The second book of The Faerie Queene both succeeds Book I and parallels it. In the opening episode, Archimago and Duessa join forces just as they did in the Legend of Holiness to separate the too-hasty knight—Guyon this time, inflamed like his precursor with a potent brew of anger and concupiscence—from his companion, the Palmer. This inaugural misadventure leads to a harrowing encounter with Mortdant, Amavia, and their infant child that recalls the Fradubio episode (I.ii). Between these events come ‘pledges of good will’ (II.ii.34.2) that signal the concord of the heroes and the virtues they espouse, echoing the ‘pledges firme’ (I.ix.18.9) that earlier bound Arthur and Redcrosse into the golden chain of the poem’s unity. This unity is complicated, however, by the symbolic rather than realistic time-scheme of the narration: the Letter to Ralegh indicates that Guyon’s quest begins the day after Redcrosse’s (70-74), yet here Guyon setting forth meets Redcrosse on the way back. The Palmer, congratulating the patron of holiness on his achieved sainthood, indicates the double register in which we must therefore correlate the legends: ‘we, where ye have left your marke’—taking up where you left off—‘Must now anew begin like race to ronne’—starting over from scratch (i.32.6-7).

The allegorical relation between Holiness and Temperance is equally puzzling. Guyon recognizes ‘the sacred badge of my Redeemers death’ (i.27.6) just in time to rein in his attack on the Red Crosse knight, and the Palmer’s name implies that he has made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, yet together they give Mortdant and Amavia a pagan burial. These mixed signals point to a deeper rift between the virtues. The Letter to Ralegh glosses Redcrosse’s armor with a reference to Ephesians 6:11: ‘Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the assautes of the devil’ (LR 64). The next verse reads, ‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, and against the worldly governours, the princes of the darkenes of this worlde, against spirituall wickednesses, which are in the hie places’. Guyon’s name means, among other things, ‘wrestler’ (pr.5.8n, xii.63.6-9n), but he does not inherit ‘the whole armour of God’ from the Redcrosse knight, nor does he quite grasp the distinction between flesh-and-blood adversaries and spiritual wickedness. Guyon is a hero from the Aeneid, from the Odyssey, from a world without revelation; he is also a hero tragically and comically captive to the Law, straining to see a horizon, but beyond that horizon is a redemption he cannot imagine. Key episodes in the narrative, from Guyon’s first encounter with Furor to Arthur’s interventions on behalf of Guyon and Alma, show repeatedly that classical Temperance unaided is no match for spiritual enemies.

The insufficiency of Temperance stands out in the episode of Mortdant and Amavia. Hearing cries of anguish, Guyon rushes into a forest where he comes upon a young woman lying ‘halfe dead, halfe quick’ (39.4) on the ground, a knife in her breast, while blood from the wound flows into the fountain beside her like a purple stream, staining its waves. A ‘lovely babe’ (40.5), unconscious of the surrounding horror, plays in her streaming blood, and beside them reclines the corpse of an armed knight, still smiling. The pink flush of youth lingers in his cheeks, in stark contrast to the blood that spatters his armor.

This episode has riveted critical attention as much for the darkness of its conceit as for the power of its tragedy, but commentary has struggled to reconcile the affect of the scene with its allegory. Scholars from Hamilton (1961) and Fowler (1961) through Kaske (1993, 1999) work to clarify biblical and patristic resonances that point to an allegory of Mosaic law by way of St. Paul (Rom 7), but their accounts do not explain why the law’s generative effect, creating knowledge of sin, should be drenched in the pathos of Dido’s death-scene from the Aeneid.1 These elements set up a powerful dissonance, sounding a strange keynote for an aesthetic of temperance—especially if Spenser conceives of this virtue as the art of blending refractory impulses. Perfect concord and harmony are the topoi of intemperance in Book II, lovingly elaborated both times the narrative visits the Bower of Bliss (v.28-31, xii.70-72). Dissonance is likewise a central concern of the scriptural passages (especially Rom 6-8) that inform the episode, coded into the names ‘Mortdant’, he who gives death, and ‘Amavia’, she who loves life (i.55.5-6). 2 In Romans, Paul grapples with the challenge of living in the spirit while sunk in the flesh: ‘How shal we, that are dead to sinne, live yet therein?’ (Rom 6:2). He goes on to explain that believers become ‘dead to sinne’ through baptism: ‘Know ye not, that all we which have bene baptized into Jesus Christ, have bene baptized into his death?’ (6:3). ‘Grafted’ with Christ ‘to the similitude of his death’, the faithful await the completion of this similitude: ‘we beleve that we shal live also with him’ (6:5, 8).

The theological allegory thus locates the action of Book II, the ‘moment’ of Temperance, partly in the world of the virtuous pagan, who apprehends the Law through the workings of human reason, and partly in the interval between baptismal ‘death’ and the resurrection it waits upon: Guyon is, so to speak, a virtuous pagan called to witness the scene of baptism, responding with shock and incomprehension.3 Kaske has rightly dismissed the idea that the washing of Ruddymane’s hands in canto ii represents a ‘baptism manqué’, but this does not mean that baptism has no bearing on the allegory: in Paul’s account, the struggle between sin and the Law follows immediately upon baptism. This is another sense in which Guyon begins where Redcrosse has ended: the well that signifies baptism is not the cold Ovidian spring of II.ii but the ‘well of life’ that restores Redcrosse in his battle with the dragon of sin (I.xi.29-34). Book II then opens with the knight backtracking from Eden and the bliss he attained there, and with the loosing of Archimago from his chains. No sooner do we glimpse the consummation that awaits the faithful than the narrative steps back, relocating us in the moment between baptism and resurrection, the interval in which the Pauline ‘inner man’ struggles with the law of his members. In effect, Temperance resumes the dragon-fight, now in an allegory of the flesh.4

The opening of Book II thus asks us to reverse Guyon’s perspective. If he is a virtuous pagan unable to grasp the mystery of baptism, we are positioned as Pauline subjects called to witness both the value and the limitations of classical Temperance as a response to the inherent sinfulness of human nature. The context for this witnessing is established in Romans 6-8. Chapter 6 speaks of baptism ‘into death’ as a liberation from both sin and the Law: ‘for ye are not under the Law, but under grace’ (14; cf. Col 2:11-14). In the next chapter Paul complicates the distinction, acknowledging, ‘we knowe that the Lawe is spiritual, but I am carnal, solde under sinne’ (7:14). He lives not simply under grace, then, but also under the Law, ‘for I delite in the Law of God, concerning the inner man: But I se another Law in my membres, rebelling against the law of my mind’ (22-23). This internal war of the mind against the members builds to the poignant lament, ‘O wretched man that I am, who shal deliver me from the bodie of this death!’ (24). The answer, of course, is that God through Christ will deliver the faithful, but the answer is also, not yet: the condition Paul evokes is one of suffering in hope.

Luther’s commentary on Romans acknowledges this deferral:

It is not necessary for all men to be found immediately in this state of perfection, as soon as they have been baptized into a death of this kind. For . . . they have begun to live in such a way that they are pursuing this kind of death and reach out toward this as their goal. For although they are baptized unto eternal life and the kingdom of heaven, yet they do not all at once possess this goal fully . . . . (LW 25:136)

The Pauline lament ‘O wretched man that I am’ expresses the torment of living toward but not in ‘this state of perfection’. Luther goes on to imagine three classes of the faithful, of whom the second class ‘endure [the death of baptism], but with great feeling, difficulty, and groaning; yet they are finally overcome, so that at least they die with patience’ (25:312). This vision of dying with patience while suffering in hope is very close to Spenser’s allegory in the deaths of Mordant and Amavia.

From Paul, Spenser takes not only a body of doctrine but also a set of metaphors. Paul speaks of two deaths: one into which baptism inducts the believer, freeing him from sin and the Law, and another—its opposite—that arises from sin under the Law, ‘for sinne tooke occasion by the commandement, and disceived me, and thereby slew me’ (7:11). There are two versions of life in this scheme as well. First there is a life prior to the Law: ‘For I once was a live, without the Law’ (7:9); later there is the life of the spirit, for ‘if Christ be in you, the bodie is dead, because of sinne: but the Spirit is life for righteousnes sake’ (8.10). The sequence of these states carries the Pauline subject from life (1), in which sin is unknown because there is no Law, to death (1), when the commandment brings death to the subject; then to death (2), in which the baptized subject dies with Christ, and finally—but not yet—to life (2), in which the subject who has died with Christ will rise with him in the spirit. The middle states in this chiastic sequence, the two deaths, overlap in the subject who is at once carnal (dead under the Law) and spiritual (dead to sin and awaiting resurrection).

What we call life is thus figured by Paul as a struggle between opposed, concurrent forms of death. Spenser evokes this reversal often, beginning with the coupling of Mordtant (he who gives death) with Amavia (she who loves life)5 and extending into the details of the scene, Amavia ‘halfe dead, halfe quick’ (i.39.4), Mortdant’s corpse still smiling and flushed with color (1.41). At the same time Spenser heightens the pathos of Paul’s cry, ‘who shall deliver me from the body of this death’, confronting both Guyon and the reader with a scene as shocking as it is opaque. It will be several stanzas before verbal echoes of Romans begin to suggest the allegory of death (1) that will be completed in the next canto. In the meantime Spenser turns not to Romans but to Virgilian Rome: Guyon’s blood freezes, he groans from deep within himself (42.3, 5), and a cluster of allusions to the death of Virgil’s Dido intensifies the scene’s pathos to the breaking point.

Spenser’s recourse to Virgil as a counterpoint to Romans yokes his allusive pre-texts as violently as a metaphysical poet wrenching the terms of a metaphor. The pathos of Dido’s suicide strains against the scripture’s need to affirm the Law in its death-dealing aspect, much as, in the Aeneid, it strains against the uncompromising demands of imperial destiny. Guyon comes upon Amavia like another Aeneas, turning back now to witness the suicidal widow’s desperate end. He then echoes Anna’s heartbroken wish to join her sister in death (Aen 4.678-79).

This version of the scene is then overtaken by scriptural allusion. The terrible innocence the infant Ruddymane (i.40, ii.1), set off against Guyon’s horror and tears, offers an appalling image of life ‘without the Law’, blissful in its ignorance of death and oblivious to the stain on its hands (Rom 5:14). Amavia as a type of Dido, the widow who destroys herself for love in the flesh, merges with the widow in the opening verses of Romans 7: ‘if the man be dead, she is free from the Law’ (3). Amavia refuses to be delivered from ‘the law of the man’, and so she remains bound to Mortdant under the Law even after his death. Theologically, then, she figures the flesh in love with sin.6 This allusion suspends her between the two Pauline deaths: because she is ‘one flesh’ with a husband who has died in sense (1), she cannot recognize her freedom to take a new husband through baptism—dying in sense (2) along with ‘him that is raised up from the deade’. In this way Spenser’s combination of scriptural and Virgilian elements positions his ‘ymage of mortalitie’ (57.2) at a strange impasse, where Pauline suffering-in-hope collides with the impatient self-destruction of Virgil’s Dido and where the sorrow of Virgil’s Aeneas blurs into the grief of Anna. It is a stark vision of mortal anguish at the crossroads between states of death.

Guyon fails to locate himself in this vision even as he feels the impulse to die with Amavia. His emotions veer between extremes of horror (st 42) and compassion (48.9) until he steps back in stanza 57, distancing himself from the tableau to pronounce on it in terms ‘more sanctimonious than sanctified’ (Mallette 1997: 55). The Palmer’s retort compounds the inadequacy of Guyon’s response: ‘But temperaunce (saide he) with golden squire / Betwixt them both [infirmity and bold fury] can measure out a mean’ (58.1-2). This invocation of Arisotelian virtue as the mean between vices of excess and deficiency prepares us for the mild absurdities of Medina’s house in canto ii, but more than that it heralds a series of confrontations in which classical virtue will fail to grasp the mysteries of sin.

Classical virtue fails in Book II because it places too much faith in the power of reason and will to control the passions.7 The Pauline understanding of ‘flesh’ undermines this program of self-discipline by reaching beyond the physical body and its impulses to include the reason and will, corrupted by the body they would govern. This is why Reformation writers insist on justification by faith alone: ‘carnall wisdome’ (Rom 3.5, Geneva gloss) is overmatched in the battle against sin, which can be conquered, even provisionally, only with the aid of divine grace. An ethics founded on the ideal of human self-sufficiency will never grasp the nature of this battle, in which the body’s resistance to the rational will is subordinate to a prior struggle between spirit and flesh: ‘the whole man is himself both spirit and flesh’, writes Luther, ‘and he fights with himself until he becomes wholly spiritual’ (LW 35: 377), that is, until he dies. Tyndale expands Luther’s formulation: ‘every man is two men, flesh and spirite, which so fight perpetually one agaynst an other, that a man must go either back or forward, and cannot stand long in one state’ (Works 186). Guyon and the Palmer, ensconced in the discourse of classical virtue, misrecognize this struggle, and so Guyon’s response to Mortdant and Amavia resembles that of Redcrosse to Fradubbio and Fraelissa in Book I: like Redcross, Guyon fails to see his own reflection in the spectacle before him.

Spenser’s allegory formulates such failures of self-knowledge as failures of interpretation—sometimes subtly, but in the Furor episode quite explicitly. Guyon and the Palmer come upon a strange ‘uprore’, a madman dragging a ‘handsome stripling’ by his hair and beating him mercilessly, followed by a lame hag who provokes the madman with ‘outrageous talke’ and occasionally lends him her staff as a cudgel (iv.3-5). This scene is marked out for interpretation in two ways. There are hints from the moment Guyon enters: ‘He saw from far, or seemed for to see . . . A mad man, or that feigned mad to bee’ (3.2, 5). The repeated equivocation, signaling that appearances will prove deceptive, anticipates the Palmer’s later warning to Guyon that (in effect) he only ‘seems to see’ Furor (10.4-7). These hints are reinforced by the literary self-consciousness of the tableau, which alludes to Lucian’s description in a widely known essay of a painting by Apelles that shows Slander ‘haling a youth by the hair’ (Works 4.2). Lucian explains that Apelles—falsely accused of conspiracy and nearly executed—transformed his experience into an allegorical painting. The allusion provides a key to the allegory, since slander is the ‘occasion’ that provokes rage, but by pointing to a story about the production of allegorical images it also brings the technique of personification forward as one of the episode’s themes.

The themes of personification and interpretation become explicit when Guyon, trying to grapple with Furor, ‘overthrew him selfe unwares, and lower lay’ (8.9), and the Palmer steps in to reinterpret the combat. The allegory has personified both Furor and Occasion as embodied agents whose features, actions, and accoutrements call for interpretation, but the interpretation they call for now insists that they are not really embodied agents after all: ‘He is not, ah, he is not such a foe’, warns the Palmer, ‘As steele can wound, or strength can overthroe’ (10.4-5). The way to defeat Furor is through an interpretation that effectively undoes the personification, working back from uncontrolled rage to its cause: ‘his aged mother hight / Occasion, the roote of all wrath and despight’ (10.9).

The portrait of this ‘wicked Hag’ in stanzas 4-5 draws on a complex array of literary and iconographic traditions, but at the heart of the labyrinth lurks a joke. Occasion in the emblem books is a naked young woman with winged heels,8 but the hag who bears this name in Spenser combines features associated in various sources with Calumny, Regret, and Punishment. The joke is that a figure identified with the causes of wrath appears to characters in the episode as an opportunity to be grasped. So Pyrhochles, when he intervenes in canto v, will misconstrue the binding of Occasion as an invitation to chivalric rescue (st. 17).

Through such comedies of misreading, the allegory in this episode circles back upon itself, identifying the literary technique of personification with the misrecognition that displaces an emotional state outward, into (or onto) the form of an adversary.9 This misrecognition takes another for the self, and so Guyon overthrows ‘him selfe unwares’ (8.9); it also takes causes for effects, since to disentangle self from other in dealing with rage is also to clarify the relation of causes to consequences. Along with its self-conscious undoing of personification, therefore, the episode also plays repeatedly with hysteron proteron—beginning in stanza 4 with Occasion, Furor’s source, following ‘him behind’ (4.1), and extending into the elaborate series of reversals set forth in Phaon’s self-exculpatory tale of woe. Phaon—the unfortunate stripling dragged along by Furor—repeatedly displaces his own guilt onto others, as when he calls Pryene ‘my woes beginner’ and insists on an emphatically sequenced program of revenge: ‘she did first offend, / She last should smart’ (31.4-6). A stanza later, this linked reversal of self and sequence catches up with Phaon as he, pursuing Pryene to kill her, finds himself pursued by his own rage, which has emerged, seemingly out of nowhere, as a character in the action:

Feare gave her winges, and rage enforst my flight;

Through woods and plaines so long I did her chace,

Till this mad man, whom your victorious might

Hath now fast bound, me met in middle space . . . .

(32.1-4)

This ‘middle space’ is the point of origin for Furor, the figure Guyon will control not through ‘victorious might’ but by calming down enough to read the allegory. Rage both arises and is dispelled in a space that is psychological, interior to the characters, but also representational—a ‘middle space’ where the internal and external, like cause and consequence, trade places in the acts of displacement or interpretation that constitute rage and understanding.

The Palmer’s successful diagnosis of Furor shows that reason and restraint do have some value. We are reminded just how limited their value is, however, by the comically inept moralizing with which Guyon and the Palmer respond to Phaon’s narrative (33.8-36). Their tag-team counsel that Phaon’s ‘hurts may soone through temperance be eased’ lacks the subtlety of the allegory, which has demonstrated with precision how easily the mind can work to inflame passion instead of disarming it.

This self-conscious emphasis on a ‘middle space’ of representation and interpretation belongs to a broader redefinition of ‘place’ in Book II as textual rather than geographic.10 The sense of the poem as a textual place cuts against its prominent concern with the geographies of empire, and it cuts against the grain of much criticism that, since Greenblatt’s landmark chapter in Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), has seen the Legend of Temperance, and Spenser’s poetry generally, as deeply invested in Irish and New World colonial ventures.11 The poem regularly invites such attention—from its opening glance at Peru, the Amazon, and ‘fruitfullest Virginia’ (pr.2.6-9) to Mammon’s cave with its images of an enslaved workforce mining and smelting precious ore, or to Maleger’s army, whose resemblance to the Irish ‘rebels’ described in the Vewe is anchored by a specific mention of ‘the fennes of Allan’ (ix.16.2). Eumnestes’ chamber too reminds us that England’s claim to imperial status rested on ‘old authentic histories and chronicles’, and that the appropriation of Irish estates similarly depended on the centrality of archival documents to establishing ownership under English law.12 Guyon’s voyage to the island of Acrasia seemingly owes as much to the literature of discovery as it does to Tasso or the Oddyssey: Read notes that ‘there are times when perils of the kind described in the Decades [of Peter Martyr] offer more immediate and vivid models [for the account of Guyon’s voyage] than could be found in Spenser’s traditional sources’ (2000: 96). The Bower itself, the goal of that voyage, embodies risks and temptations found in contemporary accounts of colonists in Ireland and voyagers to the Americas: the European colonist is threatened with the loss of both virility and identity, ‘going native’ as he abandons sexual and cultural integrity for the seductions of lascivious Gaelic or American native women.13 These observations may remind us further that Spenser did use his administrative positions in Ireland to acquire property, and that he used his poetry to assert the status of landed gentleman that he acquired along with his leases (Montrose 1996).

These worldly senses of ‘place’—imperial, geographic, proprietary—are at odds not only with its textual sense but also with the scriptural injunction against laying up treasures on earth (Matt 6:19-20). Spenser’s poem takes this contradiction into itself much as it does the contradiction between classical Temperance and Pauline theology. In the proem, for example, newly discovered territories in the Americas are set against the possibility of lunar exploration, both invoked in the course of a half-playful, half-serious appeal to faith as ‘the evidence of things which are not seene’ (Heb 11:1). The narrator is responding to imagined critics who have the temerity to suggest that Faery land may not exist, and the whole passage is a tease. Faery land is not without geographical coordinates, but it has more than one set: Murrin 1974 traces its literary history as a region located in India or America, while Erickson 1996 locates the precise boundaries to which it corresponds in England, implied in the narrator’s assurance that Elizabeth may behold ‘thine owne realmes in lond of Faery’ (pr.4.8). Yet the proem insists that it will take more than surveyors and cartographers to map this territory, punning on ‘no body’ and ‘better sence’ (1.9, 2.1), on the ‘red’ in ‘discovered’ and ‘measured’ (2.2, 4, 7), and even, for the first of many times in Book II, on the word ‘place’:

Of faery lond yet if he more inquire

By certein signes here sett in sondrie place

He may it fynd; ne let him then admire

But yield his sence to bee to blunt and bace

That n’ote without an hound fine footing trace.

(4.1-5)

The ‘certein signes’ of line two involve a double allusion. The scriptural echo of John 4:48, ‘Except ye se signes and wonders, ye wil not beleve’, extends the resonance of the allusion to Hebrews in st. 3; at the same time, Spenser’s phrase also translates vestigia certa in the passage from De Rerum Natura that he is echoing:

multaque praeterea tibi possum commemorando

argumenta fidem dictis conradere nostris.

verum animo satis haie vestigial parva sagaci

sunt, per quae possis cognoscere cetera tute.

namque canes ut mtivagae peersaepe ferai

naribus inveniunt intectas fronde quietes,

cum semel institerunt vestigial certa viai,

sic alid ex alio per te tute ipse videre

talibus in rebus poteris caecasque latebras

insinuare omnis et verum protrahere inde.

(1.400-409)

Many another proof besides I can mention to scrape together credit for my doctrines. But for a keen-scented mind, these little tracks are enough to enable you to recognize the others for yourself. For as hounds very often find by their scent the leaf-hidden quarry, when once they have hit upon certain traces of its path, so will you be able for yourself to see one thing after another in such matters as these, and to penetrate all unseen hiding-places, and draw forth the truth from them.

This allusive yoking of incongruous pretexts is characteristic of Spenser’s method. By the time we have tracked his ‘certein signes’ back to Lucretius and the Bible, we have seen as much of Faery land as we ever will. The reference to the ‘blunt and bace’ sense that cannot follow such ‘fine footing’ picks up the earlier references to ‘better sence’ and ‘witless man’ (2.1, 3.4); it plays the ‘common sense’ that ‘geveth judgement, of all the five outwarde senses’ (Wilson 1553: 112) against the ‘inward sense’, the intellect and spirit. In this way the passage anticipates the Pauline subtext of the Mordtant and Amavia episode, with its war between ‘the inner man’ and the law of his members (Rom 7:22-23). ‘Carnal wisdom’ and ‘inner man’ are tropes for ways of reading.

Book II evokes real-world geography to insist on its own difference from such ‘places’. The reference in canto ix to ‘the fennes of Allan’ is a good example. McCabe 2002 comments that the castle’s ‘association with the “fennes of Allan” identifies it as an outpost of civility of the sort with which Spenser was personally familiar’ (128); he goes on to note the role such outposts play in Spenser’s military proposals for controlling the Irish landscape. Yet no sooner has the description located the castle in that landscape than we are told the porch was made ‘Of hewen stone . . . / more of valew, and more smooth and fine, / Than Jett or Marble far from Ireland brought’ (24.1-3): suddenly Ireland removes into the distance as a ‘far’ point of origin for exotic imports. In the meantime the attacking forces, likened to Irish ‘rebels’, turn out to be ‘idle shades; / For though they bodies seem, yet substaunce from them fades’ (15.8-9). They are no more Irish kerns than they are monsters with the heads of owls, dogs, and gryphons (xi.8), for as the Pauline allegory insinuates, their external being is pure illusion, their location nowhere in the world but in our own ‘flesh’.

Spenser’s evasion of real-world geography appears as well in Guyon’s voyage to the island. In Gerusalemme Liberata, Carlo and Ubaldo travel through clearly identified Mediterranean and Atlantic topographies; their voyage includes a triumphant prophecy of the Christianization of the heathen New World, complete with an apostrophe to Christopher Columbus. Guyon and the Palmer, by contrast, encounter literary rather than geospatial landmarks, in keeping with the proem’s treatment of colonial exploration as a trope for reading.

The issues surrounding place and geography in Book II extend to the full range of Spenser’s poetry—nowhere more prominently than in the Mutabilitie cantos, where the venue for the climactic trial turns out to be Spenser’s estate in Kilcolman. But the turn away from geography toward a purely textual space called ‘Faery land’ is no less persistent. The topos of the keen-scented hound tracking textual ‘feet’, quoted above from the proem to Book II, is a commonplace applied in the Renaissance to the seeker of rare manuscripts or to the humanist editor filling in manuscript lacunae (Passannante 2011: 90). In its self-consciously bookish way, this passage looks forward to the beginning of the end of The Faerie Queene:

The waies, through which my weary steps I guyde,

In this delightful land of Faery,

Are so exceeding spacious and wyde,

And sprinckled with such sweet variety,

Of all that pleasant is to eare or eye,

That I nigh ravisht with rare thoughts delight,

My tedious travel doe forget thereby;

And when I gin to feele decay of might,

It strength to me supplies, and chears my dulled spright.

(VI.pr.1)

At least one reader knows how to trace the ‘fine footing’ of this text. What looks like sensuous ‘variety’ yields to the delight of ‘rare thoughts’—and with characteristic subtlety, Spenser varies his usual practice of adjusting orthography to secure the ‘eye’ rhyme (4-5). This literary domain is just as real and vital to the poet as New Abbey or Kilcolman because it cheers and strengthens his ‘spright’, not his body, and this difference from landed estates is precisely what makes it precious. Its delights are ‘rare’ because they are rarified, not appealing through the senses to the body and its members, but replenishing the exhausted ‘inner man’.

The ‘places’ Guyon visits in the second half of his legend include Mammon’s underground cave, the anthropomorphic castle of Alma, and the Bower of Bliss. Each of these episodes in its way marks the limited value of Guyon’s Temperance, while the intervening battle scenes make the same point in a different way, figuring the need for divine grace. When Guyon descends without the Palmer into the Cave of Mammon, his relative success in fending off temptation has been seen as an imitation of Christ’s sojourn in the wilderness. The contexture of scriptural allusion certainly keeps that analogy in view, but the differences are as important as the similarities. Guyon enters in canto vii feeding on ‘his owne vertues, and praise-worthie deedes’ (2.4-5) and ends by collapsing from lack of nourishment; if he has recapitulated the Temptation in the Wilderness, he shows no awareness of having done so, and his collapse suggests that unaided human nature cannot survive such a test. His self-sufficiency, in other words, is an illusion. Canto viii finds him suspended between life and death: having exhausted the resources of classical virtue, he has now as it were entered into the spectacle he beheld but did not recognize in Mortdant and Amavia, the condition Paul laments as ‘the body of this death’. The battle that follows, in which Arthur defeats Cymochles and Pyrhochles, has been aptly characterized as a psychomachia, but Guyon, attended by prevenient grace in the figure of an angel and then in the person of Arthur, remains as pure as the spring of canto ii in his unblemished ignorance of it all. His unawareness figures yet again the rift between spirit and flesh, his recumbent and unconscious form ‘the ymage of mortalitie’ (i.57.2) as witnessed by the spirit militant.

With Arthur and Guyon in canto ix we enter the human body, portrayed as a castle under siege. Within the safety of its walls, we are treated to an affirmative vision of the animate body as a highly organized community. Spenser’s allegory here is at its most sophisticated: entering by the mouth, the protagonists are figuratively swallowed, descending to the stomach and then remounting to the chambers of the heart and brain as they follow the path of ‘concocted’ and digested food. The castle they have entered corresponds to Guyon’s formerly prostrate form after its rescue by Arthur: rectified and functioning, the body now must re-engage its environment. It does so partly in a defensive mode, extending Arthur’s battle against internal passions by waging war against the environmental stimuli that arouse them, and partly by resuming the allegory of nourishment that led to Guyon’s collapse.

The nourishment provided by the castle will include physical digestion, sociability, and education. In canto ix, the defensive allegory (developed most fully in Maleger’s assault on the castle, canto xi) registers principally in the assertion that Alma (the embodied soul) ‘had not yet felt Cupides wanton rage’ (18.2), and in the pointed exclusion of the genitals from our tour of the body. Concupiscence as ‘wanton rage’ incorporates both the ‘forward’ and the ‘froward’ passions represented in Book II by Medina’s sisters and their suitors, or by Cymochles and Pyrhocles; in Spenser’s analysis, the distinction between irascible and concupiscible continually breaks down as lust and anger turn out to be the vicissitudes of a single underlying disease. In this sense, Alma and her well-ordered castle represent the body prior to the experience of sin under the Law, vulnerable but not yet wounded, even as they also share the defensive posture of the erected body after its war with the passions.

The allegory of nutrition in canto ix is sublime, for as the knights are ‘digested’ upward through the body, the allegorical mode itself undergoes a parallel refinement, rising from mechanical schemes of plumbing and kitchen equipment to the social comedy of the parlor, and again from the heart’s comedy to the typological symbolism of the turret. In the parlor, literally at the heart of the sequence, Spenser recasts the ur-scenario of Book II—the failure of self-knowledge—as comedy, each of the knights confounded in the effort to socialize with his anima. In the turret of the brain, this mise en abyme of representation is projected outward into the macrocosm, as the knightly homunculi seek to recognize themselves not in the sublimated passions of the heart but in the chronicle histories of their respective empires. If ‘sober government’ of the body is the rubric of Temperance (ix.1.4), then Temperance is equally a name for sober government of the body politic. The symbolism in the chronicles is still corporeal, and the underlying motif is still misrecognition. Arthur fails to discover himself as the heir to Uther Pendragon—unlike the Redcrosse knight at the corresponding moment in Book I, when Contemplation reveals to him his name and origin (x.65-66)—and this failure is reflected in the repeated inability of the British monarchy to realize the paradigm of temperate rule embodied in the ‘Antiquitee of Faery lond’.14

In canto xi, Guyon sets forth from the castle to seek the Bower of Bliss while Arthur, remaining behind, engages the armies of Maleger. The battle that follows gathers up motifs from a number of preceding episodes, including the deaths of Mortdant and Amavia, Guyon’s combat with Furor, Arthur’s defeat of Pyrochles and Cymochles, and the tour of Alma’s castle. Luther and Tyndale, quoted earlier, provide a succinct gloss on the paradoxes of this battle, for both emphasize that in the encounter between flesh and spirit, the protagonist ‘fights with himself’. The techniques of allegory stage this as an encounter with an adversary—a Furor, a Maleger—but Spenser’s text cues us repeatedly that to defeat an allegorical foe the protagonist must first decode the allegory, in effect undoing the work of personification—re-placing what has been displaced by recognizing that it belongs to the self.

Early in canto xi, the description of Maleger’s battle-plan offers such a cue:

Them in twelve troupes their Captein did dispart,

And round about in fittest steades did place,

Where each might best offend his proper part,

And his contrary object most deface,

As every one seem’d meetest in that cace.

(6.1-5)

We have been told that the attacking forces are ‘huge and infinite’, but now the poem enumerates the troops, disposing them into an order that both mimics and parodies the organization of the body so that ‘each might best offend his proper part’. The episode draws upon an allegorical tradition that reaches back through medieval texts such as The Castle of Perseverance, Piers Plowman, and the Ancrene Riwle to Philo Judaeus in antiquity—fables in which deadly sins besiege the soul by way of the senses. Spenser invites us to be unusually self-conscious about this tradition and its conventions; he asks us at once to read them as fable and to interpret them as textual strategies.15

Here again we recognize a version of the motif that underlies so much of Book II, that of mirroring and misrecognition. Guyon fails to locate himself in the ‘ymage of mortalitie’; he overthrows himself wrestling with Furor because he mistakes the nature of the struggle. He and Arthur both are bemused by encounters with their animas in the castle: direct self-awareness dismantles self-possession so thoroughly that they must turn aside, pretending not to notice what they know. As the climactic battle of Book II gets underway, these moments come back to remind us that the fable of a well-ordered castle besieged by monstrous armies involves similar kinds of misrecognition. However weirdly alien Maleger and his monstrous armies seem, they are an image of the flesh, and like the husband and wife of Romans 2-4, must be ‘considered within ourselves’ (1576 Geneva gloss). To combat them is to resume the wrestling-match between flesh and spirit described in scriptural passages like Ephesians 6:12, quoted earlier. The enemy attacking the body-castle from without is already within the gates—indeed, within the walls and foundations, ‘not built of bricke, ne yet of stone and lime, / But of thing like to that Ægyptian slime’ (ix.21.4-5). For this reason, the enemy has no real body of his own: ‘For though they bodies seem, yet substaunce from them fades’ (ix.15.9). Their body is our flesh, ‘this body of death’.

Arthur therefore defeats Maleger not by force of arms but by solving a string of riddles:

Flesh without blood, a person without spright,

Wounds without hurt, a body without might,

That could doe harme, yet could not harmed bee,

That could not die, yet seemd a mortall wight,

That was most strong in most infirmitee;

(40.4-8)

The solution to these riddles is the Pauline ‘bodie of this death’. Maleger’s strength is nothing but Arthur’s weakness, his body an illusion; he is the flesh with which the spirit must wrestle, and so in wrestling Maleger, Arthur ‘fights with himself’ (in Luther’s phrase). His fall in this battle (st. 29) therefore recalls Guyon’s self-overthrow in grappling with Furor (iv.8.9), even as his victory-by-interpretation recalls the Palmer’s warning to Guyon, ‘He is not, ah, he is not such a foe, / As steele can wound, or strength can overthroe’ (iv.10.4-5). Guyon and the Palmer apply this lesson in a limited and superficial way to the story Phaon tells later in the same canto, but Arthur, returning now to the ‘middle space’ in which Phaon’s illusions are generated (iv.32.4), undoes those illusions through an act of understanding.

Arthur’s insight does not quite break the surface of Spenser’s fiction. It is mediated by the myth of Antaeus, commonly interpreted in Medieval and Renaissance texts as Hercules’ victory over the lusts of the flesh: Arthur decodes Maleger by remembering ‘how th’Earth his mother was’ (45.2). The allusion asks us to complete Arthur’s interpretation by remembering that the castle of Alma, because it is composed of flesh, ‘Soone . . . must turne to earth’ (ix.21.9); it asks us to see this return to earth mirrored in the rebounding-aloft of Maleger’s dead body when Arthur casts it to the ground (42.5-8). They are contrasting images of the same event.

The scenes of Arthur’s combat with Pyrhochles, Cymochles, and Maleger are complicated because the Prince is at one and the same time a vehicle of divine grace (in the allegory) and a human character in need of grace (in the narrative). He is an allegory of grace when he replaces the guardian angel in canto viii: the battle with Pyrhochles and Cymochles is a psychomachia because it shows how grace steps in to aid the inner man when temperance alone cannot defeat the rebellious ‘membres’ (Rom 7:22-23). He is character in need of grace when the narrator laments his fall in the battle with Maleger: ‘had not grace thee blest, thou shouldest not survive’ (xi.30.9). The interpretive insight that decodes Maleger is a spark that leaps the gap between narrative and allegory, a flash in which Arthur almost decodes his double role as victim and adversary, identified at once with Maleger and with the castle under siege. Insofar as this recognition remains incomplete, veiled by the allusion to Antaeus and calling on us to carry the work of interpretation through to its conclusion, we are asked to identify with Arthur, to find ourselves through him mirrored in the narrative. To do so is to rectify Guyon’s initial failure to locate himself in the ‘ymage of mortalitie’.

This strategy of recreating the protagonist’s struggle within the reading experience has long been recognized as a key feature of Spenser’s style. Nowhere is it more vividly displayed than in the final canto of Book II. Just as Arthur’s victory over Pyrhochles and Cymochles enables Guyon to rise up and resume his struggle with the flesh, Arthur’s victory over Maleger settles a foundation on which the house of Temperance can arise:

Now ginnes this goodly frame of Temperaunce

Fayrely to rise, and her adorned hed

To pricke of highest prayse forth to advaunce,

Formerly grounded, and fast setteled

On firme foundation of true bountyhed;

And this brave knight, that for this vertue fightes,

Now comes to point of that same perilous sted,

Where Pleasure dwelles in sensuall delights,

Mongst thousand dangers, and ten thousand Magick mights.

(xii.1)

The triumphant opening lines of the final canto offer a visionary image of ascent, in which the castle and the allegory of Temperance rise up in a single ‘goodly frame’ during the moment of reading. But like Guyon in canto viii, they arise not to transcend the flesh but to reenter the fray, for as Luther reminds us, ‘the whole man fights with himself until he becomes wholly spiritual’. Short of death, all resurrections are provisional.

And so the visionary opening lines salute the ascent of the ‘goodly frame’ in language and imagery remarkable for their sexual suggestiveness. Resurrection is shadowed by erection, anticipating Guyon’s response to ‘sights, that corage cold could reare’ (68.9): the head advances to the prick, and as it does so the knight ‘comes to point of that same perilous sted, / Where Pleasure dwelles’, a literary precursor to Whitman’s ‘treacherous tip of me’. These incipient fantasies are very much beside the point the narrator wants to make, and that is precisely the point. They are very much present, too, but they are present as conspicuous distractions, not just irrelevant to the narrator’s meaning but inimical to it, tempting the concupiscent reader into misconstructions that will serve as the ‘firme foundation’ from which explicit erotic fantasies arise. As such, these double entendres are the textual equivalents of what Aquinas calls fomes peccati, the incipient motions of sin arising from the flesh. They recreate concupiscence as a temptation to be resisted—or not—in the moment of reading.

Spenser embodies this strategy in Phaedria when she reappears a few stanzas later. The voyagers pass by an island so sweet ‘That it would tempt a man to touchen there’ (14.6), and as if summoned by the sexual innuendo, ‘a daintie damsell’ appears, ‘bidding them nigher draw . . . / For she had cause to busie them withal; / And therewith lowdly laught’ (14.8-15.4). Calling and then laughing loudly at her own remark, Phaedria behaves as if she too has launched an innuendo, as indeed she has: ‘cause’ plays both etymologically and homophonically with case, cosa, and chose, echoing the wife of Bath’s ‘belle chose’. Through double entendre calling attention to itself as such, an explicit erotic fantasy has developed out of the phrase ‘tempt a man to touchen there’.

To enter into such a fantasy is, allegorically, to pass into the Bower of Bliss. The gate that leads into the Bower, ‘wrought of substaunce light’ (43.8), is designed not to keep intruders out but to draw them in. It is carved with images of Jason and Medea, but as much as the represented story, the medium itself is the message:

Ye might have seene the frothy billowes fry

Under the ship, as thorough them she went,

That seemd the waves were into yvory,

Or yvory into the waves were sent;

And otherwhere the snowy substaunce sprent

With vermell, like the boyes blood therein shed,

A piteous spectacle did represent,

And otherwhiles with gold besprinkeled;

Yt seemd th’enchaunted flame, which did Creusa wed.

(st. 45)

Conti observes that to some writers, ‘Medea represented Art, the sister of Circe or Nature; for Art tries its best to imitate Nature, and the closer it gets, the better art it’s supposed to be’ (489). Spenser takes the association a step further, describing an artistic representation of Medea that is so mimetically potent, it blurs the distinction between nature and art, or between represented content and the medium of representation. In a characteristic twist of Spenserian wit, the Medea story ends up standing for ‘nature’ in this analogy.

As a work of art, the Bower’s gate enacts (rather than depicts) a metamorphosis, one in which the medium and the scene represented seem to fade into each other by turns. As Leonard Barkan has observed, Renaissance poetry’s reception and transformation of Ovid consisted in just such a displacement of metamorphosis from event into technique: ‘what most essentially characterizes the Renaissance is a metamorphic aesthetics’ in which ‘the true connective tissue . . . is the poetic technique itself’ (1986: 242). Here the result of this displacement is not only an ekphrasis—a verbal description of a work of visual art—it is a description that enacts the rhetorical trope of hypallage, the figure of exchange. Exchanging the image for the thing becomes a way of passing through the gate, as if one were entering into the depicted scene (‘Ye might have seene the frothy billowes fry’). To do so is to become the most deluded of voyagers, mistaking the nature and reality of the landscape one beholds.

Illusions of this kind are the stock in trade of the Bower’s ‘Genius’, ‘That secretly doth us procure to fall, / Through guilefull semblants, which he makes us see’ (48.5-6). Throughout the description of the Garden, Spenser’s verse performs the work of this evil genius, bringing the vegetation to life with orgiastic fantasies: ‘bowes and braunches . . . did broad dilate / Their clasping armes, in wanton wreathings intricate’ (53.8-9); grapes hang in bunches from ‘an embracing vine . . . As freely offering to be gathered’ (54.2-6); artificial ivy ‘Low his lascivious armes adown did creepe’, dipping its flowers into the water so that they ‘seemd for wantones to weep’ (61.6, 9) in a mocking image of post-coital tristesse. In this sense the gateway into the garden is the garden’s description.

Erotic fantasy shares with rage this propensity for projecting itself outward, onto others or the environment. Maleger’s arrows arrive from outside their targets, but as yet another image of the fomes peccati or kindlings of sin, they arise from within the flesh they seem to penetrate. Acrasia’s concupiscent vegetation appears as invitation rather than assault, but like the castle’s return to earth and Maleger’s return from the earth, these seeming opposites figure the same thing, and the underlying mechanism in either instance is that of projection: what appears to arise from outside the subject inheres in his own flesh. In attacking the Bower, then, Guyon again misreads his relation to the scene before him, acting as if concupiscence were lodged in the bowers, groves, gardens, arbors, cabinets, banquet houses, and buildings he destroys. In this way the culminating ‘tempest of his wrathfulnesse’ (83.4) repeats on a much larger scale the error with which he begins his quest, repressing lust, converting it to anger, and turning that anger against external adversaries. Only now, instead of attacking Redcrosse he trashes the landscaping, furniture, and décor of the Bower, ‘And of the fayrest late, now made the fowlest place’ (83.9).

Yet if Guyon repudiates the Bower, Spenser claims it. With Verdant and Acrasia caught up in a fowler’s net, the poet returns to his touchstone myth, the seduction of Mars by Venus. Alluding both to Homer, who treated the love of Mars and Venus as a coarse anecdote, and to Lucretius, who treated it as a sacred mystery, Spenser finds that the inmost recess of the Bower mirrors his invocation to the Muses: ‘Come both, and with you bring triumphant Mart, / In loves and gentle jollities arrraid, / After his murderous spoyles and bloodie rage allayd’ (I.pr.3.7-9). The Faerie Queene regularly returns to versions of this image, beginning with the scene Archimago fabricates to deceive Redcrosse in Book I (ii.3-5). Like Redcrosse, Guyon reverses the sequence described in the invocation, for loves and gentle jollities provoke rather than allay these knights’ fury. But as Book II has taught us carefully and repeatedly, building to this moment, the Bower ‘is not, ah, [it] is not such a foe’.

Critics from Lewis (1936) to Greenblatt agree in taking the description of the Bower—‘A place pickt out by choyce of best alyve / That natures worke by art can imitate’ (42.3-4)—to mean that it is ‘an actual place which has been chosen, as it were, by a committee of experts, as most suited to their purposes’ (Durling 1954; rpt. Hamilton 1972: 121). But those who use art to imitate nature include poets as well as magicians, and the word ‘place’, as we have seen, undergoes redefinition in Book II, which reminds us that a place is also a commonplace (loci communes), a topos—as Berger 2003 puts it, ‘a Tasso place, for example, or a Chaucer place, or a Homer place’ (85).

The Bower of Bliss is a Spenser place. If we think only of material space we will indeed find ‘The art, which all that wrought’ appearing, as the narrator teasingly informs us, ‘in no place’ (58.9, emphasis added). But if we attend to its literariness we will find that art everywhere, for as Alpers remarks, it is ‘in some sense [Spenser’s] own’ (1990: 107). Indeed we may say that Spenser anticipates Alpers on this point. At a playful moment in the Amoretti (1595) he will invoke his beloved’s bosom as ‘the bowre of blisse, the paradice of pleasure’ into which his thoughts (like Guyon in st. 63-69) have been ‘too rashly led astray’ (76.3, 6). The Bower of Bliss is where you find it. But already in 1590, the same stanza that describes ‘a place pickt out by choyce of best alyve’ goes on to say that its pleasures are ‘poured forth with plentifull dispence’ (42.8). This pun identifies Spenser as the artist of the Bower, inflecting the ancestral name De Spencier as a nominalized verb of sexual release: what Shakespeare would call ‘th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ is here the dispense of pleasure in erotic fantasy. It is an authorial signature hidden in plain sight, and even a playful boast: we know who the poet means by the phrase ‘the best alyve, / That nature’s work by art can imitate’. We are reading him.