CHAPTER 14
Edmund Spenser
The present chapter proceeds from simple, statistical points to those that are complex and controversial. It argues that Spenser was remarkably free in his use of the Bible.1
Spenser uses the Bible pervasively in the first book of The Faerie Queene and the “Hymne of Heavenly Love” in the Fowre Hymnes, as well as occasionally throughout his poems, his letters, and the prose Vewe of the Present State of Ireland. When Spenser demonstrably uses the Bible, what parts does he turn to? “Spenser alludes to Revelation more than any other book of the Bible” Landrum (1926, p. 517) replies.2 Book I contains forty-two out of the sixty citations of it in the Faerie Queene, according to Shaheen (1976, pp. 181–2). Many of these references (e.g. FQ I.vii.16–18, viii.6, 14) are associated with Duessa in her role, closely derived from Revelation, as biblical Whore of Babylon (Revelation 17–19:3), interpreted by Protestants of Spenser’s day as the corrupt church, and thus identified with the Roman Catholic Church. The contrast between her and the Woman Clothed with the Sun (Revelation 12, interpreted as the true, the Protestant Church and reincarnated in Una) provided Protestants with a scriptural defense against the charge of having split the church. Revelation also provided Faerie Queene Book One with a common and appealing plot – a good and a bad woman who compete for the hero’s soul. This Protestant politico-religious reading of Revelation was a popular subject, one stressed by many commentaries on Revelation, of which an exceptional number existed in English, including the long commentary by Van der Noot in Theatre for Worldlings (1569), where Spenser’s first work was published. Revelation brings with it apocalypticism – the sense that current events are predestined and have been prophesied as signs that the world is about to end and that humanity is polarized “in two flocks, two folds – black, white; right, wrong”(Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves”).
Next to Revelation in number of clear borrowings come the Psalms (Landrum, 1926, p. 517; Shaheen, 1976, p. 181) – the best-known book of the Bible, perhaps even more so then than now, because at least one Psalm was included in every church service and they were also recommended for private and family devotions. The Book of Psalms also existed in more versions than any other book because in addition to that included in the various versions of the Bible as a whole, it sometimes stood alone – the version in the Prayer Book and the innumerable private metrical paraphrases, of which the Sternhold and Hopkins version had subsequently been authorized for use in churches. So great was the latitude of the variations that in one of them – the Sternhold and Hopkins metrical version as revised early on by Whittingham – there is no “shepherd” in the Twenty-third Psalm. The Sternhold and Hopkins version was often sung in church to various tunes, which are indicated in Elizabethan psalters, e.g. their version of Psalm 100 was sung to a tune which has ever since born its name: “Old Hundredth.”
The poet could choose to echo different translations in different places, as Shaheen (1976, pp. 21–35) has proved that Spenser did. Consequently the Psalms were remembered not only in clear verbal borrowings like “The Lord is my Shepherd” – they may be just the tip of the iceberg – but in typical sentiments, in imagery, in sub-genres, or perhaps, like a secular book, in mere form and style. Little was known of Hebrew poetics, but realizing this left Elizabethan poets free to use any verse form they chose, and this was a greater freedom than they had with other books of the Bible.
Much has recently been written on these metrical paraphrases, especially since most of one of them was written by a woman, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. Spenser is said to have translated “The seven Psalmes” – i.e. the Penitential Psalms, 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143, as reported in Complaints, “The Printer to the Reader” – though his versions are no longer extant. Translating the Psalms must have directed attention to biblical poetics. Spenser borrows some of the poetic form of the Psalms. Most pervasive is their syntactic parallelism: this device is also characteristic of the Faerie Queene as a whole, especially of the first three books, and elegantly exemplified in Una’s lament (I.vii.22–5). Two Messianic Psalms claim the king is God’s son: Psalms 2:7 and 89:26–7. Spenser echoes this in the notion that Gloriana is “heavenly born” (FQ I.x.59); and that Eliza in the “April” eclogue of the Shepheardes Calender is “O dea certe” and begotten by the god Pan (see lines 50–4, 91–4, Thenot’s emblem and the last line of the gloss thereto). Spenser’s description of the birth of Belphoebe, another of Elizabeth’s surrogates, as “of the wombe of Morning dew” echoes the beautiful but mysterious verse 3 in 110, a Messianic Psalm that in some versions (not the Geneva), reads “the deawe of thy birth, is of the wombe of the morning” (chiefly, the Psalter in the Book of Common Prayer; for a conspectus of versions of this verse, see Shaheen, 1976, appendix C, example 29).
A further section of the Bible, labeled Apocrypha by Protestants, held a fascination for Spenser that seems Romanist because nowadays it is considered canonical only by the Catholic and the Greek Orthodox denominations. Landrum (1926, p. 518) finds thirty-three uses of the Apocrypha in Spenser’s works. In his time, these books were not considered so Romanist in that all Bibles contained them: English Protestant Bibles inserted most of them between the Old Testament and the New. Though the Geneva Bible cautions that they be “not received by a common consent to be read and expounded publikely in the Church” (Apocrypha, The Argument), the Church of England – following Melanchthon and the Catholics rather than the Geneva editors on this issue – recommended that they be read not for doctrine, it is true, but for morality (Article 6 of the 39 Articles, which can be found in most Books of Common Prayer before the 1970 revisions). She actually ordered some of them to be read in church: Judith, Tobit, Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, and Baruch once made up most of the Old Testament lessons for Morning and Evening Prayer in October and November of the liturgical year (see the successive Lectionaries in the oldest Books of Common Prayer). 2 Esdras 14:9 inspired the theme of the degeneration of the world in FQ IV.viii.31 and V Proem; 2 Esdras 4 and 2 Maccabees 9:8 inform the image of the Leveling Giant with the scales.3
A long-recognized, striking, and extended use of the Apocrypha is the portrayal of Sapience in An Hymne of Heavenly Beautie (183–288). Spenser’s Sapience represents one of the three developed biblical characters in his works, the other two being Christ in the Hymne of Heavenly Love and Duessa as the Whore of Babylon in Faerie Queene I. Spenser’s Sapience derives not only from the canonical Proverbs 1–9, especially 9, but also from the Apocryphal Wisdom 6–9, Ecclesiasticus (now known as Sirach) 1, 4, 6, 14–15, 24, and 51, and Baruch 3:28–32. The character Gloriana owes much to Sapience or Wisdom – both the book and the character (see, for example, A. C. Hamilton’s note to I Proem 4.7). Spenser’s calling Elizabeth “mirrour of grace and majesty divine” in I Proem 4.2, as A. C. Hamilton notes, is tantamount to equating her with the similarly described Sapience in Wisdom 7:26. Sapience “reacheth from one ende to another mightily, and comely doth she order al things” (Wisdom 8:1). Sapience’s imperial attribute could justify the rule of a female monarch like Gloriana and her real-life counterpart Queen Elizabeth (Fruen, 1990, p. 66).
Una has sometimes been regarded as another surrogate for Queen Elizabeth; and Una like Gloriana is said to be “borne of hevenly birth” (I.x.9), even though she has earthly parents. Having earthly parents does not disqualify Una from being Wisdom; it only makes her a lower emanation in the same chain of being. A material cause for Spenser’s linking of Elizabeth to Sapience by the attribute of heavenly birth is the presence of sacral monarchy in the Royal Psalms, as explained above. A final cause is feminism: the link with Sapience functions as a scriptural counterweight to the Pauline strictures invoked by those misogynists like John Knox who objected to having a female as the head or supreme governor of the church – which office since Henry VIII had been a prerogative of the English crown. True, the typical exegete allegorized Sapience as Christ, thus downplaying her gender; but the very existence of a feminine sign for Christ would have strengthened the claim of a woman to a Christlike office. Besides, as Fruen has shown, Melanchthon and in a sense even Calvin equated the biblical Sapience not with Christ but with natural law and natural revelation – things that could be personified in a woman (Fruen, 1990, p. 65–70). When her surrogates are apotheosized, so is Queen Elizabeth herself. Thus Scripture and exegesis can sometimes serve the poet as a political tool. The biblically-inspired poet not only absorbs but on occasion attempts to manipulate his culture.
Another section of the Bible of predictable importance to Spenser is the Gospels, which are particularly pervasive in the Hymne of Heavenly Love. Three surprising allusions to them, surprising in view of their secular context, are “the bird, that warned Peter of his fall” (FQ V.vi.27); the association of the parthenogenesis of Amoret and Belphoebe with that of Christ (III.vi.3, 27); and the associations of the goddess Nature with the transfigured Christ (VII.vii.7). The first two Gospel references could be seen as portraying Britomart and Belphoebe as types, respectively, of Peter and of Christ, or as antitypes, focusing on their differences, or as remote analogues to them on a natural level. I compare and contrast Britomart and Peter below.
When Spenser demonstrably uses the Bible, how does he use it? This question dominates the rest of the present chapter. Verbatim quotation is the most direct, unless it is ironical (on which see below). The Renaissance recognized three looser degrees of fidelity to a source-text – translation, paraphrase, and the still looser types of imitation. The second most direct uses are translation or paraphrase, and these types of imitation, while not always mechanical, exhibit the least degree of creativity. Of this sort may have been Spenser’s supposed translations of The Seven (Penitential) Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Canticum canticorum (Song of Solomon). He is generally believed to have translated the four “sonnets” paraphrased by his French source from Revelation in the Theatre for Worldlings.
Reverential imitation comes in other and looser varieties, and these will occupy us for the middle portion of this chapter. Spenser’s uses of the Bible range from a literal to an allegorical sense, whether moral or typological; from the direct to the oblique – parodic, allegorical, analogic, or otherwise far-fetched; and from the political to the purely aesthetic.
Some borrowings are relatively direct and literal: for instance, “And eke with fatnesse swollen were his eyne” (FQ I.iv.21) from “Their eyes swell with fatnesse” (Psalter of Book of Common Prayer, Psalm 73:7). Spenser’s only change here is to adapt what in the Bible is a metonymy for the general prosperity of the wicked to a literal symptom of gluttony. Another literal imitation is longer but still simple and straightforward: Artegall’s re-enactment of the Judgment of Solomon upon rival claimants to a desired person – in the Bible, between two women about a baby (1 Kings 3:26–7); in Spenser, between Sanglier and a squire about a lady (FQ V.i.26–8). In both Spenser and the Bible, the test of ownership is the same: willingness to give up the person to the rival rather than to see him or her killed (see A. C. Hamilton’s note ad loc.).
A surprisingly literal use, almost as if the Bible were just another book of stories, is the one referred to above where Britomart on her quest for her beloved forces herself to stay awake when lodged by the sinister Dolon – a struggle that climaxes at the first crowing of “the native bellman of the night / The bird that warned Peter of his fall.” According to Spenser, Peter “fell” when he repeatedly denied knowing Christ and then heard the cock crow. That fall had nothing to do with sleep – the temptation with which Britomart is currently wrestling. But just before that in the Bible – and immediately after Christ had warned Peter of his future denial (Matthew 26:34) – Peter and his two compatriots had thrice deserted Christ by falling asleep; though the verb “fall asleep” is not used, it is implied, especially in verse 43, “He … found them asleepe againe, for their eyes were heavy”(Matthew 26:36–46, 69–75). That Spenser is thinking also of the sleepy disciples and thus conflating Peter’s two falls is shown by Britomart’s repeated injunction to her eyes to “watch,” that is, stay awake (V.vi.25–26), paralleling Christ’s injunction to the sleepy disciples, “What? Could ye not watch with me one hour? Watch, and pray, that you enter not into tentation; the spirit indeed is ready, but the flesh is weake” (Matthew 26:40–1, 43, 45–6). Britomart is the antitype of Peter: she has not experienced and will not experience a moral fall (though in accepting Dolon’s invitation, she has deviated “a little wide by West,” the direction she is supposed to be taking; V.vi.22.4, see Hamilton’s note), but she is in danger of literally falling through the floor when the perilous bed does, escaping because unlike Peter she has resisted falling asleep. The allusion is creative and oblique; it is not religious or allegorical but only stoical, prudential, and characteristic of chivalric romance. The sacredness of the subtext contributes nothing beyond the hint that love is a bit like religion and Britomart the antithesis of Peter. When the artist is imitating at such a great distance, he is quite free. (For a straightforward and condemnatory reading of this biblical imitation as being what Greene and I would call sacramental, see Dunseath, 1968, pp. 168–71.)
At the opposite extreme is a biblical allusion whose relevance could not be fully understood without the tradition of biblical allegory – in other words one where Spenser has retained the clothing of allegory that the character or action wore or allegedly wore in the Bible. One example of this is the aforementioned Duessa as the Whore of Babylon in Revelation 17–19:3. Without her assumed symbolism of the false, the Roman Catholic Church, Redcrosse’s fornication with her, meaning his starting to entertain Catholic ideas, would not be a sin so serious as to merit hell as it does: “ever burning wrath before him laid, / By righteous sentence of th’Almighties law” (I.ix.50).
Another instance of filtering the Bible through allegorical exegesis is Redcrosse’s unexpected announcement after the dragon-fight that he cannot marry Una right now but must first go back to Gloriana whom he has promised to serve for six years (xii.17–19, 41). Redcrosse then promises Una’s father that he will come back in the mystic seventh year to consummate their marriage (I.xii.19). This deferral sounds like his promised return to the Hermit Contemplation in old age and final departure to the New Jerusalem (I.x.60–1, 63–4). We can begin to see the point just from the text alone. We have already been told in a cryptic passage that Gloriana and Una both have a claim on Redcrosse’s “love” (I.ix.17.1–3). When the knight says his love of Una will be “next to that lady’s love” he parallels Lovelace’s later statement in “To Lucasta, going to the wars”: “I could not love thee half so much loved I not honor more,” and I submit that Redcrosse’s departure from Una illustrates the same complex priorities. Gloriana as we know symbolizes glory and honor, and at this point, her symbolism is more prominent than that of Una, who seems to be just an earthly beloved (but see the allegory below); also Gloriana is for the moment literally Redcrosse’s sovereign, so he should not let his personal affection for Una interfere with his patriotic duty.
Now Redcrosse’s two good women parallel Jacob’s two women in the Bible. Jacob serves Laban for seven years, allegedly to win as his wife Rachel, the woman he passionately loves (Genesis 29:15–30). The morning after the wedding night, however, Jacob finds that Laban has substituted in the bed his other daughter, the unwanted Leah, and that to get Rachel he has to serve yet another seven years. This alternation is like Redcrosse winning Una by his deeds, then serving Gloriana for a specified number of years, then marrying Una. Serving the woman in Spenser corresponds to serving the woman’s father to win her hand in marriage in the Bible. Redcrosse disappoints Una and her father just as Laban disappointed Jacob; but Redcrosse has not deceived them insofar as he has forewarned the father and on that occasion claims to have already forewarned Una (I.xii.18).
Medieval exegesis provides the point of Spenser’s imitation. Every sincere Christian wants to experience ecstatic contemplation, symbolized in the Bible by Rachel and in the poem by Una as religious truth. A literal instance of it which Redcrosse also desires is the lifestyle of the Hermit Contemplation and the city he contemplates, the New Jerusalem or heaven (I.x.55–64). But for various reasons every Christian must perform some work for society. In theology and biblical exegesis this social obligation is called the active life and is symbolized by Jacob’s other woman, Leah, who is not passionately loved but who needs him (for instance, in Aquinas’s Summa Theologica II IIae, 2, 179, 2, and in Dante’s Purgatorio 27.94–108 and Sinclair’s note ad loc.). That Redcrosse’s alternative woman is not only a personification of honor and glory but a literal queen who assigns quests to knights and records their successes (I.x.59) makes her a perfect symbol of the active life, with its devotion to achievement and its motive of winning glory. Serving the two women in Spenser corresponds to serving the exacting father of the two women in the Bible.
The numerology provides further evidence of the allusion. Spenser has revised the biblical sequence and years of service: Redcrosse wins contemplation first in what may be seen as year number one and what in mystical theory is called the spiritual betrothal, corresponding to the betrothal ceremony in I.xii.36–40; but he cannot enjoy her fully until he serves the active life for six years. Spenser has borrowed from the numbers of years Jacob served to win each lady only the idea of seven as the number of consummation, by giving the less passionately desired lady, or life, not another seven as in the Bible but the obviously incomplete number six. The spiritual marriage, the Union with Truth, will occur only with the Beatific Vision in the afterlife, which is described as the Sabbath or seventh day (FQ VII.viii.2). Redcrosse’s desire to remain with Una is analogous to and symbolic of his desire to either remain on the mountain or go straight to heaven expressed to the Hermit (I.x.63–4, see also 60–1), and tells us that he wants to become a full-time contemplative while in this life. His contrary reluctant return to his worldly duty on both occasions (I.xii.18, 41) obeys the Hermit’s imperative of good works (I.x.55–64) and adds an ethical dimension to Redcrosse’s desertion of Una. This second good woman in Redcrosse’s life represents his further and somewhat conflicting obligations. Spenser, like the allegorists of Leah and Rachel, is making the point that the believer must practice both the active and the contemplative lives, even though contemplation is obviously better and indeed the climax of one’s earthly life and the chief pleasure in the life to come. This meaning is both moral and anagogical. It reaffirms Una’s lofty symbolism without downgrading that of Gloriana. Redcrosse’s initial view of contemplation as a possible full-time job (x.63–4) could be seen as Catholic, and the Hermit’s refusal to take him on just yet and his resulting departure from both symbols of Contemplation – the personification of it and Una – to the workaday world of Gloriana could be seen as Protestant, though this same image and theme had been voiced frequently in the Catholic Middle Ages as well (see King, 1990, pp. 217–18). Thus Spenser does not distinguish between a Catholic and somewhat far-fetched allegorical exegesis like this one and a Protestant one (the Whore) but uses the Catholic one when it fits his story and the stage of his hero’s spiritual development.
Another oblique and thus creative use of Scripture is the parodic. Although the Bible retains its normative character and the irony is not at the expense of the sacred text but at the expense of the extrabiblical being who does not measure up and who may actually be using the Scripture sophistically, the tone is not reverential but witty, comical, or cynical. Sophistry is displayed when Phaedria deviously misapplies “consider the lilies of the field” (FQ II.vi.15–16; cf. Matthew 6:28–9) to authorize her frivolous idleness. In Spenser’s social satire, Mother Hubberd’s Tale, when the formal priest, recommending to the Fox and the Ape the easy life of Protestant clergy, says “Ne is the paines so great, but beare ye may” (445), he is misapplying “There hath no tentation taken you, but … ye may be able to beare it” (1 Corinthians 10:13). Some entire plots are parodic. The Giant with the scales (FQ V.ii.37–8, 42–6) not only reflects Apocryphal villains but parodies almost blasphemously God’s leveling of mountains and weighing of unquantifiable things (Isaiah 40:4, 12; Wisdom 11:17; Job 28:25). Enjoyment of these ironies depends on the reader’s recognition of the scriptural echo.
Spenser uses the Bible in the various allegorical senses ascribed to it by exegetes. The medieval mnemonic jingle defines them as follows: “Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, / Moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia” (“The letter teaches the events, the allegory what you should believe, the moral what you should do, the anagogy where you should be going”). The last three are pigeonholes for the different kinds of subject matter the literal sense can sustain: salvation-history, morality, and the afterlife, the three topics the Middle Ages considered important, just as today the three “relevant” subjects to be found in literature are gender, class, and ethnicity. Rarely are all three of the allegorical senses found in a single passage either in the Bible or in secular literature, but they are there potentially for the poet to turn on or off.
The anagogical subject-matter – allegories or direct portrayals of the future life, also known as eschatology – is rare both in the Bible and in literature. In The Faerie Queene it is exemplified on a large scale only in the New Jerusalem, which Redcrosse glimpses from the Mount of Contemplation (FQ I.x.55–7) and in “that same time when no more change shall be / But steadfast rest of all things firmly stayed / Upon the pillars of eternity” in the last stanza of the poem as we have it (FQ VII.viii.2).
Conventionally, then as now, “allegory” is of course the general name for every sense outside the literal. In the peculiar narrow sense used only in biblical exegesis, and not universally there, “allegory” is only one of them: “what you should believe.” In the Judeo-Christian tradition generally, what you should believe is not a set of doctrines but a story about God’s dealings with mankind, which is called salvation-history. Typical allegories of this sort occur when an Old Testament person like Abel or Melchisidek “allegorizes,” or better “typifies,” Christ (see, for example, Psalm 110:4; Hebrews 7:1–15; 12:24), or when St Paul the persona of Romans 7, according to commentators, re-enacts the Fall of Man. When a person resembles a biblical person she or he is called a type, a figure, or a figura.4 The Faerie Queene contains seven clear and widely recognized figural or typological episodes, on which see Kaske, “Bible,” in Hamilton et al. (1990). Being an analogy of one person or event to another, typology or figura lends itself to what Fowler calls “extended symbolism.”
The remaining sense is the moral one, which hardly needs explanation. It is practically ubiquitous in sacred and even secular texts, or at least it was once claimed to be in order to justify secular literature. While somewhat restrictive, this hermeneutical principle at least allowed a reader to investigate whether a given passage – in the Bible or in literature – is not praising but subtly critiquing a supposedly exemplary character, as exegetes rightly do with David and as Spenserians rightly do with Redcrosse, Artegall, and Calidore, thus painting these heroes in shades of gray. Spenser in the Letter to Raleigh professes to deliver “doctrine by ensample [example] not by rule,” and thus implies that everything that happens in the Faerie Queene is somehow moral in either a positive or a negative sense.
Alastair Fowler, in a book arguing that the Faerie Queene is organized astrologically, presents another and a helpful classification of Spenser’s methods of biblical imitation: “Sometimes Spenser handled the Biblical material as Bunyan was later to do: combining a large number of short texts, directly applied to contemporary life [I think he means to the reader’s daily life] into a single but multi-partite allegorical fable” (Fowler, 1964, p. 66). This method is exemplified, I presume, in Spenser’s House of Holiness in Book One, Canto Ten, especially a stanza like the following on Fidelia’s miracles of faith in which A. C. Hamilton discovers short biblical texts:
She would commaund the hasty Sunne to stay,
Or backward turne his course from hevens hight [Joshua 10:12–13 and 2 Kings 20:10],
Sometimes great hostes of men she could dismay [Judges 7:19–22],
Dry-shod to passe, she parts the flouds in tway [Exodus 14:21–31];
And eke huge mountaines from their native seat
She would commaund, themselves to bear away,
And throw in raging sea with roaring threat [Matthew 21:21].
“At his best, however,” Fowler continues,
he worked in a different manner. He would develop a few of the Biblical images in a more extended symbolism [including, I presume, typology], and make these the dominating poetic features of the Book. Thus, the character of Una, and the outline of her story, are based on the passage in the twelfth chapter of Revelation about “a woman clothed with the sun” who fled into the wilderness to escape a persecuting dragon.
In addition, as Fowler (1964, p. 66, n1) notes in this connection, John E. Hankins “shows that Spenser has conflated this biblical passage with another, traditionally associated with it: the account of the Bride’s search for her lover (allegorically, Christ) in the Song of Songs,” and this parallel too, I would add, is extended at length, up to Canto Eight, where the pair is reunited. I would add that Spenser has conflated with the above rather helpless females the character of Sapience in his portrayal of Una’s magisterial relationship to Redcrosse (I.i.; I.ix–xii) and the Satyrs (I.vi). Thus Una brings with her at least three biblical subtexts, as well as representing on the literal level the conflation of two romance characters: the romance damsel in distress and the romance damsel as guide. Such polysemy exhibits another kind of freedom that imitation even of a sacred subtext allows.
Extended development occurs with less explicitness than do the bouquets of proof texts. Although Landrum rightly finds no explicit biblical echoes in Muiopotmos, the doomed butterfly’s loose analogy to the Fall of Adam in a garden – a parallel of one entire story with another – subtends the entire last part of this poem. Una and the butterfly Clarion constitute biblical types – items that seldom show up in tabulations and commentary notes to Spenser. Extended symbolism often goes unnoticed, like the largest names on a map. Spenser’s allegory of Gloriana and Una as Leah and Rachel is an example not only of allegorical exegesis but of extended symbolism. Spenser’s use of the apocalyptic and exegetical Whore of Babylon as a model for Duessa is extended and amplified – for example, by the addition of Lucifera as an ally and of Timias as Arthur’s inferior double, and of both him and Fradubio as other victims and thus conditional parallels (that is, parallels with significant contrasts) to Redcrosse.
A clear yet richly complex instance of “extended symbolism” emerges from the way in which Redcrosse and Arthur in their respective duels with the giant Orgoglio (vii.7–15, viii.2–25) enter into conditional parallels with David in his confrontation with Goliath (1 Samuel 17:38–49) – another event of Old-Testament history. David puts aside the armor (sword, helmet, coat of mail) given him by Saul and approaches Goliath with only a staff, his sling, and a pouch of smooth stones (1 Samuel 17:38–40). But David declares that the Lord will “deliver” Goliath into his hand (1 Samuel 17:45–7). Redcrosse has also laid aside his armor, including his shield, for a quite different reason, but he makes no such profession of faith. Attacked by Orgoglio “ere he could get his shield,” he cannot defeat Orgoglio as he would have had he possessed that faith which Ephesians (6:16, cited at the end of the Letter to Raleigh) depicts as a shield (“above all, take the shield of Faith, wherewith yee may quench all the fierie dartes of the wicked”). David doesn’t need literal armor (passing over his quite effective slingshot) because of his faith in God. Redcrosse may look like the unarmed David, but he is merely a parody of him because that which David substituted for armor, i.e. faith, is here symbolized by armor, and he lacks it.
In contrast, Arthur, fully armed and, above all, shielded, prevails against both Duessa’s seven-headed beast (FQ I.vii.7–8) and, later, Orgoglio (viii.18, 19, 20, and 21), where the crucial shield is mentioned in each stanza). Faith is the metaphorical meaning of his shield (as in Ephesians). His shield enables those same miracles of defeating “unequal armies of his foes,” dismaying monsters, and harming the very heavens – effects which are later said to be wrought by Fidelia, personification of faith, in x.20 (see above). Spenser thus develops a biblical character (David) by reflecting him in both a foil and a skewed analogue. We have seen three examples of extended symbolism in Duessa as the Whore of Babylon with her extra allies and victim (a distinctively Protestant exegesis), Redcrosse and Arthur as two different Davids fighting Orgoglio as Goliath, and Gloriana and Una as Leah and Rachel. To cover imitations as complex as these, and sometimes as literal, we need a broader term than just “symbolism” – a term like “development” or “amplification.” By extending biblical symbolism with extra allies, victims, and antitypes, Spenser employs great ingenuity.
One would think that biblical imitation would stifle creativity because the normativity of the text would seem to allow only a reverential, uncritical, unmediated imitation – scarcely more than a translation, one that aims to transfer to the new work some of the primary text’s authority. This type of imitation Thomas M. Greene in his study of Renaissance imitation of the classics would label sacramental, and he gives it short and scornful shrift (Greene, 1982, pp. 38–9, 47, 57). True, he never mentions imitating the Bible, though it would seem to be a perfect example of sacramental imitation because the authority with which a classical text oppresses its author applies a fortiori to a sacred text, which may even be a means of grace. This oppression may be the reason for the phenomenon noted by Greenslade, that few works that are heavily influenced by Bible stories or scenes attain the highest rank, the exception being Paradise Lost. Greenslade (1963, pp. 496–7) praises Spenser among others for finding his plots elsewhere. Greene praises as sophisticated a “dialectical” imitation by those writers who know that their subtext was written a long time ago, perhaps on other shores, and is not applicable to their generation without considerable reinterpretation. Such cognoscenti either supply this or put the original nugget between quotation marks as a naive period-piece. Some of Spenser’s imitations of the Bible are reverential, especially Hymne of Heavenly Love and parts of Faerie Queene Book I – works whose aim clearly is to enlist the Bible’s salvific power to make the reader a better Christian (see Letter to Raleigh on Book I). Such truly sacramental imitations are supported when the Bible or a portion thereof is mentioned explicitly, as Spenser does in the Vewe, the Letter to Raleigh, the Shepheardes Calender, especially the glosses (whether he authored or just authorized them), and above all in Book I, but nowhere else. In the Letter to Raleigh, he cites Ephesians (6:11–17) to explain that Redcrosse’s armor is “the armour of a Christian man.” Redcrosse gives Arthur as a parting gift “a booke, wherein his Saveours testament / Was writ … / A worke of wondrous grace, and able soules to save” (I.ix.19). Such a view supports reverential imitation.
Descriptions of the Bible in the House of Holiness are jaundiced; and such an attitude supports dialectical imitation of it. We can see from Spenser that a Christian can utilize the Bible against itself by criticizing, relativizing, and historicizing the Old Testament along the lines of St Paul and of Christ’s “Antitheses” (Matthew 5:17–47). The Ten Commandments given to Moses on Mount Sinai are characterized as what St Paul calls the “letter” that “killeth” (2 Corinthians 3:6–7), namely as the “bitter doome of death and balefull mone,” which is “writ in stone / With bloudy letters by the hand of God” (x.53). Greene would call this echo a dialectical imitation of the account of the giving of Mosaic Law – even a combative or an adversarial one (43–48, passim). Such an imitation is authorized provided that the criticisms are those voiced or implied by Paul and the Epistle to the Hebrews. In the House of Holiness, Fidelia holds a “sacred Booke, with bloud ywrit.” All things considered, it seems to be the entire Bible: it is “signd and seald with blood” (x.13), and out of it she teaches “Of God, of grace, of justice, of free will” (x.19). Spenser sometimes says the Bible may harm its readers – a warning stressed by Catholics. Fidelia’s book contains “darke things … hard to be understood” (x.13, 19; cf. 2 Peter 3:15), and when Redcrosse hears them, he is filled with despair at his own unworthiness and wishes to die (x.21–9; cf. ix.50–1). This warning is the nearest Spenser ever comes to criticizing the Bible as a whole, and he seems to question as Catholics did the sufficiency of Bible-reading for salvation if an optimistic instructor (Speranza or Hope) is not present.
Furthermore, such relativizing and historicizing of a subtext as Greene admires in poets is only one kind of poetic freedom. Another way of using Scripture independently is by combining it with another text or discourse, as when Spenser boldly inserts between the expected heaven of “happy soules” and the heaven of angels a mezzanine “where those Idees on hie / Enraunged be, which Plato so admyred” (HHB 82–3). This project is called syncretism – a viewpoint neither wholly religious nor wholly secular – and it is common in the Middle Ages (most notably with Aristotle) and the Renaissance (most notably with neoplatonism).
Another way of declaring one’s independence from the Bible is to avoid mentioning it at all. This makes for a secular discourse – classical or courtly-chivalric or merely ethical or prudential, giving a view of humanity in itself – independent of God or the devil. Such a poem is Prothalamium, a poem celebrating a double betrothal. It is absent from Landrum’s (1926, pp. 538–44) tabulations. The almost complete absence of Scripture from Faerie Queene III and IV means that, like Shakespeare, Spenser does not regard the Bible as containing the answer to every question – for example, the question dominating Britomart’s quest, whom to marry.
An imitation both more and less direct than verbal and thematic imitation is biblical poetics. It must be admitted that Spenser often uses personification – two of his most powerful being Despaire in Faerie Queene I.ix and Mutabilitie, the protagonist of Book Seven. Personifications are not typical of biblical poetics, except for Sapience and Love in 1 Corinthians 13. In mode, Despaire and Mutabilitie resemble the Roman de la Rose more than they do the Bible.
Two kinds of biblical poetics are adversarial enough to meet Greene’s criteria – images in bono and in malo and contradictory propositions. In addition to psalmic parallelism, moral examples, and typology, all mentioned above, an element of biblical poetics that Spenser demonstrably employs throughout the Faerie Queene and in the Amoretti is the repetition of images in good and bad senses (in bono and in malo) – a biblical structure explored by patristic and medieval exegesis and recognized in the Renaissance even by some Protestants. In Faerie Queene Book One appear alternating good and bad cups, wells, women, castles, allegorical houses, garlands, and reptilian beasts. Spenser also repeats with this variation what one might broadly call “motifs” – themes and actions, such as pride/self-confidence, fasting, magic, glory-praise-honor, bidding of beads, communities (good, bad, and imperfect), and abandoning one’s shield. Redcrosse and Arthur are giant-fighting Davids – Redcrosse in malo, Arthur in bono. The good instance and the bad one are not always diametrically opposite as they are in the previous example because they are sometimes in different areas of life. Whereas the bad dragon represents Satan, an originary and cosmic principle of evil, the good dragon, forming the crest on Arthur’s helmet (I.vii.31), is just a dynastic and political symbol (see Spenser Encyclopedia, “Heraldry,” p. 354). Nevertheless Spenser’s effort to include a good dragon is unmistakable and biblical. Shifting evaluations of altars, pride, and a laurel leaf complicate Amoretti and Epithalamium (Amoretti 27–8, 58–9; Epithalamium 162–4). These tergiversations, especially when they are in the same area of life, give the feeling of a progressive self-correction, yielding the Aristotelian conclusion that vice is to virtue as abuse is to the proper use of the same thing. Despite its biblical precedent, the strategy is versatile and adaptable to secular literature such as the later books of the Faerie Queene because it is tied not to religion nor to allegory but to categories of good and evil, better and worse. It is more text-based than is allegory. At the same time, the progressive self-correction is hermeneutically unsettling because no one passage can be trusted to give Spenser’s last word about an image or practice; at the end of the poem one has to construct a complex distinction to cover everything he says, and some of those things may be contradictory. The Tenth Canto of Book One contradicts previous condemnations of certain religious practices such as fasting. The resulting indeterminacy is meant to lead the reader toward a position of adiaphorism – a position favored by Anglicans that allowed a certain latitude provided that the practice was not explicitly condemned by Scripture and could serve a good cause (Kaske, 1999, pp. 86–97).
Sometimes not only evaluations of images but whole propositions are contradicted, especially on two questions. Do we obtain heaven by God’s indefectible, irresistible grace springing ultimately from his predestination or by our own good works? And if we do so by works – winning merit, avoiding serious sin, and repenting after we fail to do so – are they performed through divine grace or through our own free will? Spenser presents all these positions (see I.ix.53 versus I.x.41 and II.i.32; and I.x.1 versus I.vii.41 and II.i.33). By exposing contradictions – what some would consider a flaw in the Bible – Spenser imitates the Bible dialectically or even “eristically,” that is, combatively.
It can now be seen how I fit into existing scholarship on Spenser and the Bible. I alone take this as my prime subject. I read both works with a more empirical closeness. Five other recent critics resemble me, have influenced me, and should be read along with me for their unique data and their differing perspectives on the subject. Darryl Gless, Literature and Theology in Renaissance England (1994) and the many works of John N. King, especially Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (1990), focus on English sources: “practical divinity” (Gless) and popular literature (King). Some textual and theological precision is unattainable by King and Gless because neither attends to the many Latin Bibles (not only Romanist but Protestant) or to their commentaries that in the sixteenth century were written and reprinted overwhelmingly in Latin. Only Gervase Babington’s commentaries and a substantial share of the many Protestant commentaries on Revelation were written in English. This was because Latin was the lingua franca of all educated European men from grammar school onwards, especially on intellectual subjects. (For a survey of the Bibles and commentaries available to Spenser at Cambridge, see the bibliographical appendix to Kaske, 1999.) I disagree with King about the extent of the Romanism in Spenser owing to my use of these Latin sources (especially of the conciliatory Melanchthon) and to King’s assumption that the Faerie Queene and the Shepheardes Calender give one consistent doctrinal position throughout (i.e. moderate Protestantism). I contend that Spenser is a disciplined pluralist, that he offers a theology in Book I (mostly scripturalist, though also stressing sacraments and sacramentals) that differs not only from that in Book II (infrequent Scripture mostly syncretized with the predominant Aristotelian ethics), but also from that in the remaining books of this poem (broadly humanistic). The same degrees of Christianity are found in the Fowre Hymnes, namely the “Hymne of Heavenly Love” (based mostly on the Bible and the Creeds), the “Hymne of Heavenly Beauty” (vaguely Christian but syncretized with Jewish and Platonic ideas), and the “Hymne of Love” and the “Hymne of Beauty” (secular).
Darryl Gless departs from King and resembles me in his acceptance of Spenser’s religious contradictions. He locates each pole of a contradiction, couched in sophisticated theological vocabulary (e.g. “intrinsic versus extrinsic causes of salvation”), in the mind of an individual reader – a reader-response approach leading to indeterminacy. This interpretation, being minimalist, is plausible, especially regarding Spenser’s equivocations on “mercy” in I.x. But I also attempt to see patterns in the contradictions (e.g. fasting in bono and in malo) and reasons for them within the text, such as the virtue treated in the individual book or the hero’s current stage of religious development. Unlike King and me, Gless limits his focus to Faerie Queene Book I. In addition there are two currently undervalued, theologically precise, and heavily scriptural interpretations of Spenser’s doctrinal contradictions arguing for Augustinian influence and allusion as the key: James Schiavoni’s (1989) “Predestination and Free Will: The Crux of Canto Ten” and Åke Bergvall’s (2001) book, Augustinian Perspectives in the Renaissance.
As a biblical poet, Spenser excels with respect to his patterns of images in bono and in malo and to his vast exfoliating structural variations on biblical events and characters. Modern readers must exert themselves to “trace” Spenser’s “fine footing” among the Scriptures. They will discover a good deal of artistic freedom.
Notes
1 Many points in this chapter owe much to my entry “Bible” in the Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto, 1990), my book, Spenser and Biblical Poetics (Ithaca, NY, 1999), and my essay “Spenser’s Amoretti: A Psalter of Love,” in Daniel Doerksen and Christopher Hodgkins, eds, Centered on the Word (Newark, NJ, 2004). Unless otherwise noted, biblical citations are taken from the Geneva Bible. Spenser citations are from The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (New York, 2001) and from Shorter Poems, ed. Richard A. McCabe (Harmondsworth, 1999). I have normalized u-v-w and i-j-y. Faerie Queene is abbreviated FQ and Hymne of Heavenly Beautie HHB in documentation.
2 Landrum’s list provides the only statistics we have on the shorter poems and the Vewe. Unfortunately, she overlooks many allusions, and her comparison of versions is illogical. Since his publication in 1976, the more discriminating Shaheen has replaced Landrum on The Faerie Queene: he has collected hundreds of verbal borrowings and proved that Spenser usually, though by no means always, employs the Geneva version.
3 V.ii. On the imitation of Esdras here, see Dunseath (1968, pp. 97–8) and Hazard (2000, pp. 163–70, passim).
4 For example, by Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York, 1959), and, with more theological rigor, by A. C. Charity, Events and Their Afterlife: The Dialectics of Christian Typology in the Bible and Dante (Cambridge, 1966), 1–2, 171–8, passim.
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