Annoying Noises in The Faerie Queene
by Charles Ross
ABSTRACT:
Spenser’s House of Care is an epic English poem published in 1590. It is an allegory
of jealousy and the noisiest place in The Faerie Queene. As part of a complex story, it
highlights three problems raised by noise ecology. Scudamore’s strained relationship with
his wife Amoret suggests that often it is not noise itself but what we think about other
people, whom we associate with the noises, that distresses us. Sir Scudamore himself, so
insensitive to noise that he thinks he can sleep to the sound of pounding anvils, illustrates
the difficulty of achieving universal agreement with regard to noise. That unlike other forms
of pollution, noise only temporarily damages the environment, may help explain the
allusiveness of the complex imagery in the House of Care itself. Spenser helps us divide the
issue of noise into real and imagined components, things that lack to be changed and things
for which we have to change our own attitudes, despite ourselves.
KEY WORDS:
noises, reclamation, moral philosophy.
The great Renaissance writer Edmund Spenser is not an obviously environmental poet.
He lived five hundred years before anyone noticed global warming.i If he was concerned with
the destruction of the planet, it was not because like others, he took a long view of history and
knew that all things come to an end, not because he thought greenhouse gases would choke the
atmosphere. Today’s scientists figure the sun will probably burn out in ten to twelve billion
years; our worry now is that we are accelerating the future un-inhabitability of the world. But
Spenser too was concerned with habitability, and he also thought in terms of reclamation. The
world needed civilizing; his method lay not in finding the right science but learning to exercise
the right virtues. Moral philosophy, not physics and chemistry, would improve the world. This
approach suggests that the sciences don’t work by themselves. We guide them, and since The
Faerie Queene is about guidance, it is every bit as important to the environment and our
handling of the earth as science is.
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Environmental problems do not necessarily go away, but they do weave in and
out of the public consciousness. Only a few years ago nuclear power plants were the
central environmental issue. Noise pollution may or not become a crisis issue, but it can
be a serious concern nonetheless.ii For me it takes the highly specific form of private
aircraft droning over my backyard when I want to sit outside and read something like
Spenser’s poetry in an appropriately bucolic soundscape. Others will have other
examples, since the issue goes beyond my own sensibilities. The war against
noisemakers will become a suitable subject for public policy, when the public is ready
for it. Although contemporary environmental lawyers work also on planning, such as
developing silence preserves or doing environmental reviews on the impact of
construction, this article focuses on the issues raised by local noise ordinances. It
suggests ways that poetry from the pre-industrial period can help us think about the
public policy aspects of annoying, intermittent or repetitive noise.iii
The purest example of an aggravating mechanical sound occurs in the fourth
book of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, when Sir Scudamour enters the house of Care,
decidedly not a noise-free zone. At this point in the poem Scudamour is looking for his
wife Amoret, who has been missing since their wedding day. Recently he has been told
that she has been seen making love to another knight, so in general the house of Care is
an allegorical representation of Scudamour’s jealousy. The knight finds a blacksmith
named Care leading six assistants in pounding an anvil to make the “iron wedges” of
“unquiet thoughts.”
In which his worke he had sixe servants prest,
About the Andvile standing evermore,
With huge great hammers, that did never rest
From heaping stroakes, which thereon soused sore:
All sixe strong groomes, but one then other more;
For by degree they were all disagreed;
So likewise did the hammers which they bore,
Like belles in greatnesse orderly succeed,
That he which was the last, the first did farre exceede.
(FQ 4.5.36)iv
Anyone who finds noises annoying can sympathize with Sir Scudamour’s
situation. According to the poem, each smith is stronger than his predecessors, and since
they strike in order, the sound is louder, louder, louder still, even louder, really loud,
until “he which was the last, the first did farre exceede” (4.5.36), before the racket is
repeated. Despite the cacophony, however, for a long while Scudamour admires “[t]he
manner of their worke” (4.5.38) seemingly unconcerned about the noise, until he tries to
engage Care in conversation. Then we learn that in addition to blacksmiths’ “heaping
stroakes,” one of Care’s helpers, named Pensiveness, operates a set of “breathfull
bellowes” that blow as loudly as the North wind. Failing to engage Care in conversation
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because of the hammering and bellows, Scudamour ignores the noise and tries to sleep.
Like many questing knights, he is used to uncomfortable accommodations, and so
. . . he said no more,
But in his armour layd him downe to rest:
To rest he layd him downe upon the flore,
(Whylome for ventrous Knights the bedding best)
And thought his wearie limbs to have redrest.
(FQ 4.5.39)
Despite his best efforts, his anger keeps him awake, and he can only toss and
turn, changing sides. No position is comfortable, and it turns out the hammers and
bellows contribute to his sleeplessness:
And evermore, when he to sleepe did thinke,
The hammers sound his senses did molest;
And evermore, when he began to winke,
The bellowes noyse disturb’d his quiet rest,
Ne suffred sleepe to settle in his brest.
(FQ 4.5.41)
Should Scudamour manage to shut his eyes for a moment, one of Care’s helpers raps
him on the head:
Eftsoones one of those villeins him did rap
Upon his headpeece with his yron mall;
That he was soone awaked therewithall,
And lightly started up as one affrayd;
Or as if one him suddenly did call.
(FQ 4.5.42)
The house of Care is so noisy, it seems, that Scudamour hears voices that are not
there, starting up “as if one him suddenly did call.” Eventually weariness neutralizes his
sense of hearing—“his weary sprite opprest / With fleshly weaknesse . . . all his senses
did full soone arrest” (43)—but as soon as sleep comes, he dreams of his wife Amoret
making love to another man. The effect of Scudamour’s troubled dream is like “a paire
of redwhot yron tongs” that Care nips at his heart with, waking him up whenever he
dozes. The scene repeats itself all night long: “In such disquiet and hartfretting payne, /
He all that night, that too long night did passe.” After a fitfull night of such “disquiet”—
le mot juste—Scudamour leaves, his face a picture of “gealous dread” (45).
Despite the differences between Spenser’s pre-industrial world and our own, a
reading of the house of Care can tell us something about our modern relationship to
noise and our need for silence. Allegorical romances like The Faerie Queene tend to use
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the relations between the sexes as narrative representations of other issues that are
themselves not suitable to the decorum of the romance form. Wooings and weddings,
dragons, wandering journeys, and bridges with strange customs may shadow forth legal
issues or problems of trade.v The House of Care, too, is about more than jealousy. It is
about Care itself, and Care can relate to many topics. In particular, if Spenser uses
noises to represent Care, then care is in some sense itself a representation of noise.
The meaning of the scene comes to us through the story, and Scudamour is not
only present at the noisiest scene in the whole Faerie Queene, he is there because he is
trying to reclaim a woman he first found seated “overthwart / Soft Silence” in the
Temple of Venus (4.10.51). Modern readers often tune out Spenser for conforming to
his society’s equation of women’s volubility and wantonness.vi But looking at the
acoustics of The Faerie Queene as a context for Scudamour’s situation, we can see
Spenser not only offers an unflattering portrait of the knight who is so insensitive to
noise that he thinks he can sleep in the House of Care, but that Spenser also calls into
question the seeming virtue of silence in woman. The result is a poetical engagement
with the problem of noise, both human and mechanical, that connects to our own social
and environmental concerns.
Like most modern anti-noise ordinances, which limit their scope to decibellevels or sudden changes in pressure, the sources for Spenser’s image stress percussion.
Hammers and anvils are used proverbially to describe anxiety as well as “tribulatione”
in Ripa’s Iconologia (1593), where the essence of the comparison is the pounding, not
the noise. There are several instances in Italian literature (Italian what? Poetry?) of
jealousy described in terms of hammering, the meaning of ammartellare, nor is Spenser
the first to use a forge as a symbol of groundless suspicions (what Shakespeare’s
wordplay refers to as “the forgeries of jealousy” that Oberon claims afflict Titania in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2.2), or to compare or contrast a lover’s sighs to wind from
a bellows.vii The symbolism of the seven smiths, if there is one, is difficult to establish,
since it is not clear if Care himself is included when Spenser compares the sound they
make striking Care’s anvil to the ringing of bells. Some sources say there were seven
Cyclopes, who worked in Vulcan’s forge, though in none of them are they deaf, as
Spenser’s seem to be.
Care and his helpers do not seem to hear Scudamour, either because they are
deaf (as John Steadman suggests), they do not care, or they simply cannot hear him
(4.5.38). (There may be a visual pun on “eare” for “care” that explains the odd phrase,
that they did not “let his speeches come unto their eare” [singular].)
Sir Scudamour there entring, much admired
The manner of their worke and wearie paine;
And having long beheld, at last enquired
The cause and end thereof: but all in vaine;
For they for nought would from their worke refraine,
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Ne let his speeches come unto their eare.
(4.5.38)
For whichever reason, the noisemakers refuse to listen to Scudamour, thereby
denying him the benefit, as Jonathan Goldberg points out, of talking to someone as a
cure for care—the “talking cure” that Freud recommends.viii Scudamour’s
conversational failure also raises the problem of distinguishing what is literal and what
is metaphoric in the scene.ix In particular, the episode blurs the internal and external
causes of Scudamour’s restlessness. Is what wakes up Scudamour his anger, his
jealousy, the hammers, bellows, dog, cock, owl, or the hideous poking by Care? At the
beginning of Stanza 44 we don’t know if Scudamour is dreaming about Amoret or
about Care, and we don’t know whether the “smart” of Care’s pincers remains when he
leaves Care’s cottage. Because it is difficult to distinguish literal from the metaphoric,
the episode leaves open the possibility that the House of Care is about noise in an
environmental sense as well as Scudamour’s jealousy.
The House of Care blends the literal and metaphoric because sound is both a
phenomenon and a perception. As Bruce Smith notes in The Acoustic World of Early
Modern England,
Noise has two possible definitions, one physical and one
psychological or social. In terms of frequency and amplitude, noise is
a combination of random frequencies across a wide spectrum, at high
amplitude. In psychological terms, that registers as confused pitch and
loud volume. What counts as confused and loud is subject, of course,
to social definition: noise is what a community deems to be noise.x
These two aspects of noise, the physical phenomena and the reaction to it,
suggest the interdependence of Scudamour and the sounds of fairyland, which is to say,
the need to look at both the physical phenomenon and the victim. Spenser’s world may
not seem particularly noisy by modern standards. As Smith reminds us, today we live
against a background of internal combustion engines and electric apparatus, particularly
amplifiers that disembody voice from its natural source. But all humans are situated in
ambient sounds that create what Smith refers to as a soundscape (Acoustical World, 44).
In Elizabethan cities there were traffic noises, horses and wagons, jingling bells on
harnesses, shouting of wares, even the thuds of the printing press. The countryside can
also be a noisy place, a phenomenon everywhere apparent in The Faerie Queene, where
howls and clanging metal and sudden arrivals and departures fracture the natural
backdrop of blowing wind, water, and birds. “In the absence of ambient sounds of more
than 70 dB (barking dogs excepted), the sound of outdoor conversations would become
a major factor in the sonic environment,” Smith says (58). In other words, noises can be
annoying not just because they are loud, but because they disturb us.
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And part of that disturbance is our reaction to noise, whatever it’s quality. But
“our” is a problematic term in the context of annoying noises. Nothing is more
mystifying that when a noise that disturbs me doesn’t bother others. A private plane
towing a banner and flying low over me while I try to putt would lead to paroxysms of
rage, but Tiger Woods claims he doesn’t even notice such things, let alone care about
them. Care and his hammering helpers don’t mind the sound of the anvil. The difference
between such experiences of points to a feature of the individual Ego that Slavoj Zizek
highlights in his summary of Freud’s fundamental insight into the phantasmatic
character of trauma: in what he terms “the late-capitalist Narcissistic mode of
subjectivity”—a qualification I’m not sure is necessary—“the ‘other’ as such—the real
desiring other—is experienced as a traumatic disturbance. . . Whatever the other does—
if s/he fondles me, if s/he smokes, if s/he doesn’t laugh at m joke heartily enough—is
(potentially, at least) a violent encroachment upon my space.” In short, what is
annoying is simply “the manifestation of the other’s desire.”xi
Because sound is both a physical phenomenon and a perception, silence itself
can be as threatening too, in part because it magnifies small noises. Spenser’s House of
Pride is strangely quiet and includes a character named Vanity who is described as
“Husher” (1.4.13). When Guyon razes Acrasia’s groves, gardens, arbors, and
buildings—probably the most well-known response to the desires of the other expressed
as externalization of a character’s inner repressiveness, Spenser does not mention any
sounds at all (2.12.83), making the destruction more ominous. In the original ending of
Book III, after Britomart rescues Amoret from Busirane, Scudamour and Amoret grow
together like the statue of Hermpaphrodite, and “No word they spake” (3.12.45), to
reinforce the mystery of the image as well as the breaking down of the othering that
otherwise separates the sexes. Spenser cancelled that ending when he added Book IV.
When the couple do meet again, if they do, Amoret is once again silent, but for a
different reason.xii There is no obvious reason for either one to be jealous, or angry, or
hurt, or insulted, or anything but married. Yet they do not speak to each other. For that
very reason, they seem annoyed.
As in modern life, silence has its detractors. Some people love to make noise.
For these stalwart opponents of noise ordinances, Scudamour might be a warning
against lack of consideration. Despite his success in the Temple of Venus, where he
wins Amoret, modern readers generally find him a rather overbearing figure because of
his taking of Amoret, almost like a rape, from the lap of Womanhood, whose definition
includes Silence and Obedience.xiii We first see him as a courtly lover pounding his head
on the ground outside the house of Busirane, where his problem is that he cannot run
through fire for her sake (FQ 3.11.27). He never meets the challenge of that place of
eery silences and thunderous pageants. Their wedding is mentioned retrospectively at
the beginning of Book IV, but during the course of their marriage, they never exchange
a word. Their constant separation seems to represent not just misfortune but an inability
to communicate. He is ironically named as the shield of love since he is unable to
protect Amoret.xiv
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Balancing the rights and wrongs of Amoret’s relationship to Scudamour is, I
want to suggest, similar to problem of writing a law that finds a way to control noise. In
the poem at large, which I won’t pretend to do justice to today, we can read in their
romance relationship the need to balance silence and sounds. Such a problem of
enforcement arises when the Noise Control officer has to prove a violation, at which
point the machinery for measuring comes in, which depends on definitions and
published standards.xv A Los Angeles ordinance, for example, necessarily includes a
proper definition of a "Decibel" (dB) as
a unit of level which denotes the ratio between two (2) quantities
which are proportional to power; the number of decibels
corresponding to the ratio of two (2) amounts of power is ten (10)
times the logarithm to the base (10) of this ratio. (Amended by Ord.
No. 156,363, Eff. 3/29/82.)
The Los Angeles ordinance also includes a definition of an “impulsive” sound—
like Spenser’s thunder and cannon fire and perhaps anvils—which it articulates as
sound of short duration, usually less than one second, with an abrupt
onset and rapid decay. By way of example "impulsive sound" shall
include, but shall not be limited to, explosions, musical base drum
beats, or the discharge of firearms.xvi
Measuring outside noises requires standards for distance and most importantly, a
balancing of desires and necessity, since all emergency work is usually excluded, and
ambient noises that cannot be controlled often work against the claim that other noises
are out of place.xvii Some ordinances limit control officers from measuring noise
anywhere but inside a person’s house, which would eliminate Scudamour from
protection, since pretty much every ordinance says you can make has much noise as you
or Care want inside your own house as long as it cannot be hear outside.
Spenser avoids specifics in favor of general notions of right and wrong, just as
nuisance ordinances written in the past few years, recognizing the difficulty of
enforcement, include general maxims. For example, Ordinance 204 of the Roselle Park,
New Jersey, starts with the maxim that “Good neighbors keep their noise to themselves”
and then seeks to prohibit continued or unnecessary noise, produced by human or
mechanical means, that disturbs the “comfort, rest, and repose at home, public and
private meetings, or church services.”xviii
The house of Care highlights the problem with noise ecology, which is that
universal agreement is hard to find. Many people are not bothered by loud noise, either
because they are nightclub owners or patrons, pilots, truck drivers, snowmobilers, gun
owners, or they have the Y chromosome that just loves explosions (as one of my
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daughter’s friends put it). Booming car speakers just manage to tip the balance toward
regulation in many municipal ordinances. Excessive noise from aircraft in the Grand
Canyon seems to have put noise pollution on the federal map, at least to some extent. xix
Tomorrow will bring other sounds, other irritations. Recently people have noticed that
the US Navy’s sonars so disturb whales that they surface too quickly and get the bends.
We need a mythopoesis of sound, such as Spenser provides, because no noise ordinance
can be for all time.
A second point relevant to the ecology of noise that can be extracted from the
story of Scudamour and Amoret is that often it is not noise but what we think about
other people, whom we associate with the noises, that distresses us. We hate irritating,
uneven sounds, but we also hate as much or more the insensitivity of those who cause
them. The immediate cause of Scudamour’s jealousy is Britomart, since Scudamour
believes Britomart is a man and he believes Ate when she says Britomart slept with
Amoret. Although Scudamour directs his anger at Britomart, it is not impossible to
assume that he is also angry at Amoret or even at himself for his failure to shield her
from temptation (as I might start to believe people who say I’m overly sensitive to
noise). The larger issue, beyond Scudamour’s mistaken jealousy, is therefore the
problem of who is ultimately responsible for the noisy hammers in the House of Care.
The motto for Canto 5 captures this dilemma, since the blurring of the literal and
metaphorical makes it unclear who keeps Scudamour awake, the external figure of Care
or Scudamour himself: “Scudamour coming to Cares house, doth sleepe from him
expell.” The verse means either that Scudamour expells sleep from himself or that it is
Care who expels sleep from Scudamour. Neither version quite works. If there is a lesson
for modern environmentalists in the house of Care, it is the need to separate the wrong
being done from our feelings about the perpetrator of that wrong.
A final feature of noise that bears thinking about is that noises like hammering
only temporarily damage the environment. Unlike industrial pollution, global warming,
or nuclear waste, noise leaves no lasting effects on the physical world. The annoyance
goes away when the hammering stops. Yet here The Faerie Queene suggests that the
problem may have lingering effects after all. Scudamour’s unrelieved unhappiness
indicates either that he is overly sensitive, just as some people can’t stand any noises, or
the opposite, that even temporary annoyances can have long lasting effects. It is hard to
believe that Scudamour and Amoret will ever laugh together about her time in the cave
of Lust, how Timias inadvertently wounded her, or her travels with Prince Arthur when
they were pursued by Slander. Scudamour’s jealousy—the romance equivalent of noise
pollution—technically ceases a canto after he leaves the house of Care, once Scudamour
sees Britomart’s passion for Arthegall and learns that Britomart is a woman. The
narrator says that Scudamour realizes his error “and woxen inly glad, /That all his
gealous feare he false had found, / And how that Hag his love abused had / With breach
of faith and loyaltie unsound” (4.6.28). One expects Scudamour’s life to improve.xx Yet
that is not the case. The last thing we hear him say is that from the moment he met
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Amoret to just before he starts to relate how her won her in the Temple of Venus, he has
never been happy:
For from the first that I here love profest,
Unto this houre, this present lucklesse howre,
I never joyed happinesse nor rest,
But thus turmoild from one to other stowre,
I wast my life, and doe my daies devowre
In wretched anguishe and incessant woe,
Passing the measure of my feeble powre,
That living thus, a wretch I and loving so,
I neither can my love, ne yet my life forgo.
(4.9.39)
Scudamour’s persistent dour mood might suggest that the problem of noise is a
recurrent one. Noises do stop, but the effects of noises do not necessarily disappear
from our mind.
Ecology is about more than global warming and harm to the environment. It is
also about the way we get along in the world.xxi A poet is most conscious of his
environment when he is most poetic, because he is a poet.xxii This paradox allows us to
bring ecological concerns to a text like The Faerie Queene that was obviously not
written with today’s particulars in mind, and yet find what we are looking for.xxiii
Scudamour is the not the Knight of Quiet, questing against noise; rather he wants to
engage in conversation with Care and the noise of his laborers prevents that. Although
England did not have any formal restrictions on noise, Book IV provides an imaginative
approach to what is now a problem by marking out the fundamental difficulty of noise
law. The marriage and gender elements of Scudamour’s relationship to Amoret,
particularly the noise of Slander, and their allusively ecological doubling by Marinell
and Florimell, highlight the difference between individual sensibility and what the
community regards as noise. Spenser also helps us divide the issue into real and
imagined components, things that can be changed and things for which we have to
change our own attitudes, despite ourselves.xxiv
Notes
i
Where modern conservancy writing looks to figure like James Audubon and
Teddy Roosevelt, the founder of national parks, or writers like Rachel Carson, who
exposed the effects of DDT on birds (Silent Spring [Greenwich, CT: Fawcett
Publications, 1964]), generally movements to stem the tide of progress, in Spenser’s day
the landscape was a site for development, as explored in the essays collected by Thomas
Hallock, Ivo Kamps, and Karen L. Raber in Early Modern Ecostudies: From the
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Florentine Codex to Shakespeare (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), which
question those who argue for a more modern sensibility, such as can be found in can be
found in Gabriel Egan’s Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism (New
York: Routledge, 2006) and for Shakespeare and seventeenth-century poetry in Robert
Watson’s Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Floods still brought famine,
diseases were due to unknown causes, and science had not replaced magic, yet the
concern for improvement was similar to our own. It was just a matter of direction, as it
is today. The bible of ecocriticism, Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination:
Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), as the subtitle indicates, is
mainly about the formation of American thinking in the nineteenth century. But
Thoreau is arguably much closer to Spenser in imagination than to present-day concerns
about renewable energy and emissions. Both Spenser and Thoreau traveled by sail when
they weren’t living the pastoral life. Steamships and railroads do not occur in Buell’s
index. His book almost resists technology, making his categories of ecocriticsm
Spenser-friendly. What he calls his “rough checklist” makes four points, that human
history and natural history are implicated in each other, that human interest is not
paramount, that human accountability to the environment is part of a text’s ethical
orientation, and finally, that an ecological writer is aware that the environment is a
process rather than constant (7-8). Not a word about global warming, and so at its roots
in the 1990s when Buell wrote, ecocriticism presented itself as a set of attitudes rather
than technologies.
Not that Buell ignores the dangers to the planet. He mentions what he calls
“environmental apocalypse literature” such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (about
DDT), Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up (a quote from
Milton’s pastoral poem Lycidas), and Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth. But at
the time he was writing he was more concerned with nuclear attack and overindustrialization per se than global warming. Since attitudes still trump science, Buell
spends quite a few pages dissecting what Paul Boyer called the “secular apocalyptic,” in
which evangelicals regard prophecies of the self-destruction of the planet as a sign of
the end of time. Buell refers occasionally to Spenser but does not cite him in discussing
his list of early American books that envision the end of the world: Michael
Wigglesworth’s popular seventeenth-century poem The Day of Doom, and nineteenthcentury fiction like Moby Dick and even Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He points out how public
events contribute to “catastrophism, as in the case of World War I and T. S. Eliot’s The
Wasteland, but properly notes that history trivializes eschatology: “The grandeur of the
divine design is diminished when the great work of redemption is made to hinge on this
or that puny time-bound experiment” (298). Buell’s point seems to be that at its heart,
environmentalism is an imaginative, not a practical science.
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ii
A survey of books on ethics and the environment finds that noise pollution is
not included among topical issues, which tend to change over time. Thus, for example,
Robin Attfield’s The Ethics of Environmental Concern, 2nd ed. (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1991), originally published in 1983, is concerned about at what it calls
the “shallow” level with conserving mineral and energy resources and at the “deep”
level (a term coined by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess in 1973) with preserving
wilderness and natural ecosystems. There is an almost Malthusian concern with human
population numbers. A few years later Louis P. Pojman’s Environmental Ethics:
Readings in Theory and Application (Boston: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 1994),
reaches beyond preservation to pollution, pesticides, the greenhouse effect, hazardous
wastes and sustainability. It includes a selection called “Dysfunctional Civilization”
from Al Gore’s The Earth in Balance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), which also
argues in terms of what is morally unacceptable in our treatment of the environment. In
Christine E. Gudorf and James E. Huchingson’s Boundaries: A Casebook in
Environmental Ethics (Washington, D. C.: Georgetown University Press, 2003), topics
include ecosytems (Everglades, Madagascar, Java), nuclear waste, coral reefs, desert
formation in China, genetically modified foods and xenotransplants (cross-breeding in
animals and humans). The most recent, Dale Jamieson’s Ethics and the Environment
(Cambridge University Press, 2008), includes lessons in ethics but also concentrates
directly on levels of pollution, factory farming, endangered species, climate change and
carbon footprints. Reviewing this last book, Peter Singer, “Long Grass,” TLS 12
September 2008, 7, writes that “Environmental problems should not be seen as purely
technological, nor purely economic. They are also ethical, and we understand them
better by appreciating all their dimensions.” It is under the rubric of “all” that The
Faerie Queene comes in, indeed, demands entrance.
iii
Virginia Wolfe commented that the rise of machines (along with the decline of
faith) separates us from Spenser, but she also commented that Spenser allows us to
“give scope to a number of interests,” in her essay “The Faery Queen,” in The Moment
and Other Essays (1948), excerpted in The Prince of Poets: Essays on Edmund Spenser,
ed. John R. Elliott, Jr. (New York: New York University Press, 1968), 19. A recent
issue of Spenser Studies signaled the arrival of ecocriticism into the field, calling for
investigations in how “Spenser’s civilizations enter into complex transactions with the
natural world” because “readers understand civility as taking shape within natural
processes” (David Galbraith and Theresa Krier, “Spenser’s Book of Living,” Spenser
Studies 22 [2007]: 1-4, 1). A similar argument for Shakespeare’s ecological awareness
can be found in Gabriel Egan’s Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism
(New York: Routledge, 2006) and for Shakespeare and seventeenth-century poetry in
Robert Watson’s Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). A more questioning attitude, in
contrast to Egan and Watson, is the theme of the essays edited by as explored in the
essays collected by Thomas Hallock, Ivo Kamps, and Karen L. Raber in Early Modern
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Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008).
iv
Quotations follow A. C. Hamilton, ed. The Faerie Queene (New York:
Longman, 2001). I regularize u and v.
v
See Charles Ross, Elizabethan Literature and the Law of Fraudulent
Conveyance: Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 57.
vi
Patricia Parker illustrates the connection with abundant examples from
Renaissance literature in Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (New York:
Methuen, 1987).
John M. Steadman, “Spenser’s House of Care: A Reinterpretation,” Studies in
the Renaissance 7 (1960): 207-224.
vii
viii
See Jonathan Goldberg, Endlesse Work: Spenser and the Structures of
Discourse (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). Starting from the
observation that Spenser’s book of friendship illustrates many of the problems of telling
tales—often unfinished, told in caves, prompted by lust, or modeled on other stories that
color one’s expectations—Goldberg argues that the incompleteness of the stories in
book four—their “endlesse worke” (4.12.1)—provides a textual correlative for the
impossible pursuit of desire, the main theme of the book. It is a theme suitable to a
person’s quest for quiet in a noisy world, and a paradox that frustrated desire, such as
Scudamour’s for Amoret, or some people’s for quiet, creates identity. To desire others
is to “mind” them in the verbal sense, to care for them and to have a care because of
them, to have them in your mind. Because we desire, we need friends, but the
impossibility of fulfilling desire causes what Goldberg calls a wound, by which he
means grief of “mind.” Desire thus destroys the independent self, which is replaced by
Care, “the goodman selfe” whom Scudamour happens upon (4.5.34). Here “self” is both
reflexive—an intensifier of the “goodman”—and nominative, referring to a
personication of the “self” we all have. The allegory of Care, which illustrates “grief of
mind” (4.6.1), defines not just jealousy but, Goldberg argues, Scudamour’s self-identity.
We are what we care about and what gives us care. Joseph Parry pursues Scudamour’s
crisis of selfhood in “Petrarch’s Mourning, Spenser’s Scudamour, and Britomart’s Gift
of Death,” Comparative Literature Studies 42.1 (2005): 24-49.
Galina I. Yermolenko, “ ‘That troublous dreame”: Allegory, Narrative, and
Subjectivity in The Faerie Queene,” Spenser Studies 18 (2003): 253-271, identifies
inconsistencies in Spenser’s presentation of the house of Care.
ix
x
The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor
(University of Chicago Press, 1999), 156.
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xi
Slavoj Zizek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and
Causality (New York: Verso, 1994), 7-8.
xii
Graham Hough, A Preface to The Faerie Queene (London: Duckworth, 1962),
says that Scudamour and Amoret should be united at 4.9.39, but that their strife is
necessary for concord, as elsewhere in Book IV (190). Thomas P. Roche, s.v. “Amoret”
in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton (U of Toronto P, 1990), notes the
problem (“she simply drops out of the poem with no explanation,” 30), although it can
be argued that Scudamour refers to her presence when he mentions “this peerelesse
beauties spoile” (4.10.3). David Quint argues that Amoret is not reunited with
Scudamour so that she can play the role of Elizabeth Throckmorton, who substituted for
Queen Elizabeth in Sir Walter Raleigh’s affections, as in the episode where Timias is
caught tending her wound, in “Archimago and Amoret: The Poem and Its Doubles,” in
Worldmaking Spenser: Exploration in the Early Modern Age, ed. Patrick Cheney and
Lauren Silberman (Lexinton: The University of Kentucky Press, 2000): 32-42.
xiii Humphrey Tonkin, The Faerie Queene (Boston: Unwin Hyman,1989) says
Scudamour must use violence to have Amoret. The beginning of his discord occurs
when he pushes past the figures around Venus, and continues through his many trials
before he can unite with her (149). James Nohrnberg in The Spenser Encyclopedia
(1990), s.v. “The Faerie Queene, Book IV,” says that the Temple of Venus makes
Amoret the prize of “male aggressiveness,” and that Scudamour is a successful seducer,
but one “who suffers “remarkable reverses in the eyes of his audience” (277), referring
to the characters who listen to him in the poem. William Oram, Edmund Spenser (New
York: Twayne, 1997), 226, calls Scudamour “an impatient lover” who fails at friendship
when he takes Ate’s words as truth and perhaps does not notice Amoret at Satyrane’s
tournament when she puts on Florimel’s girdle because the image of a chaste Amoret
does not match the vision of her Scudamour then has in his mind. Scudamour also
describes a Temple of Venus he does not understand (227).
A point made by Andrea Walkden, “Allegorical Insubordination and the 1596
Faerie Queene,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 48.1 (2008): 93-109, 97, who
discusses the tendency of critics to read Scudamour as a character as well as an
allegorical figure (94). She argues that Scudamour suffers for trying a heroic career: “In
the Temple of Venus, he separates the ties of friendship from those of love and
imagines himself to be sacrificing the one in order to gain the other” (105).
xiv
xv
Since the purpose of this article is not to actually craft a noise ordinance, I
have relied on a fairly random survey of noise ordinances and state and federal laws
through links available on-line at www.nonoise.com, which is sufficient to show the
variety of approaches to the problem. A full legal search is beyond the scope of this
project and would only help prove that reading Spenser helps us think about the issue as
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much as would exhaustive research into the law of fifty states and thousands of
municipalities and attendant case law.
xvi
Los Angeles, CA: CHAPTER XI, NOISE REGULATION, Added by Ord.
No. 144,331, Eff. 3/2/73, Amended by Ord. No. 156,363, Eff. 3/29/82.
For a definition of “ambient” noise that suggests the problems of
enforcement, see CODE OF ORDINANCES City of MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA
Codified through Ord. No. 97-Or-102 adopted December 12, 1997. (Supplement No.
14, Update 9). Title 15 OFFENSES—MISCELLANEOUS. §389.30. Definitions:
“Ambient noise level: The sound level which exists at a point of measurement in the
absence of the sound the noise emission of which is measured, being the total effect of
all other sounds coming from near and far. The total of all noise in the environment,
other than the noise from the source of interest. This term is used interchangeably with
background noise.” The ordinances of Minneapolis are instructive in their extreme
detail, including considerations of religious exceptions, time limitations, places, decibel
measurement tables, and motor noise.
xvii
xviii
South Plainfield, another town in New Jersey, declares that people have a
right to and should be ensured an environment free from excessive sound and vibration
that may jeopardize their health or welfare or safety or degrade the quality of life. See
South Plainfield, New Jersey, §135-1 Ord. 90.918, passed 2-22-82. See
http://www.nonoise.org/lawlib/cities/nj/s_plainfield.htm or
http://www.nj.gov/dep/rules/nj_env_law.html. Many ordinances begin with a statement
about the need to control noise to protect health, safety, and quality of life, such as that
Denville, New Jersey (http://www.nonoise.org/lawlib/cities/nj/denville.htm):
WHEREAS, excessive sound is a serious hazard to the public health, welfare,
safety, and the quality of life; and
WHEREAS, a substantial body of science and technology exists by which
excessive sound may be substantially abated; and
WHEREAS, the people have a right to, and should be ensured of, an
environment free from excessive sound; and
WHEREAS, the Township Council has determined that it is the policy of the
Township of Denville to prevent excessive sound that may jeopardize the health,
welfare, or safety of the citizens or degrade the quality of life.
16 USC 228g notes the “adverse effect on the natural quiet and experience of
the park” and directs it to be protected by the FAA and EPA pursuant to the Noise
Control Act of 1972 (42 USC 4901).
xix
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xx
Lauren Silberman, Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and
IV of The Faerie Queene (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 115, notes
that Scudamour is happy to see Artegall in thrall to Britomart because it establishes her
“femininity” and that she cannot “cuckold” him.
Sean Kane, Spenser’s Moral Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1989), says that ecology is a recognition of one’s boundaries (15). Sure enough, notice
the title Boundaries: A Casebook in Environmental Ethics, cited in note 2. Another way
of putting it is simply that the ethical principle that one’s rights extend only so far as
until they clash with those of someone or something else.
xxi
xxii
I would like to thank Dean Cai Languan of Shanghai Normal University for
this bit of wisdom, as well as Brady Spangenberg, Russell Keck, Ed Plough, Buffy
Turner, and Jason Lotz for the ideas they helped generate in a seminar on Spenser and
ecology.
xxiii
Outside the house of Care the single loudest sound in The Faerie Queene is
the horn Timias blows to open the gate to Orgoglio’s castle (FQ 1.8.4), imitating
Astolfo’s horn in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, which makes an “orribil suono,” causing
all who hear it to flee (OF 15.14). Timias’s horne of bugle small” (FQ 1.8.3) that can be
heard for three miles, and also has the “great vertues” of voiding enchantments,
exposing deceits, and opening gates:
Was never wight, that heard that shrilling sownd,
But trembling feare did feel in every vaine;
Three miles it might be easie heard arownd,
And Ecchoes three answerd it selfe againe
No false enchauntment, nor deceiptfull traine
Might once abide the terror of that blast,
But presently was voide and wholly vaine:
No gate so strong, no locke so firme and fast,
But with that percing noise flew open quite, or brast.
(1.8.4)
But except for Timias, I don’t think anyone in the poem makes a loud noise
intentionally to annoy someone. Care, for example, would be rather difficult to
prosecute today, since he is operating his own business in his own establishment.
Rather, Scudamour’s experience in the House of Care concentrates the effects of certain
noises that we find elsewhere in the poem, where terror and discord find expression in
iron objects, loud musical instruments, and even human voices and the sounds of nature.
Smith points out that both indoors and outdoors, shouting and words provided annoying
discontinuity (58). Indoors, Westminster Hall was a cacophony, as was St. Paul’s
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(Acoustical World 60). Similarly, many of the loud noises in The Faerie Queene occur
in large halls or rabble uprisings. Redcrosse and Duessa require the assistance of “a
gentle Husher” to make it through through the throngs into Pride’s presence (FQ
1.4.13). The crowd at Mercilla’s palace makes a “wondrous noyse” as Awe leads Arthur
and Artegall through the hall of justice (5.9.23). Outdoors, Florimell flees thorugh a
“forest wyde, / Whose hideous horror and sad trembling sownd / Full griesly seemd” to
Guyon and Redcrosse as they ride through it “[s]eeking adventures” (3.1.14), just before
Florimell appears. Later in the poem, but not long after this appearance, Florimell fears
every shade she sees and “each noyse she did heare” as she flees from the brothers
whom Timias slew (3.7.1). She flees again from the witch’s son “in perill, of each noyse
affeard” (3.7.19).
The House of Care thus recalls the noises of haunted places that figure
elsewhere in The Faerie Queene. The sounds of the barking dogs, crowing cock, and
shrieking owl that wake Scudamore replay the shrieks of the owls and the howls of
wolves that “bewrayed” Duessa as she rescues Sansfoy. The fauns and satyrs hear the
“rebownded noyce” of Una’s shrieks when Sansloy snatches away her veil (1.6.8).
Orgoglio makes a “dreadfull sownd . . . through the wood loud bellowing” that makes
the earth shake “for terror” (1.7.7). He shortly after brays as loudly as a herd of bulls
bellowing in “kindly rage” for “the milky mothers” when he loses an arm to Arthur’s
sword (1.8.11). Turpine roars so loudly as the Salvage man tears him to pieces that the
“noise” rouses everyone in his house (6.6.22). The voice of an angel so loudly calls the
Palmer to help Guyon as he lies in a faint after leaving the House of Mammon “[t]hat all
the fields resounded with the ruefull cry” (2.8.3). Merlin’s cave lies under a rock and
you can hear, the narrator says, the “ghastly noyse of iron chaines, / And brasen
Caudrons thou shalt rombling heare” and groaning sprights and “loud strokes, and
ringing sowndes” that under that “deepe Rock most horribly rebowndes” (3.3.9). Just as
Scudamour’s sleepless night seems to go on forever, voices of full-scale terror seem to
linger.
xxiv
A reference to the House of Care by Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggests the
need to look not only at noise but a particular individual’s sensitivity to noise, the
conditions, the personal interplay between the noisemaker (in this case Care, who
disappears when Scudamour wakes up) and his victim, and even the role of science in
ecology.
It always seemed right to me that Coleridge singled out Spenser’s description of
banging blacksmiths’ hammers as the part of The Faerie Queene that spoke to him most
directly.xxiv As an opium addict, Coleridge knew the terrors of a sleepless night, and
what could appeal to an insomniac more than Scudamour’s sleepless night in the house
of Care? But it wasn’t the noisy anvil that roused Coleridge’s admiration. Rather
Coleridge was impressed that Spenser understood how sleep “enhanced and
exaggerated” Scudamour’s suffering. Coleridge was especially taken by the way Care
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would disappear after nipping Scudamour’s heart with his tongs. He interpreted this
detail to mean that Scudamour’s anxiety had no real basis:
[A]t night, and in sleep, cares are not only doubly burdensome, but
some matters, that then seem to us sources of great anxiety, are not so
in fact; and when we are thoroughly awake, and in possession of all
our faculties, they really seem nothing, and we wonder at the
influence they have had upon us. So Scudamour, while under the
power and delusion of sleep, seemed absolutely nipped to the soul by
the red-hot pincers of Care, but opening his eyes and rousing himself,
he found that he could see nothing that had inflicted the grievous pain
upon him; there was no adequate cause for the increased mental
suffering Scudamour had undergone.
His auditors challenged him to explain why, if there was really nothing for
Scudamour to worry about, Spenser wrote “Yet did the smart remain, though he himself
[Care] did flee” (44). Responding, Coleridge drew on science as he understood it,
explaining that the circulation of the blood increase a person’s emotional sensitivity at
night, “when the body is in a horizontal position: he contended that the effect originated
in the brain, to which the blood circulated with greater force and rapidity than when the
body was perpendicular.” Rather than laughing at Coleridge, we may draw a cautious
lesson about our own understanding of science.
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