers’ (ed 1904–10, 1:11). Even E.K., in his gloss to SC, Aprill 120, attacked ‘certain fine fablers and lowd lyers, such as were the Authors of King Arthure the great and such like.’ By contrast, in his epilogue to The Book of the Ordre of Chyvalry (1484?), Caxton laments, ‘O ye knyghtes of Englond where is the custome and usage of noble chyvalry that was used in the dayes [of King Arthur]... Ther shalle ye see manhode curtosye and gentylnesse’ (ed 1928:82– 3). Sidney maintains that ‘honest King Arthur will never displease a soldier’ (Defence of Poetry ed 1973b:105–6). Yet, however variously interpreted, Malory's romance and others continued to be read. Although it would seem arguable that the Matter of Britain should have run its course in England by the sixteenth century, and that the Reformation must have raised antagonism to the old Roman religion of the romances, there were five editions of the Morte Darthur between 1485 and the end of the sixteenth century when Spenser chose Arthur as hero of his own romance.
The sixteenth century produced considerable debate about the historical Arthur as well. In his preface to Malory, Caxton summons up an impressive list of ‘Arthuriana’ to rebut disbelievers, including Arthur's sepulchre at Glastonbury (where the monks claimed to have discovered his bones in 1191), a royal wax seal at Westminster Abbey, Gawain's skull at Dover, and the Round Table at Winchester Castle, where it is still found today. Chroniclers and antiquarians traveled the country to examine the evidence. Some, like John Rastell, were skeptical; others, like John Leland, were impressed. The latter journeyed to Glastonbury to handle the lead cross, inscribed ‘Hic jacet sepultus inclitus rex Arturius in insula Avalonia’ (‘Here lies buried the renowned King Arthur in the Isle of Avalon’), claimed to have been found with Arthur's bones. Camden offered an engraving of the cross in the 1607 edition of his Britannia (p 166).
Yet some Elizabethans believed, and some believe today, that Arthur's bones still rested at Glastonbury, or were irretrievably lost at its dissolution in 1539. Not only Avalon but Camelot itself had been identified, again by Leland. Having traveled to Cadbury Hill just south of Glastonbury, he wrote, ‘At the very south ende of the chirch of South-Cadbyri standith Camallate, sumtyme a famose toun or castelle, apon a very torre or hille... The people can telle nothing ther but that they have hard say that Arture much resortid to Camalat’ (ed 1907–10, 1:151).
The debate over the historical Arthur had been initiated by Henry VII's Italian-born historian, Polydore Vergil, who directly questioned the existence of Arthur and the Round Table (Anglica historia). In response, Leland's influential Assertio inclytissimi Arturii regis Britanniae (1544, tr 1582) was followed by works by such Welsh writers or writers on Wales as Arthur Kelton (1546, 1547), Sir John Price (1573), and Thomas Churchyard (1587). Richard Harvey, brother of Gabriel Harvey, also wrote on the subject in 1593.
The major English chroniclers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, such as Hardyng, Grafton, Fabyan, and Holinshed, were more cautious in using familiar Arthurian material from Geoffrey of Monmouth. They record Arthur's battles against the Saxons, the names of his weapons, and Geoffrey's vision of a king who unites Britain under a monarchy. They allow him some glory on the continent, record his final battle with Mordred, and accept in detail the discovery of his bones at Glastonbury. This historical conservatism continued into the next century in writers such as the historian John Speed and the poet William Warner.
Yet the Arthur of history and romance was much less important in the sixteenth century than the political Arthur. Geoffrey's Historia had included a set of cryptic prophecies by Merlin, predicting a time when British (ie, Welsh and Cornish) fortunes, which had collapsed after the Saxon invasions, would once again arise, led by Arthur, the once and future king (rex quondam rexque futurus) who would bring peace to the land.
Such prophecies were considered, especially in Wales, to be fulfilled when the Welsh Henry Tudor gained the throne in 1485. Henry made astute political use of the myth as part of a conscious and continued effort to consolidate his authority: he not only sponsored genealogists to establish his claim to Arthurian descent through his grandfather, Owen Tudor, but also chose the name Arthur for his first son, who was born at Winchester and later proclaimed the first Prince of Wales (see Anglo 1961–2 for a different view of Henry VII's Arthurian propaganda).
Arthur Tudor died, however, shortly after his marriage to Katherine of Aragon in 1501. His brother succeeded as Henry VIII and, inspired by his father, had the Round Table (already painted in the Tudor colors, white and green) repaired in 1517. As Arthur redivivus, Henry consciously played out the romance role of Arthur's illustrious descendant. By the 1530s, however, his notion of British empire had come to involve more than self-flattery. As he escalated his struggle with Rome over an annulment of his marriage to his dead brother's wife, he threatened to move England toward ecclesiastical independence, for which he needed historical justification.
This he found in the ancient British monarchy, alluded to in the prologue of the Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533) which began, ‘Where by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world’ (Elton 1982:353). The Anglica historia was finally published in 1534 when Henry VIII apparently decided that Polydore Vergil's willingness to endorse Henry's imperial position was more important than his reluctance to follow Tudor desires in endorsing the more fanciful Arthurian legends. Polydore confirmed that the imperial crown was the inheritance of all British monarchs from the time of Constantine the Great, so that, although he discredited Arthur's fabulous empire, he saw Arthur and Henry as the inheritors of a British empire already in existence.
After the Act in Restraint of Appeals, the term ‘Imperial Crown’ became customary in sixteenth-century government documents. Even Mary retained the title of Empress when she relinquished the title of Supreme Head of the Church; and Elizabeth's Act of Supremacy of 1559 affirmed that her crown was the ‘Imperial Crown’ once again. By the time of John Dee, Elizabeth's astrologer, the attractiveness of the theory of British empire lay not in its patriotic justification of a precarious throne or of the separation of the British church from the papacy but in its confirmation of England's right to the New World. Dee argued in General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (1577) that Britain possessed a colonial empire because of Arthurian conquests, using materials from Geoffrey to give Elizabeth title to much of Europe and even the New World. (The OED, in fact, credits Dee with having been the first to use the phrase ‘Britysh Empire.’)
Few patriotic English writers were prepared to question any aspect of British Arthurianism. To be sure, in the fifteenth century Lydgate included Arthur in his Fall of Princes, but he carefully ascribes the collapse of Arthur's power not to pride but to Mordred's treason. More daring is The Misfortunes of Arthur (1587), a Senecan revenge tragedy performed before the Queen, in which Thomas Hughes presents Arthur as destroyed by fortune because of his ambition and incest. Richard Lloyd, in A Briefe Discourse of...the Nine Worthies (1584), has Arthur summarize his career and then condemn himself for incest with his married sister; Mordred is shown as the agent of divine retribution in murdering him.
For readers of The Faerie Queene, Arthur was already a complex figure. In spite of Ascham's denunciation, Arthurian romances remained popular throughout the sixteenth century. Moreover, Arthur was a favorite figure in public spectacles and popular mythology: he appeared in pageants, and a society of archers was named after him (see Millican 1932). It was left to Spenser, while echoing all these aspects of sixteenth-century Arthurianism, to recreate Arthurian romance as a vehicle of spiritual and ethical instruction, one which would embody his age's concerns, aspirations, beliefs, and vision of its own perfected self.
William Caxton 1928 The Prologues and Epilogues ed W.J.B.Crotch, EETS os 176 (London); Elton 1982; Leland ed 1907–10.
Sydney Anglo 1961–2 ‘The British History in Early Tudor Propaganda’ BJRL 44:17–48; Anglo 1969; Geoffrey Ashe, et al, eds 1968 The Quest for Arthur's Britain (London); Richard W.Barber 1986 King Arthur: Hero and Legend (Woodbridge, Suffolk; first pub 1961 as Arthur of Albion); Diane Bornstein 1976 ‘William Caxton's Chivalric Romances and the Burgundian Renaissance in England’ ES 57:1–10; James P. Carley 1984 ‘Polydore Vergil and John Leland on King Arthur. The Battle of the Books’ Interpretations (Memphis) 15.2:86–100; Richard Cavendish 1978 King Arthur and the Grail: The Arthurian Legends and Their Meaning (London); E.K.Chambers 1927 Arthur of Britain (London); John Darrah 1981 The Real Camelot: Paganism and the Arthurian Romances (London); Christopher Dean 1987 Arthur of England: English Attitudes to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Toronto); Robert Huntington Fletcher 1966 The Arthurian Material in the Chronicles, Especially Those of Great Britain and France 2nd ed, expanded by a bibliography and critical essay for the period 1905–65 by Roger Sherman Loomis (New York); Greenlaw 1932; Denys Hay 1952 Polydore Vergil: Renaissance Historian and Man of Letters (Oxford); Stephen Knight 1983 Arthurian Literature and Society (London); Norris J.Lacy, ed 1986 The Arthurian Encyclopedia (New York); Loomis 1959; Loomis 1963; Merriman 1973; Millican 1932; Rosemary Morris 1982 The Character of King Arthur in Medieval Literature (Cambridge); D.D.R.Owen 1983 ‘Arthurian Legend’ in
European Writers: The Middle Ages and the Renaissance ed William T.H.Jackson and George Stade (New York) 1:137–60; Reiss, et al (forthcoming); R.F. Treharne 1967 The Glastonbury Legends: Joseph of Arimathea, the Holy Grail and King Arthur (London); Jessie L. Weston 1920 From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge).
Despite its relatively slight use of traditional Arthurian lore, The Faerie Queene may be regarded as scarcely less important than Malory's Morte Darthur in transmitting the figure of Arthur to later English writers. It was Spenser's work that kept Arthur before poets and readers between 1634 and 1816, a time when Malory was unprinted and little known. Perhaps more important, Spenser by enhancing the image of Arthur provided later writers with an idealized hero unrelated to the dissolution of civilization represented by Malory, a character totally unlike the bold but morally flawed and frequently unwise king of medieval verse and prose romances. Spenser created a figure that, while recalling the old nationalistic spirit and mythic appeal of the early pseudo-histories and oral legends, accrued new political, moral, and religious dimensions.
Although most post-medieval English writers have drawn on stories found in Malory but ignored by Spenser—the formation of the Round Table, Guinevere and Lancelot's illicit love, Mordred's rebellion—their depiction of Arthur has borne the imprint of Spenser's noble prince. This kingly ideal continues to be a potent, though increasingly humanized, force for good in a world where moral evil, whether represented as a dragon or a malignant political ideology, must be opposed.
Spenser's radical revision of Arthur and his combination of romance with epic expanded the already wide range of tones and themes of medieval Arthurian works, helping to engender remarkably varied new treatments of the legend from the seventeenth century to th e present. Ranging from episodic romance to tightly unified novel, from sentimentalism to satire, from allegory and mysticism to realism and surrealism, Arthurian literature in its abundance (more than 400 works written since 1800) and diversity represents perhaps the most vibrant and variegated legend found in English letters.
Few of Spenser's contemporaries or immediate successors followed his lead in featuring Arthur as a significant and noble character. Two romances, Christopher Middleton's Chinon of England (1597) and Richard Johnson's Tom a Lincolne (c 1599– 1607) imitate the medieval pattern of making Arthur's court the center of chivalry from which quests originate. Neither writer emulates Spenser's practice of introducing an idealized Arthur at strategic moments to assist the lesser heroes and exemplify virtues they are striving to attain. Although in both works the eponymous hero meets a fairy monarch, neither the Fairy King who tests Chinon nor the Fairy Queen who bears Tom a Lincolne's son derives anything from Spenser's Gloriana.
Ralph Knevet's seventeenth-century imitation and continuation of The Faerie Queene employs Spenser's concept of Arthur as a model and a unifying device (see also Renaissance *imitations and adaptations). The preface announces that Knevet's Supplement of the Faery Queene (c 1633) will fulfill Spenser's intention, expressed in the Letter to Raleigh, of illustrating ‘the other part of polliticke vertues’ in the person of Arthur, ‘after that hee came to be king.’ As in The Faerie Queene, each of Knevet's books, written in Spenserian stanzas and numbered 7 through 9, features a knight of Gloriana's court who embodies a separate virtue, whereas Arthur, linking the three books, epitomizes all the virtues perfectly achieved and combined. Arthur in Book 7 knights the hero, later rescues him, and vanquishes a giant. In Book 8, he fights a tournament to save a damsel who has petitioned Gloriana for help. Book 9 relates the story of his court. These incidents, like Spenser's Arthurian episodes, while having no specific parallel or source in Arthurian tradition, derive from a fund of familiar romance materials.
The Arthurian strain is less pronounced in another seventeenth-century continuation of The Faerie Queene, Samuel Sheppard's The Faerie King (c 1650). The work imitates Spenser's manner by depicting allegorically the principal political events of the present, with the intention of glorifying Charles I. The fact that Arthur never actually appears in the work, though his sword is mentioned, suggests how poorly Sheppard grasped Spenser's use of Arthur as a structuring device and thematic tool, and also how substantially literary interest in the king was waning.
The associations with the Tudor monarchy, which Spenser had stressed, recommended Arthurian legend to partisans of the Stuart dynasty. Conversely, seventeenthcentury supporters of Parliament and Protestant reform dismissed it as mere fiction, tracing the origins of English government not through Arthur to Brutus, but through the laws of Arthur's Saxon enemies. Partly because of these political implications, three major poets of the century abandoned their plans to write epics on the Matter of Britain. Although Jonson projected an Arthurian work, he rejected both Spenser's stanza form and ‘matter’ (see ‘Conversations with Drummond’ in Jonson ed 1925–52, 1:132). Milton, in Mansus 80–4 (c 1639) and Epitaphium Damonis 161–8 (1639), spoke of treating Arthurian story in epic fashion. After serving in the Commonwealth government, however, he mentioned Arthur only briefly and skeptically in his History of Britain (c 1644–9) and memorialized his early interest in him merely through allusions in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Dryden's unrealized plans for an Arthurian epic were influenced by The Faerie Queene. He announced that ‘after Virgil and Spencer’ he would allegorically depict ‘living Friends and Patrons of the Noblest Families’ and suggest ‘the Events of future Ages, in the Succession of our Imperial Line’ (Discourse concerning Satire 1693, in ed 1956-, 4:23). His ‘Dramatick Opera’ King Arthur (1691), which represents Arthur's efforts to win his betrothed, blind Emmeline, from a wicked Saxon magician, though essentially depicting the King of the pseudohistories and oral legend, shares with The Faerie Queene the purpose of celebrating the ruling monarch by association with Arthur, and possibly echoes the Bower of Bliss (FQ II xii 63–8) when Arthur resists the temptation represented by bathing damsels.
Two epic poems by Richard Blackmore at the end of the seventeenth century reveal substantial indebtedness to Spenser. Their titles, Prince Arthur (1695) and King Arthur (1697), reflect his adherence to Spenser's plan of treating Arthur's career before and after he became king. His epics, like The Faerie Queene, allegorize characters and contemporary events, especially Catholic and Protestant controversies, and praise the ruling William of Orange in the character of Arthur. According to his preface, Prince Arthur, which recounts the young hero's rout of the Saxons and conquest of England, Ireland, and Scotland, follows the rules of epic literature broken by Ariosto and Spenser, who became ‘lost in a Wood of Allegories... wild, unnatural, and extravagant.’ Although Blackmore abandons Spenser's practice of using a separate figure to embody each of the virtues represented by Arthur, Prince Arthur like The Faerie Queene examines holiness as the first virtue. The work may show more particular indebtedness to its Spenserian model by including a review of English history before Arthur's reign and ‘forecasting’ the future kings of Britain, culminating in the present monarch. King Arthur follows Spenser's plan to illustrate the political virtues by testing Arthur's use of reason to achieve self-control. Some of the narrative and descriptive details closely echo Spenser's: Arthur defeats a dragon in an episode recalling the Red Cross Knight's adventure, and like Guyon (FQ II xii 42–87), he resists the temptations of sensuality in the garden of an enchantress who turns men into beasts.
Not until the early nineteenth century do English writers again treat Arthurian story in a lofty epic manner. Reginald Heber's fragment Morte D'Arthur (begun c 1810, pub 1830) reshapes and inventively expands material from the first part of Malory in Spenserian stanzas and archaic language. Less successful is Edward Bulwer-Lytton's King Arthur (1848), an attempt ‘to construct from the elements of national romance, something approaching to the completeness of epic narrative’ (preface). Bulwer transports Arthurian characters to improbable settings and adventures (Arthur battles walruses at the North Pole among Innuit pygmies), emphasizing by unintentional ludicrousness the contrasting greatness of Tennyson's achievement in raising ‘national romance’ to the stature of epic.
Although Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1842–85) stresses by its title the work's nature as a series of separate pieces, its account of the rise and fall of Arthurian civilization in twelve unified books invites comparison with the epic proportions of The Faerie Queene; and it was greeted in its first issue of four idylls as promising a full epic that would be national, Christian, and universal. The stories come from Malory and The Mabinogion and center on the Round Table, featuring the coming and passing of Arthur, notable love affairs, and the Grail quest. Despite a story line entirely different from The Faerie Queene, the parallels are clear in Tennyson's final overall scheme of a dozen separate tales, usually focusing on various protagonists but with Arthur, representing the ideals of the perfect society, central to each. Verbal echoes and striking details also suggest Tennyson's mindfulness of Spenser. Like The Faerie Queene, the idylls celebrate the ruling monarch through the figure of Arthur and allude to contemporary concerns. Tennyson like Spenser associates his king with Christ and provides in the example of Arthur, along with the negative example of imperfect knights, a pattern for virtuous gentlemen. He allies his king with Spenser's noble prince by insisting that his Arthur is ‘ldeal manhood closed in real man’ rather than the wanton, warring figure found in Geoffrey of Monmouth and Malory (‘To the Queen’ 38–44). The Idylls demonstrate in both the inadequate courtiers and the exemplary king the interconnection of private and public virtues which Spenser indicated would be his complete theme.
Despite Tennyson's concentration on society's failure to implement the King's ideals, the conception of Arthur which he shared with Spenser posits the possibility that individuals may achieve otherworldly perfection. But much as Spenser accentuates the contrast between ideals and human actualities by juxtaposing the chronicles of Fairyland and Britain, Tennyson shows the perfect man, Galahad, leaving Camelot for the celestial city. This theme, which underlies the movement of Spenser's hero from Britain to Gloriana's court, is perhaps reiterated in Tennyson's concluding suggestion, only tentatively expressed in a simile, that the King may pass from a desolate Britain to a fair city where he is welcomed like a returning hero (‘The Passing of Arthur’ 457–61).
Tennyson's resurrection of Arthur as the subject of grand poetry was resourceful and daring, for since Spenser no work of comparable stature had made serious use of Arthurian material. After Blackmore's ponderous epics, the legends had primarily been exploited for comic and satiric purposes. During the Age of Reason, a pervasive hostility to tales of chivalry and romance caused writers to ignore Arthurian legend, which they equated with superstition, passion, and barbarity (see Addison's criticism of Spenser in An Account of the Greatest English Poets 1694, written, as he later admitted, before he had actually read Spenser). A striking and representative depiction of Arthur at this time is the king in Fielding's burlesque, Tragedy of Tragedies, or The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (3 eds 1730–1). Father of Tom's beloved Huncamunca, Arthur is here a drunken, absurd figure, reminiscent of chapbook representations, who serves Fielding's overriding purpose of mocking extravagant contemporary tragedies.
Scott's romance The Bridal of Triermain (1813), which depicts a lover's quest in Plantagenet England based on the Sleeping Beauty story, features an Arthurian episode with comic nuances. Like Spenser's work, it employs the device derived from Chaucer's Sir Thopas of a quest for a lady encountered in a dream. The allegorical temptations overcome by the hero in the narrative which frames the Arthurian episode resemble Guyon's temptations in the Bower of Bliss (FQ II xii 55–68). Wordsworth in The Egyptian Maid (1835) similarly fashions a wry, original episode using familiar Arthurian characters. A number of works by less significant writers draw on Arthurian legend to satirize literary styles and social and political practices, two of the most engaging being John Hookham Frere's ottava rima burlesque The Monks and the Giants (1817–18) and Thomas Love Peacock's prose romance The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829), which derives material from medieval Welsh lore. Most durable of the nineteenth-century satires is Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). Through the device of time-travel, the novel exposes the barbarity of the Middle Ages and the flawed political and social conditions of Twain's own day, while also suggesting the genuine nobility of Arthur which is obscured by his society's pomposity and cruelty.
Similar satire, comedy, and burlesque continue in twentieth-century fiction. James Branch Cabell's romance novel Jurgen (1919) traces the adventures of a thirteenthcentury pawnbroker who, traveling to other eras, enjoys love affairs with Guenevere, Helen of Troy, and a Persian goddess. This eccentric work sarcastically exposes discrepancies between the chivalric code and human behavior, but emphasizes that myths have value precisely because they depict ideals not yet practiced by society. T.H.White's Once and Future King (1938–58), which like The Faerie Queene takes up Arthur's story before he becomes king, and Thomas Berger's Arthur Rex (1978) resemble virtually all the comic versions of the legend in depicting an Arthur totally different from Spenser's. They return to Malory's flawed figure but present his imperfections not as sin so much as inescapable human infirmity. And like most humorous treatments of the legend, they also demonstrate the grandeur of Arthur's vision and the pathos of human inability to enact it.
Whereas for Malory, Spenser, and Tennyson a central theme of Arthurian material is the need for individuals to espouse the social and moral ideals embodied in the Round Table or Gloriana's court, many nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers probe the plight of the individual at odds with society. Among Tennyson's contemporaries, Pre-Raphaelite painters and poets such as William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and A.C.Swinburne adapt Arthurian legend to imply that personal liberty must be won in part by flouting the religious and social values of the chivalric world. This theme is taken up by a number of poetic dramatizations of Arthurian love stories written from the 1890s to the 1920s. While some, such as J.Comyns Carr's King Arthur (1895), depict the Lancelot-Guinevere tale, most, including Thomas Hardy's Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall (1923) and John Masefield's Tristan and Isolt (1927), focus on the related love story of Tristram and Isolde. The most ambitious in conception are four plays, collectively entitled Launcelot and Guenevere: A Poem in Dramas (1891–1907), completed by Richard Hovey, who projected a cycle of three trilogies recording the history of the Round Table.
The psychological turmoil investigated in these dramas has throughout the twentieth century become the focus of more artful poetry and fiction. Edwin Arlington Robinson in three substantial narrative poems (Merlin 1917, Lancelot 1920, Tristram 1927) examines the psychological intricacies of the characters against the backdrop of a civilization verging on disaster. This view of a world at war, which dominates Arthurian fiction of the 1930s and 405, also marks many of the narratives written in the 1970s and 80s. Endeavoring to recast traditional materials in the light of modern understanding of history and psychology, some of these recent novels have debased Arthur's character while emphasizing the primitive setting, the mud, stench, and carnage of Dark-Age England, as well as the complex psychological ingredients of incest, Oedipal conflicts, and adultery in the stories of Mordred's rebellion and Guinevere's infidelity. Arthur has been depicted as a sadistic fool and a crippled megalomaniac. Most often, he is simply a good man struggling to preserve some stability and nobility in a gravely imperfect world.
The supernatural and symbolic facets of Arthurian legend are accentuated in such novels as Charles Williams’ War in Heaven (1930), John Cowper Powys’ Glastonbury Romance (1932), and C.S.Lewis’ That Hideous Strength (1945), and in such poems as Williams’ Taliessin through Logres (1938) and The Region of the Summer Stars (1944). These works emphasize the mystical Grail lore and depict the eternal conflict between forces of light and darkness. Whereas the magical ingredients and the struggle of good against evil often reappear in comparatively trivial science fiction, important poets such as T.S.Eliot (The Waste Land 1922) and David Jones (In Parenthesis 1937, The Anathemata 1952, The Sleeping Lord 1974) have used the mystic elements of Arthurian legend in powerful evocations of modern desolation. Like these poets, novelists James Joyce (Finnegans Wake 1939) and Walker Percy (Lancelot 1977) have demonstrated the pervasiveness of Arthurian myth in modern literary consciousness by employing traditional material as important leitmotifs (see *fantasy literature).
Whether Arthur's story is placed in elegant settings of romance or in repugnant naturalistic scenes, whether it is treated as allegory, psychological realism, or sciencefiction fantasy, continuing interest in the legend suggests the appeal of its mythic dimension, transmitted to subsequent generations not by the early chroniclers or modern historians and psychiatrists, but by the romances of Malory, Spenser, and Tennyson. As an embodiment of the endeavor to order experience, to civilize the brutal, worship the good, and add grace to life, Arthur has survived Enlightenment neglect and reincarnations in vastly inept writing. Despite persistent debunkings, he cannot be invoked in modern literature without bearing vestiges of both the tragic figure of Malory and the stainless hero of Spenser and Tennyson.
Comprehensive lists and discussions of Arthurian works written in English after Spenser may be found in Roberta Florence Brinkley 1932 Arthurian Legend in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore); Howard Maynadier 1907 The Arthur of the English Poets (Boston); Merriman 1973; Millican 1932; Reiss, et al (forthcoming); Beverly Taylor and Elisabeth Brewer 1983 The Return of King Arthur: British and American Arthurian Literature since 1900 (Cambridge); Raymond H.Thompson 1985 The Return from Avalon: A Study of the Arthurian Legend in Modern Fiction (Westport, Conn); Elise van der VenTen Bensel 1925 The Character of King Arthur in English Literature (Amsterdam).
King Arthur appears as a character in twenty Middle English romances written between the latter half of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, and representing all the ME dialectal regions. They are Alliterative Morte Arthure, Arthur, The Avowing of King Arthur, The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne, Golagros and Gawane, The Grene Knight, Lancelot of the Laik, Lybeaus Desconus, Merlin by Herry Lovelich, Merlin: A Prose Romance, Le Morte Arthur, Of