“THAT IDLE NAME OF LOVE:”
Genre and Arthurian Identity in The Faerie Queene
Elizabeth McIntosh
December 5, 2013
As Arthur heroically defends himself from the onslaught of Pyrhocles and Cymochles,
both allegories of intemperance, he is distracted by Gloriana’s gorgeous visage. Pictured on the
shield of his foe, the Faerie Queene’s face diverts his attention, and dangerously lessens the
force of his attack (II.viii.43). At work here is the tension between Arthur’s epic and romantic
identities—identities that Spenser opposes throughout his poem. Critics of The Faerie Queene
have long remarked upon the work’s generic complexity, and have celebrated Spenser’s
fascinated recombination of forms as one of his greatest creative feats. Variously deploying
pastoral, comedic, and biblical tropes, The Faerie Queene above all engages with the epic and
romance traditions, from which it derives many of its most memorable characters and episodes.
Spenser’s treatment of these two genres may be, in part, an attempt to mediate controversial
elements of his politics, particularly his nebulous imperial aspirations for the Tudor dynasty,
and his more definite complaints about court morality. Engaging with contemporary critical
debate on the ethical function of poetry, he instructs his preeminent reader (namely Elizabeth I)
from the within the epic register, and criticizes her through the incidents of the romantic form.
This last may appear a paradoxical claim, given the commonplace that Spenser adopts romantic
convention in order to compliment the unmarried Elizabeth; but I would rather suggest that he
deploys the negatively-charged morality of the romantic mode in order to criticize her politics,
and the court culture those politics inspire, especially as set against the politically productive
results of epic endeavor. Defining “epic” and “romance” as Spenser might have construed
them, I will briefly summarize relevant generic criticism before turning to the poem that
furnishes the meat of my argument.
Founded on the opposition of the “epic” and “romantic” forms, this essay must begin by
explaining what it intends by those names. Epic, easy to describe, refers to the tradition Homer
1
founded with his Iliad and Odyssey, and which Virgil adopted and adapted in The Aeneid.
Spenser himself cites these masters in his ‘Letter to Raleigh,’ and in his Proem to Book I, he
suggests his emulation of Virgil’s career when he writes “Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome
did maske, / As time her taught in lowly Shepheards weeds, / Am now enforst a far unfitter
taske, / For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds” (Proem to Book I.1-4) He reminds
his reader that he’s already authored The Shepheardes Calendar; like his Mantuan predecessor
he trains his poetry in the pasture before allowing it to enter the lists as an epic contender. He
also formally follows Virgil by opening The Faerie Queene on an autobiographical note, for
many Renaissance editions of The Aeneid began with Virgil’s account of himself. 1 All this is to
say that Spenser regarded the Roman poet’s history and poetic undertakings as worthy of
imitation. Deeply interested in the moral education of his reader, he must have found matter in
Virgil’s texts suited to the study of virtue. In equating the epic and the ethical, Spenser
concurred with fellow poets like Sir Philip Sidney who, in his Defense of Poesy, explains why
heroic poetry accomplishes more than other, “lower” registers.
As the image of each action stirs and instructs the mind, so the lofty image of such
worthies most inflames the mind with desire to be worthy, and informs with counsel
how to be worthy. Only let Aeneas be worn in the tablet of your memory, how he
governs himself in the ruin of his country in the preserving his old father and carrying
away his religious ceremonies, in obeying god’s commandment to leave Dido though
not only all passionate kindness but even the humane consideration of virtuous
gratefulness would have craved other of him…how in his inward self and how in his
outward government…he will be found in excellency fruitful. 2
The inspiring actions of classical heroes—and Aeneas in particular—were generally perceived
as productive of virtuous striving toward self-government. Recalling the memorable adventures
of an epic hero, Renaissance readers would be moved to behave similarly: to honor their
1
2
McCabe, Richard A. and Colin Burrow. ‘Spenser’s Genres.’ 410.
Sidney, Philip. Defense of Poesy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970. 31.
2
parents, to observe their religion, and to put their duty to their country ahead of their romantic
passions.
For these Elizabethan poets, and for Renaissance writers generally, the virtuous epic
also appealed to the extent that it spoke to the rise of the nation-state. In his essay “Courts and
patronage”, Michael Schoenfeldt nicely summarizes the surrounding political context. “The
Renaissance placement of the epic as the highest genre,” he explains, was in part because “the
epic was the genre most fully concerned with the foundation of empires. The widespread
ambition to compose an epic issued from the desire to do for one’s own country what Virgil
had done for Augustan Rome—to establish a national mythology.” 3 For the late 16th century
English poet, then, epic verse permitted rumination about current affairs and offered a place for
statements of political philosophy. Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the earliest and most obvious
English Renaissance epic, abounds with such political commentary, with special interest in the
rise of the English state under the aegis of the Tudor dynasty.
While Renaissance and 21st century critics mean roughly the same thing when they
speak about epic, they assign radically different definitions to “romance”. Certainly love and its
poetry occupied a dubious position in the Renaissance calculation of moral worth. Of all the
genres, Sydney exempts courtly love poetry alone from his Defense; these verses appeared to
serious writers as a dissipation of poetic effort, a waste of time and skill on morally
counterproductive projects. 4 The conviction that courtly love poetry encouraged idle
wickedness was not new. From its nascence in the love songs of Provencal troubadours to its
adulthood in the elaborate chivalric romances of Marie de France, Chretien de Troyes, and
3
Norton, Glyn P. and Michael Schoenfeld. ‘Courts and patronage.’ The Cambridge history of literary
criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 372.
4
Helgerson, Richard. Self-crowned laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the literary system.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. 71.
3
Thomas Malory, courtly love found itself widely criticized, and especially by the church. Even
its greatest theorists acknowledged its un-Christian consequences. In The Art of Courtly Love,
for example, Andreas Capellanus warns Walter:
Any man who devotes his efforts to love loses all usefulness…for many reasons any
wise man is bound to avoid all the deeds of love and to oppose all its mandates. The
first of these reasons is one which it is not right for anyone to oppose, for no man, so
long as he devotes himself to the service of love, can please God by any other works,
even if they are good ones. For God hates, and in both testaments commands the
punishment of, those whom he sees engaged in the works of Venus outside the bounds
of wedlock or caught in the toils of any sort of passion. 5
In this, Capellanus reminds readers that the pleasures and pains of courtly love distract
Christians from their duty to God. Adulterous passion—inherent to the structure of such
romance—explicitly violates the sacrament of marriage and invalidates any good works
achieved by the adulterer. If the sincerity of Capellanus’s remarks can be questioned (given that
his admonition follows over a hundred pages devoted to wooing and winning a lady), the
seriousness of medieval churchmen’s castigation of courtly love is beyond doubt. In The
Allegory of Courtly Love, C.S. Lewis traces the lineage of this monastic suspicion of passionate
desire from Pope Gregory I to Thomas Aquinas and summarizes it neatly: “The general
impression left on the medieval mind by its official teachers was that all love—at least all such
passionate and exalted devotion as a courtly poet thought worthy of his name—was more or
less wicked.” 6 I want to suggest that this medieval conception of courtly love reappears, only
slightly modified, in The Faerie Queene where it is constantly shown to harm Arthur’s morality
and retard his epic purpose.
5
Capellanus, Andreas, and John Jay Parry. The Art of Courtly Love. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1960. 187.
6 Lewis, C. S.. The Allegory of Courtly Love. London: Oxford University Press, 1938. 336.
4
A second branch of “romantic” literature informs The Faerie Queene, at least as
strongly as the courtly love poetry just considered. The Italian romances of Boiardo, Ariosto
and Tasso—whose erring heroes digress constantly from their quests to pursue every maiden
that crosses their path—also contribute to the structure of Spenser’s vision. 7 To generalize
grossly, these works, in themselves innovations upon the courtly love poem, begin to reflect a
nuanced skepticism of the original Provencal form. Lewis captures their posture when he calls
Ariosto “a master of irony and comic construction,” by which he means readers ought to take
the digression of Orlando and Rodomonte as less than absolutely serious. 8 Spenser continues
the skeptical project suggested by his Italian peers, albeit in far graver tone, when he sets
Arthur off in a never-realized quest to find Gloriana. This paper, then, strives to define
“romantic” poetry as Spenser might have done: literature inspired by a love that distracts a hero
from worthier moral and poetic purposes.
Contemporary critics tend to understand the generic fusion that’s epic romance as the
necessary consequence of Spenser’s intended audience, Elizabeth I, the unmarried Queen.
When Spenser explains, “in that Faery Queene…I conceive the most excellent and glorious
person of our soueraine the Queene, and her kingdom in Faery land,” and then goes on to
consider that “shee beareth two persons, the one of a most royall Queene or Empresse, the other
of a most vertuous and beautifull lady” he’s uniting the epic and romantic genres to address
Elizabeth (Letter to Raleigh). Unmarried, she’s the appropriate subject of love poetry, but as
England’s monarch, she may also feature in the sterner epic project. In his study of “Spenser’s
genres,” Colin Burrow summarizes the prevailing critical attitude: “Spenser was always
fascinated by generic hybridity. But by the time he wrote his epic that fascination was a
7
8
Hamilton, A. C., and Patricia Parker. "Romance." 613-614.
Lewis, C. S.. The Allegory of Courtly Love. 302.
5
necessity: he simply had to incorporate the delays, digressions, and erotic excurses of the
romance form into his epic if he was not to write a work dramatically unsuited to its unmarried
dedicatee.” 9 Absolutely correct in associating The Faerie Queene’s romantic aspects with
Elizabeth’s unmarried status, such an attitude may too willingly embrace Spenser’s assertion of
his project’s complimentary nature. It assumes that Spenser adopted the paradigms of romance
in order to please his Queen, and neglects to consider other motives. This essay will attempt to
show that, far from flattering Elizabeth as a romantic heroine, Spenser criticizes her by making
her the object of morally dubious romantic excurses. Set against the virtuous, nation-building
vision of the epic, this romantic identity can most productively be read as censorious of
Elizabethan politics and the court culture it inspires.
Burrow himself explores the possibility of generically-driven political criticism in his
comprehensive survey, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton, perceptively interpreting various epic
scenes as intended to persuade Elizabeth toward a firmer foreign policy. 10 In Poetry and
Courtliness in Renaissance England, Daniel Javich also notices the censorial potential of the
epic register, especially as it pertains to courtly “courtesie.” 11 These scholars confine their
insights about generic criticism to the epic project. Neglecting to search the poem’s romantic
episodes for similar critical commentary, they miss what seems to me Spenser’s most
compelling attack on Elizabethan politics and morality: by positioning the conventions of
romance against those of the epic, Spenser appears to suggest the way Elizabethan policy, at
times, undermines the morality of the court and by extension the health of the state.
9
McCabe, Richard A. and Colin Burrow. ‘Spenser’s Genres.’ 410.
Burrow, Colin. Epic romance: Homer to Milton. Oxford: Clarendon Press ; 1993. 127-129.
11
Javitch, Daniel. Poetry and courtliness in Renaissance England. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1978. 141-160.
10
6
Overlooking this critical conjunction of epic and romantic registers, genre theorists also
tend to ignore the heroic-lover, Prince Arthur. Considering that Spenser situates Arthur as both
an “Aeneas” and an “Orlando”—and therefore as the pivotal character of generic fusion—this
feels like an oversight worth addressing. 12 The only character with a part to play in each Book
of The Faerie Queene, and also the only privileged to seek out the poem’s ultimate object,
Gloriana, Arthur merits more extensive examination. To be fair, the Prince has seldom
interested critics who prefer to analyze more “finished” characters like Redcrosse, Guyon,
Britomart, Artegall and Calidore. C.S. Lewis, whose enthusiasm for Arthurian legend informs
his fiction and criticism alike, regrets that, “in the unfinished state of the poem we cannot
interpret its hero at all.” 13 This feels like an unnecessarily glum posture towards Arthur’s
legibility in the poem. When, several pages later, Lewis brilliantly captures Spenser’s take on
courtly love as the “final struggle between the romance of marriage and the romance of
adultery,” he supports this reading with studies of Britomart, Busirane, Amoret, Belpheobe and
Scoudamour; but he neglects to mention the paradigmatic hero of courtly romance, Arthur, the
king whose history furnished matter for all the tradition’s greatest masters, from Chretien to
Malory. Arthurian scholars have in turn overlooked The Faerie Queene. “By the very nature of
his role in The Faerie Queene, Spenser’s Arthur has to be essentially invincible; in part because
of his infallibility, he is neither the most important nor the most memorable of Spenser’s
knights. The Faerie Queene is a great poem, but not a great Arthurian poem,” 14 writes L.R.
Galyon in The New Arthurian Encyclopedia. This position oversimplifies Arthur’s position in
the poem; he is not infallible, and if he is invincible, readers doubt it enough to read his battles
12
Spenser, Edmund, Thomas P. Roche, and C. Patrick Donnell. ‘Letter to Raleigh.’ 15.
Lewis, C. S.. The Allegory of Courtly Love. 336.
14 Lacy, Norris J., and L.R. Galyon. “Edmund Spenser.” The new Arthurian encyclopedia. Updated
paperback ed. New York: Garland Publ., 1996. 428.
13
7
with some uncertainty of their outcome. I am going to suggest that Arthur shows himself
fallible precisely at the moments when he’s tempted away from epic adventure by the pleasures
of courtly love. Demonstrating the weakness of his most magnificent hero, Spenser constructs a
critique of the immoral romantic object that distracts Arthur from the virtuous infallibility of
epic empire building.
Spenser’s preference for this latter form perhaps informs his choice to introduce Arthur
with an ekphrasis, thereby locating the Prince firmly within that tradition. First and most
famously expressed in Book Eighteen of the Iliad, the epic ekphrasis traditionally studies a
hero’s shield. Homer describes Achilles’ as Vulcan casts it, image compounding upon image to
form a totalizing vision of the world the hero inhabits. This Greek cosmos complexly combines
pictures of war and peace, city scenes and country harvests, the stars and all the seas beneath
them. 15 Consciously responding to such a comprehensive world vision, Virgil chooses to
emblematize Augustan empire in a shield replete with dynastic symbols and history. 16
Presenting pictorial promises of empire realized, Aeneas’s shield functions as a summation of
the laudatory and imperialistic poem that presents it.
Arthur rides into The Faerie Queene similarly appareled in ekphrastic armor. Like the
shields of his classical predecessors, the Prince’s trappings emblematize both his individual
telos, and that of the whole epic he inhabits. The poem presents its prince’s costume in
complete detail and begins:
His glitterand armour shined farre away,
Like glauncing light of Phoebus brightest ray;
From top to toe no place appeared bare,
15
Homer, Robert Fagles, and Bernard Knox. 1990. ‘Book Eighteen: The Shield of Achilles.’ The Iliad
[Iliad. English]. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Viking.
16
Virgil and Robert Fagles. 2006. ‘Book Eight: the Shield of Aeneas.’ The Aeneid [Aeneid. English].
New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Viking. 241-246.
8
That deadly dint of steele enganger may:
Athwart his brest a bauldrick braue he ware,
That shyned, like twinkling stars, with stons most pretious rare (I.vii.29).
Where Achilles and Aeneas possess shields of significance, Arthur owns an entire armorial
complement of meaning. In this, Spenser gestures to the Christian armor imagined by St. Paul
in his Letter to the Ephesians, conjectured by the disciple as an allegory of virtue in which each
element of armor has a particular connotation. The Christian shield, for example, represents
faith, the helmet, salvation and the sword, the spirit. 17 Importing a similar apparatus into The
Faerie Queene, Spenser christianizes the pagan trope of ekphrasis and readies the Bible-versed
reader to search for symbols in Arthur’s suit, which indeed are to be found everywhere. He
begins to underscore the relation between the epic and the moral by dressing his hero in an
ekphrasis of virtue.
In its full first effect, Arthur’s armor harnesses the brilliance of both sun and stars; its
light likened to theirs, it becomes a kind of cosmos, its entirety shining like “Pheobus,” and the
“twinkling stars.” And if the “glitterand armour” glares as “farre away” as these lights, then it
casts its brilliance widely indeed. For then it encompasses the scope of the globe; readers begin
to suspect the imperial ambitions of Arthur’s armor. What’s more, the armor bridges not only
geographical boundaries but temporal ones as well. Reconciling day and night, sun and stars, it
would seem to transcend the exigencies of time with a promise of eternal glory.
In a stanza-level enjambment that focuses the poem on the overawing magnificence of
the baldric’s crowing jewel, Spenser concludes his depiction of the starry belt:
And in the midst thereof one pretious stone
Of wondrous worth, an eke of wondrous mights,
Shapt like a Ladies head, exceeding shone,
17
The Vulgate New Testament with the Douay Version of 1582 in parallel columns. London: Samuel
Bagster, 1872. (Ephesians VI: 10-21). 467-488.
9
Like Hesperus emongst the lesser lights,
And stroue for to amaze the weaker sights (I.vii.30).
So outstandingly brilliant as to literally project from the lines that frame it, this “Ladies head”
has commonly been read as Gloriana’s. 18 Gloriana, then, seems to shine as the brightest star in
the cosmos of Arthur’s armor, furnishing the power required to illuminate the earth and to still
time. This is a terrible image, which awes Arthur’s foes and the reader alike, prompting their
submission to the Empress and her soldier. In an ekphrasis that assigns significance to the
smallest detail, the Faerie Queene’s visage looms large as the emblematic object of Arthur’s
quest, just as the history of Augustus dominates the shield of his Rome-founding ancestor
Aeneas. 19
The poem next turns its attention to Arthur’s helmet, devoting the entirety of two
stanzas to a description that further illuminates the epic’s imperial goals for the Prince. In the
first of these, the poem pictures the design encircling the helmet’s crown:
His haughtie helmet, horrid all with gold,
Both glorious brightnesse, and great terrour bred;
For all the crest a Dragon did enfold
With greedie pawes, and ouer all did spred
His golden wings: his dreadfull hideous hed
Close crouched on the beuer, seem’d to throw
From flaming mouth bright sparkles fierie red,
That suddeine horror to faint harts did show;
And scaly tale was stretch adwone his backe full low (I.vii.31).
These lines correspond remarkably with those that they succeed in several aspects. In the
second line of its description, the Gloriana jewel appears “Of wondrous worth, and eke of
wondrous might;” first comes intrinsic virtue and second, outward strength. The second line on
the helmet proposes a similar duality of “Both glorious brightnesse, and great terrour bred”—
18
Footnote to Spenser, Edmund, Thomas P. Roche, and C. Patrick Donnell. The Faerie Queene.
London: Penguin, 1987. 1096.
19
Virgil and Robert Fagles. 2006. ‘Book Eight: the Shield of Aeneas.’ 241-246.
10
again a balance of internal quality and external power. In a further point of similarity, the text
finally highlights the capacity of these miraculous objects to instill awe in “weaker” or “fainter”
specimens. To add to the resemblance, scholars have identified the dragon described as the
ensign of the Welsh Tudor dynasty; 20 Henry VII is reputed to have borne the monster before
him at the Battle of Bosworth. 21 Spenser structures his text so as to suggest the analogy
between Gloriana and the Tudor dragon, an imperial fusion that binds Arthur’s epic and Tudor
identities together in the poetry of armorial ekphrasis. The dragon behaves in manner consistent
with such dynastically driven imperialism. “With greedie pawes” he enfolds the helmet’s crest,
and he spreads his wings over its entire edifice, as if to encompass the whole globe in the scope
of his ambition—for the physical similarity between the sphere of the earth and that of the
helmet is evident.
“Enfolded” —one might say protected—by this fierce Tudor dragon, stands the final
feature of Arthur’s helmet:
Vpon the top of all his loftie crest,
A bunch of haires discolourd diuersly,
With sprincled pearle, and gold rich full richly drest,
Did shake, and seem’d to daunce for iollity,
Like to an Almond tree ymounted hye
On top of greene Selinis all alone,
With blossomes braue bedecked daintily;
Whose tenderlocks do tremble euery one
At euery little breath, that vnder heauen is blowne (I.vii.33).
The composite imagery of this stanza enhances the dynastic properties of Arthur’s armor on
several counts. Spenser likens the plurality of crest hairs to a single blossoming almond tree in
lines that bear an unmistakable resemblance to Virgil’s first Georgic. “Contemplator item, cum
20
21
Hamilton, A. C., and Gordon Tesky. "Arthur in The Faerie Queene." 69.
BBC Wales. " BBC Wales - History - Themes - The Welsh flag: The dragon and war." BBC Homepage. http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/history/sites/themes/society/flag_war.shtml
(accessed October 9, 2013).
11
se nux plurima silivis / induet in florem et ramos curvabit olentis: / si superant fetus, pariter
frumenta sequentur, / magnaque cum magno veniet tritura calore…” (Notice too when the
almond tree apparels herself thickly in blossom and bends her fragrant bows: if the fruit grows
surpassingly, then an equal harvest will follow, and a great threshing will come with great
warmth…). 22 Giving readers the first two lines of the Georgic passage, Spenser’s epic expects
them to supply the subsequent result. The implication is clear: guarded by the Tudor dragon,
England may anticipate natural abundance and increasing prosperity. While such a departure
into the generic space of agricultural poetry might seem to contradict the premises of this paper,
I would rather argue that text in no way exits the literary tropes of epic poetry. In fact the
Georgic promise of natural abundance under Tudor rule unifies the totalizing world vision of
Achilles’ shield with the dynastic glory promised in Aeneas’s.
Spenser chooses “Selinis” as the geographical location of his almond tree, and here
again he invokes Virgil. Recounting his Aegean wanderings for Dido’s court, Aeneas
remembers, “tedque datis linquo ventis, palmosa Selinus” (I left you behind palm-covered
Selinus), 23 by which he means he avoided the island birthplace of the victor’s palm. 24 Aeneas,
then, defers victory for future voyages and landings; in fact final victory in The Aeneid
arguably appears only on its hero’s shield, in the form of Augustan triumph. In a sense
exaggerated by his current amorous digression in the palace of Dido, Aeneas defers his crown
of victory. Arthur, far from skirting the geographical home of victory-awarded, contains the
place on his very person; he bears it triumphant upon his brow, where, spatially proximate to
22
Fairclough, H. Rushton, and G.P. Goold. Virgil, vol. I: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I-VI. New and
rev. 1999 ed. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University, 1935. 110.
23
Fairclough, H. Rushton, and G.P. Goold. 418.
24
Footnote to Spenser, Edmund, and Carol V. Kaske. The Faerie Queene: Book One. Indianapolis/
Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2006. 112.
12
and protected by the Tudor dragon, it further affirms his identity as the conquering agent of
Elizabethan empire. That Arthur’s helmet tells of focused heroism, however, hardly means that
the Prince himself exhibits such unfailing devotion to imperial duty—as we’ll later see, his
romantic digression extends much further than that of Aeneas.
Arthur’s shield is the ekphrasis’s final and most fully developed element— and yet
readers are not exactly permitted to see it; rather, they study a catalogue of its capacities and
historical uses. This terrible invisibility is in keeping with the scholarly consensus that Spenser
modeled Arthur’s shield on Raimondo’s in Gerusalemme liberata, in which the diamond shield
symbolizes God’s answer to faith. 25 “All closely couer’d was / Ne might of mortall eye be euer
seene” (I.vii.33), begins its depiction. Here, Spenser seeks to improve on the classical ekphrasis
(which concerns itself with exterior detail) to emphasize the new Christian dimension of his
hero’s identity. Faith, he suggests is internal, although it produces results in the temporal world.
Through Arthur and his shield, God answers faith variously: “But when as monsters huge he
would dismay, / Or daunt vnequall armies of his foes...”(I.vii.34). These refer to actual episodes
in The Faerie Queene, which in turn have been read as allegories of real historical and military
incidents from Elizabeth’s reign. Felling Orgolio by uncovering the shield, Arthur overcomes
an agent of the church of Rome (I.vii.19). 26 Destroying the Paynim Souldan by the same
means, Arthur reenacts England’s marvelous deliverance from the Spanish Armada (V.viii.3738). 27 Succored by his Protestant belief, Arthur virtuously advances the political interests of the
English crown.
25
See footnote to Spenser, Edmund, and Carol V. Kaske. 112.
Hamilton, A. C., and Hugh Maclean. "Orgoglio.” In The Spenser Encyclopedia. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press: 1990. 518.
27
Hamilton, A. C., and Gordon Tesky. "Arthur in The Faerie Queene." 71.
26
13
So far Arthur’s armor has presented him as the outstanding representative of
Elizabethan empire—a hero fully inscribed in the epic mode, and pressing for his Queen’s
interests with unqualified fervor. What, then, can the poem mean when it continues, “For so
exceeding shone his glistring ray, / That Pheobus golden face it did attaint, / As when a cloud
his beames doth over-lay / And silver Cynthia wexed pale and faynt, / As when her face is
stayned with magicke arts constraint” (I.vii.34)? In an ekphrasis that began by equating the
brilliance of Arthur’s armor to that of the sun and stars, readers arrive at a conclusion in which
his shield surpasses them entirely. Certainly this creates a sense of cumulative magnificence,
dramatizes Arthur’s entrance into the epic.
Yet in his Letter to Raleigh, Spenser plainly associates Elizabeth and Cynthia. He writes
to his friend and sometime patron that he “shadows” the Queen “in Belphoebe, fashioning her
name according to your owne excellent conceipt of Cynthia, (Phoebe and Cynthia both being
names of Diana).”
28
In his Proem to Book I, he also associates the Queen and Phoebus when
he addresses himself to a “Goddesse heavenly bright…whose light / Like Pheobus lampe
throughout the world doth shine” (Proem to Book I.4). All this rhetoric harks back to an
established troubadour trope in praise of female beauty. 29 Sidney exemplifies the device in
Astrophil and Stella when he likens “Stella’s joyfull face” to “morning sun on snow.” 30 So to
read that Arthur’s shield—God’s answer to faith—causes Cynthia to wax “pale and faynt,” and
“Pheobus golden face...attaint[s]” is to confront a treacherously ambiguous reversal of the usual
structure of courtly love praise. Spenser might excuse himself on the grounds that Cynthia and
28
Spenser, Edmund, Thomas P. Roche, and C. Patrick Donnell. ‘Letter to Raleigh.’ 16.
Mayr, Roswitha. The Concept of Love in Sidney and Spenser. Salzburg, Austria: University of
Salzburg, 1978. 11.
30
Sidney, Philip, and William A. Ringler. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney. Oxford: Oxford at the
Clarendon Press, 1962. 8.9.
29
14
Phoebus signify the heavens that pale from faith; biblical precedent for such a miracle can be
found in Joshua, Kings, Judges, and Exodus, and Fidelia of the House of Holinesse possesses a
similar talent. 31 Yet in an epic in which every certainty has its doubtful shadow, the divine
twins also inevitably signify his Queen. Darkening their luster, Arthur’s shield dissociates
Elizabeth from the Protestant faith she aspires to defend, or at least suggests that her
commitment to that Faith might benefit from bolstering, overshadowed as it is by Arthur’s.
Brighter than the heavenly beauty of Gloriana, it asserts the importance of Arthur’s epic
identity above his part as an abject suitor singing her praise. The shield’s total effect complexly
unifies affirmation with hinted instruction; scholars who assert the purely laudatory nature of
The Faerie Queene’s early Books miss a nuance of Spenser’s genre-driven address. His
ekphrasis shows readers how romance and epic might be critically integrated, and in this, it
emblematizes not only his hero and his subject, but also the generic undertaking that informs
the style of the whole epic.
So revealing of the epic’s subject and style, Arthur’s armor merits tracking throughout
the narrative; the moments he removes it often are often ones of generic tension or instability,
and consequently are also places that foreground Spenser’s tone of address to Elizabeth. One
such scene—which perhaps does more than any other to juxtapose romance with epic—is
Arthur’s retelling of his encounter with Gloriana. This passage follows closely on Arthur’s
deliverance of Redcrosse from the dungeons of Duessa’s keep. Prompted by Una, he regales
the lady and her knight with his story, beginning by conjuring up a youth spent in wholesome
self-restraint.
I was in the freshest flower of youthly yeares…
That idle name of loue, and louers life,
31
See footnote to Spenser, Edmund, and Carol V. Kaske. 158.
15
As losse of time, and vertues enemy
I ever scornd, and ioyd to stirre up strife,
In middest of their mournfull Tragedy,
Ay wont to laugh, when them I heard cry,
And blow the fire, which them to ashes brent:
Their God himselfe, grieu’d at my libertie,
Shot many a dart at me with fiers intent,
But I warded them all with wary gouernment (I.ix.9-10).
In this convincing vision of the stoic bachelor, Arthur presents love as a waste of time, an idle
pastime inimical to the cultivation of virtue. Indeed the young Prince scorns romantic
attachment as “vertues enemy,” a true “Tragedy” to be avoided with “wary gouernment.” In
The Faerie Queene, “government” is a term with special significance. Here obviously meaning
self-government, that is, the regulation of gross human impulse, it can also denote government
in the political sense. The figure of the “royal body,” as both a person and a political entity is
one that pervades Renaissance political philosophy and literature. Elizabeth herself deployed
the metaphor in her 1558 accession speech at Hatfield House. 32 Spenser knew of this tradition
and engaged with it: Alma’s House of Temperance explicitly allegorizes the trope in the form
of a castle whose parts correspond to the human body, and which Alma (who is Temperance)
rules with astute moderation (II.ix). In this castle, in the parlor that symbolizes the heart, Love
causes occasional disruption— to one slighted lover “all pleasaunce was…grief and annoy,”
“another seemed envious or coy,” and a third “in her teeth did gnaw a rush.” (II.ix.35). Alma
has only to appear, and the confusion threatened by lover’s pastimes resolves in the tempering
of sinful impulse; virtue reigns again. All this is to say that the poem implies a lot by Arthur’s
“wary gouuernment,” which read in its historical and literary context, becomes a comment on
32
Marcus, Leah S., Janel M. Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose. ‘Queen Elizabeth’s First Speech, Hatfield,
November 20, 1558. Elizabeth I: collected works. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
51-52.
16
the relation of virtuous government and romantic attachment. Love, the poem suggests, may
not be compatible with the individual virtue of the hero, or the composite virtue of the state.
Continuing his tale, Arthur arrives at his dream of Gloriana, an episode that has been
the focus of much recent criticism, and which serves as the foundation for Arthur’s generic
identity as a “romantic” figure.
For-wearied with my sports, I did alight
From loftie steed, and downe to sleep me layd
The verdant gras my couch did goodly dight,
And pillow was my helmet faire displayd:
Whiles euery sence the humour sweet embayd,
And slombring soft my hart did steale away,
Me seemed, by my side a royall Mayd
Her daintie limbes full softly down him lay:
So faire a creature yet saw neuer sunny day (I.ix.13).
Arthur’s physical movements indicate his changing state; he moves from “loftie” steed”
“downe to sleep,” a transition that mimics the poem’s movement from an elevated epic posture
to a lower romantic register. The helmet—which so forcefully emblematizes Tudor political
and imperial victory—as Arthur’s “pillow” is “faire displayd.” Literally “sleeping on the job,”
Arthur descends into an ambiguous state of slumber in which the self-governance explicated
above is suspended by the “humour sweet” of sleep. At this juncture, the Prince succumbs to
the potentially destabilizing temptation of Love. Recalling how “my hart did steale away,”
Arthur attributes independent liveliness to a part of his body and soul. Demonstrating
autonomous volition, the heart escapes the jurisdiction of the head in a division that further
underscores love’s subversive effects on rational self-government.
In the two stanzas that follow, The Faerie Queene explicitly engages with the tropes
and expectations of courtly love poetry in order to establish Arthur as an abject lover, just as it
17
earlier deployed armorial ekphrasis to fashion him as an epic hero. Arthur recounts to Una and
Redcrosse how,
Most goodly glee and louely blandishment
She to me made, and badd me love her deare;
For dearely sure her love was to me bent,
As when just time expired should appeare.
But whether dreames delude, or true it were,
Was never hart so ravisht with delight,
Ne living man like wordes did ever heare,
As she to me delivered all that night;
And at her parting said, She Queene of Faeries hight.
When I awoke, and found her place devoyd,
And nought but pressed gras where she had lyen,
I sorrowed all so much, as earst I joyd,
And washed all her place with watry eyen.
From that day forth I lov’d that face divine;
From that day forth I cast in carefull mynd,
To seeke her out with labor, and long tyne,
And never vowd to rest, till her I fynd,
Nyne monethes I seek in vain yet ni’ll that vow unbynd. (I.ix.14-15).
In this, readers may detect two romantic motifs: the adulterous tryst, and the questing lover.
Endemic to the literature of courtly love, and particularly its subgenre of Arthurian chivalry,
liaisons abound in tales of Lancelot, Tristram, and Arthur himself, and they inform Spenser’s
chivalric vision here as well. “For dearely sure her love was to me bent,” Arthur recounts in a
line that indicates the intensity of the passion bestowed. Diction full of flirtation suggests a
physically pleasurable outcome. “Goodly glee” and “louely blandishment” render Arthur
“ravisht with delight.” Comparable scenes of physical pleasure characterize Lancelot and
Guinevere’s relationship in Chrétien de Troyes twelfth-century Chevalier de la charrete, 33 a
romance that inspired the thirteenth-century ‘Vulgate Cycle’ ultimately popularized in England
33
Lacy, Norris J., and L.R. Galyon. “Edmund Spenser.” The new Arthurian encyclopedia.
Updated paperback ed. New York: Garland Publ., 1996. 428.
18
with Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century rendition of the legend in Le Morte Darthur. 34 In this
prose account of Arthurian chivalry, readers discover explicit statements of the knight’s passion
for his lady. Returning from the Quest for the Holy Grail, Malory’s Lancelot feels strongly
tempted by Guinevere, “and so they loved together more hotter than they did beforehand, and
had many such privy draughts together that many in the court spoke of it.” 35 In Le Morte
Darthur physical love occupies an ambiguous moral space; the text does not condemn passion,
exactly, but undeniably suggests that carnal attachment has political consequences. Lancelot
and Guinevere’s romance, for example, instigates the dissolution of Camelot. 36 Tristram, an
equally popular figure in medieval romance, conducts a similar romance with Isolde, to the
constant detriment of Cornwall’s stability. 37 Finally, Arthur suffers more than any other knight
for his sexual indiscretions; lying with his sister, he sires Mordred, the son who will attempt his
overthrow. 38 In proposing the romantic trope of the tryst, Spenser engages with a dangerous
precedent, concerned with the way a knight’s sexual passion undermines his political and
chivalric endeavors. Caught in the moral morass of adulterous sexual dissolution, Arthur would
seem unable to complete his epic undertaking. In explicating the distractions romance presents
to the epic hero, the poem confronts the incompatibility of Elizabeth’s identities as a desirable
woman and a puissant empress.
A still worse possibility presents itself: that of a historically “loose” Gloriana, an
Elizabeth who’s actually unchaste. Ben Jonson confided to Sir William Drummond of
Hawthorndeen the popular suspicion that Elizabeth “had a membrana on her, which made her
34
Hamilton, A. C. and R.W. Hanning. “Chrétien de Troyes.” 148.
Malory, Thomas, and Helen Cooper. Le morte dArthur: the Winchester manuscript. Oxford, England:
Oxford University Press, 2008. 403.
36
Malory, Thomas, and Helen Cooper. ‘The Death of Arthur.’ 468-527.
37
Malory, Thomas, and Helen Cooper. ‘Sir Tristram de Lyonesse.’ 169-304.
38
Malory, Thomas, and Helen Cooper. ‘How Uther begot King Arthur.’ 21-23.
35
19
incapable of men, though for her delight she tried many.” 39 Such rumors were invariably
accompanied by the names of alleged lovers, the Earl of Leicester predominant among them. 40
Figuring Elizabeth in Gloriana, Spenser skirts close to these reports when he writes of an
Arthur “ravisht with delight” and of the “pressed grasse” the Prince finds on waking. These
traces of an unverifiable encounter mimic the symptoms of a condition that would allow
Elizabeth to enjoy the embraces of a lover while still remaining, magically, a virgin. In offering
Arthur pleasure before he’s undertaken any quest on her behalf, Gloriana would display the
worst lasciviousness, and would model a miserable morality for her courtiers. In this
generically romantic episode, Spenser may pose his most daring reproach of Elizabeth and the
court she presides over.
The same stanza offers an opposite interpretational option, which nevertheless critiques
Elizabethan policy and behavior as harshly as the first. In this reading, Gloriana doesn’t go far
enough in her romantic overtures to the Prince. Far from weakening Arthur’s heroic resolve
with the looser delights of sexual intercourse, she withholds from him the marital love that
would symbolize the jointure of Tudor and Arthurian might. If “dreames delude,” then indeed
“so fayre a creature yet saw never sunny day,” “ne living man like wordes did ever heare.” In
this reading, Gloriana’s presence is a teasing fiction devised by Arthur’s sleeping mind: the
Elizabethan foil tantalizingly offers union but never accedes to it. Such an analysis takes
support from the historical reality of Elizabeth’s marital politicking and officially reported
virginity. On January 28, 1563, the Commons submitted a petition to their Queen imploring her
to make a marriage. In the interests of the “imperial crown of this realm,” they implored:
39
Quoted in O'Connor, Garry. William Shakespeare: a popular life. New York: Applause Theatre &
Cinema Books, 2000.86.
40 Hamilton, A. C. and Woudhuysen, H.R. “Leicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of. ”432.
20
And for that your subjects cannot judge nor know anything of the form or validity of
any further limitations set in certainty for want of heirs of your body, whereby some
great, dangerous doubt remaineth in their hearts to their great grief, peril and
unquietness, it may please your majesty by publication of certainty already provided, if
any such be, or else by limitation of certainty, if none be, to provide most gracious
remedy in this great necessity…” 41
This urgent statement of political unease associates the continuation of the Tudor “imperial
crown” with Elizabeth’s ability to provide an heir, and foresees peril for England should she
fail to do so. The same letter also cites the dissolution of Alexander the Great’s empire “for
want of heir by him begotten,” in an explicit linking of imperial enterprise and dynastic
security. 42 By the time Spenser had begun to compose The Faerie Queene in the 1580s,
Elizabeth’s unmarried and therefore childless state was definite. So in Gloriana’s teasing and
possibly unconsummated address to Arthur, readers may detect criticism of Elizabeth’s
unmarried state. Withholding herself from Arthur, and denying the sexual expectations of
romantic poetry, she also defers the imperial project allegorized in the union of the Tudor
dynasty to Britain’s once and future embodiment. Elizabeth and her fairy image expose
England to unsatisfactory, non-Tudor successors—a damning fault in an epic purportedly
consecrated to the elevation and establishment of that dynasty’s English empire. Put another
way, the ethical problems of romantic convention emerge particularly against the backdrop of
the epic tradition whose aim is empire. Were Elizabeth to read the poem solely as a romantic
address—for Spenser a morally doubtful undertaking in and of itself—she might simply be
pleased to find herself the object (and subject) of a new courtly love poem. The text disguises
the moral failings of Elizabeth and her male courtiers in allusion and uncertainty. Ambiguously
41
Marcus, Leah S., Janel M. Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose. ‘A Commons’ Petition to the Queen at
Whitehall, January 28, 1563. 72-77.
42
Marcus, Leah S., Janel M. Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose. 74.
21
suggesting a variety of interpretations without endorsing any one, Spenser invites his readers to
contemplate the full range of censorious possibilities; our doubt thickens his critique.
So far we’ve seen the way Spenser wields one trope of the romantic tradition to critique
the fraught political position of his female ruler. His appropriation of the questing lover of
courtly poetry may express an equally frustrated view of Elizabethan politics. Waking from his
vision, Arthur finds himself in the thrall of his devotion to Gloriana, a figure he resolves to seek
“out with labor, and long tyne, / And never vowd to rest till her I fynd.” He concludes, “Nyne
monthes I seek in vain yet ni’ll that vow unbynd.” These lines suggest a radical re-purposing of
Arthur’s identity; riding into Canto Seven and the poem generally as the champion of Tudor
empire, he bolsters Redcrosse’s wavering Protestant holiness and dispatches Duessa, the evil
agent of Rome. His role as the epic hero of Protestant England seems established. Waking from
his dream, however, Arthur’s telos suddenly becomes romantic; his ultimate goal is Gloriana.
Any—and as we’ll see there are many— heroic adventures pursued by Arthur would then seem
to distract him from this, his fundamental quest. If, as this essay has already hinted, Arthur’s
romantic aspects present a variety of political problems, then his political aspirations likewise
complicate his romantic duties. The virtuous and public object of empire building does not
align with the immoral and private pursuit of pleasure.
A comparison with his nearest epic counterpart serves to define this tension. Like
Arthur, Aeneas functions as a historical figure propagandistically enlisted as the founding hero
of a political dynasty, in this case the Augustan empire. His actions in The Aeneid proclaim a
new canon of heroic stoicism in pursuit of imperial establishment, and when he idles with Dido
in Book Four he digresses from his guiding purpose. 43 Love temporarily distracts him from the
43
Virgil and Robert Fagles. ‘Book Four: the Tragic Queen of Carthage.’ 127-152.
22
worthier cause of empire building. By contrast, seemingly committed above all to the romantic
ideal of Gloriana, Arthur digresses not romantically but imperially, when he acts in the epic
idiom as the originating figure in the Tudor dynastic legend. Yet the Prince accomplishes the
most when in his mode, and nothing at all in his search for Gloriana, whom he ultimately never
discovers; and perhaps this paradox suggests something about the uselessness of courtly love
poetry.
Arthur again feels the competing claims of courtly and epic duty in Book II, when he
arrives on the scene to find his sword unexpectedly in the possession of Archimago. As before,
Arthur’s armor here symbolizes his epic identity, and the political virtue that attends that
identity; when Archimago describes the Prince’s blade to Pyrochles and Cymochles his speech
plainly associates it with a laudable epic morality. Unfolding the history of the sword’s
creation, the sorcerer explains how Merlin, “Then it in flames of Aetna wrought apart / And
seven times dipped in the bitter wave / Of hellish Styx, which hidden vertue to it gave. // The
vertue is that nether steele, nor stone / The stroke thereof from entraunce may defend”
(II.viii.20-21). In this, Merlin plays Thetis to the sword, endowing it with the infallible
properties that the demi-goddess secures for her son Achilles when she baptizes him in the
Styx. 44 Spenser further underscores the sword’s virtuous quality a stanza later when Pyrhocles
“That vertuous steele… rudely snatched away” (II.viii.22). In its repetition of the term “virtue,”
the text suggests more than the blade’s power as a weapon; it also invokes virtue in the moral
sense, and so deepens the reader’s sense of positive association with epic.
The ensuing scene, in which Arthur braves the joint onslaught of Pyrhocles and
Cymochles, further aligns epic purpose and virtue, and also positions Arthur’s romantic quest
44
Footnote to Spenser, Edmund, and Erik Irving Gray. The Faerie Queene: Book Two. Indianapolis/
Cambridge: Hackett, 2006. 112.
23
for Gloriana as antithetical to heroically determined morality. To Pyrhocles and Cymochles,
who respectively represent something like unrestrained wrath and abandoned self-indulgence, 45
Arthur at first offers mediation and justice in a speech with distinct Virgilian overtones
(II.viii.27). In the posture of an Aeneas, Arthur sets out to enforce the chivalric laws of Fairy
Land and to defeat the particular vices that haunt the landscape of the Book of Temperance.
When he’s eventually required to fight the pair, he fights the sins of rage and sloth. So it’s
perplexing that the face of the Fairy Queen provides intemperance embodied with its greatest
tactical asset. Arthur struggles to subdue the brothers because:
But ever at Pyrrhocles when he smitt,
Who Guyons shield case ever him before,
Whereon the Faery Queenes pourtract was writt,
His hand relented, and the stroke forbore,
And his deare hart the picture gan adore,
Which oft the Paynim sav’d from deadly stowre (II.viii.43).
When Arthur takes Gloriana’s image to heart, he participates in a long tradition of knights
who’ve felt similarly about their own ladies. Only in previous cases the lady’s image typically
bolsters the strength of her champion, and urges him on to victory. 46 Sidney’s Astrophil
celebrates the outcome of a recent tournament: “Having this day my horse, my hand, my launce
/ Guided so well, that I obtain’d the prize…the true cause is, / Stella lookt on, and from her
heavenly face / Sent forth the beames, which made so faire my race.” 47 Stella’s visage inspires
Astrophil to overcome every challenger. Unmistakably, Gloriana’s face has the opposite effect;
it nearly causes her champion to succumb to the onslaught of his attackers. Held by an allegory
of unchecked bodily passion, Gloriana the beloved—the object of the poem’s romantic
aspirations—resists the enactment of justice and the victory of heroic stoicism. The poem allies
45
Hamilton, A. C., John Webster and Richard Isomaki. "Pyrochles, Cymochles." 574.
Mayr, Roswitha. The Concept of Love in Sidney and Spenser. 14.
47 Sidney, Philip, and William A. Ringler. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney. 41.1-14.
46
24
intemperance with adoration and thereby suggests the opposition of romantic and epic goals.
And since it’s the epic that serves the project of good governance—both corporeal and
political—it’s necessarily the romantic that detracts and distracts from this virtuous project of
imperial establishment. Violently reversing the conventional terms of courtly flattery, Spenser
commits himself to a project that often sets imperial productivity against the distractions of
romance.
While it might be objected that Arthur defeats his assailants shortly after the passage
given above, it remains the case that Spenser chose to include the incident at all; in a purely
laudatory generic hybrid Arthur’s epic and romantic identities would align in praise of Gloriana
the empress and beloved. Their failure to so coalesce ramifies within the realm of political
commentary: the unmarried Elizabeth again becomes a problem for the poem. With this
question in mind, it may be useful briefly to consider the status of portraiture in Elizabethan
England, so as to interpret the use of her picture within the scene. In his survey of the portraits
of Elizabeth I, Roy Strong details a long history of portrait use in the marriage negotiations
Elizabeth and her advisors conducted ceaselessly from roughly 1560-1580. Various suitors
included the Habsburg Archduke Charles, the Duke of Anjou, and his younger brother the
Duke of Alençon, and each was sent a portrait of Elizabeth. 48 James Melville, ambassador of
Mary Queen of Scots, writes in his Memoirs that Elizabeth showed him a miniature with the
incription: “ ‘My lord’s picture.’’ He concludes by remembering that he “held the candle… and
found to it to be the Earl of Leicester’s picture.” 49 Elizabeth also sent her pictures to the courts
of allies across Europe and even saw her image appropriated in defamatory and licentious
48
Strong, Roy C. Gloriana: the portraits of Queen Elizabeth I. New York, N.Y.: Thames and
Hudson, 1987. 23-24.
49
Strong, Roy C. 29.
25
caricatures of herself and Anjou in Paris in 1583. 50 In sum, the Queen’s portraits were as
politically charged as any literary offering made in her name. More directly than the poetic text,
they negotiated on her behalf, securing romantic alliances and exerting her influence abroad
and at home. As Melville’s testimony suggests, portraits could be intimate statements of
personal regard, even as they could also be deployed publically as critical statements about
unwanted marital unions.
Interestingly, Strong includes the same passage from The Faerie Queene explicated
above (II.viii.43) as an epigraph to his chapter ‘Ruler Image and Holy Image.’ I would suggest
that he would do as well to use it as a header to a section on anti-Elizabethan propaganda; this
may be the spirit in which Spenser wrote the ambiguous lines for here again we find
Elizabeth’s image—her portrait as it were— at the center of a contradiction between romance
and epic. Her portrait is literally distracting Arthur from his duty as the agent of imperial
expansion and the heroic enforcer of the moral law of the land. This, then, suggests another
damning critique of failed marital politicking, and worse, politicking with Catholic candidates
such as Alençon and Anjou. When Spenser seems to engage the romantic register to
compliment lovely Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, he may actually be making a darker statement
of condemnation against her real historical “romances.” He brings the marital and political
associations of the portrait to bear on his opposition of the romantic and epic genres. Sharing
the power of her picture with the notably pagan knight, Gloriana not only aligns herself in a
romantic promise to a non-Protestant suitor, but she also weakens the military might of her
Protestant empire-builder.
50
Strong, Roy C. 34.
26
Arthur’s battle with Pyrhocles and Cymochles reveals how the incoherence of the epic
and romantic registers can be used to disparage Elizabethan policy. A similar critical opposition
between the genres occurs in Book III, when Arthur’s “epic” armor again becomes the concern
of the poem during a romantic digression. Chasing after Florimell, Arthur separates from
Timias and Guyon, and losing his companions, the Prince also loses sight of his real purpose;
he hardly considers Gloriana or her empire as he rides heedlessly after the fair maiden.
Significantly, it is through a “forest wyde” that he “long time wandred” (III.v.3), for as Patricia
Parker has noted, “the frequently allegorical or magical landscape of romance…often includes
three elements: forests, clearings and caves,” and the forest in particular reflects “the
uncertainties and winding paths of the romance narrative itself.” 51 Lost in the allegorical
geography of romance, Arthur errs from his true telos as the suitor of Gloriana and the
establisher of her Tudor empire. Like Redcrosse riding through the Wood of Error, Arthur
displays a censurable morality and a lack of ethical purpose when he enters too far in to the
topoi of the romantic genre. For here he not only neglects his heroic duty as the enforcer of the
laws of Fairy Land, but also actually appears to threaten the sanctity of those codes. Alarmed
readers consider how “…fast she from him fled, no lesse afraid, / Then of wilde beastes if she
had chased beene: / Yet he her followd still with corage keene,” and this despight the fact that
Florimell has already “her self freed from that foster insolent,” and therefore does not require
the pursuing Prince’s assistance (III.iv.50-51). Florimell rightly perceives Arthur as a threat to
her chastity since the text presents the Prince as a “wild beast” driven on by desire. “Corage
keene” signifies not enthusiastic valor but eager lust. 52 Arthur, the lady he chases, and readers
51
Hamilton, A. C. and Patricia Parker. "Romance.” 616.
Footnote to Spenser, Edmund, and Dorothy Stephens. The Faerie Queene: Books Three and Four.
Indianapolis/ Cambridge: Hackett, 2006.
52
27
all doubt the outcome of an encounter; the Prince evidences great desire—and it feels briefly
plausible that he might violate the code of chivalry in the satisfaction of that desire.
Several stanzas later, clouds cover the starry sky above the forest and Arthur
relinquishes the chase:
Tho when her wayes he could not more descry,
But to and fro at disadventure strayd;
Like as a ship, whose Lodestar suddeinly
Covered with cloudes, her Pilott hath dismayd;
His wearisome pursuit perforce he stayd,
And from his loftie steed dismounting low,
Did let him forage. Downe himselfe he layd
Upon the grassy ground, to sleep a throw;
The cold earth was his couch, the hard steele his pillow…
Oft did he wish, that Lady faire mote bee
His faery Queene, for whom he did complaine:
Or that his Faery Queene were such, as shee:
And ever hastie Night he blamed bitterlie (III.iv.53-54).
Likening Arthur to a ship without a star to navigate by, Spenser both precisely replicates the
difficulty of seeing Florimell without light, and gestures to the larger dislocation of Arthur’s
present “disadventurous” position. Lost in the morally perilous woods of romantic poetry,
Arthur no longer appears as the Aeneas-like imperial agent of Book One; romantic digression
distracts him from worthier dynasty-building endeavors. As in his initial encounter with the
Faerie Queene, Arthur removes his armor, the supporting brace of his epic identity. With “hard
steele as his pillow,” he gives himself over to un-virtuous visions of Florimell in which the
undiscriminating fervor of his lust confuses the maid and her Fairy monarch.
Loving the Queen and her lady, Arthur seems less than kingly; he rather appears like
one of the lascivious courtiers lampooned in Mother Hubberds Tale. Lamenting the poetic
projects of Tale’s would-be courtier Ape, Spenser versifies:
But ah, for shame
Let not sweete Poets praise, whose onely pride
28
Is vertue to advaunce, and vice deride,
Be with the worke of losels wit defamed,
Ne let such verses Poetrie be named:
Yet he [the Ape] the name [of Poet] on him would rashly take,
Maugre the sacred Muses, and it make
A servant to the vile affection
Of such, as he depended most upon,
And with the sugrie sweete thereof allure
Chast Ladies eares to fantasies impure.
To such delights the noble wits he led
Which him reliev’d, and their vaine humours fed
With fruitless follies, and unsound delights.
But if perhaps into their nobles sprights
Desire of honor, or brave thought of armes
Did ever creepe, then with his wicked charmes
And strong conceipts he would it drive away,
Ne suffer it to house there halfe a day.
And whenso love of letters did inspire
Their gentle wits, and kindly wise desire,
That chiefle doth each noble minde adorne,
Then would he scoffe at learning, and eke scorne
The Sectaries thereof, as people base
And simple men, which never came in place
Of worldes affaires…(l.810-835). 53
In this Spenser begins by bemoaning any unfortunate confusion of moral (that is, epic) poetry
—concerned with the propagation of virtue and the derision of vice—with immoral and
obviously romantic poetry that prompts its writers and readers to sin. Satirizing the lascivious
“delights impure” of courtiers, he explicitly claims that the “sugrie sweet” verses of romantic
lays inspire the lust that leads to such “delights.” He moreover shows how pursuit of courtly
love and the composition of its poetry lead to the dissolution of “brave thought of armes,” and
the “love of letters” vital for good government and national culture building.
These satirical lines present the essential problem at work in the contradiction between
epic and romance that structures the Faerie Queene’s genre-driven criticism of Elizabethan
53
Spenser, Edmund, and Richard A. McCabe. The shorter poems. ‘Mother Hubberds Tale.’ 361-362.
29
politics. Elizabethan literature and art often address their unmarried monarch in the language of
romance. But since the adulterous romantic behavior validated and discussed by such courtly
literature is morally condemnable and also distracting from the working of sober government,
Elizabeth's unmarried femininity produces a literary and political culture inimical to Spenser's
vision of stoic male empire building. In both ‘Mother Hubberd’s Tale’ and The Faerie Queene,
Spenser attacks the licentiousness of a court culture influenced by the romantic genre. Pursuing
Florimell with lawless lust, Arthur demonstrates the bad effect of his courtly passion for her
Queen. When he seems to compliment Elizabeth’s desirability as the fair object of Arthur’s
romantic quest, he actually criticizes the kind of politics and culture that this female virginal
identity partially inspires.
A final example may clarify the point. In Book Six, a canto before his final
disappearance from the poem, Arthur removes his heroic arms for the third time.
Wearie of travell in his former fight,
He there in shade himselfe had lyd to rest,
Having armes and warlike things undight,
Feareless of foes that mote his peace molest;
The whyles his salvage page, that wont be prest,
Was wandred in the wood another way,
To doe some thing, that seemed to him best,
The whyles his Lord in silver slumber lay,
Like to the Evening starre adorn’d with deawy ray (VI.vii. 19).
The text, as always, closely aligns the epic mode with the wearing of armor; when Arthur
undoes his “armes,” his “warlike things” also come off. Taken to mean Arthur’s sword and
shield, “warlike things,” redundantly supplements the sense already proposed by “armes.”
Understood more broadly as heroic acts, “warlike things” further expresses the link between
Arthur’s armor and his epic identity. Indeed this interpretation takes support from the line that
precedes it. If Arthur is “wearie of travell in his former fight,” it’s logical that he now ceases to
30
labor heroically, especially considering that “travell” derives its definition from the French
noun “travail,” which means work. 54 Abandoning its armored epic posture to display itself a
looser romantic register, Arthur’s body, personal and political, lies “fearlesse of foes that mote
his peace molest.” Its vulnerability results particularly from its dissolution in unrestrained
amorous dreaming. When Arthur’s squire leaves “his Lord in silver slomber,” a sleep that
Spenser likens to “the Evening starre adorn’d with dewy ray,” he abandons the Prince to
dreams of Cynthia; 55 “silver slumber” synesthetically suggests the influence of that Goddess
over Arthur’s dreams, and perhaps her presence in them. “Like to the Evening starre,” Arthur is
suggestively “adorn’d” by the “deawy ray” of Cynthia’s light. As Arthur enjoys romantic
visions of another Elizabethan foil, he exposes himself to attack by Turpin, through whose eyes
the reader sees the sleeping Arthur.
In his repeated assertion of the perils of “loose” sleep, Spenser engages with yet another
trope of medieval romance. The lays of Chretien de Troyes abound with disastrous dream
sequences and Malory’s Le Morte Darthur reiterates these episodes in its definitive account of
Arthurian legend. In one such episode, Arthur, King Uriens and Accolon ride out to hunt in a
great forest. Like Spenser’s Arthur in Book III and Redcrosse in Book I, they soon err in these
woods, and find themselves aboard a ship where, charmed by their female attendants they fall
into a magic sleep. Waking, each knight discovers a disastrous alteration in his circumstance:
Arthur, for example, stirs to imprisonment. Accolon rises “by a deep well’s side…in great peril
of death,” and mournfully exclaims, “Jesu save my Lord Arthur… for these damosels in this
ship have betrayed us—they were fiends and no women, and if I may escape this misadventure
54
Footnote to Spenser, Edmund, Andrew Hadfield, and Abraham Stoll. Faerie Queene ; and, The
Mutabilitie cantos. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett ; 2007. 98.
55
Footnote to Spenser, Edmund, Andrew Hadfield, and Abraham Stoll. 98.
31
I shall destroy them all that I may find of these false damosels that fare thus with their
enchantments.” 56 Accolon imagines his erstwhile hostesses as sprites who borrowed human
shape in order to charm him and his companions. In this, he implicitly correlates sleep and
seduction by a non-quite-real female, as does Spenser when he writes of the Prince’s
encounters with Gloriana and Cynthia. It’s worth adding the outcome of Accolon’s and
Arthur’s misadventure: failing to recognize one another at a tournament arranged by Morgan le
Fay, they fight to Accolon’s death, and Arthur’s near destruction as well. In Arthurian romance,
sleeping augurs ill-fortune for the hero, and when the Prince gives himself over to pleasurable
imaginings of Cynthia, he creates a situation in which Turpin can consider regicide. Spenser
exaggerates and dramatizes the deleterious effects of romantic abstraction. Dead both
allegorically and actually, Arthur would be unable to fulfill his destiny as the founder and
administrator of Tudor empire; readers perceive that romantic topoi have bad results in the
practical realm of epic enterprise.
Arthur’s generically-romantic sleep has a more obvious political consequence as well:
the devolution of organized justice. Returning from his rambles in the woods, Arthur’s
companion, the “Salvage,” finds Turpin preparing to attack Arthur,
And throwing down his load out of his hand,
To weet great store of forrest frute, which hee
Had for his food late gathered from the tree,
Himselfe unto his weapons he betooke,
That was an oaken plant, which lately hee
Rent by the root; which he so sternly shooke,
That like a hazell wand, it quivered and quooke (VI.vii.24).
Setting down his “food late gathered” the Savage must disrupt the habits of his rural
subsistence in order to enact justice—a telling failure of Fairy Land’s political system. Arthur,
56
Malory, Thomas, and Helen Cooper. 63.
32
the usual enforcer of law and order, sleeps through his judiciary and police responsibilities.
Distracted by romantic dreams, the Prince allows royal authority to degenerate into an “everyman-for-himself” pre-feudal picture of power. To simplify greatly, he appears like the courtier
more concerned with the composition of love poetry than with the maintenance of his country
estate and the extension of his English nation.
Put another way, as the subject of Arthur’s romantic reverie, Cynthia, the shadow of
Elizabeth, problematically inspires the romantic distraction that dilutes the virtuous purpose of
her nation’s governor. Historical cases of such attachments are easily found. Elizabethans
detected certain affinities, for example, between the character of Arthur, and Spenser’s onetime employer Robert Dudley the Earl of Leicester. 57 This identification aptly summarizes
Arthur’s fraught position in the poem as Gloriana’s would-be lover and imperial agent; Dudley
was Elizabeth’s foremost favorite 58—their romantic attachment may be suspected from
Elizabeth’s comments to Melville, discussed above—and also her advisor at court and soldier
abroad. In 1585, Elizabeth placed him at the head of a military intervention in the Netherlands,
where he met with brief victory and accepted the United Provinces’ invitation to become its
absolute governor. 59 This move went radically beyond the parameters of Elizabeth’s
instructions, and earned Raleigh her great displeasure. In a series of letters dated from February
10, 1586 to July 19 of the same year, Elizabeth writes to her former suitor and current general
in a tone that ranges from an elevated political rhetoric of high dudgeon to the informal
language of personal endearment. “You shall let the earl understand how highly upon just cause
we are offended with his last late acceptation of the government of those provinces…” she
57
Hamilton, A. C. and Woudhuysen, H.R. “Leicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of. ”432.
Footnote to Marcus, Leah S., Janel M. Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose. 67.
59 Footnote to Marcus, Leah S., Janel M. Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose. 269.
58
33
commences one letter, speaking through surrogate. 60 Five months later she begins, “Rob, I am
afraid you will suppose by my wandering writings that a midsummer moon hath taken large
possession of my brains…” 61 The content of the letters fluctuates as radically their tone, and
the policy they propose varies too. In 1587, Leicester resigned his post, signaling the failure of
a vacillating campaign that historians regard as Elizabeth’s most unsuccessful piece of foreign
policy. 62 So it is just conceivable that Spenser, long intimate with Leicester, 63 had this incident
in mind when he figured Arthur generally, and particularly, when penned that Prince’s defeat of
Geryneo in Book V. 64 To qualify the point, I am not necessarily arguing that Spenser intended
Arthur as a constant foil to Leicester, but merely that he perhaps sometimes does, and that the
history of Dudley and the story of Arthur both illuminate the contradictions of government and
love.
Arthur, however, unlike Leicester, wakes from his dubious romantic dream just in time
to recuperate his faltering identity as the good governor of Fairy Land. Rising, he mercilessly
subdues Turpin, the would-be king-killer and enemy of Courtesy, the particular virtue of Book
Six. Although Turpin “fell flat to ground, ne word unto him sayd, / But holding up his hands,
with silence mercie prayd,” Arthur “so full of indignation was, / That to his [Turpin’s] prayer
nought he would incline, / But as he lay upon the humbled gras, / His foot he set on his vile
necke, in signe / Of servile yoke, that nobler heart repine” (VI.vii.25-26). This image of
unremitting justice can only stem from Aeneas’s execution of Turnus in the final lines of The
60
Marcus, Leah S., Janel M. Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose. “Queen Elizabeth to Sir Thomas Heneage,
her Emissary to the Earl of Leicester. February 10, 1586.” 269.
61
Marcus, Leah S., Janel M. Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose. 282.
62
Adams, Simon. "Elizabeth I and the Sovereignty of the Netherlands 1576-1585." Transactions of the
Royal Historical Society Vol. 14 (2004) (2004): 309-319. 309.
63 McCabe, Richard A. and Willy Maley. ‘Spenser’s Life.’ 19.
64 Hamilton, A. C. and Tesky, Gordon. “Arthur in The Faerie Queene.” 71.
34
Aeneid. Like Turpin, Turnus “ille humilis supples oculos destramque precantem / protendens”
(as a supplicant lowered his eyes and reached out his right hand) (XII.930-1). Both epics see
their antagonist prostrated before their avenging hero; Aeneas seeks reprisal for the death of
Pallas and Arthur for the attempt on his own life, which Turpin so obviously makes in
contravention of the laws of Courtesy.
In his study Epic Romance: Homer to Milton, Colin Burrow considers Spenser’s
appropriation of this very episode, but with regard to a scene from The Faerie Queene that this
essay has already treated, Arthur’s defeat of Pyrochles and Cymochles. In his analysis of this
scene, Burrow suggests that Arthur’s violent dispatch of Pyrocles represents Spenser’s attempt
to “eradicate all trace of the retarding pity which had delayed so many generations of romance
Aeneases.” 65 He reads in Spenser’s return to the harsher justice of Virgil’s epic a certain
anxiety about Elizabeth’s predisposition to mercy. Citing arguments made by Spenser in his
prose treatise, A View of the Present State of Ireland, Burrow suggests that the poet worried
that “the romance instincts of the monarch,” would impede the subjugation of an unruly
Ireland. 66
Burrow might discover further proof of his point here in Book Six, in what seems to me
an equally convincing re-enactment of the Aeneas’s execution of Turnus. “Turpin,” for
example, obviously finds his eponym in “Turnus.” Of course, in this version, Arthur does not
kill Tupin, but only hangs the villain by his heels so “that all that which passed by, / The
picture of his punishment might see” (VI.vii.27). Falling short of execution, such punishment
nevertheless convincingly emblematizes the swift and unsparing justice sought by Spenser.
That Spenser appends this paradigmatically epic scene to the romantically-inspired dream of
65
66
Burrow, Colin. 128.
Burrow, Colin. 128-129.
35
Cynthia crystallizes the critical dichotomy presented by this essay. Prompt epic remediation is
required to save the scene from its dissolution in romance. By now it is obvious that episodes
derived from the romantic register distract and detract from the imperial and instructional
interests of Spenser’s literary politics. Actions taken from within the epic mode, by contrast,
appear as morally laudable and politically savvy steps toward the maintenance of the Fairy
kingdom. Always at the nexus of romantic and epic registers, Spenser makes his most subtle
and damning critiques of Elizabethan government.
Formulating the legal code of his Republic, Plato finds “poets guilty of the most serious
misstatements about human life, making out that wrongdoers are often happy and just men
miserable; that injustice pays if not detected.” The philosopher concludes, “we shall have to
prohibit such poems…” 67 Spenser struggled with this kind of blanketing moral condemnation
of poetry in every one of his projects, but particularly in The Faerie Queene. Like many of his
fellow Renaissance poets, he suspected that poetry could instruct its reader morally, and as
we’ve seen, politically too; yet he would also have eagerly agreed with Plato that other kinds of
poetry, fictionalizing and authorizing unjust actions and outcomes, produce sin and bad
government in the real world. In Arthur, Spenser most concisely figures this poetic moral
dichotomy. Writing the Prince into both his epic and romantic poetry, he uses literature to
explore the political and ethical results of each generic form, and in so doing, criticizes and
instructs his Queen. But Spenser’s achievement goes beyond generic creativity and canny
political critique: he warns his English public against dangerous passions and fashions them in
habits of reasonable self-government.
67
Cornford, Francis Macdonald. The Republic of Plato. London: Oxford University Press, 1945. 80.
36
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