The frequently allegorical or magical landscape of romance on land often includes three elements: forests, clearings, and caves. Typical forests or woods are the magic wood of Oberon in Huon of Bordeaux (whose delightful variety and sudden storm resemble features of Spenser's opening canto) and the enchanted forest of Ismeno in Tasso's Gerusalemme, whose windings (like those of Spenser's Wood of Error) seem to reflect the uncertainties and winding paths of the romance narrative itself. Clearings or open spaces in the woods seem to be related to clearings or luminous moments in the narrative. Caves may variously house magicians or instructor-hermits (like the one in Chrétien's Perceval or Spenser's Contemplation), oracles, ogres (Homer's Polyphemus, Virgil's Cacus and his romance descendants, Ariosto's Caligorante, or Spenser's Malengin), or enchantresses (as in the obvious erotic associations of Calypso's grotto in the Odyssey); or, conversely, they may be a prison for damsels in distress (Heliodorus’ Chariclea, Spenser's Pastorella), a demonic counterpart of the female romance enclosure, the enclosed garden of the Song of Solomon and Romance of the Rose, or its already potentially sinister version, the garden in which a young wife is imprisoned by an old and jealous husband (as in Marie de France's Guigemar and Chaucer's Merchant's Tale).
Often animistic or demonological, romance landscape is frequently strewn with fairy rings, geniuses guarding its groves and fertile places, and magical, crippling, or healing wells, such as the storm-creating fountain of Chrétien's Yvain or the Fountains of Love and Hate in Boiardo and Ariosto. Recurrent within it is the marvelous but often ambivalent garden or locus amoenus, such as the Gardens of Alcinous (which Odysseus pauses to admire and which seem related to the temptation to suspend his quest in Phaeacia), the clearly erotic Garden of the Joy in Chrétien's Erec et Enide, and the dangerous simulacra of Eden in the enchanted gardens of Circe's descendants in Boiardo and Ariosto, Trissino, Tasso, Camoens, and Spenser (both in the Bower of Bliss and the baneful pleasure garden of Muiopotmos). Equally frequent in medieval and Renaissance romance are enchanted castles and houses of instruction, such as the Castle of Corbenic (where Gawain, in the Vulgate Lancelot, is uncertain how to interpret the signs he sees), the enchanted castle of Ariosto's Atlante (from whose spell not all its prisoners are happy to be released, 4.39), and the Castle of Enquiry in Perlesvaus. Though some of these places initiate and others imprison, virtually every spellbound castle in romance is a potential house of instruction, if its temporary residents, even belatedly, are able to recognize its significance.
Often the landscape as well as the plot of romance is labyrinthine, a generic feature Ariosto seems to be emphasizing in his hippogriff which, lifting knights out of the mazes of their earthbound wandering, implicitly recalls Daedalus as both the architect of the original labyrinth and the mythical inventor of flight. Theseus’ quest to kill the Minotaur at the center of this labyrinth is recalled in the labyrinthine or spider-web structure of Dante's Inferno with its monstrous Satan at the center, and in the traditional romance pun of Spenser's labyrinthine Wood of Error (error being Latin for labyrinth as well as for wandering or mistake), with its culminating monster.
The inhabitants of the landscape vary widely in different traditions but are typically multiple, in keeping with the romance tendency to sheer proliferation of characters as well as to copia of plot. They include fairy mistresses (in romances from Marie de France's Lanval and the anonymous medieval lai of Guingamor, where the hero, like Rip Van Winkle, is held by a fairy in an otherworld of eternal life for 300 years, to Arthur of Little Britain, Sir Thopas, and The Faerie Queene), magicians and sorcerers (from Merlin in Arthurian romance to the ‘subtil clerk’ of Chaucer's Franklin's Tale), pirates and brigands (from Greek romance to FQ VI), dwarfs (from Chrétien's Erec to FQ I, where the dwarf ’s reduced size and bag of needments may represent a buried reality principle in romance like that embodied in Cervantes’ Sancho Panza or the mocking Astolfo, who though not literally a dwarf begins his career in Ariosto as a muchdisillusioned little myrtle tree), and giants, ranging from terrifying (like the biblical Goliath, the Cyclops of the Odyssey, the raping and child-devouring giant of St Michael's Mount in the alliterative Morte Arthur, or the giant-oppressor L'Orgueilleux ic (like Pulci's Morgante and Margutte). in Huon of Bordeaux) to the friendly or comThese giants often function as threshold symbols guarding the entrance to an adventure (like the biblical Anakim of Deuteronomy, the giants guarding the lower reaches of Dante's Inferno, and the giant herdsman who points the way to the magic fountain in Chrétien's Yvain).
Romance also typically contains animals ranging from menacing (like the dragon whose defeat in Huon of Bordeaux may have provided a model for Spenser) to helpful or protective (like the lions of Yvain or FQ I iv), from initiators into other realms (like the white hind of medieval romance or the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland) to symbolic concentrations of the story's emotional register (like the dead nightingale directly related to the pathos of thwarted love in Marie de France's Laüstic).
The atmosphere of awe or wonder in ro-mance is created in part by its characteristic battery of marvels. Miraculous means of transport are part of the wish-fulfillment dream of freedom from or control over time and space, and are western relatives of the Oriental magic carpet: for example, the self-propelled boat (from Jason's Argo to the anticipations of Phaedria's enchanted skiff in the magic boats of Trissino and Tasso), Ariosto's flying hippogriff, the wooden horse which conveys the dwarf of Valentine and Orson instantly wherever he wishes, and the brass horse which carries its riders wherever they want in Chaucer's Squire's Tale. Magic rings confer invisibility (eg, in Chrétien and Ariosto) or the ability to understand the language of birds (eg, Canacee's ring in the Squire's Tale).
Other marvels include magic shields and marvelous or mysterious swords, from Arthur's Excalibur and the flaming lance of Chrétien's Lancelot to the sword in the Squire's Tale which can heal the wounds it inflicts, like the sword of the Word in Revelation; technological marvels such as the brass men with iron flails in Huon of Bordeaux and similar figures in Arthur of Little Britain, both possible precursors of Spenser's Talus; and the virgin-detecting gadget from Greek romance to FQ IV, a particularly mechanical version of the dialectical impetus in certain forms of romance to separate the true form from its counterfeit. Further marvels include natural prodigies like the green man of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Orrilo in Boiardo and Ariosto, who continue to move despite their dissevered parts, and magically invulnerable heroes like Talos in the Argonautica, who dies only when Medea discovers his Achilles’ heel. They easily shade into the Christian miraculous in the Grail romances and romances clearly related to saints’ legends (such as the medieval Amys et Amiloun); the self-propelled vessels of Breton lai and Arthurian romance, for example, easily combine with the ship symbolizing the church in the Vulgate Queste and Malory.
The other ubiquitous marvel of romance is the book. Boiardo's Innamorato is filled with a series of amazing volumes, from the book Orlando forgets to consult for the riddle of the Sphinx-like monster (1.5.76–8) to the one which reveals the topography of Falerina's mysterious garden (1.24). Ariosto, however, overgoes them all in the book of Logistilla—that true Renaissance marvel, the encyclopedia with an index; it enables Astolfo to undo the series of enchantments which prevent the romance narrative from ending, a process which suggests that the truly remarkable book of romance is the romance itself. In Chrétien, the true inheritor of the progress of chivalry from East to West is the romance of chivalry he himself is creating. This self-reflexive strain emerges in the riddling texts in Shakespeare's comedies and romances, which bear an oblique relation to the plays themselves, and in Spenser's reflections on his own poem in the proem to FQ VI.
The form of quest romance is generally sequential, whether that sequence takes the chivalric form of avanture or the marine form of the perilous sea voyage (from the Odyssey and Greek romance to the medieval Voyage of St Brendan and Camoens). Romances are therefore often filled with threshold symbols of transition or initiation, such as gates and doors, or dreams: the Odyssey, for example, contains a series of such symbolic thresholds, from the shore on which Odysseus meets Nausicaa to the trancelike sleep in which he is transported to the shores of Ithaca, a linking of sleep or dream with thresholds or transitions which also figure prominently in Dante's Purgatorio. Dream-visions crucial to pivotal moments in the plot also appear in Arthurian romances such as the alliterative Morte Arthur, which relates Arthur's premonitory dream of Fortune's wheel, and in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. The temporal, journeying form of the romance also frequently transforms the daily activity of eating into the ritual form of the feast: in the Odyssey, the marvelous feasts offered to the journeying Odysseus and Telemachus have as their negative counterpart the temptation of a premature or forbidden eating (the Oxen of Helios) or a cannibalistic feast (Cyclops, Laestrygonians) in which the guest is not eater but eaten.
Romances are also often filled with objects or episodes which, like dreams or prophetic oracles, seem to function as signs: mysterious processions, symbols like the Bleeding Lance and vessels of the Grail procession. Frequently, wall hangings, tapestries, or paintings reflect or comment on the plot itself, providing a prospect or retrospect on it (as in the Vulgate Mort Artu, where Lancelot's paintings betray to Arthur the story of Guinevere's adultery, and in Orlando furioso 33, where future history is depicted in the wall paintings at the Castle of Tristan), a story significantly related to it (as in the story of Venus and Adonis in the tapestries at Castle Joyous in FQ III i), or a spatial summary of events sequentially presented in the flow of the narrative.
Other romance motifs are clearly linked to the progress of the narrative or the understanding of its events. The motif of the hunt, in which a knight pursues an animal into a forest which then envelops them both, is a masculine erotic motif; its amatory overtones emerge in the English punning on hart/heart and deer/dear, and in such scenes as the hunt of the sailors in Lusiads 9. In the nightmare reversal of this motif of linear pursuit, the hunter becomes the hunted, as in the story of Actaeon, and in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight where the hunts of Sir Bercilak have their counterpart in the lady's erotic pursuit of Gawain. But the hunt is also a potentially demonic double of the quest itself, an extreme version of its resolute pursuit of goal or meaning. In the Grail romances, the quest is as much to comprehend the meaning of the Grail as to possess a particular object; and in Wolfram's Parzival, the impulse of questing must be tempered by an ability to wait patiently for revelation or guidance, just as in Spenser the relation of temperance to the tempering of an obsessive quest is suggested in Phedon's demonic hunt (II iv). Spenser speaks explicitly in the proem to Book II of the obsessive ‘hunt’ for meaning, a hunt whose simultaneously mechanical and apocalyptic fervor may be suggested in the figure of Talus threshing out truth in Book V.
In a different relation to the narrative, the motif of the entranced gaze upon the face or symbol of the beloved provides moments of suspension, temporary stability, and reflection in the quest-narrative's sequential procession, as do the similar epiphanies of Venus and Aeneas in Aeneid 1: Percival's staring at the blood drops in the snow in Chrétien, the Narcissus gaze of the Romance of the Rose, Dante's fixing his eyes on Beatrice in Purgatorio 31–2, the awe-inducing epiphanies of the normally helmeted Bradamante in Boiardo and Ariosto and of Britomart in Spenser, and Calidore ‘rapt with pleasaunce’ by the sight of the dance on Mount Acidale. Such moments, however, also threaten to suspend the narrative permanently, or to freeze its forward movement. In romance influenced by the Bible, all lush gardens after Eden are potential false paradises like Sodom (which promises fertility but ends as a sterile Dead Sea—a progression figured spatially by Tasso's placing of Armida's garden on a ‘sterile lake’ like the dead or idle lake beneath Spenser's Phaedria in FQ II). Any epiphany short of the final epiphany risks a suspension of movement, a problem suggested when Radigund (whose face Artegall sees, as he had seen Britomart's) becomes a potentially entrapping Dido to Artegall's Aeneas in FQ V.
Another romance motif intimately linked to the narrative progression is the exposure of an enchantress, from the stripping of the biblical harlot, the overcoming of Circe in the Odyssey, and the story of the lamia-wife in Philostratus (Life of Apollonius 4.25), to the stripping of the Siren in Dante's Purgatorio 19, the husband's discovery of his wife's secret nature in Melusine, the exposure of Ariosto's Alcina and Trissino's Acratia, and the convergence of these Odyssean, biblical, and romance figures in the overcoming of Acrasia in FQ II xii. Since the movement in all these episodes is from veiling to unveiling, from a version of Calypso (whose name in the Odyssey is related to ‘covering’) to apo-calypse (uncovering or revelation), this motif is not surprisingly a recurrent figure for the completion of the romance quest, of the text itself, or of the process of the quester's or reader's comprehension: the biblical Whore of Babylon is finally exposed in a book called Apocalypse, and Ariosto speaks of the uncovering of Alcina as a form of uncovering the veil of her ‘pages’ (OF 7.74). The symbolically female body of the romance text itself thus joins its characteristically female landscape (enclosing forest, mysterious cave, enveloping bower) as a space the knight or reader must quest through and emerge from. The counterpart of the witch-exposure motif might logically be the transformation of the loathly lady into a beautiful bride (as in Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale), a movement from ugly to beautiful which reverses the deceptively beautiful enchantress’ progress in the opposite direction.
The female figures in romance present a curious contradiction. The motif of the passive damsel in distress continues unabated from the classical story of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the monster, through the medieval stories of St George and the dragon, Percival's rescuing of Blancheflor, and the multiple echoes of Andromeda in Ariosto, to such modern thrillers of imperiled beauty as King Kong; while the motif of the helpless fleeing female extends from Ovid's Daphne and Syrinx, who can save themselves only by joining the landscape, to Spenser's Florimell. Yet heroines in romance from Heliodorus to Shakespeare—and versions of the martial maid from Virgil's Camilla to Ariosto's Marfisa and Bradamante and Spenser's Radigund and questing Britomart—are frequently not merely passive objects of others’ quests or pursuits but initiators of the plot.
Several other romance motifs combine as figures for the movement of the narrative towards its ending. The proliferation of twins or counterfeit doubles is frequently related to the extension or dilation of the romance itself. For example, as soon as the erring Redcrosse separates himself from Una, he meets his own double in Fradubio, and the poem doubles itself as well, beginning over again with Duessa; but there is a sense here that if Redcrosse recognized his double in Fradubio, Book I might end at this point. The phantom doubles of Aeneas in Virgil and of rival knights in Italian romance also serve to delay further the resolution of the text. Similarly, the disguising of Odysseus’ name and identity both in Phaeacia and in Ithaca also seems to correspond to the romance narrative's postponement of recognition and ending, as do the multiple names of the heroes in Sidney's Arcadia and the pseudonyms and disguises of the characters in Shakespeare's Cymbeline (where the suppression of name and identity through disguise is structurally parallel to the concealed origin and woodland nonage of the king's sons and to the riddling text before its definitive reading, all belonging to the space before the romance's ending).
The structure of deepening complication and ultimate resolution in romance is, finally, related to the motifs of descent and ascent, which may take literal or metaphoric forms. More or less literal versions of the former include descent to the present world from a higher one, or descent to an underworld (eg, into the mouths of subterranean or submarine monsters in the myth of Perseus, the story of Jonah, the Harrowing of Hell, and Dante's Inferno; into pits or graves in Greek romance and the biblical stories of Joseph and Daniel; into enchanted places such as the buried silver city of Marie de France's Yonec, the underground castle of perpetual light in Sir Orfeo, and Morgana's underwater crystal palace in Boiardo). These descents, often connected with dream (as in the descent to the house of Morpheus in FQ I i), frequently involve the vanquishing or harnessing of demonic forces, or the discovery of a buried treasure of wisdom or wealth, the reward of the drama of initiation that the descent represents.
Metaphorical descent often includes downward metamorphosis (like that of Lucius to animal form in Apuleius’ Golden Ass), exile (like the banishment of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden, and the exile of children set adrift on water, from Moses at the beginning of the Exodus narrative to the heroes of Amadis and King Horn), and radical change of fortune (as in the motif of the infant exposed on a hillside and adopted by shepherds, explicit in Daphnis and Chloe and recalled in New Testament stories of the birth of Christ, a figure of royal descent born into a semipastoral setting and provided with a foster father in Joseph). Related to the motif of the mysterious foundling is the motif of the latency or enfance of the eventual hero (as in the figures of Tristram and Satyrane in Spenser, and the king's sons in Cymbeline). The common romance figure of the wild man or noble savage might be seen in this context as the conversion of what is simply a stage along the way to civilized or adult life into an independent, separate state, perceived as a comment on a corrupt civilization, but also shading into the figure of the irredeemable wild man, a possibility which contributes to the ambivalence of the figure of Caliban in Shakespeare's Tempest.
The motif of ascent, too, can be literal, as in the emergence of Guyon from Mammon's underworld in FQ II, its Virgilian model in the emergence of Aeneas from Hades, Odysseus’ escape from the cave of Polyphemus, and Dante's spiral ascent through Purgatory. Or it can be metaphorical, as in the disenchanting of Lucius the ass in Apuleius (and Bottom in Midsummer Night's Dream), the waking of a sleeping beauty, and a statue's coming to life as at the end of The Winter's Tale. If descent is related to the initiation or complication of the romance narrative, the corresponding ascent is frequently associated with the recognition or recovery of identity, the breaking of enchantment, and the resolution of both the romance text and its central mysteries. Generally, such resolution depends upon a sign which enables recognition, like Odysseus’ scar or marriage bed, the birth tokens which reveal the noble origin of Daphnis and Chloe, and the ring by which the wife of the dying Guy of Warwick recognizes him as the hermit she has faithfully attended. The conspicuously unfinished Faerie Queene hints at such signs of recognition and resolution, but stops short of realizing them. Pastorella is restored ‘to the joyous light’ and recognized by her birthmark; but the poem's narrator is last seen besieged by the Blatant Beast, and longing for a final revelatory Sabbath's sight.
D.C.Allen 1970; Alpers 1979; Ariosto ed 1968 intro; Arthos 1956; Auerbach ed 1953; H. Baker 1971; Beer 1970; Cheney 1966; Ronald S.Crane 1919 The Vogue of Medieval Chivalric Romance during the English Renaissance (Menasha, Wis); Walter R.Davis 1965 ‘A Map of Arcadia: Sidney's Romance in Its Tradition’ in Sidney's Arcadia pp 1– 179 (New Haven); A.B. Ferguson 1960; Fletcher 1971; Frye 1957:186– 206; Frye 1963:69–87; Frye 1976; Giamatti 1966; Giamatti 1975; Goldberg 1981; Greene 1963; Edwin A.Greenlaw 1929 ‘Britomart at the House of Busirane’ SP 26:117–30; A.C.Hamilton 1982 ‘Elizabethan Romance: The Example of Prose Fiction’ ELH 49:287–99; Hamilton 1984 ‘Elizabethan Prose Fiction and Some Trends in Recent Criticism’ RenQ 37:21–33; Hankins 1971; Hanning 1977; Laura A.Hibbard 1924 Mediaeval Romance in England (New York); Hieatt 1975a; Hough 1962; Hughes 1925–6; Hughes 1929; G.L.Huxley 1969 Greek Epic Poetry from Eumelos to Panyassis (London); W.P.Ker 1896 Epic and Romance (London; rev ed 1908); George M.Logan and Gordon Teskey, eds 1989 Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance (Ithaca, NY); Roger Sherman Loomis 1949 Arthurian Tradition and Chrétien de Troyes (New York); Loomis 1959; Loomis 1963; Marinelli 1971; Millican 1932; Murrin 1980; Nohrnberg 1976; P.A.Parker 1979; Parker 1987; Peter Parsons 1981 ‘Ancient Greek Romances’ LRB (20 Aug2 Sept):13–14; Lee W.Patterson 1981 ‘“Rapt with Pleasaunce”: Vision and Narration in the Epic’ ELH 48:455–75; Ben Edwin Perry 1967 The Ancient Romances (Berkeley and Los Angeles); David Quint 1979 ‘The Figure of Atlante: Ariosto and Boiardo's Poem’ MLN 94:77–91; Quint 1983 Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature (New Haven); W.B. Stanford 1954 The Ulysses Theme (London; rev ed 1963); J.Stevens 1973; Tuve 1966; Vinaver 1971; Kathleen Williams 1964 ‘Romance Tradition in The Faerie Queene’ RS 32:147–60.
This major allegorical romance of a courtly (and extramarital) wooing was launched by Guillaume de Lorris around 1230–5 in an incomplete version of 4028 lines and completed by Jean de Meun around 1275 in a total of 21,750 lines (following ed 1965– 70). Partly translated from the Old French into fourteenth-century English as The Romaunt of the Rose in a version attributed to Chaucer, its images and themes were constantly echoed and developed by later allegorists until Spenser's own time. A best seller of its period, extant in some 300 manuscripts, many splendidly illuminated, it was still a much cited and oftprinted work in sixteenth-century France—fourteen editions were printed before 1528. The English version was available to Spenser in Thynne's editions of Chaucer (1532, 1542).
The Faerie Queene has many echoes of the Romance, especially in scenes of courtship or seduction, where Spenser (like earlier allegorists) plays subtle variations on the allegorical landscapes and personifications that the Romance popularized as a means of representing the interior life of the lover. The courtly festivities in the beautiful park where a young man learns to become vulnerable to love and passion, the swift sharp assault of Cupid's arrows, the long, drawnout wooing where brief hectic moments of hope punctuate interminable agonies of rejection, the unremitting attempts to secure the right allies to break into the castle where his mistress’ affections lie imprisoned, the endless discussions with personifications alternately representing counsels of friends, threats of enemies, or his own introspections—all these motifs Spenser would have encountered in many medieval allegories but nowhere with more authority than in their original manifestation in the Romance.
Spenser's use of this material displays, on occasion, considerable subtlety. In the Romance, Oiseuse (Chaucer's Idleness), representing the necessity of leisure before an affair of the heart can develop, appears as the gatekeeper of the Park of the Courtly Life; lacking her favor, no one enters that equivocal paradise. In The Faerie Queene, the figure reappears as Ease, not precisely in the role of porter but with similar allegorical force as presenter of the prologue to the masque of Cupid in the house of Busirane (III xii 4), and in inert rather than fully allegorized form in Castle Joyous where the beds are ‘dight…for untimely ease’ (i 39). In cantos ix–x, we encounter a more complex appearance of the figure in Paridell, the descendant of Paris who is idle enough to remain in Malbecco's castle to seduce Hellenore after Britomart and Satyrane have ridden away on their knightly quests. Oiseuse's physical setting is echoed in Spenser's Bower of Bliss, the locale of The Faerie Queene closest in allegorical intention to the Park of the Romance. Instead of Oiseuse, the figure of Genius is its porter, one who ‘doth us procure to fall,/Through guilefull semblaunts’ (II xii 46–9, doubtless referring to the ambiguous figure of Jean's Genius who expatiates at length on a heavenly garden attainable only through indulgence in unrestrained sexual activity. At the same time, Spenser's alertness to the original formulation of Idleness as the guardian of the garden of courtly love is echoed in Guyon's rebuff of Genius’ ‘idle curtesie’ (49).
Spenser follows the Romance most directly, it would seem, in Scudamour's account of winning Amoret from the Temple of Venus (IV x). Scudamour's way to the temple is opposed by Doubt, Delay, and Daunger, whereas in the Romance the lover has to cope with Daunger, Fear, Shame, Wicked Tongue, and so forth, in his quest for the Rose. But the contrasts are as notable as the parallels. Scudamour's adversaries put up no more than a token resistance, as opposed to the almost endless delays inflicted on the lover of the Romance. This may well reflect Spenser's presentation of Scudamour's suit as a legitimate courtship in contrast to the less honorable intentions of Jean's Amant, who finally has to instigate a protracted siege of the Castle of Jealousy which protects the Rose Bud.
In general, Spenser follows Chaucer in utilizing his allegory to comment on and respond to the Romance. While he makes love relationships almost the major theme of The Faerie Queene, he breaks away from the oppressively narrow world of Jean's erotic garden where the vast range of topics discussed by Amant with his friends is constantly brought back to his all-absorbing erotic plight. Spenser eschews the interminable dialogues of the Romance and expresses that obsession directly in the claustrophobic horrors of Busirane's castle. At the same time, he puts it in context of a range of other erotic relationships, notably that of Britomart and Artegall, which frame allegorical solutions to the questions so provocatively unresolved in the Romance. The life of eros is thus brought into harmony with the other major principles of human existence.
PAUL PIEHLER
A standard edition of the French Roman is Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun 1965–70 Le Roman de la Rose ed Félix Lecoy, 3 vols (Paris); English translations include ed 1962 and ed 1971. Studies include John V. Fleming 1969 The ‘Roman de la Rose’: A Study in Allegory and Iconography (Princeton); Hankins 1971; Lewis 1936; Piehler 1971; Quilligan 1977; Roche 1964; Tuve 1966; Van Dyke 1985.
The Faerie Queene and Sidney's Arcadia (1590)—courtly, learned, exquisite—are the great English exemplars of the long and rich sophisticated-romance tradition parodied by Nashe before Don Quixote (1605) cut off its premodern phase and Milton turned elsewhere for a poetic theme. The eighteenth century saw the rise of bourgeois romance to full-length novel status with Robinson Crusoe—Trader's Progress—and the triumph of a Pamela less highborn than Sidney's; and Richard Hurd shortly proclaimed that, except for those who still love Spenser, romance in the sense of chivalric tales of wonder had long been thoroughly obsolete: ‘what we have gotten…is a great deal of good sense. What we have lost, is a world of fine fabling’ (Letters on Chivalry and Romance 1762). A new stage of prose romance commenced with Horace Walpole's ‘Gothic Story,’ The Castle of Otranto (1764), which under the special patronage of Shakespeare enshrines the age's love of sensation in its arts and its romantic appreciation of the past (Preface to 2nd ed). Walpole's effort to unite the naturalness of modern characterization with the ‘resources of fancy’ available to older writers makes him the progenitor of three kinds of fiction: the historical novel and historical romance, both practiced preeminently by Scott and continued by Fenimore Cooper, and Gothic fiction, whose great practitioners, if we take Gothic in its loose modern sense, were Ann Radcliffe and M.G.Lewis in the 1790s, and Mary Shelley, C.L.Maturin, and James Hogg in the decade after Waterloo. Jane Austen made gentle fun of Radcliffe, and still more her readers, in Northanger Abbey (written 1797–8); but by the time her book appeared in 1818, the settings, characters, and conflicts of the best romantic fiction had become instruments for the exploration, partly symbolic and partly realistic, of the mysterious worlds of feeling and subrational intimation; and this function continues to the present. Several of the major Gothic novels in portraying the corruption and destruction of their central figure—The Monk, Frankenstein, Melmoth the Wanderer, Confessions of a Justified Sinner—pioneer the shift to irony that by our time dominates serious fiction.
Verse romance reappeared in the late 1790s with the work of Southey and Coleridge, continuing in Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, and on through most of the Victorian period with the medieval recreations of Tennyson and William Morris—the latter like Scott also a prose romancer. Romance is represented by Coleridge's major poems in three different ways, to which later nineteenth-century verse romances conveniently conform: the chivalric-Gothic Christabel is the most traditional, with its damsel assailed in her father's castle; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner transforms the ballad's romance and other materials, as well as its form, recreating them into the most influential model since The Pilgrim's Progress of a tale of outward event and inner discovery; and Kubla Khan in a complex dream fragment proclaims the near-identity of passion, vision, and poetry. With Christabel we can associate Tennyson's ‘Lady of Shalott’ and Morris’ ‘Defence of Guenevere’; with the Ancient Mariner, such poems of inner worlds and imaginatively heightened experience as Browning's Childe Roland, Thomson's (B.V.’s) City of Dreadful Night, and Dylan Thomas’ two verse narratives; and with Kubla Khan a line of symbolic accounts of dream, vision, ecstasy, and their loss extending from Blake's ‘Song’ (‘How sweet I roam'd’) via Shelley's ‘Alastor’ and Keats's ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ to such lyrics of the Celtic twilight as Yeats's ‘Song of Wandering Aengus’ (1899). The irony shaping many of these poems gives them immature or inadequate heroes and settings whose engulfing desolation expresses their silence or despair. By the end of the nineteenth century, the long poem had lost both its ‘kinds’ and its audience, so that while two of our three types survive—those represented by the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, which radically transformed traditional forms and contents—they do so mainly as lyrics, single or grouped.
The wide and lasting popularity of such swinging Victorian-chivalric ballads, unshadowed by irony, as Tennyson's ‘Sir Galahad’ and Longfellow's ‘Excelsior’ combined with the influence of the more highbrow poems mentioned above to keep sentimental medievalism alive until after the onset of World War I (see Fussell 1975); other sources were the German tales of F. de la Motte Fouqué, especially ‘Sintram and His Companions’ (tr 1820), and Kenelm Henry Digby's The Broad Stone of Honour (1822). The same medievalism affected, besides poets, novelists from Charlotte Mary Yonge to Marie of Roumania (Ilderim 1925) and Hannah Closs (Tristan 1940) and artists in several media, notably Edward BurneJones, painter and designer of stained glass and tapestry. Graham Greene's play with Yonge's text and Digby's name in The Ministry of Fear (1943) indicates just how hollow the chivalric picture of the Christian gentleman looked during World War II, while V.S. Naipaul depicts a comparable dead end, the commercialization of that chivalry Burke once called ‘the unbought grace of life,’ in Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion (1963).
Victorian popular fiction from Bulwer Lytton to Marie Corelli, to say nothing of that aimed at the barely literate (Varney the Vampire, Ada the Betrayed, etc; see James 1963), leaned heavily on Scott and the Gothic romancers. These contributed also to the work of Dickens and the Brontës, and of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. The influence of Bunyan, too, can be observed from Charlotte Brontë and Hawthorne through to John Buchan. Although Victorian illustrators sometimes made a knight of Christian, his plebeian origins and analogy to such honest apprentices as Dick Whittington and Crusoe recommended him to holders of the Self-Help ethic. More visibly realistic novelists, such as George Eliot, Meredith, Hardy, and James, sharpen the imaginative outlines of their stories—‘liberate’ their ‘experience,’ James might have said—with elements of romance design. Those the late nineteenth century called its ‘romancers’ were the spinners of tales of adventure and of Empire: Stevenson, Rider Haggard, Conrad, and Kipling. For a generation after Stevenson, most conscious romancers can be identified by their borrowings from the Scottish-cumbiblical heightened prose of Kidnapped (1886) or his Don Quixote-cum-Arabian Nights style of chapter headings.
While the relatively naive tale of adventure has carried on from Buchan to Ian Fleming and beyond, more thoughtful taletellers like G.K.Chesterton, Charles Williams, C.S.Lewis, J.R.R.Tolkien, and Ursula K.LeGuin (the Earthsea trilogy) have revived the initiatic quests, the conflicts of cosmic good and evil, and the symbolic landscapes of medieval and Renaissance romance, while others like David Lindsay, Mervyn Peake, and William Golding have made more untraditional use of romance's otherworlds. Lewis was steeped in Spenser and in George MacDonald, and Chesterton, Williams, and Tolkien all knew both in some degree. Lindsay and Golding, like Graham Greene, are more typical of twentieth-century serious writing in that their designs are bitterly ironic, comparable to those of Kafka's Castle and Trial—not initiatic or penitential but leading to disillusion, betrayal, or death.
The bulk of modern romances are written to mass-production formulas: the ‘romance’ or ‘women's love-story’ (such as those by Barbara Cartland or published by Harlequin Books), the nurse book, the Gothic, the western, the occult thriller, science fiction, ‘fantasy,’ and the conspiratorial thriller, usually about espionage, that at least in North America has largely ousted the detective story. A very few distinguished writers, among them Leonard Cohen and Thomas Pynchon, have redeemed some of this mostly inert stuff by melting it down in their own highly eclectic romances, in a manner perhaps learned from Joyce's Ulysses.
principles The traditional romance world has two essential principles, both expansive: extent and variety in space and materials, and an up-and-down dimension of moral and spiritual order. The first is usually supplied by the quest-journey with its contrasting episodes and halting places and stories heard along the way; settings of castle, garden, forest, valley are integral to the actions taking place in them, and the vicissitudes of the hero's career add to the range of variety and contrast spread before the reader. Later romance heroes continue to travel, from Crusoe through Huck and Kim to hitchhikers through the galaxy, and many like the Scarlet Pimpernel or James Bond aim to extend the reader's social as well as geographic range. A different expansive device is simple juxtaposition, as when The World's Desire brings Ulysses and Helen separately to Egypt just as Moses is leading the Israelites out of it (Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang 1890). Spenser like the Italians gained further diversity by telling the stories of several heroes; in the most inventive period of English narrative construction before our own, Lewis’ Monk (1796) tells alternately the tales of Ambrosio and of Raymond and Lorenzo, strongly contrasting but converging to form the story's climax—what his age calls a ‘perplexed narrative.’ Romance expansiveness helps Lewis to do more than just spin out Ambrosio's brief history: switching between narrative lines allows him to manage timing and maintain suspense, and to bring in episodes and poems of independent interest.
Lewis wrote for an audience whose expectations were different from those of the readers of classic romance: they enjoyed complication leading to a convergence of threads at the end, some psychological complexity, and a strong ironic component. This last is evident in the way Gothic fictions from Walpole on are apt to center on the fall of the sin-stained villain rather than the victory of the relatively passive bright young hero, to sacrifice at least one innocent life to everyone else's happy ending, and to feature among their settings at least one very dominant one that is not expansive but constrictive, like The Monk's complex in narrow scope of church-monastery-cemetery-convent linked by the vaults where Lorenzo discovers Ambrosio in the act of murder. Spenser's house of Pride despite its splendors perched above foul dungeons and its proximity to the realms of Night is too well balanced by the out-of-doors and the variety of the rest of Book I to do more than hint at the claustrophobic atmosphere of such Gothic settings where the great world narrows down into a trap—emphasized in Lewis by the contrast between the expansive Raymond-Lorenzo plot with its travels in Germany and anticipated happy ending and the confined, constricting story of Ambrosio's downfall.
The up-and-down dimension of romance is supplied by a clear-cut social hierarchy from king to churl, a similarly clear-cut moral scheme of virtues and vices and their friends, and the assurance that both these hierarchies reflect the divine order which has selected the hero for his task and will help him to succeed. The world of The Monk is polarized in a traditional way between (presumably) heaven and (definitely) hell. More recently, a late descendant of Crusoe, John Buchan's Prester John (1910), replacing heaven with the imposed order of Empire and hell with ‘savagery,’ develops both a topography of dark depths (cellar, lowland, cavern) out of which the hero has to keep scrambling to reach the white-held heights, and a myth much like that of Spenser's Book I of an Eden that must be rescued from the snake of an impending black kingship before it can bloom. Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902), using comparable African materials to a largely opposite purpose, flattens its landscape to the snakelike course of the river drawing Marlow into ‘the depths of the land’ and of mankind's past—a form of ironic constriction, for all the ‘vast country’ surrounding it, and affording no sharp distinctions between black and white, servant and master, savagery and civilization, ideal and abomination.
Traditional romance, centered on a quest-adventure that proceeds into yet-untraveled space, throws any suspense it generates forward to the ending. Gothic romance centers instead on mystery: like Oedipus Rex, it intensifies suspense and directs it simultaneously towards what happened in the past. Mysteries concerning (usually) the parental generation need to be resolved before the young people who are (often) at least the technical leads can take up their full adult roles. Thus time ceases to be a straightforward continuum that unrolls with the story, and becomes an important new dimension for exploration. Most Gothic novels are in some sense about the grip of the past on the present: the young hero (or heroine) from whom its secrets are hidden is tyrannized by them, and their revelation sets him free, restoring him to his identity and proper place in society, while for the villain it leads to condemnation.
In romance up to, say, Robinson Crusoe (1719) and in the romantic romance strain that continues to the present, the invisible links connecting persons or events are providential or at least positive: orphans turn out to be lost heirs; luck changes in the nick of time. From the Gothic on, these links are often negative or even demonic, if the natural causality set rolling by imperfect human nature isn't (as it is in Frankenstein 1818) devastating enough. Later romances often replace or combine the social hierarchy with its microcosmic representation in family or household, and links of this kind often work ironically—hence the importance in Gothic fiction of parental tyranny, fratricide, and incest. In The Monk, for example, the convent's complex of labyrinthine vaults, which brings most of the main characters together for the denouement, is reflected in the similarly labyrinthine set of family relationships that links the characters, calamitously including the apparently isolated Monk. Providence here has abdicated in favor of a hostile fate, personified in the powers of darkness that encompass Ambrosio. Their activities bring in another kind of infernal machine, apart from the family that abandoned him and on which he then disastrously impinges (compare the history of Frankenstein's Being), namely, the conspiracy that deals in set-ups and illusions, more prominent in present-day romance than the family trap, though sometimes combined with it (eg, Greene The Ministry of Fear, Condon The Manchurian Candidate 1959).
In serious late romance, where irony has more and more come to dominate, both heroes and villains have lost in grandeur. Settings, too, have diminished: writers (and movie-makers) make much of shabby streets, disused pleasure grounds, and derelict land; the pastoral glimpse shows simple men fishing in dull canals or feeding pigeons. Power is no longer symbolized by colorful tyrants in castles and abbeys but by white-coated technicians in laboratories, computer centers, or psychiatric hospitals, fronting for some disembodied entity often known as the ‘company’ or ‘firm,’ though highly uncompanionate and not above infirmity (cf David Ely Seconds 1963). Where, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sinister masterminds might depend on mesmerism or hypnotism, in the later twentieth century from Brave New World (1932) to Gravity's Rainbow (1973) these are replaced by more irresistible means of thought control whose practitioners may aim less to dominate the world for themselves or their class than to maintain a disconsolating status quo.
In the past, those in high places if not ‘ordained of God’ could be expected to embody the order and values of society; now because they have power, they are not to be trusted. Being leaders or spokesmen of ‘our side’ may not keep them from cynically sacrificing their own players for obscure or merely strategic gains or to maintain their own positions (Le Carré The Looking-Glass War 1965). Both sides use the same dirty tricks. Only in mythic romances like Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (1954–5) or LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy (1968–73) is it possible to divest oneself of evil powers, however reluctantly they were at first acquired. If kept, those fables tell us, such powers eat out the humanity of their possessors: in grittier tales, the character who, exasperated with his dupe's role, presses to the center of the web is apt to find there a hollow man, a mere mask of authority, or a mere programmed machine.
The heroes of such narratives, powerless and shrunk to the dimensions of an ironic age, are damaged, unimpressive, or foredoomed, like Greene's Raven, Orwell's Winston Smith, or Le Carré’s Leamas. They serve masters and schemes unworthy of an honest man's respect, and what destroys them is apt to be whatever in them we find most human, when not the mere blind chance that rules a flattened cosmos.
further narrative devices In addition to magnifying the importance of setting and of family relationship and shifting their viewpoint towards that of their villains, the practitioners of Gothic developed a whole cellarful of devices to carry them beyond the ‘and then-meanwhile’ sequence of the traditional form. The imaginative and also formal possibilities opened up already in The Castle of Otranto by the exploration of the past soon led to subordination of the original ‘Gothic’ representations of a (roughly) historical past to a personal past as represented by one's parents and grandparents. Accordingly, representation of the past by castle or family portrait could be reinforced or replaced by an excursion into it via inset tale or document or—most frequently—a villain's confession placed near the end. Or, the narrative structure itself might dramatize by a frame or by a fictional preface like Walpole's the set-back dimension of the past.
Gothic proliferates frames and insets with an exuberance learned from Don Quixote, The Arabian Nights, and the Ancient Mariner. Mary Shelley, Maturin, and Hogg are the masters of this device. Maturin's lengthy Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), with the most elaborate of English tale-within-tale designs, makes of the Wanderer's dream on his last night a grand final symbolic synthesis: besides prophesying the future like other Gothic dreams, it draws together symbols from the rest of the book so as to both resume his past and associate him with other damned adventurers, Faust and Don Juan. Hogg gives his Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) a frame and inset of similar lengths that tell the same story from different viewpoints, each reflecting obliquely on the other, thus preparing the way for the self-reflexiveness of, say, Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962).
In nineteenth-century romance developments, the relation between frame and inset tends to be replaced by the central character's (or narrator's) crossing a symbolic threshold—Lockwood's dream or Alice's passing through the looking glass—or coming into possession of a clue object—the scarlet letter or the ancestral potsherd of She (Rider Haggard 1887); or, say from Sherlock Holmes on, a visitor gives (or bequeaths) him a mission, as Guyon acquired his from the bloody-handed babe.
Complex and prominent narrative devices, once as definitive a feature of Gothic as its involved architectural settings and their reflection in involved patterns of family relationship, after long disuse have returned in the romances of our own age. They can be quietly handled, as in Watership Down's series of mythic tales coalescing at the end with the story line (Richard Adams 1972). Or they can help large novels aim at large purviews, as in John Fowles’ The Magus (1965). Or the grandeur rarely allowed nowadays to characters or action may stride back in through the scope of the narrative structure, as—most astonishingly—in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, where the viewpoints of a skin cell and a lightbulb join with others to make up about the fullest and most animate universe available since Paracelsus, till the whole of existence together accelerates its mindless trip to The End.
JAY MACPHERSON
Beer 1970; William Patrick Day 1985 In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy (Chicago); Paul Fussell 1975 The Great War and Modern Memory (New York) esp pp 135–44, 213; Mark Girouard 1981 The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven); Martin Green 1979 Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (New York); Ralph Harper 1969 The World of the Thriller (Cleveland); Louis James 1963 Fiction for the Working Man 1830–1850: A Study of the Literature Produced for the Working Classes in Early Victorian Urban England (London); David Punter 1980 The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London); Ioan Williams 1970 Novel and Romance, 1700–1800: A Documentary Record (London).
Of all the real or imagined cities Spenser draws upon, it is Rome that he refers to most often, no doubt because of its rich diversity of associations both for the writers of antiquity and for the civic humanists of the Renaissance. From Complaints, we can see the extent to which his notion of the city was formed by du Bellay's meditations on its ruins in his Antiquitez and Songe, works which Spenser both translated and used as models for his own Ruines poems and Visions of the Worlds Vanitie. Du Bellay's great exemplum of decayed grandeur presented Spenser with a wide variety of attitudes toward the city: awe over its glorious past, pathos for its present dereliction, and somber consideration of the causes of its decline, namely, the overweening pride that went before its fall and the penchant for civil discord which seemed to precipitate it.
But however much the arrogance, luxury, or ‘mutinous uprore’ (Rome 22) of the city against itself may have contributed to its dissolution, time itself is the primary worker of its woe. Rome serves du Bellay as a dramatic witness to mutability's sway over the world, and the poet of Antiquitez continually returns to this realization as he ponders the tragic evanescence of a city built to last forever. His sustained meditation reflects some measure of Augustinian scorn for the mortal work which styles itself divine and then dies.
Yet on the whole, Spenser found in du Bellay not so much condemnation of vanity as nostalgia for Rome's past glory mixed with a melancholy awareness that no earthly thing is sure, no civil structure so sturdy but that ‘time in time shall ruinate’ the work of human hands (Rome 7). Against this inexorable tide, du Bellay offers little divine consolation beyond the possibility that the motion of time's scythe may be part of a providential plan (30). The hope he extends more explicitly, however, is that the poet's words can withstand the very forces of mutability before which marble and porphyry crumble. The ‘brave writings’ of ancient Rome keep the city alive (5), and modern poets like du Bellay himself (says Spenser in his envoy to Rome) give her ‘eternall dayes.’ The city that survives, therefore, is a verbal construct.
The real degree to which Spenser Englished du Bellay is not to be seen in his translations so much as in his own poem, Ruines of Time, with its wholesale appropriation of vocabulary, theme, and tone. Here the narrator is the fallen city herself, not Rome but the vanished citadel of Roman Britain, Verulam (‘Verlame’). Having been made princess ‘of this small Northerne world’ (84) by imperial power, she was inevitably vulnerable to the ravages of imperial decay. But Verlame is concerned less with the reverses of politics than with the entropy of history, the ‘devouring death’ (52) that has turned an entire Anglo-Roman culture into dust, as it had done before in the successive empires of Assyria, Persia, and Greece. By summoning up the ghost of Roman Britain, Spenser discovers a death's head in Albion, the sure sign of a fall in the midst of a burgeoning sixteenth-century civilization. Thus, Britain has already had her own experience of Roman triumph and decline. The lesson to be learned, as Verlame goes on to say, is that the only abiding record of glory in so utterly transitory a world is the glory that finds its way into words. For Verlame, rescue came through Camden, that ‘nourice of antiquitie,’ whose Britannia kept her memory alive (169–75), even as Spenser's Time will attempt to immortalize the second subject of this double lament, the late Philip Sidney.
In The Faerie Queene, Spenser uses Rome both to conjure up the civic landscape of Fairyland and to explore Rome's significance for Britain's own self-understanding. One might expect in a poem of epic and Virgilian ambitions that Spenser's Rome would be the civic ideal of the Aeneid; yet the city's presence in FQ I is, in fact, typological and also largely negative. We see first of all the massed ‘antique ruines of the Romaines fall’ on the junkheap of history hidden beneath Lucifera's palace of Pride (v 48–50). Along with the great kings of Babylon and Egypt, one finds ‘High Caesar, great Pompey, and fierce Antonius’ in the company of Romulus, Tarquin, and Scipio—all wretchedly enthralled by the vain arrogance of power and finally undone by that enthrallment. Spenser seems to have in mind here the Rome of Augustine's City of God, overwhelmed by its own lust for domination. Later, in FQ I vii–viii, he also draws on the biblical polemic of Revelation 17–18 in his association of the triple-crowned Duessa with the Whore of Babylon, thereby in standard Protestant fashion applying an apocalyptic indictment of pagan Rome to the Roman Catholic Church. A more positive appropriation, however, lies in the role Rome plays in suggesting the ethos of Gloriana's unseen capital, Cleopolis (x 58–9). Its ‘towre of glas’ (Panthea) may refer to a prominent feature of the idealized classical city described in the Mirabilia urbis Romae (a twelfth-century guide for pilgrims), while the constancy of purpose and longing for virtuous fame that impel Gloriana's knights recall the passion for honor that even Augustine commends in the Stoic heroes of republican Rome (City of God 5.12–19).
If FQ I exploits Rome's typological ambiguity as an exemplum of both evil and good, Spenser's subsequent use of the city in FQ II–IV concerns its importance in Britain's own historical myth. Arthur discovers in Briton moniments (Spenser's adaptation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia) that civilization came to Britain directly from Troy, even as Christianity, in the person of Joseph of Arimathea, arrived directly from Jerusalem, in both cases bypassing entirely the mediation of Rome. The Romans later invaded the island under Julius Caesar, envying Britain's ‘blazed fame’ and driven on by ‘hideous hunger of dominion’ (II x 47). But if Britain was thus made tributary to ‘ambitious Rome,’ the chronicle suggests how in time it would become allied to its conqueror through marriage and birth. From the union of Helena of York and the Roman Constantius would come the child Constantine, ‘Who afterward was Emperour of Rome’ and a monumentally important convert to his mother's ‘British’ faith. In this way, the Christianization of the empire might be said to begin in Britain.
This sense of connection with Rome, rather than domination by it, is even more strongly asserted in FQ III ix 33–51, where Britomart and Paridell discuss history as if it were one vast Trojan succession. Although Aeneas’ grandson Brutus is said to have replanted the ‘antique Trojan stocke’ in England before the founding of Rome itself, the glory of that culture nevertheless flourished first in Italy. But as Britomart foretells at the end of their discussion, the time shall come when Britain's hour is at hand, so that Troynovant (London) will at last come into its own and ‘in all glory and great enterprise,/Both first and second Troy shall dare to equalise’ (44).
The ascendancy that Britomart anticipates is celebrated as an accomplished fact within the mythic marriage of Thames and Medway. In IV xi 28, Spenser represents the transfer of world civilization from Rome to Britain by describing the groom in terms of Cybele, a goddess whom Virgil uses as a symbol of Rome's identity as the mother of gods and godlike men (Aeneid 6.784–7). Cybele's new residence in England and her connection with the Thames suggests the passage of Roman glory to London, the latest avatar of Troy, albeit one which is far from the ancient source, placed as it is in ‘the utmost Angle of the world’ (III ix 47). Thus, just as the Virgilian opening of FQ I proem 1 announces Spenser's self-conscious imitation of the great epic poet of Rome, so we can also see his allusions to that city in FQ II–IV as an attempt to suggest Britain's participation in Roman virtue, greatness, and heroic destiny.
PETER S.HAWKINS
M.W.Ferguson 1984; Greene 1982; Hankins 1971:211–13; Manley 1982; Robert S.Miola 1983 Shakespeare's Rome (Cambridge) pp 1–17; Ramsey 1982; Rathborne 1937:24–40; Walter Rehm 1960 Europäische Romdichtung 2nd ed (Munich) pp 130–4.
. See Complaints: Ruines of Rome: By Bellay
(Spanish ‘lovely rose’) Although she never appears directly as a character in Spenser's poetry, Rosalind is named in six eclogues of The Shepheardes Calender and in Colin Clout (927–51; cf 464–79, and see also Var 7:651). E.K.refers to her as a ‘countrie lasse’ who lives in a ‘neighbour towne’ (SC, Jan Arg, 50). Hers is a ‘feigned name, which being wel ordered’ may reveal her real name. In glossing Hobbinoll's claim that she is the ‘Widdowes daughter of the glenne,’ he refers to her as a ‘Gentle woman of no meane house’ (Apr 26, gloss). She may be alluded to as Colin's love in the dance of the Graces on Mount Acidale (FQ VI x 16, although any specific identification is denied at 25). In their correspondence of 1580, furthermore, Harvey addresses Spenser/Immerito's mistress as ‘mea Domina Immerito, mea bellissima Collina Clouta’ and as ‘altera Rosalindula’ (‘a changed [another?] little Rosalind’) (Var Prose p 476; see also p 466).
Rosalind may represent some actual person such as Spenser's first wife, or Mary Sidney, or even Queen Elizabeth (Banks 1937, Mohl 1949, McLane 1961); but her identity remains elusive despite the remarks by E.K. and Harvey. Within the fiction of the poetry, she has been interpreted as a destructive influence on Colin Clout or as his best inspiration (Cullen 1970, Shore 1976). The name was apparently first used by Spenser, and his characterization of Rosalind may be recalled in the heroine of Lodge's Rosalynde (1590) and Shakespeare's As You Like It—although with some irony, for the latter is willing to meet her suitor halfway and suffers pangs of lovesickness. Drayton (in Idea: The Shepheards Garland 1593) and Phineas Fletcher (in Piscatorie Eclogs 1633) pair Colin and Rosalind as ideal lovers (Sp All pp 31, 192).
RICHARD MALLETTE
Theodore H.Banks 1937 ‘Spenser's Rosalind: A Conjecture’ PMLA 52:335–7; Ruth Mohl 1949 Studies in Spenser, Milton and the Theory of Monarchy (New York).
. See Complaints: Ruines of Rome: By Bellay
. See Complaints: The Ruines of Time
(1819–1900) In his youth, Ruskin was introduced to Spenser's poetry in the family reading circle; and late in life, in Fors Clavigera, he included the poet among those storytellers suitable for children of ‘the upper classes’ (ed 1903–12, 29:502). In his middle years, in The Stones of Venice II and III (1853) and Modern Painters III (1856), his analysis of Spenser's allegory indicates his high evaluation.
His esteem originates partly in a recognition of Spenser's place in the allegorical tradition. Familiar from an early age with such works as Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Quarles’ Emblems, Ruskin was alert to sustained allegory, and by the 1850s he was able to extend his vision and relate Spenser's personified depictions of vices and virtues to the carvings of Saint Mark's and the Ducal Palace in Venice, the paintings of Orcagna and Giotto, and the poetry of Dante (10:317–21, 380–409; 11:180). In particular, he found in Spenser ‘the exactly intermediate type of conception between the mediaeval and the Renaissance.’ To illustrate this, he remarks on Spenser's depiction of Cupid (FQ III xii 22–3) as ‘under the ancient form of a beautiful winged god…but still no plaything of the Graces, but full of terror’—a depiction that relates Spenser to Dante rather than to those trivial Renaissance renderings of Cupid as ‘confused with angels’ (10:401). Such references to different artists, different forms of art, and different eras give scope to Ruskin's commentary and a European significance to Spenser.
Ruskin also finds in Spenser's poetry a distinctive combination of imaginative insight and keen analysis. Correspondingly, he presents vivid responses to such personifications as Envy (FQ I iv 30–2; 5:132–3) and Maleger (II xi 21–2; 10:383–4) as well as detailed analyses of Spenser's sustained allegory (most remarkably of FQ I, in an appendix entitled ‘Theology of Spenser’ which remains the best available statement of its moral allegory; 11:251–4 and rpt in Var 1:422–4). Single personifications and the overall schematic placing of vices and virtues (which is said to be ‘extremely complicated’) are both of interest to him.
Above all, Ruskin came to value Spenser for ‘the use or fancy of tangible signs to set forth an otherwise less expressible truth’ (5:132). This comment may be related both to his increasing respect for allegory as a means of imaginative expression and to his persistent emphasis on visual realizations. Consequently, his more rewarding remarks on Spenser often occur in the context of his elucidations of paintings (eg, Turner's Hesperides; 7:404–7). According to Ruskin, the poet and the painter are ‘essentially the same’—artists who ‘concentrated sermons into sights’ (12:496).
In a letter of 1841, Ruskin remarks that Spenser's ‘finest passages never can be fathomed in a minute, or in ten minutes, or exhausted in as many years’ (1:443). The care with which he developed his interpretations in the 1850s shows that he held to this recognition. As he remarks in The Stones of Venice, The Faerie Queene was ‘only half estimated, because few persons take the pains to think out its meaning’ (10:383n). In his own commentary, Ruskin writes as both a close practical critic alert to Spenser's artistry and an historian of moral philosophy.
JOHN HAYMAN
References in this article are to Ruskin ed 1903–12. See also Louis E.Dollarhide 1967 ‘The Paradox of Ruskin's Admiration of Renaissance English Writers’ UMSE 8:7–12; George P.Landow 1971 The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton).
The term sacrament enters the language of the church and hence western theology from the Roman soldier's oath or sacramentum, a public assent to membership in a united body. It is the Vulgate Latin for the Greek New Testament mystērion, ‘a secret.’ Alexander Nowell's Catechism (1570), which formulates the religious principles of the Church of England, defines sacrament as ‘an outward testifying of God's good-will and bountifulness toward us, through Christ by a visible sign representing an invisible and spiritual grace’ (ed 1853:205). The theological significance of the sacraments is to exhibit the principle of the Incarnation or embodiment of God in Jesus’ human form, to express the objectivity of God's action on the soul, and to root Christian life in the church as a holy society. The validity of the sacraments depends upon correct administration by the officiating cleric, and their efficacy depends upon faith and repentance of the recipient. The Book of Common Prayer accordingly states of Communion that if ‘we spiritually eat the flesh of Christ, and drink his blood, then we dwell in Christ and Christ in us, we be one with Christ, and Christ with us’ (BCP ‘Holy Communion’ ed 1976:258).
Spenser accepts the Protestant reduction of the seven sacraments of the medieval Catholic church to the two ‘sacraments of the gospel’ ordained by Christ: baptism and Holy Communion or the Lord's Supper (Matt 28.19, Luke 22.14–20). Communion in particular forms the core of the reformed English church service formulated by Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, in the Book of Common Prayer (1549), which was reinstated (following the 1552 version) in the Elizabethan prayer book of 1559. No longer to be counted as sacraments are confirmation, penance, ordination, marriage, and extreme unction, though all of these continue as rites of the Church of England. Other English rites also lack sacramental status: for example, visitation of the sick, burial of the dead, churching (thanksgiving) of women after childbirth, and commination (cursing) of sinners.
Regeneration does not inhere within the sacraments themselves, which function as ‘certayne sure witnesses and effectual signes of grace and Gods good wyll towardes us’ (Article 25 of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion [1571]; see Hardwick 1876, app 3). They are only instrumental in the remission of sins and growth in grace. Spenser's ‘newborne knight,’ Redcrosse (I xi 34), is a good example of the ‘regeneration or newe byrth’ signified by the water of baptism (Article 27). Similarly, the bread and wine of Communion signify spiritual feeding and the promise of resurrection. The prayer book emphasizes the active participation of the congregation in both sacraments as a means of joining in the reformed Christian community to be created by the new service.
Sacramental imagery pervades the climactic three-day battle in which Redcrosse defeats the Dragon (FQ I xi; see Kaske 1969), but it also appears elsewhere (eg, Heavenly Love 194–6). Spenser stresses the general impact of the sacraments in the life of the individual Christian rather than allegorizing specific liturgical ritual or theological doctrine. Thus sacramental concerns represent only one of many aspects of the knight's growth in strength through grace. At the end of the first day of battle in Eden, Redcrosse, as a figure for unregenerate man, falls into the baptismal Well of Life. Rising on the second day with the ‘baptized hands’ of the believing Christian, he falters before the onslaught of the Dragon's ‘mortall sting’ and falls into the eucharistic ‘streame of Balme’ trickling from the Tree of Life (I xi 36, 38, 48). Tudor Protestants identified this tree with the ‘life everlasting’ derived from Christ's sacrifice (Geneva gloss to Rev 2.7). On the third day, as the faithful Christian bearing Christ within, Redcrosse slays the Dragon.
As a sacramental emblem, the bloody cross on the knight's shield of faith symbolizes Christ's sacrifice on the Cross. The symbolic action of his quest parallels the baptism of children with the sign of the cross and the ministerial admonition ‘to continue Christ's faithful soldier and servant unto his life's end’ (BCP ‘Public Baptism’ ed 1976:275). The dipping of candidates for baptism into water commemorates John the Baptist's immersion of the penitent into the river Jordan as an act of spiritual cleansing. Christ's baptism associated ritual ablution closely with the work of the Holy Spirit, who alone can produce conviction of sin, repentance, and faith (Mark 1.4–11). Arthur's immersion of Maleger—possibly an embodiment of original sin—into ‘a standing lake’ (II xi 46) may invoke the baptismal symbolism of water to signify divine power to destroy evil (Woodhouse 1949; for a dissenting view, see L.H.Miller 1966). Guyon's inability to cleanse Ruddymane's ‘guiltie hands’ in a well (II ii 3) may refer to the power of baptism to renew life without eradicating the sin intrinsic even to the nature of the elect Christian (Article 16 ‘Of Sinne after Baptisme’; see Fowler 1960–1).
The administration of the Eucharist in the English service rejects the Catholic Mass and its doctrine of transubstantiation (the conversion of the elements of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ). Instead, the new Protestant rite commemorates Christ's sacrifice on the Cross in propitiation for the sins of mankind (Luke 23) through spiritual feeding rather than the repeated sacrifice of the Mass or priestly absolution. The Catholic overtones of the religion of Isis, whose ‘Mas’ involves a ‘daily sacrifize,’ may help to explain why her priests refuse to drink wine: ‘for wine they say is blood’ (V vii 4, 10, 17). At a time when Protestants identified the Whore of Babylon with the Church of Rome (Geneva glosses to Rev 17), the ‘golden cup’ of the harlot Duessa links the traditional Mass to the superstitious practice of ‘magick artes’ (I viii 14). Paridell's spilling of wine to declare his illicit love for Hellenore involves a parody of the divine mystery of Communion when she, too, spills the ‘guilty cup’ as a sign of understanding his ‘sacrament prophane in mistery of wine’ (III ix 30–1).
Cranmer's substitution of the term ‘Communion’ for ‘Mass’ in the prayer book reflects the original meaning of koinonūa (fellowship) in the Greek New Testament. He intended the ritual of the Lord's Supper to gather individuals in a communal act of faith based upon a direct spiritual relation between the individual and God rather than through the intermediate agency of priest or sacrament. Christian fellowship though chiefly receptive involves active participation in Christian service or deeds of active charity (see Booty, et al 1981; King 1982, ch 3). Thus, in spite of Redcrosse's desire to withdraw from the world into contemplation following his vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem (I x 63), he must go on to defeat the Dragon in a battle rich with sacramental imagery, prior to the communal celebration of his betrothal to Una, an act that mirrors the union of Christian and Christ in the Communion service (I xi–xii). (See also *Church; *Reformation).
JOHN N.KING
For such characters in The Faerie Queene as Lust, Timias, Artegall, and especially the Salvage Man himself, Spenser draws on the tradition of the wild man in European culture. This legendary figure was familiar in the literature, visual arts, popular festivals, and more sophisticated entertainments of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He appeared as a hairy creature, naked or girdled with foliage, and usually carried a great club or uprooted sapling as a weapon. Other characteristics were a secluded dwelling place ‘Farre in the forrest’ (VI iv 13), a simple diet of acorns, berries, and flesh of beasts, lack of coherent speech, and extraordinary physical strength. The terms applied to him— ‘wild’ or ‘savage’ man, ‘woodwose,’ ‘wild man of the woods’—reflect his life in the forest and intimacy with natural forces. His significance became enriched as he was used allegorically (Bernheimer 1952:23).
Just as the primitive condition may be considered positively or negatively (see *primitivism), the wild man himself came to bear contrasting interpretations. Usually he was characterized by uncontrolled passion; wild itself implies being passionate and subrational (OED II 6b, 12), and the woods were associated with the passions (see Hankins 1971:60–73, 123–5). Yet his very simplicity, naturalness, and dynamism tended to associate him with whatever strengths of character or constitution may be attributed to fundamental human nature. The wild man was a popular heraldic emblem and supporter of arms, signifying such qualities as fortitude, strength, and fecundity.
Aside from characters such as Orgoglio and Satyrane, who have some minor affinities with the wild man, Spenser presents various full-blown versions of the figure. In Book IV, a ‘wilde and salvage man’ personifies lust (vii 4–36). This absurdly grotesque savage mocks the way in which lust involves privation from real human contact. Artegall's appearance as a wild man at Satyrane's tournament has considerably less negative import (iv 39–44). His ‘wyld disguize’ renders the conventional fur or hair as ‘mosse,’ much as was done in festivals; his shield bears the motto ‘Salvagesse sans finesse’ (wildness without art). More positively, however, he displays the fortitude and strength of his wild counterpart. Spenser applies the wild man tradition here to express the potentially raw, retributive energy of justice.
For the maddened Timias, Spenser's use of wild-man motifs is less pejorative still. When Timias combats Lust, he becomes implicated in that passion, causing Belphoebe to reject him. In desperation, he assumes the life of a solitary, purely instinctive wild man, ‘All overgrowen with…haire,’ like Lust, and ‘mute,’ showing ‘Ne signe of sence …ne common wit’ (vii 26–47). For him, this wildness is partly penitential. The wild man's state here constitutes a return to first principles from which renewal can spring.
The Salvage Man in Book VI is Spenser's most richly developed and positive exponent of the tradition. Nameless, he is loosely denominated ‘A salvage man,’ ‘wyld man,’ or ‘the Salvage’ (iv 2, 8, 9), and thus readily seen as a type. Though his hair is not mentioned, he has other traits of the wild man, such as nudity (4), a tree ‘Rent by the root’ borne as a weapon (vii 24), and a highly instinctual, impassioned temperament (eg, iv 5–6). His purely vegetarian diet (14), however, and his instinctive sense of honor and compassion (iv 3; v 1–2, 29) are departures from the paradigm; in these respects, he is much like the ancients’ noble savage (Bernheimer 1952:112–3). Thus Spenser mixes elements of the native and classical traditions in a way that is guardedly optimistic about the potentialities of fundamental human nature.
As Book VI deals with courtesy, root of ‘civill conversation,’ and ‘Civility’ (i 1, x 23), the basically favorable portrayal of a primitive human state applies allegorically to human capacities for both courtesy and the advancement of civilization. The knight or courtier and the savage become complementary figures (Cheney 1966:195–6, 204–13), and the contributions that the qualities of each can make to courtesy are analyzed through the actions of Calepine and the Salvage Man. With the latter's aid, Calepine becomes a more well-rounded figure capable of heroism (iii 46–iv 22). Yet, for all his indomitable energy, the Salvage is pathetically weak in skills of self-expression and social intercourse (v 4–5, 30). Through meeting exemplars of civility like Serena, Calepine, and Arthur, he encounters qualities that he lacks. Similarly, as Arthur's assistant, he is an emphatic extension, in effect, of his master's fortitude and energy (vi 18–vii 27, viii 28–9). Calidore too has brought the Calepine and Salvage within himself, as it were, into an apt relation, for he is ‘mylde’ and skilled in the arts of conduct, yet ‘full stout and tall,/And well approv'd in batteilous affray’ (i 2). Spenser implies that some aspects of the natural world and some lower or subrational human attributes are essential in life but must serve civilized values as the Salvage serves Arthur.
Ultimately, then, the Salvage's significance may be compared to that of Una's lion, her satyrs, and Satyrane: he embodies fundamental human strengths, while also indicating their limits. In one sense, he relates to the passions as basic, motive energies: in their proper place, the passions were considered good, since they were assumed part of human nature as created. However, because the Salvage is dynamic and irascible, he especially relates to the irascible appetite in its capacity for good (Hankins 1971:30, 180); the symbolism is obviously apt, for that appetite constitutes a potential wild man within. When functioning appropriately, it was held to serve the highest, rational human powers in overcoming inner and outer challenges, and the Salvage's service of Arthur is partly explicable in this way.
The Salvage's cultural significance complements his broad psychological role. His humble way of life epitomizes certain values inherent in the simple and energetic kind of primitive life from which civilization began to evolve; ‘obaying natures first beheast’ (iv 14) and attuned to the natural order, he approaches Edenic or golden-age ideals of existence. In general, then, he refers us to contributions that elemental human qualities can legitimately make, when appropriately disciplined or sublimated, to the wellbeing of both our culture and our inner selves. However advanced civility and courtesy have become, we find they are rooted in very deep strata of human development from which we should not distance ourselves too much.
KENNETH BORRIS
For a general survey, see Bernheimer 1952; see further Penelope B.R.Doob 1974 Nebuchadnezzar's Children: Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature (New Haven); Timothy Husband 1980 The Wild Man: Medieval Myth and Symbolism (New York); Lynn Frier Kaufmann 1984 The Noble Savage: Satyrs and Satyr Families in Renaissance Art (Ann Arbor); D.A.Wells 1975 The Wild Man from the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’ to Hartmann von Aue's ‘Iwein’ (Belfast); and H.White 1972. On Tudor manifestations, see Robert Hillis Goldsmith 1958 ‘The Wild Man on the English Stage’ MLR 53:481–91; and G.M.Pinciss 1982 The Savage Man in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Renaissance English Drama’ in Hibbard 1982:69–89. Herbert Foltinek 1961 ‘Die wilden Männer in Edmund Spensers Faerie Queene’ NS ns 10:493–512 surveys the narrative but scants its allegorical implications.
(Fr ‘wild boar’; cf sang ‘blood’) A brutal and disdainful knight in FQ V i 13–30, Sanglier is the first to experience Artegall's justice. His heraldic device, ‘A broken sword within a bloodie field’ (19), recalls the baffling of dishonorable knights.
From a Squire weeping beside the headless corpse of a lady, Artegall learns that Sanglier in a fit of rage had thrust his own lady from him, seized the Squire's in exchange, and, when the first lady protested, beheaded her. At his master's bidding, the iron man Talus finds the knight and leads him back, ‘Bound like a beast,’ for judgment. When Sanglier turns the Squire's charges back on his accuser, Artegall resorts to a ‘sleight’ modeled on Solomon's first judgment, which showed that the wisdom of God was in him (1 Kings 3.16–28). First persuading the knight and Squire to accept his verdict on pain of bearing the dead lady's head for a year should they ‘dissent,’ Artegall proposes that each lady, the living and the dead, be cut in half and shared equally. When Sanglier agrees and the Squire demurs, Artegall judges the former to be the killer; and Talus compels him, ‘his pride represt,’ to take up his burden of shame.
In Spenser's Legend of Justice, Sanglier represents the more primitive threats to the achievement of civil society. A law unto himself, he exemplifies criminality in the personal sphere, and his trial contrasts with the more public one of Duessa at Mercilla's palace in canto ix. In Aristotelian terms, he has both taken more than his just share, making him subject to distributive justice in yielding the disputed lady to the Squire, and done injury to others, meriting corrective justice in the form of his ‘penaunce.’ Viewed as a projection of the hero's own internal struggle, Sanglier embodies that imbalance of the rational and irrational parts which is closely related to intemperance. In administering justice to him, Artegall relies on both force and guile, foreshadowing his later difficulties in defining where the justice of a case lies as well as the need for extreme and duplicitous measures in imposing it on the bestiality of men. (At the tournament in IV iv 39–40, ‘Sir Sangliere’ is the first opponent confronted by the disguised Artegall, who bears the motto ‘Salvagesse sans finesse.’)
These concerns govern Spenser's use of analogues. The episode combines the austere guile of Solomon's judgment of the harlots, the decapitation motif of folklore (on the headless lady as an ancient hieroglyph of justice, see Manning 1984:66–70), and the imposed penance in Malory's account of Sir Bedivere and his lady (Morte Darthur 6.17). Another analogue is the story of Hercules and the Erymanthian boar, an episode read by Renaissance mythographers as an allegory of the overcoming of intemperance. Here Artegall shows his Herculean justice against Sanglier, the boar (see Dunseath 1968:73– 6). The close relation between this kind of injustice and intemperance is suggested by Guyon's similar encounter with a bloody victim at the outset of Book II; and its chivalric and civic connections, by parallels with the opening episode of Book VI, which likewise involves a hero, a squire, and a knight (Crudor) who mistreats his own lady.
JOHN D.BERNARD
These brothers ‘all three bred/Of one bad sire’ (I ii 25) play important roles in the allegory of FQ I ii–vi. Duessa identifies them as Night's ‘Nephewes’ (ie, ‘grandsons,’ from L nepotes) and Night calls them sons of Aveugle (Blindness; v 22–3). They are Saracens or Paynims, ‘car[ing] not for God or man a point’ (ii 12). The theological allegory might be inferred from Galatians 5.22–3: ‘But the frute of the Spirit is love, joye, peace, long suffring, gentlenes, goodnes, faith, Mekenes, temperancie: against suche there is no Law.’ The allegory implies a progression from the state of infidelity or faithlessness (Fr sans+foy without faith) occurring upon Redcrosse's separation from Una in ii 6, through a condition of lawlessness (sans+loy without law), to a state of despair or joylessness (sans+joy without joy). The narrative journey across these realms unfolds slowly and in carefully interlaced episodes. Sansfoy in canto ii and Sansjoy in iv confront Redcrosse, while Sansloy in iii and vi pursues Una. The outcome of their actions, moreover, is highly ambiguous.
In ii 12–19, Sansfoy succumbs quickly to Redcrosse, but neither Sansjoy nor Sansloy falls so easily. The forces of pagan Night from whom they descend threaten and confuse the children of the new Day in attacks that require defense by the Christian virtues. In iv 38, Sansjoy seeks vengeance against Redcrosse for his brother's death. His desire for revenge, an eye for an eye, clearly links him to the Old Law that Redcrosse will replace with the New Law of forgiveness. In that combat, however, Sansjoy disappears in a cloud (v 13). The indecisive outcome leaves Redcrosse beguiled with his own ‘gay chevalree’ (16), pointing ironically back to the narrator's initial description of him as ‘too solemne sad’ (i 2) and ahead to his confrontation with Despair (ix 21–54).
Meanwhile, Sansloy hounds Una. His sort of lawlessness suggests an anarchic overflow of uncontrolled power opposing Una's one, true law. Historically he may figure overly zealous religious reformers, like members of the Puritan Anabaptist sects, who sought the lawless overthrow of the established church. When he enters in iii 33, his appearance whose ‘looke was sterne, and seemed still to threat/Cruell revenge, which he in hart did hyde’ evokes the attributes of choler or irascibility. In 34–44, he attacks Archimago who is falsely dressed as Redcrosse; and he kills Una's defender, the ramping lion, a type of natural strength aptly standing in for the true Redcrosse whom Una has called her ‘Lyon’ (7). The lion, also a figure of natural law, ‘Lord of everie beast in field,’ falls to Sansloy, ‘He now Lord of the field,’ who vilely abuses Una, ‘his pride to fill’ (iv 43). Later he fights Satyrane (vi 40–7), Una's second defender, himself a tamer of lions (25). Satyrane's battle with Sansloy, however, remains unresolved, possibly because Satyrane represents the conventional wild man who needs to keep his own natural energies continually in lawful check. Sansloy appears finally in the house of Medina (II ii 18–37), where he is the lover of Medina's immoderately sensual younger sister, Perissa.
In its broadest sense, the allegory concerns discrepancies between signifiers that refer to holiness, the central theme of Book I. Multiple confusions result from faulty relationships between signs and the things that they refer to. Redcrosse confronts Sansfoy, the eldest brother, after Archimago has deceived him with a false vision of ‘Una’ copulating with a squire, rendering Una and her knight ‘divided into double parts’ (ii 9). The stanza that narrates his meeting with Sansfoy reveals his identity as ‘The true Saint George’ (12). Still the champion of faith, he now faces the challenge of faithlessness implicit in the name ‘writ’ on the shield of the ‘faithlesse Sarazin.’ In the ensuing encounter, however, signifiers and their signifieds become blurred.
One blurring occurs in a confusion of pronoun references. The welter of pronouns in ii 15 effaces any distinction between Redcrosse and Sansfoy. In a simile comparing the combatants to two rams, both rams are ‘stird with ambitious pride’ (16). Their ‘equall puissaunce’ (17) implies both that Redcrosse is equal to fight Sansfoy, and that he may share some of his moral qualities. When Redcrosse appropriates Sansfoy's shield as a ‘signe’ of victory (20), the significance is highly ambiguous. After claiming the shield of faithlessness, Redcrosse abandons his quest to free Una's parents.
Redcrosse's attraction to Fidessa-Duessa complicates this play of signs. Initially revealed as the Scarlet Whore of Babylon (Rev 17.4) in ii 13, and named ‘Fidessa’ in 26, she is identified explicitly as Duessa in 44. Again a simple faith in the one-to-one correspondence of signifiers to their signifieds deceives Redcrosse. It also deceives Una: with her new companion, the lion, she falls into the hands of Archimago disguised as Redcrosse (iii 26). Ironically, too, the disguise tricks Sansloy. Keen to avenge his brother, he associates the sign of the red cross on Archimago's shield with its conventional signification (34). Archimago's lawless use of false sign s deceiv es the cham of lawlessness himself.
The sign of Sansfoy's shield plays a major role in Sansjoy's encounter with Redcrosse. The setting is the house of Pride (not identified until v 53) where Redcrosse, led by Duessa, estranges himself from ‘joyaunce vaine’ (iv 37). As if in response to this estrangement, Sansjoy appears in the next stanza. Viewing Sansfoy's shield as the sign of Redcrosse's victory, Sansjoy seeks revenge (39). The next day, the shield is hung upon a tree to remind them of their cause (v 5). A glance at it prompts Sansjoy to address his brother in Styx. Intertextually the action echoes Aeneas’ anger at the sight of Pallas’ belt during his battle with Turnus in Aeneid 12, an allusion that both confirms Sansjoy's heroism and displaces Redcrosse's joyless heroism. Sansjoy's concealment in the cloud and his descent into hell for a cure, however, link him finally with Turnus, who similarly vanished in Aeneid 10, signaling his bewildered opponent's victory by default.
Ambiguities cluster finally around Duessa and her role in the action. In iv 47, she lies to Sansjoy for her own duplicitous purposes. Her ambiguous address during his combat with Redcrosse in v II—‘Thine the shield, and I, and all’—could apply to either or both of the contestants. Whatever the outcome, she will gain the advantage. Duessa confirms her strategy when she repeats those words to Redcrosse as the apparent victor (14). So distorted is her use of words and signs that even her own powerful ancestor, Night, fails to recognize her when she pleads for Sansjoy's life (27). Her own faithlessness as ‘Fidessa’ confirms the implications of Sansfoy's name, while her grim lawlessness confirms the implications of his brothers’ names. In his attachment to her, Redcrosse courts the vices of Sansfoy, Sansjoy, and Sansloy under a different designation.
WILLIAM J.KENNEDY
In Hymne of Heavenly Beautie (183–301), Sapience appears seated in the bosom of God, clad like a queen with crown and scepter. She rules the house of God, the sky, and all below it; heaven and earth obey her will; all things partake of her fullness and exist through her, who made them and sustains them. Her beauty, ‘Sparkled on her from Gods owne glorious face,’ exceeds any power to praise it. The man whom God allows to see her enjoys all bliss, for she pours out the riches of her treasury on her beholders; as the ‘faire love of mightie heavens king,’ she is the one source of true and lasting ecstasy. Sapience is Heavenly Beauty, the culminating figure of the Fowre Hymnes; the only true object of man's desire, she is the celestial counterpart of Venus who presides over the Hymne of Beautie.
Sapience's structural position in the Hymnes was emphasized in the critical view that the woman enthroned in glory, beloved of God, represented the Virgin Mary, thus setting up a mother-son relationship in the ‘heavenly’ hymns that matched the Venus-Cupid pair in the ‘earthly’ ones (Winstanley in FH ed 1907). This view is now unfashionable; most modern critics fall into two main camps: the allegorical and the Neoplatonic.
Allegorical commentators claim that Sapience represents a quality of the Godhead, which may or may not be identified with one of the persons of the Trinity (see *God). The biblical personifications of Wisdom in Proverbs 8–9 and Wisdom 6–8 show many parallels to Spenser's Sapience (Osgood 1917), and the medieval iconography of Wisdom is very like his description (Tuve 1940). The biblical Wisdom was identified in early Christian times with the Holy Ghost, but in the later West a much stronger tradition associated her with the Logos of John 1.1, the second person of the Trinity (Fletcher 1910–11, Osgood 1917). Some critics have argued that Sapience is not a person of the Trinity, but a personified attribute of the Godhead; Spenser's figure may be seen at the end of a long tradition of mystical contemplative writings, in which the devout soul is encouraged to meditate on God's works in order to rise to a partial understanding of his wisdom (Collins 1940). This approach has led to attempts to trace in the structure of the poem the threefold ascent of the mystics, or the six stages of illumination of the soul described by Bonaventura in his Itinerariun mentis ad Deum (DeNeef 1974).
In sharp contrast, Neoplatonic critics insist that Sapience is a real entity in the cosmos, distinct from the Trinity. They seek her origins in the Renaissance Neoplatonism of Ficino, Leone Ebreo, and especially in Benivieni's Canzona della Amore celeste et divino with the commentary by Pico (Fletcher 1911). In this vein, Sapience has been identified as a celestial Venus, the divine mind of Neoplatonism, the first creation of God (Bennett 1931c, 1935), or even the Shekhinah of the Cabala, lowest of the ten sephiroth or emanations of the Godhead and sometimes identified with the Old Testament Wisdom (Saurat 1930:222–37). Such ideas may have come through the mediation of Leone Ebreo (Quitslund 1969). Modern interest in gender and excitement with the idea of ‘God-as-mother’ finds in Sapience a daringly androgynous presentation of the Godhead (Galyon 1977), or develops the idea of God's love for his ‘soveraine dearling’ to the verge of blasphemy (Quitslund 1969). Conservative opinion holds that Spenser's Sapience is essentially orthodox—the Son-Logos, or a personified divine attribute—superficially adorned with glamorous Neoplatonic terminology (Ellrodt 1960, Welsford 1967).
Wisdom figures in the Renaissance have extremely complex origins—indeed, the whole of the Western tradition could accurately be summed up as the history of wisdom (Rice 1958)—and Spenser is just vague and rhapsodic enough to lay himself open to a great diversity of interpretations. In Heavenly Beautie, the Highest is ‘farre beyond all telling’; the poet must therefore contemplate his ‘essentiall parts’ and his works instead of The image of such endlesse perfectnesse’ (99–112). He is perhaps aware that almost anything one can say about the Trinity is heretical, and traditionally ‘in Englysshe ought not reherced be’ (Court of Sapience ed 1984, line 2245). His image of God, then, is deliberately metaphorical: God is seated on the throne of truth, scepter of righteousness in hand, thunder and lightning under his feet; his radiance is brighter than the sun, and Sapience is in his bosom. The context here seems to suggest that Sapience is to be read metaphorically or allegorically; such an allegorical figure has many clear precedents in literature. The fifteenth-century Court of Sapience (printed in the early sixteenth century) shows her as the guide of man and the counselor of God; Sapientia, invoked to descend from the throne of God, had appeared in a play performed for Queen Elizabeth in 1565 (in Sapientia Solomonis 1.2.22–9), and Milton planned to introduce the character Wisdom in an Ur-Paradise Lost. The closest parallel of all is Heinrich Suso's Horologium Sapientiae, a fourteenth-century Latin text (with several vernacular translations, including English), which was popular throughout the sixteenth century (Welsford 1967). There Aeterna Sapientia, presented and often pictured as a female figure, is the beloved and the instructress of the disciple, but she is equally clearly Christ, ‘as he that is spouse and wyfe of every chosen soule’ (Seven Poyntes fol 64v).
Suso makes the traditional point that although the Trinity is all-wise, and each person in the Trinity is equal in wisdom, yet man may think of the Son as particularly the embodiment of wisdom. Sapientia is either an aspect of God, or the Son of God: since the Godhead is three-in-one, its identities and distinctions are beyond human comprehension. Allegory is the proper way of talking about such matters, for, if Sapience is allegorical, she can be both the Logos and an aspect of God at the same time; after all, allegory does not equate one thing with another: it merely explores the different facets of an idea by means of personified abstractions. In Heavenly Beautie, Spenser is saying nothing more complicated theologically than that God is supremely lovable; his difficulty is to express this in terms which make emotional and imaginative sense. If Sapience is the most complicated allegorical figure in Spenser's entire work, it is because she represents something as comprehensive, as simple, and as unknowable as God; Spenser uses a language both modern and traditional in his own day to express the supremacy of her claim to be loved.
E.RUTH HARVEY
Bennett 1931c; Bennett 1935; Sixt Birck 1938 Sapientia Solomonis (1557) ed Elizabeth Rogers Payne (New Haven); Collins 1940; Court of Sapience ed 1984; DeNeef 1974; Ellrodt 1960; Jefferson B.Fletcher 1910–11 ‘Benivieni's “Ode of Love” and Spenser's “Fowre Hymnes”’ MP 8:545–60; Fletcher 1911 ‘A Study in Renaissance Mysticism: Spenser's “Fowre Hymnes”’ PMLA 26:452–75; Galyon 1977; Osgood 1917; Frederick Morgan Padelford 1914 ‘Spenser's Fowre Hymnes’ JEGP 13:418–33; Padelford 1932 ‘Spenser's Fowre Hymnes: A Resurvey’ SP 29:207–32; Quitslund 1969; Eugene F.Rice, Jr 1958 The Renaissance Idea of Wisdom (Cambridge, Mass); Antonio V.Romuáldez 1964 Towards a History of the Renaissance Idea of Wisdom’ SRen 11:133–50; Saurat 1930:222–37; Spenser ed 1907; Heinrich Suso 1977 Horologium Sapientiae ed Pius Künzle (Fribourg, Switzerland), Eng tr as The Seven Poyntes of True Love and Everlastyng Wisdom Drawen oute of the Boke That Is Clepid Orologium Sapientie (Columbia Univ Lib Ms Plimpton 256, fols 62–99), also printed in William Caxton, comp 1491 Book of Divers Ghostly Matters (Westminster; STC 3305); Tuve 1940; Welsford 1967.
A notoriously difficult mode to define; the amount to be found in Spenser's works varies with the definition adopted. Its widest definition, as the censure of the world as it is by contrast with the world as it should be, would bring almost everything he wrote within its scope. By its narrowest definition, as the witty censure of contemporary vices expressed through the realistic detail of everyday life and manners, he wrote almost none. Samuel Butler describes satire as ‘a kind of knight-errant, that goes upon adventures to relieve the distressed damsel Virtue’ (Miscellaneous Observations in ed 1973:280). The definition seems to fit Spenser's work admirably, but only occasionally does he allow the poem itself to be such a knight errant or corrective agent.
Although the new fashion for satire among his contemporaries was showing increasing signs of classical influence, Spenser owed little to the classical satirists and wrote no formal satires. His models were predominantly medieval, in such things as the polemical use of pastoral eclogue, the iconography of the sins, and the whole tradition of complaint. Mantuan's Neo-Latin eclogues influenced the satire of The Shepheardes Calender. Langland's Piers Plowman (listed by Francis Meres among the finest English satires), Skelton's Colyn Cloute, and other complaint poems contributed to his idea of satire. Beast fables also had a long tradition of use as moral correctives, and Caxton's popular translation of the beast epic Reynard the Fox (although not itself satirical) probably lies behind Mother Hubberds Tale. All these works reinforced the rhetorical prescription that satire should be written in the middle or low styles, and Spenser pitches his own satirical work at those levels.
Some of Spenser's fullest expressions of the imperfection of the world cannot be considered satire because they are concerned not with human evil or folly and its correction but with the state of the universe after the Fall. The Complaints volume contains many examples. Matters such as the destructive power of time are beyond human amelioration; but even such a theme as mutability can move into satire when Spenser envisages change as specifically for the worse, brought about through human degeneracy. The myth of the passing of the Golden Age, which directly expresses this falling away from perfection, is alluded to in the opening lines of his one consistently satirical poem, Mother Hubberd, and made more specific later: ‘But this might better be the world of gold:/For without golde now nothing wilbe got’ (152–3). In the proem to the Legend of Justice in The Faerie Queene, Spenser describes how the present age is not golden but ‘stonie,’ and men themselves ‘transformed into hardest stone’ (V proem 2).
A commoner satirical image for degeneracy is the corruption of men into beasts. This can be expressed as narrative metamorphosis, as with Acrasia's victims, whose physical state is reduced to match the intemperate sensuality of their minds (II xii). Grill the hog even ‘repines’ at being changed back to his human shape; he is left to his ‘hoggish mind’ with Guyon's observation that ‘the mind of beastly man’ has ‘so soone forgot the excellence/Of his creation’ that he will choose ‘To be a beast, and lacke intelligence’ (86–7). The contrast between beastliness and intelligence is crucial: the Palmer uses his staff of reason to convert the monsters back into human form, and the whole Legend of Temperance is concerned with the governing of animal appetite by rationality. The same degeneration of man into beast is implicit in the procession of the seven deadly sins (I iv), where their association is traditional, and in the choice of the Fox and Ape as protagonists of Mother Hubberd. The Fox indeed claims to be even more like man than the Ape, ‘for my slie wyles and subtill craftinesse’ (1045). Similar implications underlie the presentation of the Fox in the beast fable of SC, Maye, and the ecclesiastical imagery of wolves there and in September. Ignorance, too, will reduce men to beasts. In Teares of the Muses, Urania, the Muse who in the Renaissance definition raises men to divine contemplation through philosophy, laments, ‘What difference twixt man and beast is left,/When th'heavenlie light of knowledge is put out?’ (487–8); and she claims that men who lack the ‘blis’ of wisdom are like ‘brute beasts’ (530–1).
In addition to his satire on the general state of man, Spenser singles out specific abuses for attack. The most prominent are the corruption of the church; the corruption of love; the corruption of the court and (in Mother Hubberd) of government; the corruption of language and poetry; and envy, slander, and backbiting. The categories overlap considerably and are frequently linked by Spenser.
The corruption of the church is treated most fully in the ecclesiastical eclogues of The Shepheardes Calender (Maye, Julye, and Sept) and in the episode in Mother Hubberd where the Fox becomes a priest and the Ape his parish clerk. The three eclogues all depict the traditional contrast between the good shepherd, who cares for his flock, is humble, and is content with little, and the bad shepherd, who prefers the good life to caring for his sheep and is a lover of ‘Lordship’ (Maye 123). The bad shepherds are loosely associated with Roman Catholicism but certainly not limited to it. In Mother Hubberd, the shepherd imagery is implicit since the ecclesiastical episode follows the Fox and Ape's employment as literal shepherds; here the prime target is the laziness of priests within the established church. The Priest who recommends the clerical life contrasts the present easy dispensation to the hardship of the old Catholicism with its monastic requirements of frequent services, fasting, asceticism in clothing, and chastity (353–574). Idleness, first of the seven deadly sins in FQ I iv, is similarly depicted as a cleric, though this time ‘Like to an holy Monck.’
The inversion of values shown in the pursuit of the worldly or beastly in preference to the ideal or divine is satirized in many forms. Colin Clouts Come Home Againe censures the corruption of love, as Colin describes how at court love is no more than ‘a complement for courting vaine’ (790). The central books of The Faerie Queene are filled with episodes that demonstrate the difference between false love and true. The most overtly satirical include the Squire of Dames’ references to the difficulty of finding a chaste woman (III vii 53–61: his advances are refused by only three women, one of those being a prostitute who refuses on account of his poverty, and another a nun who does not trust his secrecy), and the episode of Florimell's girdle of chastity, which will not stay fastened (IV v 17–18). Malbecco's inability to choose between saving his wife and his money, and to match up to the satyrs in potency, is also satirized (III x 15, 48).
The corruption of the court is dealt with most specifically in Mother Hubberd, when the Ape becomes a courtier (581–942); in Colin's indictment of the court in Colin Clout (660–792); and in various passages of The Faerie Queene, particularly Philotime's court (II vii 43–9). The characteristics that Spenser most condemns are ambition and the ‘wrong wayes’ that courtiers use to raise themselves and push down others. Colin's comment that ‘each mans worth is measured by his weed’ (CCCHA 711) is given narrative form in Mother Hubberd, when the Ape surpasses all other courtiers in the ‘newfanglenesse’ of his outfit (675); he also revels, conjures, gambles, pimps, and indulges in all kinds of ‘costly riotize’ (805). Braggadocchio and Trompart are The Faerie Queene's closest equivalent to the Ape and the Fox—Braggadocchio with his ‘gallant shew’ unsupported by any inward virtue, and Trompart the clever con man (II iii).
The court provides numerous examples of how the corruption of language dissociates words and inner truth. Braggadocchio's boasts are hollow, the Ape advances himself by flattery, and Colin describes the vicious courtier's prime attribute as ‘a guilefull hollow hart,/Masked with faire dissembling curtesie,/A filed toung furnisht with tearmes of art’ (CCCHA 699–701). Love at court also becomes a matter of words alone with no substance behind them (775–90). Further, false language can promote false philosophy: both the Giant with the scales and the Fox argue for equality and equal shares (FQ V ii 30–8, MHT 124–66); Spenser comments that the Giant was ‘admired much of fooles, women, and boys.’
A similar disjunction is seen between true value and the state of contemporary poetry. Teares of the Muses is largely devoted to the pervasiveness of ignorance, ‘ribaudrie,’ and bad style, which is characterized as ‘Heapes of huge words uphoorded hideously,/With horrid sound though having little sence’ (213, 553–4); furthermore, courtiers devote their wealth to supporting flatterers rather than patronizing true poets (469–72). SC, October shares the same themes.
The ultimate corruption of language—and the most insidious of the dangers in Spenser's moral universe—is slander, language used to make virtue appear vicious. Spenser's most extended treatment (in FQ VI) is more serious than satire allows, but slander is more overtly satirized in Teares of the Muses), Mother Hubberd, and Colin Clout.
Political and ecclesiastical satire aimed at specific targets was more dangerous and needed more disguise. There is disagreement over how much Spenser's work contains and who his targets were; but the Complaints volume ran into serious trouble and was called in, largely on account of Mother Hubberd's attack on misgovernment and corruption at the highest level in the state. The 1611 edition of Spenser's collected works omits Mother Hubberd, and its version of Ruines of Time softens and generalizes the passage attacking Burghley (447–54). The Shepheardes Calender contains a certain amount of topical satire, especially in the ecclesiastical eclogues; but the most transparent allusions are also the least censorious, and the extent and subject of the rest are problematic. Spenser's satire is never limited to the topical, however: he always looks through that to larger patterns of vice and virtue.
HELEN COOPER
K.W.Gransden, ed 1970 Tudor Verse Satire (London); Alvin Kernan 1959 The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (New Haven); Peter 1956.
The first of the beast-taming ‘salvage’ knights of The Faerie Queene that show the natural will to virtue (see *Salvage Man). His exploits appear in contexts that contrast natural and supernatural virtue. In I vi, he helps Una escape from the satyrs, and later battles Sansloy while she flees. In III vii, he is able to bind but not destroy the witch's hyena that pursued Florimell and devoured her horse, and fails to save the Squire of Dames from Argante but must be saved himself by Palladine. In III xi, he pursues Ollyphant uselessly into the forest, for the giant embodies aberrant lust which only Palladine or Britomart, female knights of chastity, may vanquish. In his tournament for Florimell (IV iv–v), he fights to good purpose as a knight of Maidenhead until defeated on the third day by Britomart. As a champion of natural virtue, he is a noble and powerful knight, but his success is limited, and twice he displays cynicism toward women (III vii 57, ix 6–7).
A ‘well deserved name’ (I vi 20) and satyremblazoned shield (III vii 30) associate Satyrane ‘armd in rugged steele unfilde’ with the forest, the domain of lawless desire. As the offspring of a satyr father and a human mother, he is one-fourth beast (the satyrs being half man and half goat). Even his human descent emphasizes bestial potentialities, if we may so interpret the name of his mother Thyamis (Gr ‘passion’), of her father Labryde (Gr ‘greedy, turbulent’), and of her husband Therion (Gr ‘wild beast’). A natural child, begotten by a satyr on a woman captured in the forest, he is not content to remain a mere creature of nature. His behavior shows a tacit rejection, with recognition, of the circumstances of his birth, for since childhood he has been at war with his bestial affinities. In youth, he exercised his prowess in subduing the beasts of the forest (I vi 25– 6); and on reaching maturity, he left the forest but returns periodically to his ‘native woods’ in order ‘To see his sire and ofspring auncient’ (30). His motive for returning is appropriately the natural virtue of filial piety. His career as a knight is allegorically a continuation of his youthful pastime: the taming of innate bestiality. Having left the forest, he struggles with incomplete success to get the forest out of himself (Evans 1970:45, 55–6). His victories bear the same relation to those of Redcrosse and Arthur that natural virtue bears to supernatural. The one seeks to transcend, the other to transform, fallen nature.
The ambiguity of Satyrane's characterization suits the allegory of Books I, III, and IV, which stresses the affinity of natural virtue for goodness and truth but also its inferiority to and dependence upon supernatural virtue. Nurture cannot finally change nature though it is not, on that account, to be scorned. The ‘greatest and most glorious thing on ground/May often need the helpe of weaker hand,’ remarks the narrator concerning Arthur's reliance upon his squire in their battle against Maleger's ‘unruly rablement’ (II xi 30). But neither can the lesser take precedence over the greater. In the tournament for Florimell's girdle, Satyrane's satyr-emblazoned shield is replaced with a ‘maiden-headed shield’ (IV iv 17), and he fights powerfully in behalf of virginal chastity until overcome by Britomart, a virgin destined for marriage.
RONALD A.HORTON
Minor deities associated with the countryside in classical mythology, and mentioned in the Bible (Isa 13.21, 34.14), satyrs are ‘gods of the wooddes: they were monsters having the head of a man, the body of a goat’ (T.Cooper 1565). They are followers of Dionysus, and in representing the natural forces of fertility, they are often licentious (see also *Faunus). Satyrs figure prominently in FQ I and III, and are mentioned incidentally in FQ VII vi 39, Daphnaïda 156, Visions of Bellay 12, Virgils Gnat 178, and Teares of the Muses 268.
The satyrs in FQ I vi are naive, benign creatures whose natural religious instincts lead them to worship Una when they see her unveiled, though these same instincts ultimately lead them to the idolatry of worshiping the ass on which she rides and finally to serve old Sylvanus. Although they are only slightly raised above the condition of animals, they are more virtuous than the pagan Sansloy whom they frighten away, and their offspring in Satyrane shows their capacity to improve. They have been associated with the Renaissance idea of the noble savage (Pearce 1945), although Spenser rejects the view that the light of nature is sufficient to save virtuous pagans (Whitaker 1952:163–4). They have also been seen allegorically as the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome (Kellogg and Steele in FQ ed 1965a:29), or (since Upton 1758) as ignorant, primitive Christians (Steadman 1958 claims that their worship of the ass is a symbol of the ignorant clergy). Finally, they have been seen to represent the Jewish nation, an interpretation based upon Renaissance commentaries on biblical history, which saw the Jews as a people who were shown the truth unveiled, rejected it, and returned to their now-superseded ceremonial law and to idolatry (Jordan 1977).
The satyrs in Book III are so primitive and lecherous as to be excluded from the virtue of chastity and even from its abuse: their sexual appetites are so far distanced from the human and the civilized as to be neither good nor evil. This amorality need not extend to Hellenore, the second Helen, a symbol of woman's infidelity who goes dancing with the satyrs garlanded as Queen of the May, kisses each of them, and then is embraced by one satyr nine times during the night (cf Ovid Amores 3.7.25–6). These satyrs ‘represent perhaps what human life would be like if human beings were as completely adjusted to the “fallen” level of nature as animals and plants are’; they symbolize the sexual world of ordinary human experience, ‘the dreaming experience of the night, with its erotic resonance’ (Frye 1976:99). Continuously dancing or fornicating, they are much closer to their classical predecessors than those of Book I.
RICHARD D.JORDAN
Jordan 1977; Lotspeich 1932:105–6; Nohrnberg 1976:218–22; Steadman 1958.
The history of Spenser scholarship begins with E.K.’s glosses and notes to the first edition of The Shepheardes Calender (1579), and from the beginning exhibits a need to explain and justify Spenser's methods (especially his use of allegory and archaic language) to readers with different tastes and expectations.
Early editors concentrated on assembling the works: the folio Faerie Queene of 1609 was the first to include Book VII, and the Works of 1611 first brought together almost all of the poetry known to be Spenser's. Sir James Ware published Vewe of Ireland, with notes, in 1633. The remaining seventeenthcentury editions debased the text, though the third folio (1679) included a glossary, which suggests that some of Spenser's language was inaccessible to readers. (For the later editorial tradition, see critical *bibliography.)
Camden (1605, 1615), Ware, Thomas Fuller (1662), John Aubrey (1669–), Edward Phillips (1675), and William Winstanley (1687) began to collect and publish material on Spenser's life, packing anecdotes around their skimpy facts; John Hughes gathered this material in the ‘Life’ which headed his edition of Spenser's works (1715). In an edition of The Faerie Queene in 1751, Thomas Birch added a good deal of fresh material, and H.J.Todd in the variorum Works of 1805 not only assembled but also documented a biography to which subsequent scholars have added only a few important facts.
Retrospective commentary on the poems began with Kenelm Digby's Observations (1643). Essays prefixed to Hughes’ edition provided a context and a moral interpreta-tion for the allegory, and began to gather sources and analogues (especially classical) and to discuss Spenser's language in order to defend him against a neoclassical bias which found his work shapeless and uncouth. The relatively narrow critical focus of Hughes’ work, the tendency to emphasize those parts of the poems that best satisfied the tastes of the time and to ignore the rest, would be typical of most scholarship and criticism until nearly the end of the nineteenth century. Jortin's Remarks on Spenser's Poems (1734) and notes in Upton's edition of The Faerie Queene (1758) suggested many other classical and Renaissance sources. Upton's notes for the first time made extensive scholarly materials available to readers stanza by stanza.
Upton, and all the other commentators for the next 150 years, drew heavily on Warton's Observations on the Fairy Queen (1754, 1762), especially on his extensive knowledge of Spenser's medieval predecessors. His eclectic historical investigation opened the way for readers to see Spenser in his own terms rather than those of their times, and was thus perhaps the single most influential study of the poet. Warton, Todd, and especially Upton also began to work out the details of the historical allegory. With its full glossary and extensive notes, including long extracts from the studies of his principal predecessors, Todd's edition closed out the first phase of the scholarly history.
Spenser scholarship after Todd has the features characteristic of all English and American literary scholarship during the period. Solid information—bibliographical, lexical, historical—continued to mount up as scholars edited texts, glossed words, confirmed or invalidated dates and relationships, and traced sources. Early in the century, the emphasis fell on biography, but later scholars returned to the wider range of concerns inherited from Warton and Upton, especially with the intellectual traditions Spenser drew upon and the social and political context in which he worked. By the end of the century, scholarly activity had been almost wholly transferred from amateurs to professionals, from literary parsons and lawyers to professors, from general-interest magazines to learned journals. Eventually the sheer bulk of the material assembled to help readers may have come to intimidate all but academics.
No single work of the nineteenth century had as much immediate impact or long-range influence as Warton's Observations. G.L.Craik's Spenser and His Poetry (1845), which is about one-third selected passages of text, one-third paraphrase tying them together, and one-third background material, added little that was new but mingled text and commentary with the genial authority of a first-rate lecturer. Though G.S.Hillard's ‘First American Edition’ of The Poetical Works (1839) made no significant scholarly contributions, the editions of F.J.Child (1855) and J.P.Collier (1862) included much important new lexical and historical material; Child was the first of many American scholars who by the 1920s had moved the center of Spenser studies across the Atlantic.
R.W.Church's critical biography in the English Men of Letters series (1879) applied the work of contemporary historians with significant effect, and emphasized Spenser as a religious poet more than any previous study. A.B.Grosart's elaborate edition (1882–4), though published without the notes and glossary originally called for in its prospectus, included important essays by Edward Dowden, Edmund Gosse, Francis Palgrave, George Saintsbury, and Aubrey de Vere.
Early in the century, romantic emphasis on the poetry as the personal expression of an individual writer meant that scholars were especially concerned with biography. Although Todd had given most of the facts, new information filled out knowledge about Spenser's schooling, added greatly to what is known of his career, turned up the early marriage to Machabyas Chylde, and clarified his relationships with Harvey, the Sidney circle, Raleigh, and Bryskett. But for every grain of new fact about Spenser there was a bushel of speculation, especially about the identities of the fair Rosalind and E.K., the poet's connection with Sidney and the Areopagus, his relationship with other Spensers and Spencers, and the circumstances around the sacking of Kilcolman Castle and his death. As might be expected, the resulting image was of a passionate, sensitive man frustrated and tormented by his failure at court and the brutal conditions of his Irish exile, temporarily solaced by doomed relationships with kindred souls, ending his unhappy life amid violence, rejection, and poverty. By the same token, these studies did not have much room for common domesticity, politics, practical religion, or day-to-day morality, nor for awareness of him as a capable civil servant in an important post.
As the century advanced, attention shifted to political and religious issues. An article in the conservative, English-oriented Dublin University Magazine (1843) centering on the destruction of Spenser's home by Irish rebels was almost at once answered by one in the nationalist Dublin Review praising Spenser as a poet but censuring him as the willing agent of a repressive colonial power—both the historical record and Vewe, then as perhaps now, troubled even Spenser's most enthusiastic readers. Collier's biography (in his edition of 1862) printed in full many of the relevant documents and paid much attention to the historical allegory; the poet of romance, vision, and sentiment was replaced by a writer whose first impulse was political. Efforts to solve the historical allegory of The Faerie Queene led scholars towards the relationships among the Leicester circle (especially Sidney), Burghley, and the Queen. Church's critical biography of 1879, however, foregrounded theological concerns. A clergyman deeply affected by the religious revival of the mid-century, he based his study on Ephesians 6.11, the arming of the Christian knight (Spenser as well as Redcrosse and Arthur) drawing heavily on the work of the mid-Victorian historians, especially Froude and J.R.Greene, who had so fully documented the interdependence of political, religious, and literary activities in the Tudor period.
Through the century, admirers of Spenser struggled with the allegory. Most studies were stronger on speculation than on fact, and some were positively ludicrous, like Thomas Pennant's, which saw in the Despair episode (first published in 1590), Spenser's reflections on the loss of family and home in Tyrone's rebellion of 1598, or the Notes and Queries series of 1864, unsigned but probably by Robert Cartwright, which concludes by an astonishing sequence of logical leaps that Duessa represents The Shepheardes Calender, punished by Sidney and the Areopagus for failure to conform to classical standards. But some strove for scholarly rigor. One of the most stimulating treatments, because it viewed the allegory as part of an entire aesthetic, was Ruskin's sympathetic (and deeply romantic) account in The Stones of Venice (1853). An important landmark was set in 1889 by the publication of H.E.Greene's ‘The Allegory as Employed by Spenser, Bunyan, and Swift,’ the first article on Spenser in PMLA and a clear sign of the movement of scholarship on Spenser out of the hands of interested amateurs and into those of academics.
Greene's essay directs attention to those scholars, increasingly numerous as the century went on, who continued the work of Warton and Upton by relating Spenser to his literary forerunners and contemporaries. If the Romantics emphasized biography, the Victorians increasingly addressed sources and influences. The eighteenth-century studies had dealt very fully with Spenser's classical predecessors, Homer and Virgil, and with his main English model, Chaucer. Now Greene was followed by A.S. Cook's gathering of possible sources for the house of Sleep (1890), A.E. (Sawtelle) Randall's Sources of Spenser's Classical Mythology (1896, the first book-length study of a single topic in Spenser scholarship), and R.E.N.Dodge's long PMLA article (1897), ‘Spenser's Imitations from Ariosto.’
All this scholarship meant that by the turn of the century Spenser was being presented to grammar-school students with the extensive introductory materials and notes that classical scholars affixed to Homer or Virgil. H.M.Percival's school-text of FQ I (1893), even more than G.W.Kitchin's similar edition of FQ I and II (1867–8), was able to relate Spenser to several major literary traditions, to a wide variety of religious, political, and social institutions, and to assorted moral and aesthetic points of view. The range of Percival's concerns and sympathies is much wider than that of any previous scholar, even Warton or Church. A similar catholicity appears in K.M.Warren's school edition of the entire poem (1897–1900).
These trends continued into the twentieth century. A few new lines of inquiry were opened up. W.W.Greg's Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama (1906) and C.H.Herford's edition of The Shepheardes Calender (1895) initiated study of Spenser's relationship to pastoral. J.J.Jusserand's ‘Spenser's “Twelve Private Morall Vertues as Aristotle Hath Devised”’ (1905–6) inaugurated a dispute about the sources of the organizational scheme set forth in the Letter to Raleigh that widened into extensive reconsideration of the structure of The Faerie Queene, not in terms of some particular classical or medieval model (as Hughes, Warton, and Church had looked at it) but as unique. Major achievements here were W.L.Renwick's Edmund Spenser: An Essay on Renaissance Poetry (1925), also notable for its emphasis on Spenser's Italian and French predecessors besides Petrarch, Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, and Marot, and Janet Spens’ Spenser's ‘Faerie Queene’ (1934). J.S.Harrison's Platonism in English Poetry of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1903) was an important early contribution to twentieth-century Spenser scholarship, soon followed by Lilian Winstanley's edition of Fowre Hymnes (1907). Collaterally, the OED made possible increasingly detailed study of Spenser's words; and the outpouring of editions, reprints, and studies of other medieval and Renaissance English manuscripts and books made his intellectual context accessible as never before.
Most work pursued previously established topics at higher levels of knowledge and sophistication. ‘Thus M.Y.Hughes’ Virgil and Spenser (1929), D.Bush's Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (1932), and H.G.Lotspeich's Classical Mythology in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser (1932) update Hughes and Jortin, while C.S. Lewis in his Allegory of Love (1936) became the twentieth-century Warton. A shelf of basic books on Spenser was produced, including Dodge's (1908) or J.C.Smith and Ernest de Sélincourt's (1912) edition of the works, H.E.Cory's The Critics of Edmund Spenser (1911), C.H.Whitman's Subject-Index to the Poems of Edmund Spenser (1918), F.I.Carpenter's Reference Guide (1923), and H.S.V.Jones’ Spenser Handbook (1930).
Most significant of all was the appearance of what we might call the professional Spenserian, the scholar whose whole career or a large part of it would be centered on Spenser. Thus in 1907 P.Long contributed the first of seventeen items (mostly biographical) listed in Sipple 1984. In 1909, E.Greenlaw (24 items in Sipple) entered the field, followed by F.M.Padelford (21 items) in 1911. Both were among the instigators and editors of the work that climaxes this second, professionalizing phase of the scholarly history as Todd's had climaxed the first. Their monument is the Variorum Works, along with A.C.Judson's definitive Life (1945) in the same format, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press beginning in 1932. These massive volumes dwarf the work of Hughes, Upton, Warton, even Todd; in their abundance, but also their intimidating size, they are both a glory and a curse, as they testify to the richness of Spenser's work, but also to its linguistic, intellectual, and emotional distance from us.
DAVID EVETT
SURVEYS OF SCHOLARSHIP: Alpers 1969; Atkinson 1937; Carpenter 1923; Herbert Ellsworth Cory 1911 The Critics of Edmund Spenser UCPMP 2:81–182; David Evett 1965 ‘Nine-teenth-Century Criticism of Spenser’ diss Harvard Univ; McNeir and Provost 1975; Sipple 1984; Wurtsbaugh 1936.
LANDMARK EDITIONS: Birch (FQ ed 1751); Child (Poetical Works ed 1855); Church (FQ ed 1758b); Collier (Works ed 1862); Dodge (Complete Poetical Works ed 1908); Greenlaw, et al (Var 1932–57); Grosart (Complete Works ed 1882–4); Hales and Morris (Complete Works ed 1869); Herford (SC ed 1895); Hillard (Poetical Works ed 1839); Hughes (Works ed 1715); Kitchin (FQ I–II ed 1867–8); Percival (FQ I ed 1893); Smith and de Sélincourt (Poetical Works ed 1912); Sommer (SC ed 1890; facs ed); Todd (Works ed 1805); Upton (FQ ed 1758a); Ware (Vewe ed 1633); Warren (FQ ed 1897–1900); Winstanley (FH ed 1907).
SOME SIGNIfiCANT WORKS OF SCHOLARSHIP: Bush 1963; Church 1879; Cook 1890; Craik 1845; Kenelm Digby 1644 Observations on the 22. Stanza in the 9th Canto of the 2d. Book of Spencers Faery Queen (London; rpt in Var 2:472–8); R.E.Neil Dodge 1897 ‘Spenser's Imitations from Ariosto’ PMLA 12:151–204; Frederick G.Fleay 1877 A Guide to Chaucer and Spenser (London); Jefferson B.Fletcher 1899 ‘Areopagus and Pléiade’ JGP 2:429–53; Fuller 1662; Herbert Eveleth Greene 1889 ‘The Allegory as Employed by Spenser, Bunyan, and Swift’ PMLA 4:145–93; Greenlaw 1909–10; Greenlaw 1932; W.W.Greg 1906 Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama (London); Hallam 1837–9; J.S.Harrison 1903; Samuel Hayman 1843 ‘Spenser's Irish Residence: By a Dreamer’ Dublin University Magazine 22:538–57; Henley 1928; Hughes 1929; Hurd 1762; H.S.V. Jones 1930; John Jortin 1734 Remarks on Spenser's Poems (London; rpt New York 1970); Judson 1945; Jusserand 1905–6; Keightley 1855; Lewis 1936; Lotspeich 1932; G.C.Moore Smith (Harvey ed 1913); Henry Morley 1887–95 English Writers: An Attempt towards a History of English Literature 11 vols (London); Richard Green Moulton 1876–85 Syllabi for lectures for the University Extension Program, variously printed (Harvard Univ Library); Mueller 1959; Padelford 1911; Edward Phillips 1675 Theatrum Poetarum (London; rpt Hildesheim and New York 1970); Randall 1896; Renwick 1925; George Saintsbury 1898 A Short History of English Literature (London); F.C.Spencer 1842 ‘Locality of the Family of Edmund Spenser’ Gentleman's Magazine ns 18:138–43; Spens 1934; de Vere 1887 ch 2; T.Warton 1762 (1st ed 1754); Whitman 1918; J[ames] Ernest Whitney 1888 ‘The “Continued Allegory” in the First Book of the Fairy Queene’ TAPA 19:40–69; William Winstanley 1687 The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (London; rpt Gainesville, Fla 1963).
From the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, what we call ‘science’ was called ‘natural philosophy’; ‘science’ usually meant ‘knowledge’ or ‘skill’ (as it does in Spenser). Historians of science disagree whether sixteenth-century science (in our sense) was essentially a ‘medieval’ or a ‘Renaissance’ phenomenon, whether the occult sciences contributed significantly to its development, and whether humanism stimulated or retarded its growth. Although it is difficult to define and delimit, a scientific revolution took place between 1450 and 1650 (ie, between the humanists’ rediscovery and first printing of classical treatises on science and medicine, and the inauguration of the mechanistic view of the world). This revolution is as much a part of the Renaissance— and as complex in its causes and origins—as is the Reformation. Both movements owe much to a conservative drive to recover ancient wisdom—the one of human intellect, the other of divine revelation—and both made changes that helped reshape our view of the world and of ourselves.
If it is true that the ‘new science’ profited from the humanists’ recovery of such ‘lost’ works as Lucretius’ scientific poem De rerum natura, the Geography of Ptolemy, and the De medicina of the first-century medical authority Celsus, along with better texts of ancient authorities already accessible in the Middle Ages (eg, Aristotle, Ptolemy's Almagest, and Galen), it is also true that humanistic discoveries included the Neoplatonic, Hermetic, and Cabalistic texts of late antiquity (see *Hermeticism). These materials are relevant here because ‘science,’ even through the seventeenth century, was rarely free from magic and was frequently combined with a mystical Christianity.
At the same time that these continuities with ancient scientific and magical traditions were being maintained, there were genuine efforts to break with the past and redefine our relationship to nature. Ironically, this impulse was shared by occultists and scientific rationalists alike. Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493–1541)—who called himself Paracelsus to show that he was ‘greater than Celsus’—tried to overthrow Aristotle and Galen, the two greatest scientific authorities in medieval and Renaissance universities. He sought to erect not only a new medicine based on observation and his own version of alchemical principles, but also a Christian, Neoplatonic, and Hermetic philosophy that would reveal all of nature's secrets. Francis Bacon, who also attacked the moribund Aristotelianism of the universities, articulated what was to become the rationalist basis of a science grounded in observation and experiment, and devoid of magic, mysticism, or the entanglements of religion. As shown by the theological and alchemical activities of late seventeenth-century scientists like Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and the English virtuosi (not to mention those of the professed Paracelsians, Neoplatonists, and Hermeticists), such a separation was not easily achieved; nevertheless, the mathematical quantification of matter by Boyle and Newton extended the work of Galileo (1564–1642), Descartes (1596–1650), and others, and helped bring about the very mechanistic world view that the virtuosi and Neoplatonists alike resisted.
Even by the turn of the sixteenth century, however, the great advances in astronomy and physics, medicine and physiology, botany and zoology, mathematics and chemistry that we associate with the development of modern science had begun. There was a complex interplay between the old and the new: between the legacy of ancient science, the theory and practice of late medieval science, and fresh observation and empiricism; between a largely Neoplatonic, magical view of the world (with its implicit analogies between microcosm and macrocosm and its assumption that matter was imbued with spirit) and an emerging ‘scientific rationalism’—in short, between the acceptance of past authority and the assertion of present self-sufficiency. To a modern reader, the results of these interactions are somewhat paradoxical. Thus Copernicus (1473–1543) himself acknowledged that his heliocentric system was a revival of ancient Pythagorean theories; and while both Kepler (1571–1630) and Galileo helped to validate the Copernican model, Kepler's laws of planetary motion derived largely from his search for mystical universal harmonies in a vitalist universe, and Galileo's belief in circular planetary orbits persisted despite his mathematical formulation of the laws of physical motion and his discovery of the moons of Jupiter. Similarly, John Dee was a leading mathematician of the sixteenth century, but he also pursued numerology and angel magic via Hermetic texts, astrology, and alchemy. Nor was there a contradiction in the mind of the Aristotelian and Galenist William Harvey (1578–1657) between the minute observation and quantitative arguments by which he arrived at his theory of the circulation of the blood, and his calling the heart the ‘sun of the microcosm’ (ironically, his genuinely scientific discovery was first defended by the Hermeticist and Paracelsian, Robert Fludd [1574–1637]). Again, the exploration of the New World, Asia, and the East Indies led to representations, both verbal and pictorial, of plants and animals before unknown, and schemes of plant classification began in the late sixteenth century; yet even the new herbals did not entirely supplant that of Dioscorides (1st c AD), and even if the seventeenth-century encyclopedias and monographs devoted to animals went beyond the medieval bestiaries and the fabulous stories of Pliny the Elder's ubiquitous Natural History (1st c AD), they still made room for the mythical and monstrous. These characteristic examples suggest that syncretism, as in Renaissance moral philosophy, was common in contemporary natural philosophy as well, and that modern scientific attitudes were to develop only slowly.
Spenser died about a decade before the Copernican astronomy was generally accepted by English scientists, and before the theoretical works of Bacon were published. Hence for him, the new philosophy did not call ‘all in doubt,’ as it did for Donne in his Anatomy of the World (1611). Unlike his friend Gabriel Harvey, Spenser did not keep abreast of the latest scientific investigations and theories. He may have observed a lunar eclipse with interest (Meyer 1983), but his knowledge is mainly that of the conservative handbooks and encyclopedias of the midsixteenth century (see Spenser's *reference works), and even that is not always accurate (see *cosmogony and Johnson 1937:194).
Spenser's use of the handbooks is traditional in being mainly illustrative, comparative, and moral. Unlike many heroic poets, he does not include substantial ‘digressions’ on scientific matters, one means by which the poet could inspire ‘wonder’ and demonstrate the range of his learning (cf du Bartas Les Sepmaines, Milton Paradise Lost 7, 8). However, Spenser's mythological exploitation of ‘scientific’ materials—whether in adopting a traditional myth or adapting one to his own purpose—is shown in his treatment of astronomy, Chaos, constellations, and etiological tales. In some small way, he participates in the ancient tradition of the scientific allegoresis of myth, which derived from the Stoics and was celebrated by Reynolds in his Mythomystes (1632).
There is evidence, moreover, that Spenser was interested in science, especially in relation to scientific poetry. He was familiar with a number of scientific poets, both ancient (Hesiod, Empedocles, Lucretius, Virgil in the Georgics) and modern (Palingenius’ Zodiacus vitae, du Bartas, perhaps George Buchanan's De sphaera, and Giovanni Pontano's Meteorum liber). All four of the latter (along with many other scientific poets) are mentioned by Harvey in the same note where he remarks that even though Spenser is ‘not completely without knowledge of the sphere and astrolabe,’ he is ignorant of ‘astronomical laws, tables, and instruments.’ He also tells us that Spenser took pleasure in repeating from memory that part of du Bartas’ Les Sepmaines which deals with astronomy, ‘which he esteemes as the proper profession of Urania’ (ed 1913:161–3). While Urania had become the ‘Christian Muse’ of Renaissance poets like du Bartas, she was originally the Muse of astronomy. In Teares of the Muses, Spenser bewails, through Urania, man's lack of scientific knowledge, especially of astronomy and cosmology, which through contemplation would lead to a knowledge of God (499–522); this was a fairly conventional justification for scientific study in general (see Schuler 1985).
While Spenser himself was no practitioner of scientific poetry, his account of the human body in Alma's castle (FQ II ix) is related to the anatomical sections of encyclopedic and scientific poems like du Bartas’ and John Davies of Hereford's Microcosmus (1603), and to versified allegories of human physiology like Robert Underwood's A New Anatomie (1605) and Phineas Fletcher's Purple Island (1633) (see also Barkan 1975).
See also *Aristotle, *birds, *body, *constellations, *elements, *flowers, *medicine, *natural history, *New World, *plants, *psychology, Spenser's *reference works, *zodiac.
ROBERT M.SCHULER
Basic reference works on the history of science include Dictionary of Scientific Biography 1970–80 ed Charles Coulston Gillispie, et al, 16 vols (New York); Isis Cumulative Bibliography…1913–2984 1971–6 ed Magda Whitrow, 6 vols and 1980–5 ed John Neu, 2 vols (London); and the current annual bibliography in the journal Isis.
Useful surveys of Renaissance science include Allen G.Debus 1978 Man and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge; a reinterpretation of the importance of the occult and a thorough bibliographical essay on the basic scholarship); and W[illiam] P.D.Wightman 1962 Science and the Renaissance 2 vols (Edinburgh). See also Marie Boas Hall 1982 ‘Problems of the Scientific Renaissance’ in André Chastel, et al 1982 The Renaissance: Essays in Interpretation (London) pp 273–96 (an excellent survey of recent historical debates); Johnson 1937; Meyer 1983; Robert M.Schuler 1985 ‘Theory and Criticism of the Scientific Poem in Elizabethan England’ ELR 15:3–41; Svendsen 1956.
Many readers who have been drawn to Spenser have also, like the distinguished scholar C.S.Lewis, been interested in science fiction. Moreover, at least one novel that might be called science fiction is partly set in the world of The Faerie Queene: L.Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt's The Incomplete Enchanter (New York 1941; rpt 1975 in The Compleat Enchanter). In this humorous tale based on the idea of parallel universes, a modern psychologist finds a way to visit various literary worlds, among them Spenser's; there he encounters Britomart and Amoret, attends Satyrane's tournament, and falls in love with Belphoebe, whom he brings back to his own universe to marry.
At times, details in The Faerie Queene seem to anticipate science fiction. For example, is Talus, the iron man of FQ V, an early robot? However tempting such speculation might be, it is important to recognize that science fiction is a specifically modern genre, one that first appears in the nineteenth century and depends both upon a scientific world view and upon the prior existence of the realistic novel. Spenser is not a science-fiction writer, nor has his work had significant influence on the form. But there are genuine affinities between The Faerie Queene and science fiction because both are versions of romance.
The characteristic aesthetic effect of romance is wonder, and concern with the marvelous provides a point of contact between Spenser and science fiction. Giants, magic lances, and enchanted castles have their science-fiction equivalents in alien creatures, superlasers, and strange planets. Sciencefiction stories often follow a quest pattern that is structurally similar to the pattern of Spenser's romance narratives. Moreover, in science fiction as in Spenser, fully rendered psychological characters are normally beside the point, for characters in romance tend to be representative rather than individualized: the knight versus the evil magician or, in science fiction, the scientist versus the religious fanatic. Romance forms typically emphasize setting. In The Faerie Queene, the most memorable passages are often descriptions of crucial allegorical places such as Lucifera's palace. Likewise, in science fiction, the most significant element of the story is often neither character nor plot but the strange new world that the writer imagines. This generic continuity allows readers to move comfortably between the earlier and the later forms of romance, and comparative study of Spenser and science fiction can be illuminating to both.
MARK ROSE
Mark Rose 1981 Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction (Cambridge, Mass); Robert Scholes and Eric S.Rabkin 1977 Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision (New York).
Spenser's generation found the perennial human temptation to slander particularly worrisome, perhaps because several factors converged to give language and its dangers more importance than ever: humanist stress on rhetoric, increased political opportunity for nonaristocratic but articulate men, arguments over Bible translation, the proliferation of printed books, and widespread anxieties about reputation. Writers feared malicious misinterpretation, clergymen exhorted Christians to govern their tongues, the government harshly enforeed statutes against maligning the crown, and judges were deluged by cases concerning slander (Carr 1902; Plucknett 1956, ch 5; Sharpe 1980).
Spenser, too, thought slander important; and to judge from the opening of The Shepheardes Calender and from his complaints that backbiters attack poetry (FQ I iv 32, VI xii 40–1), he took its threats personally. Even some of the language he applies to the slander of persons could apply also to texts: Detraction likes to ‘blot’ and ‘wrest’ (V xii 34). Yet Spenser invents one poet, Bonfont, who for libeling Mercilla deserves blotting; his tongue is nailed to a post and his name revised to ‘Malfont’ (FQ V ix). Malfont, who has disobeyed the injunction of Exodus 22.28 not to ‘raile upon the Judges’ or the ruler, is guilty of scandalum magnatum (slander of great persons) for which the penalty, after a trial most likely held before the equity court of Star Chamber, was sometimes mutilation. After seeing his mother allegorized as Duessa, James VI of Scotland asked Elizabeth to prosecute Spenser himself; but luckily the Queen did not consider Spenser a Malfont (see *James I).
(See Sclaunder Fig 1.)
The Elizabethan picture of slander had many traditional elements. Classical authors (eg, Ovid, Horace, and Plutarch), the Bible, medieval allegory and exegesis, and Renaissance moralists, artists, mythographers, common proverbs, and pageants provided images of teeth, double or polished tongues, stings, venom, swords, spears, arrows, dogs, snakes, fire, vomit, poisonous breath, deceitfully laid snares, webs or nets, theft, and ambush. The imagery suggests division, separation, illness, entrapment that halts forward motion, and the penetration of society's and the self's perimeters the vomit and venom parody the good poet's honeyed mouth and Helicon's waters.
Slander's motivating energy is envy, which inspires one ‘to put under and to destroy an other man, that he may be chief himselfe there’ ([Slander] 1573: sig CIV). Slander therefore appears where people are most competitive, poisoning life for courtiers, lovers, and poets. Yet, to be plausible, slander often consorts with its seeming opposite, flattery; slanderous Duessa pairs off with smooth Blandamour and maligning Turpine with falsely pleasing Blandina (FQ IV i, VI vi–vii). Such deception is worse than a social failing: the Greek for calumniator is diabolos, from which comes devil, the subtle accuser and slanderer who divides man from man, language from truth, identity from reputation, and humanity from God. Gloriana's capital Cleopolis is threatened by slander's theft of good fame, and Una (Truth) must be lost when doubleness seduces or befuddles us.
Spenser's most explicit personification of calumny is the figure of Sclaunder, the hag with whom Arthur, Amoret, and Aemylia pass the night (IV viii). The spelling of her name, although not uncommon, also recalls scandal. Her words are poisonous vomit, snakebites, ‘noysome breath’ (24–6). A thief of good name, she is poor, filthy, ragged, and (like many of her relatives in The Faerie Queene) female, for calumny is the weapon of the inferior and is ‘unmanly’ in its sneakiness. She sits on the ground, a brief reminder of the association of slander with the earth, found also in the famous image of Time welcoming his daughter from the cave of envy and calumny and, less directly, in Psalm 85.11: ‘Trueth shal bud out of the earth,’ words usually read as referring to Christ (Saxl 1936, D.J.Gordon 1975). As Pastorella is forced into the dark of the Brigands’ underground ‘hellish dens,’ she reenacts the myth of Persephone (VI x 39–xi 51); but she also represents slandered truth that is restored from imprisonment to ‘the joyous light’ by a knight who will win at least a temporary victory over the Blatant Beast. Furthermore, Spenser strengthens the association of slander with earth's darkness by comparing this defamatory monster of evil tongues to the hellhound Cerberus, interpreted by mythographers as the man-eating grave.
Sclaunder undermines the community that language creates, for her words do not express her ‘inward mind’ but rather wound our ‘inner part’ with venom from her ‘inward parts.’ Although siander is usually public (Detraction likes ‘common haunts’ V xii 34), its lies isolate the calumniator in a secret on which he must be silent (Sclaunder lives alone), and its goal is ostracism and inner anguish for the victim. Yet good words, too, may be misread as defamation (even if true, they could sometimes be a scandalum legally). Thus, as Arthur and his companions leave the still-barking Sclaunder, the narrator laments that some readers will ‘misdeeme’ the ladies for their evening spent ‘conversing’ with Arthur and will wrongly imagine a sexual affair (IV viii 29). As a woman, Amoret would have had little legal recourse in the Renaissance against any such misdeeming if publicly expressed as slander, which may be why Spenser chose Arthur, his most inward and mysterious knight, as her protector in Sclaunder's hut.
Sclaunder detests Amoret because detraction hates love. Similarly, a ‘Venemous toung’ stirs up ‘coles of yre’ (Amoretti 86), and ‘false reports’ make a lover's life hell (Hymne of Love 261–5). Slander is not wholly arbitrary, however, for it exploits appearance, whether of imprudence (like Serena's in FQ VI iii) or of an encounter with Lust, however innocent (like Amoret's in IV vii). Anyone who, like Clarion, is ‘regardles of… governaunce’ risks entanglement in envy's and slander's web (Muiopotmos 384; see Bond 1976). Courts are particularly dangerous: in Apelles’ famous painting (long lost but much discussed and imitated), Calumny holds a wrath-kindling torch and is attended by Envy, who drags Innocence before an asseared judge (in many versions a king), as Repentance stands sadly by and naked Truth awaits her revelation (Lucian Slander, Cast 1981; cf FQ II iv 3). Hippolytus, falsely accused to Theseus (I v), Redcrosse slandered by Duessa to Una's father (who wisely waits to hear the truth, just as Arthur listens patiently to the calumniated Britomart in IV ix 35–6), Guyon maligned by Occasion (II iv), Archimago slandering one knight to another (II i, iii), Artegall misreported to Radigund (V v), Malfont and smooth-tongued Malengin outside Mercilla's court (V ix), and ambitious Defetto's jealousy of Timias’ ‘favour’ (VI v 12–13)—all illustrate Spenser's complaints that courts breed defamation, especially in the ambitious and envious (Mother Hubberd, Colin Clout). Typically, the Fox destroys the old aristocracy with ‘fained crimes’ (MHT 1186). As the Geneva gloss to Psalm 101.5 says, slander is ‘moste pernicious in them that are about Kings.’
Slander is dynamic, generating emotional, narrative, and spatial movement; it literally misleads. Spenser exploits slander's nature in FQ I and II; but because it operates chiefly to separate characters, he finds it particularly valuable thematically and structurally in Books III–VI. Friendship, justice, and courtesy—public virtues concerned with appearance and community—find defamation especially troublesome. Thus the story in FQ IV is propelled by the slanders of Duessa and double-tongued Ate, ‘mother of debate’ (i 19). Ate's actions closely recall Ecclesiasticus 28.13–16, which says the ‘double tongue’ has destroyed cities, ruined the great, cast out chaste women, and led to fiery anger and hellish captivity. ‘Whoso hearkeneth unto it, shal never finde rest, and never dwell quietly’ (see also Ps 12.2 on the double hearted). In psychosexual terms, this is precisely what happens in FQ IV, for after Amoret has been slandered by Ate's comments to Scudamour and then held captive by Lust, she visits Sclaunder and later confronts the sexually imprisoning and wrathful Corflambo, father of Poeana. Poeana's name relates her to penitence and penalty, recalling both the dynamics of Apelles’ painting and Ecclesiasticus 5.15 on the repentance following slander. Her mar-riage to pleasant Placidas seems mischievously to associate quelling the painful wrath that comes from slander with the affection even an external courtesy arouses. (Elsewhere, too, Spenser follows scenes of calumny with images or names indicating fire, for he knew that an evil tongue ‘setteth on fyre the course of nature’ [James 3.6]. For example, after credulous Phedon who, like Apelles’ judge, lacks ‘warie governaunce,’ comes fiery Pyrochles, II iv–v.) Meanwhile Scudamour has listened to slander and, as Ecclesiasticus foretold, spends a restless night in the noisy house of Care.
There is little protection against slander, although the Hermit in FQ VI vi recommends caution and self-discipline. Perhaps the conventional wisdom is right: time is the rescuer of last resort even though the chief slanderer, the dragon Satan, will not finally be bound until the end of time. One of Erasmus’ Adages says ‘Frustra Herculi,’ meaning that slander is in vain against a complete hero; and indeed Arthur seems immune. Hercules-like Artegall, however, is rewarded for service to Mercilla by meeting Envy and her sister, the poisonous hag Detraction, who uses her distaff to spin ‘false tales’ that are doubly painful for being cleverly close to the truth (V xii 36).
Like David ignoring his stone-throwing calumniator (2 Sam 16.5–13), Artegall calmly keeps his ‘right course’ to Gloriana's court (V xii 43); but Spenser himself continues to wander in the ‘strange waies’ of Fairyland, making up his own tales (VI proem). Slander is an uncomfortable subject for him. The diabolical Archimago lies and feigns; but as an allegorist, Spenser, too, is an arch imagemaker and arch magician, one whose position is all the more delicate because he loves Una. He detests the slander that misuses our power to invent, in part because he knows so well how feigning—fiction—works.
ANNE LAKE PRESCOTT
Bond 1976; Frank Carr 1902 The Law of Defamation (London); Cast 1981; Chew 1962; Fletcher 1971; D.J.Gordon 1975:220–32; Theodore F.T.Plucknett 1956 A Concise History of the Common Law 5th ed (London), ch 5; Fritz Saxl 1936 ‘Veritas Filia Temporis’ in Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer ed Raymond Klibansky and H.J.Paton (Oxford) pp 197–222; Joyce H.Sexton 1978 The Slandered Woman in Shakespeare ch 1 (Victoria, BC); J.A.Sharpe 1980 Defamation and Sexual Slander in Early Modern England: The Church Courts at York Borthwick Papers 58 (York); [Slander] 1573.
(1771–1832) The facts that Scott absorbed The Faerie Queene in early adolescence, that he could quote whole cantos from memory, and that his review of Todd's edition reveals a thorough understanding of the historical allegory, do not in themselves demonstrate the centrality of Spenser in his work. Scott knew Shakespeare even earlier, read Boiardo, Tasso, and Ariosto in Italian and Don Quixote in Spanish, and was familiar with the medieval literature of chivalry, so that the presence of Spenser—whose Protestantism and antiquarianism made him in some ways a more congenial figure than the Italian allegorists—is nevertheless often difficult to pin down. That so many of Scott's protagonists are ‘errant’ (in both senses) assures their kinship not only with the knights of The Faerie Queene but with many other heroes of romance. Moreover, despite his own appropriation of its patterns, Scott consistently attributes to chivalric literature a seductive power which can be somewhat sinister: in a Waverley hero, for instance, enthusiasm for Ariosto and Spenser is the sure sign of an idealistic temperament too ready to interpret events in terms of literary stereotypes, too naive to deal with political and social reality.
Scott's own imagination is demonstrably permeated with Spenser: Spenserian details, phrases, and episodes occur frequently in both his poetry and his prose. Yet perhaps because his ambivalence about the poet's appeal is an aspect of that ambivalence about romance and fantasy, and about the heroic and picturesque past, which informs all of Scott's work, the passages which are the most narrowly Spenserian sometimes betray a certain unsureness of purpose. The most thoroughly Spenserian of the longer poems, The Bridal of Triermain, an apocryphal Arthurian tale culminating in an allegorical quest, and The Vision of Don Roderick, an historical pageant (in Scott's favorite Spenserian stanzas) recalling Merlin's disclosures to Britomart (FQ III ii 26–50), are the slightest and least seminal. In the fiction, some episodes with apparently Spenserian inspiration, like the underworld ordeal in The Monastery (ch 12), presided over by a fairy White Lady who warns the hero not to trust his human powers, or the vigil and masque in The Talisman (chs 4–5) which recall Britomart's experiences in the houses of Busirane and Dolon (FQ III xii, V vi 27), seem both improbable and irrelevant to Scott's historical vision. Powerful creations, like Die Vernon in Rob Roy, who is a kind of Belphoebe, or the accursed fountain in The Bride of Lammermoor (cf FQ II i 35–ii 10), may owe as much to other models (to Shakespeare, for example, or to the ballad tradition) as they do to Spenser.
There is, however, one striking charactertype in the fiction which Scott consistently introduces with direct quotation from The Faerie Queene: the recluse with weird power. Examples include the Black Dwarf (The Black Dwarf ch 15; FQ I ix 35) and old Janet (Waverley ch 15; FQ III vii 6), Burley (Old Mortality ch 43; FQ I ix 35), blind Alice and Lucky Gourlay (The Bride of Lammermoor chs 4, 31; FQ III vii 5–6), Wayland Smith (Kenilworth ch 10; FQ IV v 34), and Norna (The Pirate ch 24; FQ III iii 18). The Spenserian association in these cases is not only with a mysterious individual (Despair, Florimell's Witch, Mammon, Care, Merlin) but also with a mysterious place. Indeed, Scott's feeling for the fateful encounter with figures hidden in the heart of a romantic (but not fictitious) countryside, so important an element in both the poetry and the fiction, does seem to owe something specific to Spenser, who domesticated the terrain of romance in a way which appealed deeply to Scott's imagination. That Spenser himself can be invoked as a guide to natural beauty in Rokeby (2.6) suggests his presence behind the picturesque landscapes in the narrative poems; that so strong an historical figure as Burley can end up, disconcertingly, as a demon in a wild Spenserian lair strikingly illustrates how Scott's reading of The Faerie Queene sometimes shaped critical details in his fiction.
MARJORIE GARSON
Walter Scott 1829–33 Waverley Novels 48 vols (Edinburgh); Scott 1833– 4 Poetical Works 12 vols (Edinburgh); Scott 1834–44 Miscellaneous Prose Works 28 vols (Edinburgh).
David Brown 1979 Walter Scott and the Historical Imagination (London); David Daiches 1951–2 ‘Scott's Achievement as a Novelist’ NCF 6:80–95, 153–73; Georg Lukács 1962 The Historical Novel tr Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London; first pub 1937) pp 19–63; Jane Millgate 1984 Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist (Toronto); Harry E.Shaw 1983 The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and His Successors (Ithaca, NY); Alexander Welsh 1963 The Hero of the Waverley Novels (New Haven).
Between 1560 and 1584, roughly the time of Spenser's apprenticeship, Scottish writing was in a sorry state. No major figure had emerged to replace the great ‘makars’ of the past, Henryson, Dunbar, and Douglas. Alexander Scott (1520?–1590?) was still composing his intricate love lyrics, ranging from the Petrarchan idealism of ‘Thocht I in grit distres’ to the open cynicism of ‘A Luvaris Complaint’; but his links are with Wyatt, and he does not adopt the poetic forms most regularly associated with Spenser.
During this period, there are a number of poetic complaints (like Spenser's Complaints), mainly contained in the Bannatyne Manuscript (1568, ed 1928–34, vol 2). They bewail variously mutability, the vicissitudes of fortune, the temptations of youth, and the vices of courtly life. But there is no example of a sustained allegory nor, more surprisingly, of pastoral verse with or without satiric intent. Henryson's ‘Robene and Makyne’ is included in the Bannatyne Manuscript, but no poet followed either that fine example or the later Egloges of Alexander Barclay.
This period encompassed the troubled reign of Mary Tudor and its aftermath, when Scottish poets consciously turned to French rather than English sources in an effort to maintain a distinct literary tradition. Religious and political problems dominated, and most of the occasional verse of the day satirized the weakness of government and looked back wistfully to more stable times. The strong Protestant and anti-Marian line in Spenser's verse was anticipated or echoed by many Scottish Protestant poets led by Robert Sempill. In this tradition, Mary is likened variously to Delilah as the betrayer of a God-fearing husband or to Clytemnestra and Semiramis as husband murderer and voluptuary. The approach is, therefore, more direct than Spenser's, scorning allegory and innuendo for techniques drawn from flyting.
This was the situation when James VI for the first time gained true political power in 1584. Lamenting the state of Scottish letters, he published in that year Ane Schort Treatise, Conteining Some Reulis and Cautelis. Setting himself up as the Maecenas of a group of court poets called the Castalian Band, and relying heavily on the then ‘maister poete’ Alexander Montgomerie (1545?–1598), he started a Renaissance based firmly in the Edinburgh court. Although this was specifically to be a Scottish Renaissance distinct from current movements in England, and although later (1596) his fury at the treatment of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, in The Faerie Queene turned him against Spenser whom he wished to see ‘dewly tryed and punished’ (Carpenter 1923:41–2), his Schort Treatise with its interest in expanding the resources of the language, its advocacy of alliteration, and its emphasis on a wide variety of verse forms did produce some verse which might loosely be called Spenserian.
The major Scottish Spenserians such as Drummond, William Alexander, and Robert Ayton (who composed a number of pastorals) did not produce their best work until after 1603; but among the early Castalians, three developments are of interest within a Spenserian context.
Of these, the most important concerns the sonnet and the interlacing (‘Spenserian’) rhyme scheme. The Bannatyne Manuscript contains one sonnet rhyming abab bcbc cdcd ee, In his Essayes of a Prentise (1584), James VI composed fourteen sonnets which adopt this rhyme scheme, a form imitated in the five sonnets of dedication. Although Montgomerie had probably used this form earlier, the King's example established it as the norm in Scottish sonneteering, and the evidence would suggest that many of these Scottish sonnets predate Spenser's first use. This rhyme scheme may well have originated from the sixteenth-century Scottish lyric, for over half the verses in the Bannatyne Manuscript use it, while every religious work with an eight-line stanza has the rhyme pattern abab bcbc. Using this as the octave, it would be easy to derive the Spenserian rhyme scheme from native sources.
Two major works by the early Castalians bring Spenser to mind, though in different ways. The first is Roland Furious by John Stewart of Baldynneis (1550?–1605?), an abridgment of Ariosto's Orlando furioso. Like Spenser in The Faerie Queene, Stewart tries to impose a moral scheme on those parts of the poem which he treats. The Christian implications of the events are highlighted, characters begin to represent set moral positions, and thematic leitmotifs such as the idea of chastity and the conflict between love and honor are stressed. Roland was probably composed before 1586, but there is no question of Spenser's indebtedness to it. It is proof, however, that one Scottish poet did embark on a major poem in some ways similar to The Faerie Queene and, like Spenser, tried to introduce a more orderly form and a more obviously moral tone than were to be found in his sources.
The other poem is Montgomerie's The Cherrie and the Slae, an allegory which first appeared in an unfinished and corrupt form published in 1597. The links between it and The Faerie Queene are slight. The poet is faced with a choice between picking the easily accessible sloe or striving up the crag to seize the distant cherry, and in the end he chooses the latter. The major similarity lies in the allegorical method. Like Spenser's poem, it is in most places multivalent. Cherry and sloe are seen sometimes to represent distant and easy loves, at others to set aspiration against humble contentment, grace against gracelessness, Catholicism against Protestantism, and perhaps even the crown of Britain against that of Scotland. Both poems work through loose associations, like a dream, rather than faithfully translating clear conceptual ideas.
R.D.S.JACK
The Bannatyne Manuscript Writtin in Tyme of Pest 1568 1928–34 ed W.Tod Ritchie, STS 2nd ser 22, 23, 26, 3rd ser 5 (Edinburgh); James Cranstoun, ed 1891–3 Satirical Poems of the Time of the Reformation STS 20, 24, 28, 30 (Edinburgh); James I ed 1955–8; Alexander Montgomerie 1887 Poems ed James Cranstoun, STS 9–11 (Edinburgh); Montgomerie 1910 Poems supplementary vol, ed George Stevenson, STS 59 (Edinburgh); Alexander Scott 1896 Poems ed James Cranstoun, STS 36 (Edinburgh); John Stewart of Baldynneis 1913 Poems ed Thomas Crockett, STS 2nd ser 5 (Edinburgh).
R.D.S.Jack 1985 Alexander Montgomerie (Edinburgh); Helena Mennie Shire 1969 Song, Dance and Poetry of the Court of Scotland under King James VI (Cambridge).
An ancient family of landed gentry, centered in Herefordshire, whose English ancestry can be traced to the eleventh century; the Scudamores of Holme Lacy, their most important Elizabethan branch, were elevated to the peerage in the seventeenth century (‘Lucas-Scudamore of Kentchurch’ in Burke's Landed Gentry 1965–; ‘John Scudamore’ in DNB). The name was variously spelled in the sixteenth century (Skydmore, Skudmore, Scudamour, etc); by the 1570s, however, it was becoming normalized to Scudamore, the spelling most in keeping with the family motto, scutum amoris divini (the shield of divine love). Upton found a correspondence between this name and Sir Scudamour in The Faerie Queene; and Todd, taking his claim from Upton, asserted that Spenser had ‘immortalized…the noble family of Scudamore’ (Var 3:290, 2:223).
Spenser's Scudamour probably represents a special compliment to the family's most eminent Elizabethan members, Sir John Scudamore of Holme Lacy (c 1542–1623, knighted 1591) and his second wife, Lady Mary (d 1603). Sir John was a Gentleman Usher to the Queen (as well as a member of Parliament for Herefordshire, 1571–89), but Mary Scudamore's position at court was the more important, for she was the Queen's second cousin and a member of the Boleyn family, which Elizabeth notoriously favored over her father's. Ann, the younger sister of Thomas Boleyn (father of Henry VIII's Queen Anne), married Sir John Shelton. Their oldest child, John, was Mary Scudamore's father (Rye 1891:52, 247). By 1 September 1574, she and Sir John Scudamore were married and she was already a Lady of the Queen's Bedchamber, an honor which she seems to have held until at least 1602 (see, eg, Report…on de l'Isle and Dudley 1925, 2:20–1, 254, 428; Chambers 1923, 4:67). When Spenser calls Belphoebe and Amoret twins who ‘twixt them two did share/The heritage of all celestiall grace’ (III vi 4), he may intend a reference to the kinship of the Queen and Lady Mary, though he waits nearly 50 stanzas before revealing that Amoret loves ‘the noble knight Sir Scudamore’ Praise of Amoret and Scudamour not only celebrates the Scudamore family but may also form a part of the encomium that The Faerie Queene offers to Elizabeth.
Though no connection seems to have been previously made between Lady Mary Scudamore and Spenser's Amoret, Spenser's Sir Scudamour has been identified both with Sir John and with his son and heir, James (1568–1619; see Cokayne 1910–59, 11:573n; DNB; Gibson 1727). Primarily because of his marriage to Mary Shelton, Sir John Scudamore can be named with some confidence as the likelier of these two candidates.
Moreover, by making Amoret and Scudamour married lovers in Book IV, Spenser may mirror historical fact for the purposes of argument. Belphoebe's anger over Timias’ care for the wounded Amoret has been widely interpreted as a thinly veiled reference to the Queen's anger over Raleigh's affair with Elizabeth Throckmorton, her maid of honor. At the same time, however, Spenser may be cunningly doubling Raleigh's Elizabeth with Mary Scudamore, whom the Queen beat and cursed in the mid-seventies for marrying Sir John but later completely restored to favor, as evidenced by the munificent gifts that the Queen bestowed on her in the early nineties (see the letter of Eleanor Bridges in Mss of… Rutland 1888, 1:107, and W.T.MacCaffrey 1961:116). By hinting at a parallel between the forgiven Scudamores and the unforgiven Raleighs, Spenser might be suggesting to the Queen that, like the Scudamores, the Raleighs were truly virtuous and worthy of her esteem and that their recent transgressions were just as pardonable as the Scudamores’ earlier ones.
LINDA R.GALYON
Burke's Landed Gentry 1965–, 18th ed, ed K.P. Townend (London); Chambers 1923; G.E. C[okayne] 1910–59 Complete Peerage ed Vicary Gibbs, et al, 13 vols (London); Matthew Gibson 1727 A View of the Ancient and Present State of the Churches of Door, Home-Lacy, and Hempsted (London); The Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Rutland…Preserved at Belvoir Castle 1888–1905, 4 vols, Great Britain, Historical Manuscripts Commission Series 24 (London); Report on the Manuscripts of Lord de l'Isle and Dudley Preserved at Penshurst Place 1925 ed C.L.Kingsford, Historical Manuscripts Commission Series 77 (London); Walter Rye, ed 1891 The Visitacion of Norffolk Made by William Hervey Harleian Society 32 (London).
Because Spenser revised Scudamour's role between the 1590 and 1596 editions of The Faerie Queene, we must account for him in two different contexts. The 1590 edition closes with the ecstatic reunion and embrace of Scudamour and Amoret which Spenser renders in the famous simile of a ‘faire Hermaphrodite…of white marble wrought.’ The mythic, mystic, and Christian contexts of this figure are complex and evocative and give resonance to the union of bodies and souls that triumphantly concludes the anatomy of love between women and men in Book III (see *androgyne, *hermaphrodite).
These stanzas disappear from the 1596 edition. The continuation of Scudamour's separation from Amoret in Book IV extends their story to the public context of friendship as well as the more private one of chastity. More subtly, the change remedies the uncharacteristic simplification in the 1590 ending of Book III. The earlier conclusion, striking as it is, suggests that the obstacles to chaste love disappear when separation becomes reunion and ‘loves bitter fruit’ becomes sweet fulfillment. The more complex combination of Books III and IV, however, indicates that the relevant contexts of love include relations among lovers, their friends, and their culture as well as between the lovers themselves. In Book III, we see Scudamour only twice, for twenty stanzas in canto xi and for a few stanzas at the end of canto xii. The 1596 edition enlarges and enriches his story.
Most critics have been inclined to assess Scudamour according to the terms suggested by the great tableaux in Busirane's castle. The disruptions and excesses of sexual love portrayed there represent threats to all lovers, including Scudamour and Amoret, but Scudamour's particular difficulties are better understood in reference to the story that immediately precedes his appearance: the fabliau of Paridell, Hellenore, and Malbecco, with its treatment of greed and jealousy. For Scudamour suffers from willful and self-consuming jealous rage. The opening stanza of III xi apostrophizes the ‘hatefull hellish Snake…Fowle Gealosie, that turnest love divine/To joylesse dread.’ Looking back at Malbecco, the narrator also looks ahead to Scudamour, who appears six stanzas later, disarmed and wallowing in anger and grief. Like Malbecco, he is ‘woxen…deform'd.’ He has cast away his shield with its emblem of Cupid—from which he gets his name (Ital scudo shield+Fr amour love). His love has become ‘selfe-consuming smart,’ and his martial confidence turns to despair and ‘fell woodnesse [madness]’ (27) when he cannot follow Britomart through Busirane's flames. To do Scudamour justice, his desperation has cause, for even Britomart is dismayed at the prospect of facing Busirane, a magician of formidable power.
In Book IV, Scudamour continues to figure forth anxieties about love. Although he defeats Paridell in canto i, Blandamour, Duessa, and Ate play on his jealousy and thereby gain ‘triumph without victorie’ (50). Canto v details the pathetic comedy of a sleepless Scudamour, tormented all night in the house of Care by ‘gealous dread’ (45). Unhorsed by Britomart in canto vi, he is also finally disabused of his suspicion of Amoret's faithlessness. But he is not yet reunited with Amoret, for she has been carried off once more. In canto ix, he continues to bewail his amorous misfortunes—rather puzzlingly, as Amoret should be present with Arthur, the last of her rescuers. Possible references to her presence are equivocal and, along with Spenser's failure to include a reunion of the two long-separated lovers, may point toward incomplete revision of the end of Book IV.
Scudamour makes his most lengthy appearance, and his last in The Faerie Queene, as both narrator and hero of the episode in which he wins Amoret in the Temple of Venus (IV x). As an untested young knight, he ventures to the temple ‘To winne me honour by some noble gest’ (4). There he defeats twenty defenders of the Shield of Love, and in gaining it achieves, as his name suggests, his identity. The motto engraved below the shield summarizes Scudamour's subsequent triumphs and frustrations: ‘Blessed the man that well can use his blis:/ Whose ever be the shield, faire Amoret be his.’ Though Scudamour wins the shield, he evidently cannot well use his ‘blis.’ Busirane abducts Amoret on their wedding night, and Scudamour later discards his trophy in despair.
After defeating the twenty knights, Scudamour continues into the temple, passing Doubt and Delay at the first gate and Daunger at the second. He then penetrates the porch of the temple itself, where Concord holds Love and Hate in dynamic equilibrium. Within the temple, he finds a veiled, probably hermaphroditic statue of Venus which recalls the canceled ending of 1590. This ‘Idol’ is surrounded by Womanhood and her demure group of handmaidens who personify traditional feminine virtues. Amoret's place in the midst of a setting devoted to the conciliating and civilizing aspects of love contrasts sharply with her captivity in Busirane's house of disruptive and unregulated sexual desire. Despite her pleas, Scudamour leads her from the temple. (Spenser presents a slightly different version of their story in his Letter to Raleigh.) Of all Spenser's allegorical places, the Temple of Venus has perhaps been least expressive for modern readers. This may reflect on Scudamour, who as teller sometimes seems uncomprehending of his own tale; or it may reflect the evasiveness of the central symbol, Venus, who in both classical mythology and for the Renaissance has multiple, shifting signification.
That Scudamour can reach Amoret in the Temple of Venus but not in Busirane's castle is important for assessing him. Commentators who regard his intrusion into the temple as excessively bold or as evincing too much ‘maisterie’ (dominance) tend to regard the later difficulties of the pair as a consequence of their defective courtship. It is possible, however, to infer that Scudamour has enough strength to face love in its relatively restrained and orderly mode, but not to confront its more passionate and chaotic aspect.
It is worth recalling that the actors in Spenser's poetry may be treated as characters only up to a point; they also function as emblematic figures. As a character, Scudamour may be ambiguous; as a figure, he is clearer. He stands as both Amoret's fulfillment and her affliction. The question the narrator asks during Amoret's captivity in Busirane's castle—‘Ah who can love the worker of her smart?’ (xii 31)—applies to Scudamour as well. Paradoxically, it applies to all passionate lovers: we must resent as well as adore the person who galvanizes us with such acute, sometimes painful, emotions.
Paired with Timias as Amoret is paired with Belphoebe, Scudamour participates in the exploration of the human psyche that those four lovers express as a group or as a set of allegorical ‘characteristics.’ The sum of the virtues of Scudamour and Timias approaches a whole and well-proportioned knight, just as the virtues of Amoret and Belphoebe are joined in the loving yet war-like Britomart. Scudamour and Amoret play leading roles in a masque of amorous vulnerability. Neither can fully overcome Busirane without Britomart's help. Neither can accept with mature equanimity what Britomart tells Scudamour, that ‘life is wretchednesse’ (xi 14); and both suffer, therefore, from a tendency to hysteria. On the other hand, their mutual devotion provides each with the strength to avoid final defeat. If they cannot vanquish Busirane, neither can he—as formidable as he is—vanquish them.
An embodiment of the ambivalence inherent in love, Scudamour serves as an apt explorer of the Temple of Venus, home of love's longing and fulfillment, eagerness and reticence. He constitutes an emblem of love's contradictions: its weakness and its strength, its ability to enrage and frustrate as well as to civilize and resolve. He remains paradoxical because, as Spenser and his contemporaries were acutely aware, love is paradoxical. Scudamour, to borrow a splendid phrase from James Nohrnberg (1976:478), portrays ‘Love against Himself.’
LESLEY BRILL
For Spenser, as for other poets dealing with hexaemeral and cosmogonic themes, the sea is associated with the chaos from which all things emanate, and is identified, as in Virgil, with ‘Ocean, father of the world’ (Georgics 4.382; cf Homer Iliad 18.607–8). Generally preferring the English sea to the Greco-Latin ocean, Spenser invokes ‘the seas abundant progeny’ (FQ IV xii 1), associating mythic creativity and concord with a setting which is also a center of historical and political allegory. For all their protean inconstancy, Spenser's seas are generally brought into a context of moral and social order, as in Colin's hymn to love (Colin Clout 857–60), or the paean to Venus and her ability to ‘pacifie/The raging seas’ (FQ IV x 44). Though part of the natural world, they are usually geographically vaguer than those of Homer, Virgil, and his other European models. Except for the procession in FQ IV xi, his references to the sea and ocean lack their sense of a world having a Mediterranean center. Even the Irish Sea of Colin Clout resembles the Fairyland sea confronted by Britomart, Marinell, and Florimell in being a generic ‘world of waters’ (197).
The sea enters Spenser's work in various rhetorical guises: as part of the psychic landscape of The Faerie Queene (topothesia), as part of the natural world being described (topographia; see *topographical description) or praised (encomium), in the form of allegorical personification (as with Marinell) or of mythical gods and goddesses figuring physical or symbolic aspects of the sea (eg, Proteus), and as a reservoir of Homeric similes and tropes whose obtrusiveness turns the reader's attention to the artist and his role as traveler and maker (FQ I xii 42, VI xii 1). Unlike rivers, which are benign and orderly manifestations of the element and give purpose to the sea, the sea itself is threatening, demanding that order be given to the amorphous material of nature and art.
Colin Clout provides a paradigm for Spenser's method. Working from confusion to recognition, the poem begins with an ignorant, inexperienced view of nature. Describing his initial fear in terms of warring elements, Colin presents the sea as a nightmarish mirror to the shepherd's world, with hills, wilderness, floods, and herds terrible to behold (196–211). The poem moves from this naive vision of nature to the inspired one embodied in the hymn to love where Colin reshapes these elements and submits experience to a poetic and mythic order that explains, and thus tames, fearful contrariety.
Colin's education begins when he meets his alter ego, the □‘shepheard of the Ocean,’ who navigates the world ruled by the goddess-like ‘Cynthia the Ladie of the sea’ and her aquatic herdsmen. His encounter with the world of waters unfolds into a political allegory having its intellectual springs in a Neoplatonic cosmography. For Colin, the sea voyage to Cynthia's court is also a poetic journey, and, appropriately, his poem develops a protean quality as it assumes different forms: the historical, political, and physical allegory provide its various meanings; the hymn to love offers a transcendent view of nature and has its complement in the river epyllion; and its pastoral form makes it the first English version of a piscatorial eclogue.
In similar ways, the sea assumes a prominent place in the affective dimension of The Faerie Queene. Before Book III, references to the sea are chiefly limited to rhetorical tropes which adumbrate its ominous nature; an exception is Guyon's Odyssean voyage on ‘that sea’ which leads to Acrasia's bower (II xii 2–37). In Book III, however, the sea emerges from the rhetoric into a psychological landscape traveled by his characters and inhabited by gods and goddesses of the waters; it becomes one of the major meeting places of The Faerie Queene. In the sequence from Britomart's arrival at Marinell's strand (III iv 6), to Marinell's defeat and Florimell's abduction (vii 29), to their engagement (IV xii), Fairyland undergoes a sea change in which the watery element becomes the essence of setting, allegory, character, and action. Powerful, dangerous, fickle, and libidinous, a physical reminder of the need for restraint, the sea is an appropriate setting for the Books of Chastity and Temperance.
What were rhetorical tropes for earlier figures in the poem become for Britomart projections of her mind and desires. When she looks over the sea and complains of her sea of sorrows, her fearful seas of emotion are projected onto the Rich Strond itself in the form of Marinell's challenge. While her chastity must restrain her feelings as she looks at the throbbing sea, Marinell represents the other force that threatens to corrupt chastity, a sea-borne frigidity which stands in Aristotelian opposition to extreme concupiscence and manifests itself in his jealously guarding his jewels and, on his mother's advice, avoiding women. Throughout these episodes, the sea provides a context in which external and internal barriers are eroded and replaced by fertile, ‘natural’ emotional ties.
The domestic portrait of the sea in Book IV enlarges but remains true to other images of the sea in Spenser. Florimell, for example, flees to the ‘roring shore’ (III vii 27): her undisguised beauty makes her vulnerable to her own sexuality (as Britomart, for example, is not). But the haven of the sea proves a delusion: the aged Fisher becomes lecherous; she is rescued and then courted in turn by Proteus, ‘Shepheard of the seas of yore’ (viii 23–30). Florimell's perpetual harassment by denizens of the sea underscores the importance of Britomart's masculine disguise.
The psychological torment of Britomart, Florimell, and Marinell is explicitly identified with the sea and its deities, albeit in the mode of domestic comedy. Cymodoce's troubles with her son and Florimell's with her future in-laws show the process by which the sea must be tamed (as Cynthia tames it in Colin Clout), Proteus controlled, and the more benign authority of Nereus and Neptune imposed over the sea. The book culminates in the poem's largest image of order: the marriage of Thames and Medway. In the procession, moving as it does from the grand gods of the watery element to the sea gods tamed by space and history, to the powerful river gods, and then to local rivers located in the immediate present, we see a channeling of the sea occasioned by the ordering institution of marriage. It provides the immediate narrative frame for the reconciliation of Marinell and Florimell, who discover their psychological compatibility, and in whose names we again see the two worlds of water and land. Born of the sea (as we are reminded in IV xii 2), and borne on it, love's force in nature is complex and protean, but capable of being brought within the ken of the Orphic poet and his educated reader.
W.H.HERENDEEN
Alexander Falconer 1964 Shakespeare and the Sea (New York); Herendeen 1986; Murtaugh 1973; K.Williams 1970–1.
The five senses supply sense data from which our faculty of judgment constructs an image of the world (see *memory, *psychology), and to that extent they are indispensable. But as inhabitants of a fallen world whose prince is Satan, we are corruptible by the fallacious reports, especially the pleasant ones, which our senses provide, and likely to forget that sensuous delights are transient and delusive. ‘First learne your outward sences to refraine/ From things, that stirre up fraile affection,’ the Hermit advises Timias and Serena, ‘For from those outward sences ill affected,/The seede of all this evill first doth spring’ (FQ VI vi 7–8). Much of what our senses supply neutrally as information is construed inwardly as temptation, resistance to which is always praiseworthy and sometimes heroic. Given our readiness (in Henry Vaughan's words) ‘to dispence/A sev'rall sinne to ev'ry sence’ (‘The Retreate’), indulgence in the senses is spiritual self-abuse.
Mediating between our souls and the world, our senses fall prey to Satan, who sometimes seduces them and sometimes takes them by force. Each possibility results in a different model of the threat. Temptation is imagined accordingly either as a ‘banquet of sense’ (at which we undergo systematic provocations of our visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile senses) or as a martial assault on our embattled bodies which are placed consequently under siege conditions by Satan's cohorts. Unlike Guyon, Cymochles succumbs intemperately to a typical ‘banquet’ in the Bower of Bliss when, smelling the ‘daintie odours’ of roses and eglantine, and listening to the ‘chearefull harmonie’ of birdsong, he feasts his eyes on ‘a flocke of Damzels’ who, in provocative déshabillé, excite his senses of taste and touch (those instruments of base carnality) with the ‘sugred licour’ of their kisses (II v 29–33). The alternative model for temptation is found in the house of Alma episode (ix–xi), where the human body is conceived of as a ‘castle’ in which the soul (Alma) resides, and which has been under ‘long siege’ from a ‘thousand enemies’ (ix 12) led by Maleger (xi 23), an emanation of original sin. Each of the five senses constitutes a ‘Bulwarke’ of the castellated body, and each is under constant attack by ‘fowle misshapen wights’ (xi 7–8) who resemble creatures associated emblematically with that particular sense. Relief comes only through the intervention of divine grace.
A more positive response to the senses, however, is expressed in Amoretti-Epithalamion, where the lover anticipates ‘the bowre of blisse’ in his lady (Am 76) and his enjoyment of ‘her paradise of joyes’ after their marriage (Epith 366).
K.K.RUTHVEN
Barkan 1975; Kermode 1971:84–115; Carl Nordenfalk 1985 ‘The Five Senses in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art’ JWCI 48:1–22; Var 2:456– 7.
The narrative of Serena and Calepine occupies much of the middle of FQ VI. They first appear when Calidore stumbles upon their secret dalliance (iii 20). While he apologizes for his intrusion, Serena wanders into a flowery field where she is caught and wounded by the Blatant Beast, then rescued by Calidore (21–6). Calepine seeks ‘some place of rest’ and ‘safe assuraunce’ (28) where her wounds may heal. When the shameful Turpine not only refuses to help her but also wounds him, both are rescued by the Salvage Man, who succours them and offers temporary haven. Although Calepine is cured, Serena is not. Again separated from him, she sets out with the faithful Salvage ‘To seeke some comfort’ (v 7) and meets Arthur together with his squire, Timias, also wounded by the Blatant Beast. Arthur takes them to a Hermit; by following his advice, she is cured. She and Timias set out together and encounter Mirabella being punished by Disdain and Scorn. When Timias falls under Disdain's iron club, Serena flees once more ‘To seeke for safety, which long time she sought’ (vii 50). In canto viii, she falls asleep and is captured by cannibals who strip her naked and prepare to sacrifice her in an elaborate ritual. Amidst their ‘divelish ceremonies’ (viii 45), Calepine arrives and rescues her again. The narrative concludes with the lovers once more united, although in the darkness he fails to recognize her and she is too ashamed to reveal who she is.
Spenser seems to have been undecided about Serena's name: some copies of the 1596 Faerie Queene call her Crispina at VI iii 23, and in all copies she is called Matilda in the argument to canto v. The fair and tranquil (from L serenus) virgin who wanders in a flowery field is, like her mythic analogues Proserpina and Eurydice, captured by a subhuman creature, threatened with ravishment and death, and apparently rescued from darkness and despair. As myth, then, the narrative presents the threat of cannibalism as a sparagmos or ritual death preparatory to the desired reunion (Frye 1957:192–3).
Spenser's story may derive from Achilles Tatius’ Clitophon and Leucippe, but it is shaped by the popular sixteenth-century romance motif of the calumniated mistress: an innocent maiden is falsely accused, suffers shame and scorn, is separated from her beloved and undergoes a kind of ‘death,’ but finally is reunited with him (cf the story of Phedon and Pryene in II iv). Ariosto's story of Ariodante and Ginevra is one version of the type (Orlando furioso 5); Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing is a second. Another possible source is Ariodante and Genevora, a play presented before the Queen in 1583 by Spenser's tutor at Merchant Taylors’ School, Richard Mulcaster.
Spenser's interest in Serena is both psychological and social. From the first incident in which she is ‘abasht’ to the last in which she is ‘shame[d],’ she is an ironically untranquil innocent who needs constant ‘gard’ and ‘comfort.’ Although she is seriously threatened only at the beginning and end of her adventure, her story is interlaced with incidents displaying varying degrees of discourtesy: the ambush of Timias by Despetto, Decetto, and Defetto (v); and Mirabella's public humiliation by Disdain and Scorn (vii–viii). In each incident, a private fear of exposure is matched by a fear of public disgrace, and a natural desire to withdraw into a ‘covert shade…To solace…in delight’ (iii 20) is a prelude to embarrassment. Accordingly, Serena's inwardly festering wound represents the psychological effects of this fear of social victimizing.
If Timias is partly a fictionalized portrait of Raleigh and his wife, Elizabeth Throckmorton, whom Raleigh called Serena, the social basis of her discomfort is clear. Always threatened when she moves from cover of any kind into the open, her predicament illustrates the persistent danger of public slander. This may explain part of the Hermit's ‘cure’: ‘Shun secresie, and talke in open sight’ (vi 14).
As a vulnerable beauty in need of continual protection, Serena offers positive lessons in social compassion. Calidore, the Salvage Man, Arthur, the Hermit, and Calepine all take turns guarding and comforting her. Such protectiveness seems very close to the heart of Spenser's notion of human courtesy; but insofar as her story is read as a version of the romance motif of ‘beauties chace’ (III i 19), it also depicts a parody of such courtesy. As the object of this quest, Serena is twice seen as a fleshly morsel to be consumed. From her initial wound by the Blatant Beast's ‘wide great mouth’ to the cannibals’ final threat, her story charts an inversion of the usual sensory ascent in quest of beauty.
Such a corruption of beauty (associated with the highest sense, sight) into physical food (incited by the lower sense, taste) is common to romance and may derive from the Proserpina myth. Analogues in The Faerie Queene include the hyena that feeds on woman's flesh (III vii), Lust (IV vii), and Corflambo (IV viii). In the episode with the cannibals, this perversion is carefully staged. These savages begin, much as any wouldbe lover, reveling in the sight of Serena's shining face (viii 37); but the conventional adoration of beauty quickly degenerates into a debate over whether she will serve for one meal or many. As Serena is stripped naked, Spenser employs an Elizabethan blazon to praise the various parts of the lady's body, only to pervert that blazon by having the cannibals’ leers convert ‘dainty flesh’ to ‘common feast’ (38).
In effect, Spenser here grotesquely literalizes the feeding imagery by which Elizabethan writers expressed beauty's attraction. To feast our eyes on beauty may well be the object of our quest, Spenser implies, but such language betrays a gluttonous voyeurism that deforms woman into sexual object, spiritual gazing into lascivious leering, and human courtesy into discourtesy. The naked Serena surrounded by shrieking cannibals parodies and perverts not only Una among the savages in FQ I vi and Pastorella among the shepherds in VI ix but especially the climactic vision of the dance of the Graces in VI x. The connection is made explicit by Calidore's second intrusion, but other parallels are implicit: the stately pavilion of Acidale, the shepherd's joyful piping, the innocent singing and dancing of the hundred naked maidens, the one that ‘Seem'd all the rest in beauty to excell’ who stands ‘in the midst’ to receive their ceremonial flowers (x 10–17)—each detail of the Acidalian vision is both foreshadowed and perverted in the cannibals’ obscene rite. Most striking, perhaps, is the contrast between the lovers: Colin's mistress graces him as he in turn ‘pype[s] apace’ to make a Grace of her, whereas Serena sits in shamed and disgraced silence refusing to respond to her lover even as he is incapable, in the darkness, of recognizing her.
Although Calepine and Serena are together again at the end of canto viii, the discourtesies each has experienced preclude a joyful reunion. Such anticlimax suits Spenser's own narrative purposes, for out of their failure to achieve complete integration he sets the stage, as it were, for the poem's ultimate emblem of joyous harmony and courteous concord in the visionary dance of the Graces on Mount Acidale.
A.LEIGH DENEEF
Cheney 1966; Frye 1957; McNeir 1968; Staton 1966; Tonkin 1972.
A complex verse form invented by the Provençal poet Arnaut Daniel and employed by Dante and Petrarch; it appears in England in the sixteenth century as part of the Petrarchan lyric mode. The form was not often used by English poets, but Sidney experimented with it in his Old Arcadia (70, 71, 76 in ed 1962); and his double sestina (71) led Barnabe Barnes to attempt a triple one in Parthenophil and Parthenophe (1593; ed 1971:127–30). Puttenham's description (under seizino) gives little idea of the form's complexity, though he does warn that the ‘restraint to make the dittie sensible will try the makers cunning’ (Arte of English Poesie 2.10). Such modern poets as Eliot, Pound, and Auden revived the sestina; and Empson called attention to its possibilities when he discussed its use by Sidney (1930:45–50).
The sestina is composed of 39 lines in six strophes (or stanzas) of six unrhymed lines each, plus an envoy or turn (tornada) of three lines. The concluding words of the six lines in the first strophe are rearranged for subsequent strophes in an order rigorously determined by the Provençal troubadours. If numbered 1 2 3 4 5 6 for one strophe, the end words of the next strophe form the sequence 6 1 5 2 4 3. Thus, the six strophes successively end 123456, 615243, 364125, 532614, 451362, and 246531. In the concluding three-line envoy or turn, all six end words are repeated medially and finally, usually though not always in the order of their first appearance (as would be dictated for a seventh strophe in the sequence).
Spenser's only example of the form, Colin's lament in SC, August 151–89, is an imitation of a poem by Sannazaro, by way of Sidney (see Harrison 1930:715, Ringler in Sidney ed 1962:416). He adheres to the traditional purpose of the sestina in using it as a vehicle for complaint, to which the form is well suited in view of its plangent repetition of the same words in each successive strophe. The poem is innovative, however, in its frequent run-on lines and its use of energetic verbs (resound, augment) as end words. The conflict between forces for change and permanence challenges previous notions of what constitutes a sestina. As Webbe remarks, ‘Looke uppon the rufull song of Colin sung by Cuddie in the Sheepheardes Calender, where you shall see a singuler rare devise of a dittie framed upon these sixe wordes Woe, sounde, cryes, part, sleep, augment, which are most prettilie turned and wounde uppe mutually together, expressing wonderfully the dolefulnesse of the song’ (A Discourse of English Poetrie 1586; in G.G.Smith 1904, 1:276). Following the precedent of the Spaniard Gutierre de Cetina (1518–54), he breaks with the conventional order of the end words, so that each successive strophe follows the simpler pattern of 6 1 2 3 4 5. (By way of homage, he translates one of Cetina's end words, quejas ‘cries.’)
The tendency of Spenser's sestina toward run-on lines reaches its climax, significantly, in lines 168–9, at the boundary between the third and fourth stanzas, midway through the six stanzas of the sestina proper: ‘When I them see so waist, and fynd no part/Of pleasure past. Here will I dwell apart.’ The inability to participate in past joys drives the speaker to apartness and grief in the future. The sixth stanza leads him to a new kind of participation and harmony with nature: ‘Hence with the Nightingale will I take part’ (183).
Traditionally, the sestina has seemed appropriate to the pastoral setting, inasmuch as the patterned, cyclical sequence of its permutations is suggestive of the passage of the seasons and their reflection in the topography of the mind. In this respect, the form could speak directly to Spenser's recurrent concern for the rhythms of the human and natural worlds, and for the echo he sought to make resonate between them, in joy (as with Epithalamion) and in Colin's lovelorn state as well, where ‘The forest wide is fitter to resound/The hollow Echo of my carefull cryes’ (159–60).
Furthermore, earlier practitioners of the sestina had capitalized on the mythological and Christian significances of the numbers six and seven which figure prominently in the form (without and with the envoy, respectively); not only the figure of the poet merging with the landscape (as Petrarch had meditated on that figure in his poems to Laura-as-Daphne, transformed into the laurel branch), but the weekly rhythm of labors and repose could be found by Spenser in the sestina. Frye has called attention to such hexaemeral groupings in the uncompleted Faerie Queene: ‘There are six books, and Spenser has a curious fondness for mentioning the number six…In most of these groups there is a crucial seventh, and perhaps the Mutabilitie Cantos have that function in the total scheme of the epic…The poem brings us to the poet's “Sabbath's sight” after his six great efforts of creation, and there is nothing which at any point can be properly described as “unperfite”’ (1963:70–1). Although Spenser had at first proposed a 12-or 24-book poem, in accordance with his epic models, he ended by settling for fewer; and in his sixth book, he returned to the figure of Colin Clout and the pastoral setting. In its calendrical symbolism, and its systematic use of interlace to suggest the persistence of pattern triumphing over change, the sestina would have offered him a miniaturized lyric model for the patterns and resolutions of the myths of romance.
MARIANNE SHAPIRO
Empson 1930; Thomas Perrin Harrison, Jr 1930 ‘The Relations of Sidney and Spenser’ PMLA 45:712–31; Shapiro 1980; Spanos 1978.