The Faerie Queene Among the Disciplines

Prof. Elizabeth Fowler

Let me begin with a peculiar piece of news: anatomy is dead. I mean this quite literally: the medical discipline of human anatomy has just died and is disappearing from our universities. No more human anatomists are being trained; instead the work of the retiring anatomists is used as basic stuff in the study of cells, organs, development, disease, in all of the other medical sub-disciplines. Scientists will tell you that we simply know everything that’s in the human body and have named and described all of it. It’s not that we human bodies no longer have anatomy, and yet, in a way, it is. Now we have physiology and biochemistry instead. This is only one of the latest developments in the historical change of the disciplines, a change in the very way we think about knowledge.

You at the beginning of your college careers are required to get to know about the structure of the disciplines by testing them in turn, and then are asked to choose one in which to apprentice yourself. You open up the blue book, you see all the departments, and they seem to present themselves as natural divisions of knowledge--the chemists don’t teach poetry and the political scientists don’t teach anthropology. Why should they? Then you look a little closer, and get to know your way around and find out that there are all kinds of problems about the boundaries--departments overlap in a seemingly inefficient way and it’s necessary to cross-list, to blur distinctions, and eventually to phase programs in and out. One of the things you will notice about the way knowledge is divided in 1996 is that some disciplines have a lot of historical consciousness, and others have almost none. For example, in mathematics and physics you study the current issues and topics of research with almost no reference to what happened even ten years ago, let alone how people thought in the sixteenth century.

In English 125 you are introduced into the mystery, that Middle English word for vocation, of literary criticism, the discipline of which your professors are the priests. Yet while Chaucer, Spenser, Donne, Marvell, Milton, and the others now seem firmly within our established dominion as the objects par excellence of literary criticism, it is equally true that these poets did not see their own work as falling within this discipline. English literature departments weren’t even invented until three hundred years after Spenser. The Faerie Queene falls in a territory that, rather like Eastern Europe, has been occupied by a series of competing disciplines, all claiming title in terms of what we might call explanatory power, and all achieving different treaties with other disciplines about what territory belongs to whom. Part of our job as workers in a discipline that prizes historical consciousness is to understand the context in which The Faerie Queene understands itself. The poem is a somewhat crazed example of the life and death of disciplines, because just as The Canterbury Tales abandon the pilgrimage when its characters are only partway to Canterbury, and just as the poem ends with Chaucer’s Retraction, The Faerie Queene abandons its quest through the virtues and ends with a legal allegory: the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie – a beautiful fragment appended to the poem. Like Chaucer, Spenser accomplishes a disciplinary transition. One of the good reasons to read The Faerie Queene is to look at knowledge from outside the Blue Book, outside the divisions and departments of knowledge as we understand it in 1996.

We understand far less about Spenser’s Faerie Queene than we do about The Canterbury Tales or Paradise Lost. The Faerie Queene is bigger than anything Chaucer or Milton wrote; it is, in fact, enormous. The Faerie Queene is an epic, a personification allegory, and a romance: it reveres Chaucer, Malory, and Skelton for writing in English; it flaunts its affiliations with Homer’s Odyssey, with Vergil’s Aeneid, with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and with the renaissance Italian epic romances by Tasso, Ariosto, and Boiardo that Spenser says he wants to “overgo”: in other words, to be bigger, better, and smarter than. If you’ve read any of these, or English or French chivalric romances, or Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and Wife of Bath’s Tale, or seen Star Wars, Terminator Two: Judgement Day or Blade Runner, you have a sense of the kind of world Spenser is drawing us into. The events of The Faerie Queene take place long ago and far away, but there is also a pervasive sense of futurity, of science fiction: there is a sense that apocalypse is never far ahead. Perhaps if you think of the relation between Star Trek and U. S. foreign policy and domestic crises it won’t seem quite so strange to know that The Faerie Queene too bears some topical reference to the issues of sixteenth-century Britain.

The Faerie Queene, however, made a lot less money than Star Wars or Star Trek. Spenser died before he was fifty and during that short life he was never a courtier, an aristocrat, or rich; he didn’t come from an upper-crust background like Philip Sidney’s or Walter Ralegh’s, he never had the comfortable bourgeois London life that Chaucer lived as the controller of customs and a Member of Parliament, and he never had the importance in high political circles that Milton was to command. Spenser had a good teacher at what we’d call a high school in London and got to Cambridge University on financial aid. He earned his baccalaureate in 1573, and after some years of odd jobs for minor celebrities, he became the secretary of the new English governor of Ireland, Lord Grey. That job brought him to Dublin, and for the rest of his life--some twenty years-- Spenser supported himself as a civil servant, moving around in the English colonial administration during the late sixteenth-century wars in Ireland. His positions there were mainly in the judicial bureaucracy, where he was immersed in legal language and habits of mind, and where he saw quite a lot of ugliness. Besides an impressive amount of poetry (in which there is a lot of legal diction), Spenser wrote an important political treatise on Ireland near the end of his life.

The Faerie Queene claims outright to be moral philosophy, which is comprised of two parts -- ethics and political philosophy --according to Spenser’s Letter to Ralegh. It is organized according to six virtues: and “virtue” is a term belonging to the language of moral philosophy, but The Faerie Queene is not simply an illustrated tour to the pieties and precepts of the philosophic tradition. The poem treats philosophical questions from the standpoint not of Westminster and the queen’s court, but of the colonial frontier, where Spenser lived and where the standard lines of English political philosophy looked very ragged. In fact, ethics and political philosophy were going to part ways in the next century, to begin to be seen as decisively different modes of knowledge: one private, one public; one about the asocial passions, the other about disinterested institutions. At the time The Faerie Queene was written this division had not yet taken place. You don’t have to know moral philosophy to understand the poem; but you will want to take the poem seriously when it says it is asking questions about the ethical and political virtues. This is why John Milton calls Spenser a better teacher than the philosophers Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas.

If the poem is about philosophical questions, why all the gruesome violence? This is generic to romance, but it is also true that the colonial world Spenser lived in was horribly violent. When we read The Knight’s Tale, it is somehow different to know that Chaucer himself had been a soldier in a war, and was captured and held for ransom. We might say that poetry is like the amphitheater of The Knight’s Tale, a theater that we build in order to stage crises in a way that allows us to think them through symbolically, to come to terms with them culturally, and to make judgments. Poetic form is thus both escapist and terribly direct. Romance provided Spenser with a medium in which he could explore the relation of tyranny and violence to social structures. The television writer David Milch once told me that a writer needs to find a form and a structure that will embody the problems she has with her material, so that the form can function almost like a pair of gloves, both insulating her from the material of her story and at the same time allowing her to actually handle that material. I think romance functions this way for Spenser, deeply embodying the violence of the Irish wars yet distancing him from it enough to allow him to write about it. Brutal fights, beheadings, rapes, torture, cannibalism, dismemberment, genocide--such things fill the plot lines of The Faerie Queene like the blood that comes up to Palamon and Arcite’s ankles in the grove. The violent acts become knots at the center of the poem’s material: knots that interpretation must work out. The poem is partly a psychological, archetypal world where such plot events are symbolic, but it also records their existence in a material, historical world.

Most of The Faerie Queene was written in Ireland. There, the English were engaged in the brutal suppression of a series of rebellions by brutal Irish lords, and the country was in a terrible and terrified state. In Spenser’s prose tract he tells about an English captain who bragged about placing the severed heads of recently executed Irish rebels along the pathway to his tent so that if any local person came to beg a favor from him, she or he would be suitably undone by seeing the heads of her relatives or neighbors on the way to her English governor. C. S. Lewis wrote that Spenser’s involvement in English colonization in Ireland “corrupted his imagination,” leading the poet into using allegory as a kind of moral justification for such gravely immoral acts as Lord Grey’s massacre of some 300 Irish and Spanish soldiers, women, and children at Smerwick, which we think Spenser witnessed. It is true that Spenser takes no particular political line in The Faerie Queene, and -- unless you count the tautological ideas that “virtues are good” and “vices are bad” -- neither does he push any particular moral line in the ethical framework of the poem. Yet it is abundantly clear that his arguments are political and moral. He sets a lot of ideas in motion, tests and evaluates them against each other, but never gives his own conclusions. Instead he seems, like Chaucer, to explore the conditions, the limitations, and the strengths and consequences of many moral and political propositions. Ask yourself not “what does he conclude?” or “what does he believe?” but “how does he set the question?”

Violent political conquest was as morally vexed a topic in medieval and early modern political philosophy as it is today. The law of nature allowed that power could be derived from military conquest (obviously power is derived from military conquest still in, say, Bosnia), but the question was posed, and remains: can it be morally justified? The English prided themselves on their “ mixed” constitution: English political philosophers called their polity a commonwealth, and sharply distinguished its form from absolute, tyrannical monarchy because the power of the crown was seen as limited by the power of the commons and by what is called the English common law, a body of customs and precedents. It was thus a limited monarchy, where the consent of the people (or at least some of them) was considered to be the source of the crown’s dominion. For example, Magna Carta is a series of legal documents from the thirteenth century that expresses the fundamental, constitutional nature of this consent. English political apologists claimed that their idea of the commonwealth was superior to the indigenous political structures of Ireland, which they called barbaric. They also claimed that Irish political leaders had surrendered to conquering English troops centuries earlier. But with the persistent rebellions of sixteenth-century Irish chieftains, could it reasonably be claimed that the primary virtue of the commonwealth, government by consent, was being conveyed by the English? Can you extend the benefits of consensual government to the natives by means of military force? It’s an oxymoron. Can we bring a democratic government to Somalia with tanks? Such a government is supposed to arise out of its citizens, so imposing it by force can be in some contradiction to the principles of democracy. Much of sixteenth-century Ireland was still controlled by people who did not feel in the least bound by the long-past surrender of their neighbors to the English--especially since the tribal political organization of Ireland meant their neighbors were often their enemies. Was it reasonable to say that the English were benevolently offering the enlightened legal structures of the common law to Irish subjects when Elizabethan governors kept the territory in a near-constant state of martial law? To his credit, Spenser tackles these questions head on. Every time a knight meets battle, the poem asks the primary issue of the colonial war for the English--whether to reform or reduce the enemy. Throughout the six books it becomes harder to know who the enemy is, and whether he is us. The casual murders of chivalric romance become stickier. Diplomacy, restraint, friendship, mercy, and in Book VI courtesy become virtues to be pursued by nations.

The political imagination of The Faerie Queene is various and searching. There are many institutional figurations of the political aspects of the six virtues; the knights encounter many examples of governments, of city-states, of rulers and their strengths and limitations. The very basis of social bonds is itself a major theme of the poem, as it is in The Canterbury Tales. Spenser has filled his allegory with stories that probe the meaning of trouthe, maistery, dynasty, sovereignty, love, lordship, felawschipe, obedience, dominion, marriage, and all their Chaucerian associations. Like Chaucer, Spenser treats politics and sexuality as inextricable.

We might think of the boundaries between disciplines as very like those “gloves” that writers choose when they choose poetic forms and genres. The boundaries between Yale’s literature, history, and philosophy departments, for example, are at once artificial and powerful. There was nothing like a “Department of English Literature” at Cambridge University in the year 1573. However, they did teach moral philosophy there. As Spenser says, its two parts can be divided according to Aristotle’s models: The Nichomachean Ethics and the Politics. In the Ethics, Aristotle “seeks to describe and understand the highest good and to prescribe ways to achieve it.” Among all the disciplines or sciences, says Aristotle, there is a “controlling” or “ master” discipline that aims at the highest good: that queen of the disciplines is called “architectonik” in Greek. Aristotle says that something he calls politike’ is the highest discipline, because it studies not only the good of individuals, but the good of the polis, the political community of individuals. Our own twentieth-century translators of the Ethics say that the best translation of politike’ is “political science.” Well, remember the Wife of Bath’s question: who painted the lion? The translators of the Ethics and the Politics are often political scientists, and we should not be surprised that they argue that what takes place in political science departments is more important than what happens in others. Spenser’s contemporary Philip Sidney had an alternative translation of this passage in Aristotle, arguing that something called “poetry” is the true practitioner of politike’ and thus queen of the disciplines. Sidney, who was about your age at the time, wrote a very clever essay on the boundaries between disciplines that influenced Spenser, called The Defense of Poesy. In it he claims that astronomy, philosophy, and mathematics are:

but serving sciences [meaning subordinate or lesser sciences], which, as they have each a private end in themselves, so yet are they all directed [like tributary rivers] to the highest end of the mistress knowledge [meaning the feminine master science as opposed to the subordinate “serving” sciences], [called] by the Greeks architectonike, which stands . . . in the knowledge of a man’s self, in the ethic and politic consideration, with the end of well doing and not of well knowing only . . . So that, the ending end [meaning “telos”, or final goal] of all earthly learning, being virtuous action [e.g., ethos], those skills that most serve to bring forth that have a most just title to be princes [e.g., dominion] over all the rest.

Politike’, the writing of ethics and the highest pursuit of the queen of the disciplines, Sidney goes on to argue, is poetry: not “ political science.” According to Sidney, moral philosophy in its highest and most active sense is written by the poet, not the philosopher or political scientist. Poetry does everything philosophy does, and everything history does, but better. Sidney’s is a brilliant argument, adding a license to the poet’s political dominion that Percy Bysshe Shelley expands centuries later. (Do you know his phrase for poets? They are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.)

What is the language of this moral philosophy? In The Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle goes about describing how we can achieve the highest good by a long discussion of virtues. The term “ethics” itself comes from character. Aristotle writes:

Virtue of character [i.e. of e’thos] results from habit [ethos]; hence its name ‘ethical’, slightly varied from ‘ethos’. (2.1: 1103a16)

“Habit” in this sense means patterns of action: what people do with their lives. This formulation of virtue holds good even on the level of the political community, for Aristotle claims that the goal of the legislator is to make the citizens good by “habituating” them: “[The right] habituation is what makes the difference between a good political system and a bad one” (1103b6). The understanding of virtue through character that is the strategy of the Ethics is important for understanding Spenser: The Faerie Queene is organized around six virtues, one for each book, to alert you to its discussion of moral philosophy. The poem’s argument is embodied in personification allegory: an imaginative form in which character bears a heavy burden of signification, as ideas, passions, places, and even institutions are made into characters. In the Letter to Ralegh, Spenser says that “the general end of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline.” This intention has to do with the fit between the character of a people and the character of their government which ethics and politics attempt to produce--his goal is both to make good citizens and to make good governors or government.

Let’s look at what Spenser says in the Letter to Ralegh:

The generall end therefore of all the booke [= the telos of the book] is to fashion [= Aristotle’s “ habituate"] a gentleman or noble person [= those who according to Sidney have “ just title to be princes"; also “reader”, “aristocrat”, “virtuous person” (remember the anti-aristocratic defense of gentilesse in the Wife of Bath’s Tale), “poet” in Sidney’s terms, and “man” OR the genderless “person” which could include women, such as the Queen] in vertuous and gentle discipline. [= in the science of virtue, that is, moral philosophy, ethics and class politics]

As we might expect from the semantic valences of the word “ethics,” the business of fashioning a person turns out to have a lot to do with character, but character as a technical tool of poetry. Spenser writes:

. . . I have followed all the antique Poets historicall, first Homere, who in the Persons of Agamemnon and Ulysses hath ensampled a good governour and a vertuous man, the one in his Ilias, the other in his Odysseis: then Virgil, whose like intention was to doe in the person of Aeneas: after him Ariosto comprised them both in his Orlando: and lately Tasso dissevered them againe, and formed both parts in two persons, namely that part which they in Philosophy call Ethice, or vertues of a private man, coloured in his Rinaldo: The other named Politice in his Godfredo.

According to this passage, Homer, Vergil, and the Italian epic poets were all writing a version of moral philosophy. The “person” of ethics, and the “person” of politics are the same in Sidney’s Defense: they come together in the person of the noble poet, who claims “just title to be prince” through practicing the skills of his vocation. Spenser says he will portray the ethical and political virtues in Arthur, generally, but he goes on to explain that there will be many knights who are called the “patrons” of specific virtues: Redcrosse, Guyon, and Britomart in the first three books. How can we best articulate the relationship of the knights to the virtues? This is a rich question that has never been exhausted. Many possible models for that relationship are evoked in the poem: Christian typology, iconography, moral or historical allegory, character psychology, archetypal or mythographic symbolism: these are some of the terms that you may explore in class. Let’s talk about the peculiar notion of allegory, a literary form that doesn’t play much of a role in The Canterbury Tales at all.

The large-scale structure of The Faerie Queene, its scheme of the six virtues, is as powerful as advertised. The six virtues that Spenser chooses were not found in any obvious place; they are not, as he claims in the Letter, Aristotle’s virtues. You should guess this even if you haven’t read Aristotle because the first book is devoted to holiness, which of course is a Christian rather than an Aristotelian virtue. Each of the six virtues shares an important characteristic: it can be interpreted in terms of both “ private” and political meanings. The six books attempt to connect the ethical and political dimensions of their respective virtues. As in Aristotle’s book of Ethics, the role of character is paramount: The Faerie Queene uses what is the most flexible and surreal kind of characterization possible: personification allegory. In order to investigate how the poem’s multi-valent use of the disciplines works together with character, we need to explore the workings of allegory in The Faerie Queene.

There is an abundance of theory about allegory, theory which may be a guide to its interpretation. The basic idea of allegory is best conveyed by the sixteenth-century English writer George Puttenham, who calls allegory “ a long and perpetual Metaphore.” In other words, allegory is a metaphor that the poem elaborates to such a great degree that it becomes an aspect of the plot. Allegory arises from the words of the poem, from the language and the various dictions that the poem employs, thus allegory is best explored by close reading. The idea of the extended metaphor conveys precisely this sense of bringing different materials together that I have been trying to get across to you. Within his allegory, Spenser is able to take different dictions, genres, disciplines, and modes of thinking and to compare them, measuring them against each other. The theory of allegory that comes closest to what I think happens in The Faerie Queene is encapsulated in the quotation from Sir John Harington that I’ve put on the handout:

The ancient Poets haue indeed wrapped as it were in their writings diuers and sundry meanings, which they call the senses or mysteries thereof. First of all for the litterall sence (as it were the vtmost barke or ryne) they set downe in manner of an historie the acts and notable exploits of some persons worthy memorie : then in the same fiction, as a second rine and somewhat more fine, as it were nearer to the pith and marrow, they place the morall sence profitable for the actiue life of man, approuing vertuous actions and condemning the contrarie. Manie times also vnder the selfesame words they comprehend some true vnderstanding of naturall Philosophie, or somtimes of politike gouernement, and now and then of diuinitie : and these same sences that comprehend so excellent knowledge we call the Allegorie, which Plutarch defineth to be when one thing is told, and by that another is vnderstood.

Here Harington promotes allegory as a form capable of combining the dictions and the methods (“mysteries”)and the kinds of knowledge that pertain to different disciplines in a way that reminds us sharply of Spenser’s emphasis on the two parts of moral philosophy in the Letter to Ralegh. Harington’s levels are first history “an historie the acts and notable exploits of some persons worthy memorie”; second, “the morall sence profitable for the actiue life of man, approuing vertuous actions”--that is, ethics; third, we have natural philosophy, which in the renaissance means science; fourth, he gives us “politike gouernement”--that’s our political philosophy; and as an occasional fifth, “diuinitie” or what we call theology.

All the descriptions of what kinds of different levels you can have in allegory I advise you to regard as promptbooks, lists of questions to ask yourself as you are reading and attempting to analyze the different kinds of meanings and materials brought together by Spenser. The argument that you build on top of the “data” garnered through these questions is what matters and takes a lot of specific working out. There are no answers without argument in the interpretation of allegory. Let’s say we gathered together all the Spenserians in the world in this room (something we actually came close to doing a few weeks ago in celebration of the fact that this year marks the 400th anniversary of the poem). Then let’s say we put them all to work on the same episode, perhaps the apparently straightforward architectural allegory of the House of Holiness, asking them to point out the four levels of the allegory – well, we would get many, many different answers. Believe it or not, this doesn’t mean anything goes--what it means is that, as Aristotle says, we don’t judge rhetoricians the way we judge mathematicians. What counts most in literary criticism is not repeatable results and formula, but persuasive argumentation -- with lots of textual evidence. There could be a hundred correct answers, but there are certainly answers that are unconvincing and some that are flat out wrong.

I might just say a word about the formula of the four levels I’ve written at the bottom of the page on the handout. It’s hard to understand what the four terms mean, and if you have difficulty separating them, it’s because it is part of the work of interpretation to distinguish them. They are not “ given". For more on this kind of theory of allegory, see Gordon Teskey’s essay on allegory in A. C. Hamilton, ed., The Spenser Encyclopedia.

So much for a brief introduction to theories of allegory. Now let me offer one other model for the relationship of the poem’s characters to the virtues. When Spenser says, in the middle of the Letter to Ralegh, “For considering that she beareth two persons, the one of a most royall Queene or Empresse, the other of a most vertuous and beautifull Lady” he is referring to the political and the ethical dimensions of Queen Elizabeth’s image. But there is something deeply institutional about this reference, and it is so interesting and peculiar that I have put a passage from an Elizabeth law report onto your handout. Here in the Letter to Ralegh Spenser is using a legal doctrine in order to explain the relationship of a personification to ethical discourse and political philosophy. This doctrine is sometimes known as that of “the queen’s two bodies”: Spenser says “considering that she beareth two persons”. It is a legal fiction--did you know that “fiction” is a technical term in jurisprudence just as it is in literary scholarship? Let’s read the passage:

The King has two Capacities, for he has two Bodies, the one whereof is a Body natural, consisting of natural Members as every other Man has, and in this he is subject to Passions and Death as other Men are; the other is a Body politic, and the Members thereof are his Subjects, and he and his Subjects together compose the Corporation, as [Justice] Southcote said, and he is incorporated with them, and they with him, and he is the Head, and they are the Members, and he has the sole Government of them; and this Body is not subject to Passions as the other is, nor to Death, for as to this Body the King never dies . . . (argument from Willion v. Berkley in Edmund Plowden, Commentaries or Reports 233a (Elizabethan, but rpt. London, 1816)

Personification as a rhetorical strategy can have high stakes and costly consequences. In Milton’s time, when King Charles I’s natural body is proved to be a traitor to his own body politic, he is beheaded. When Spenser alludes to the doctrine of the monarch’s two bodies in the Letter to Ralegh, he is inviting us to think about the ethical and political aspects of English culture as it appears in the language and in the institutions. Rhetoric, for Spenser, goes all the way down. It is both ornament and institutional foundation.

The union of two persons in marriage -- or what lawyers called “unity of person” -- similarly has both ethical and political significance in the poem. In Book I, the ethical or personal virtue of Holiness is worked out through the struggles of Red Cross Knight. The political virtue of Holiness is embodied in the figure of Una, who is associated with the one, true, post-Reformation church, what Spenser’s contemporary Richard Hooker calls the “ecclesiastical polity” and Milton will call “church government.” She is heir to Adam and Eve’s political dominion over the entire earth, which is imagined as monarchical, and she is shadowed by her illegitimate twin Duessa, who is associated with things like Islam and the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church. Una is a religious version of the “body politic” that according to another passage from the Elizabethan lawyers “is utterly void of Infancy, and old Age, and other natural Defects and Imbecilities, which the Body natural is subject to” (Plowden 212a; later used by Coke in Calvin’s Case). She is the daughter of Adam and Eve but always young and beautiful. When her inheritance is restored to her through the rescue of her parents by Red Cross, Una marries him. Their union forges a bond between the ethical aspect of holiness, in Red Cross, and the political or institutional aspect of holiness, in Una. Their marriage represents or repeats the coming together of Christ and his Bride the church in the Christian rewriting of the Hebrew Bible’s Song of Solomon. Insofar as Red Cross is a figure for British history, the wedding also represents the union of the secular polity and the ecclesiastical polity into a single institution in the earlier part of the sixteenth century, when Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII became both the head of the nation and the head of the church by refusing the Pope’s jurisdiction. This is the English share in what we call the Reformation. England in Elizabeth’s time is a special kind of mixed monarchy: it has a required state church and that church is Protestant. Spenser’s bride and groom are not allowed to actually live together, as Red Cross is immediately called back to court and to current affairs, but the idea of their marriage represents as solid a resolution as Spenser ever makes between these doubled representations.

Up to now I’ve been giving you a news bulletin about how the poem looks to me as a whole -- a kind of satellite picture of its large-scale structures. But when it’s down to just you and the poem -- well, you and the poem and the CNN-battery-style commentary of Hugh MacLean and Anne Lake Prescott at the bottom of the page, or Thomas Roche at the back of the book, saying “this meant the chariot of the sun” or “i.e., too dry brain,” or “the pomp and hypocrisy of Rome,” or my favorite -- when Spenser says that Redcrosse knight strangles the loathsome monster Error and she vomits a lot of frogs, gore, and books and papers, MacLean says “books and papers”: that means “5. Catholic propaganda directed against Elizabeth I and the established church; by extension, the often virulent literature of religious controversy.” (How do they KNOW this stuff? They don’t get it from the poem. The Faerie Queene itself easily falls into the category “books and papers,” and the editors are tilting at windwills trying to keep Spenser’s indictments from casting shadows on his own project.) Anyway, when it’s just you and the poem--and the talking heads--and suddenly you see before you “a Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine, / Ycladd in mightie armes and silver shielde,” well, that satellite map of ethics and politics and allegory and the scheme of the virtues that I’ve been sketching is just not going to give you much guidance. How can you match it up to the simple problem of going in or staying out when the road of the poem gets to the woods?

The best rule is to trust your instincts and stick close to the language, where the real evidence is. Every aspect of the language asks you to compare and to make distinctions: rhymes invite comparison, alliteration draws words together, spelling suggests puns and false etymologies that grow into metaphors and even plots. Spenser invents words, puts others into fake archaic forms, spins his syntax into fantastic knots. The narrative slips in and out of different points of view, and keeps you waiting for important details: Una appears in stanza 4 of canto 1, but she is not called Una until 41 stanzas later, significantly only after her evil twin Duessa is created out of “liquid ayre.” A literal description of the reader’s situation might be “we cannot know this singular, true person except through a contrast with her evil shadows.” If you can make an accurate description of this kind, you’ve done a lot. Don’t allow the editors to fast-forward the poem for you: when we first meet Archimago in book I, canto i, stanza 29, he reminds us of the Old Man in the Pardoner’s Tale: “And to the ground his eyes were lowly bent, . . . [he] often knockt his brest, as one that did repent” I.i.29. By stanza 35 he is “glosing” and fussing with his religious props so much that we notice he is like the Pardoner himself and we begin to mistrust his intentions: “For that old man of pleasing wordes had store, / And well could file his tongue as smooth as glas; / He told of Saintes and Popes, and evermore / He strowd an Ave-Mary after and before” I.i.35. Later he is named and we find he is an extraordinarily powerful, though demonic, artist. He is called a “maker” -- the word for poet that Chaucer uses of himself. If we follow the notes and lose our sense of this subtle and gradual progression, if we exaggerate Spenser’s reputed radical Protestant antipathy to Catholicism, we make the mistake of severing the connection between the illusions of Archimago and the illusions of poetry. Could the editors really prove this portrait isn’t general anticlerical satire, as in Catholic Chaucer’s writing? I don’t think so, and in foreshortening the process of deciding who is evil and who is good, the notes work against the very method of The Faerie Queene.

Notice also how tempted the authors are to supply you with an answer when you’re wondering who Spenser is talking about. Despite the white and black hats that often descend and tell us that a certain knight is a paragon of virtue and another is the cruelest knight alive, it remains difficult to know who the enemy is and, again, whether he is us. This is true on a syntactical level: it is frequently unclear to whom pronouns refer. During crucial battles we lose sight of who is doing what to whom: Red Cross and Sans Foy are obscured as if in a cloud of dust and blood. The syntactical ambiguity is meaningful: the struggles between the knight and his enemies become internal struggles as well. Following the trail of pronouns is always productive in this allegory. Similarly, it is often unclear what is taking place outside a character and what inside: in Book III’s House of Busirane, Amorett’s heart is torn from her breast and put quivering into a silver basin as characters such as Shame, Sorrow, Feare march by in a kind of parade. Are they her feelings or do they belong to the masculine tyranny of her torturer? The allegory raises this question by refusing to place the emotions inside Amorett.

Events can produce a similar confusion: the same events seem to happen over and over, with just enough variation to make it impossible to line them all up the same way. Monsters, trees, caves, fountains, gardens all echo and shadow each other and invite us to refine our evaluations of them. If you enjoyed following the image of the prison in The Knight’s Tale through the plot, where it is transformed from a political prison, to the prison of love, to the prison of this life, then you will love following the many plots of the images in Spenser. The characters themselves repeat in dubious versions: illusions and mirror images become “real” and put the characters and the reader in difficult interpretive positions. How do we know, and then, how do we respond? We are in the same quandary that Red Cross Knight experiences when a rather poetic vision comes to him not in a book, but in a wet dream. Do we want to take out our swords and condemn Una because she appears to be trying to seduce us? Do we take the opportunity of this moral shock to run off with the whore of Babylon? Do we interpret on the basis of a single visual sign, or should we be patient and ask questions before killing a stranger? Do we condemn the Bower of Bliss offered to us in the poem’s sensual language, because we hear some Puritan Palmer whispering in our ears? Despite what the notes suggest, I think Spenser wants you to ask yourself what you think before you give in to the authorities. Pay sharp attention to tone: the narrative shifts often, taking conflicting views. Spenser uses the breaks between lines, or stanzas, or cantos, or books in order to shift tone. He samples bits and pieces of cultural detritus and patches them together in an ambitious scheme--but not into a harmonious whole.

Instead, the poem produces variety; it explores differences and difficulties on both the small scale and the large. When it moves into metaphor, the metaphor can often pull against the grain of the narrative. For example, take a look at the second epic simile of book I, at canto i, stanza 23. Always mark these epic similes: they usually begin with “As when” or some similar phrase, and take up their own stanza. Redcross is trying to keep his hold around the dragon’s throat, nearly drowning in a river of stinking monster vomit, full of all that gory stuff: half-digested flesh, frogs and toads, poison, monster fetuses (and the infamous “books and papers”). Suddenly, Spenser says:

As gentle Shepheard in sweet even-tide
When ruddy Phoebus gins to welke in west,
High on a hill, his flocke to vewen wide,
Markes which do byte their hasty supper best.
A cloud of combrous gnattes do him molest,
All striving to infixe their feeble stings,
That form their noyance he no where can rest,
But with his clownish hands their tender wings
He brusheth oft, and oft doth mar their murmurings. (I.i.23)
This is a jolting shift from romance to pastoral, from extreme tension to langorous repose, from gruesome cruelty to indifferent gentleness. It is a little window piercing through the poem’s narrative to another language, another point of view. The shift here is necessarily somewhat comic--it breaks the tension, reduces the knight’s enemies and the knight’s achievement, and suggests to the reader that, as dangerous as the struggle with Error has been, worse enemies are yet to come. When they do come, the flying insects of this pastoral window are found to have presaged them very precisely. Look at stanza 38:

And forth he [Archimago] cald out of deepe darknesse dred
Legions of Sprights, the which like little flyes
Fluttring about his ever damned hed,
A-waite whereto their service he applyes.
To aide his friends, or fray his enimies;
Of those he chose out two, the falsest twoo,
And fittest for to forge true-seeming lyes . . . (I.i.38)
The little, pastoral, epic simile of stanza 23 breaks out and becomes part of the plot.

The case of the epic simile is a miniature case of the tension between genres that continues throughout The Faerie Queene. Formal shifts and disjunctions are clues that help us find the gaps and conflicts between points of view, ideas, and arguments. Ultimately, the ability of the poem to hold all these discordant pieces together lies in the special capacities of allegory. The first stanza of the poem says “Fierce warres and faithfull loves shall moralize my song”: epic and romance both play major roles in shaping the poem. At the end of Book II, Guyon’s destruction of the Bower of Bliss is an epic victory that compares our hero to Odysseus, but in terms of romance, it is a cognitive and social failure: the two generic interpretations work at cross-purposes and bring the reader’s responses to a pitch.

Let me now give you a tiny, paragraph-size window onto the way that The Faerie Queene ends, simply because Spenser appears there, though most of you probably won’t read book VI. It will help give you a bridge to the lovely and sad Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, which many of you will read. The hero of book VI, the book of courtesy, is called “Calidore.” Even more than his fellow knights, he is something of an anti-hero, even a bumbling idiot at times. The political virtue of courtesy is linked to Calidore’s role as a courtier: the first canto of book VI begins “of court, it seems, men Courtesie doe call.” Reading Chaucer will have alerted you to the need to take an attitude of deliberate suspicion whenever a poet emphasizes the word “seems”. Calidore is very much like Sidney’s cultivated, noble statesman, but he is not treated very kindly by the poem. In The Defense of Poetry, you will remember, Sidney manages to join the noble courtier and the poet in a single figure. Not so in The Faerie Queene; in fact, the courtier and the poet are two different characters, and they are all at cross- purposes. In canto x of book six, Spenser’s alter ego Colin Clout appears in a reprise of Spenser’s early poem The Shepherd’s Calendar. Colin plays the bagpipes; he is a Vergilian pastoral poet who dresses humbly and speaks bluntly. He pipes a melody and conjures a fantastic vision of his beloved together with the three graces and a hundred naked maidens dancing on the hill near Spenser’s castle in Ireland, where The Mutabilitie Cantos will take place. This is a grand rewriting of the dancing maidens and the rapist knight in The Wife of Bath’s Tale. It also turns out to be an echo or shadow of the destruction of the Bower of Bliss: Calidore ignobly spies upon Colin from the bushes, and the maidens disappear. The vision is ruined, causing the shepherd-poet to break his pipe in anger. The scheme of the virtues is ruined as well. Courtesy, the language of the court, is revealed to be at odds with the moral vision of the poem.

That vision never recovers. The Mutabilitie Cantos abandon the scheme of the virtues -- there is no “knight of constancy.” Spenser stages an allegorical trial of competing claims to dominion on “Arlo Hill” -- an actual hill above his own property in the south of Ireland. A myth that explains the origins of violence in Ireland is framed by the trial, which pits the imperial Roman god Jove, against a daughter of the Titans named Mutability. The virtues are gone, the poem is no longer structured by moral philosophy; instead it looks to jurisprudence, to the theory of conflict of laws. Poetry, as queen of the disciplines, is now sorting out the image of all knowledge within her by thinking of disciplines as territories which each have their own indigenous laws, laws that have a hope of reconciliation only according to the larger laws that sort out international conflicts. Dame Nature, the personification of natural law, is a figure charged with acting rather like the United Nations; and she procures only a limited peace. Never even in the height of Chaucer’s satire or in the emotional depths of the Retraction have we seen a poetry so conscious of the limitations of genre, of the narrowness of the disciplines, and of the inadequacy of poetic representation itself.

If we move past the first step in reading – identifying what it is we have in front of us (a process rather like the dead science of anatomy) – the second step is to try to understand the process. Our question here might be: what leads to the abandonment of moral philosophy and the scheme of the virtues? More broadly, we must notice that there are images of irresolution scattered throughout the six books. Among the many amorous couples of the poem – Una and Red Cross Knight, Amorett and Scudamour, Britomart and Artegall, Colin Clout and his beloved dancer, Britain and Ireland, ethics and politics – not a single quest for reunion is satisfied. Neither the unity of person in marriage nor a culturally unified polity seems possible in the world of The Faerie Queene, but such a unity is deeply imagined and desired. The Faerie Queene incorporates a nationalist epic of immense ambition; but it also embodies a romance that exalts a Chaucerian notion of consensual union. That romance is in powerful disagreement with the epic and nationalist ambitions of the poem, and that romance still moves us.

There is much to learn from the rigor and passion of the Spenserian fictional imagination. I urge you all, while reading The Faerie Queene, to accept Spenser’s challenge and to hold up the stories of the past to the pressing ethical and political issues of the present world. That process is an important part of English 125, which aims to be an introduction to the major, and thus the discipline. This course tries to discover and invent the highest purposes of reading, of interpreting, and of writing. I hope you will take seriously the decision to place yourself among the divisions of the Blue Book, because that decision can effect the shape of knowledge – both as it shapes you, and as it structures the university and the polity itself. Keep asking the disciplines, as Spenser invites you to do, to help you deliberate about how to fashion yourselves, both as good people and a good polity.

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