1immodest: From L modus measure, by way of immodestus
excessive, immoderate. See 37.4 for the only other use in the poem.
1.1
St. 1 Paraphrasing Nic Eth 2.3, to the effect that pleasure is harder to resist
than anger. Aristotle adds that both art and virtue address themselves to what is
difficult, since the greater the difficulty, the greater the success. The analogy
between art and virtue is especially resonant for FQ.
1.1Continence: The ability to ‘contain’ appetites and impulses.
In Aristotle, ευκραςια eukrasia. Cf. akrasia in i.51.2-4n.
1.7abstaine: Transitive use is unusual, according to OED
‘probably a literary imitation of the trans. use of L abstinere’. It means either
that ‘feeble nature’ can hold her enemies at bay or that she can keep herself away from
them. The 1596 reading, ‘restraine’, is more conventional and less equivocal.
2.1
St. 2-19 Some narrative details in this episode derive from OI; see Var
2.240-41; Kostic, Spenser’s Sources 272-80 and 368.
2.7Gondelay: A light skiff with cabin amidships, rising to a
point on each end.
2.8arbours: Vines or shrubs trained on a lattice or other
framework.
3.4Pope Ione: Legendary medieval figure reported to have held the
papacy in the 9th century while disguised as a man. Cf. Boccaccio, De
mulieribus claris CI, De Iohanna anglica papa (‘Joan, an Englishwoman and
Pope’). The phrase as merry as Pope Joan was proverbial (Smith 1970, no. 529);
Foxe, quoting the proverb, associates its mirth with ‘the pleasures of Venus, Bacchus,
and Ceres’ (Actes 1583, 159). Pope Joan was invoked often by anti-Catholic
polemicists in the 16th century, but in 1587 the French antiquary de Raemond
debunked the legend using methods of humanist textual scholarship, and by 1596 Spenser
has replaced this proverb with the phrase ‘that nigh her breth was gone’.
3.7–3.9
3.7-9 Cf. Aristotle’s disapproval of vacuous laughter at NicEth 4.8.
5.1
St. 5 Echoing Homer on the ships of the Phaecians, which ‘have no pilots, nor
steering-oars . . but of themselves understand the thoughts and minds of men’ (ου γαρ
Φαιηκεσσι κυβερνητηρες εασιν, / ουδετι πηδαλι’ εστι, τα τ᾽ αλλαι νηες εχουσιν: / αλλ᾽
αυται ισασι νοηματα και φρενας ανδρων; on gar phaiēkessi kybernētēres easin, / oudeti
pēdali’ esti, ta t’ allai nēes echousin: / all’ autai isasi noēmata kai phrenas
andrōn, Od 8.557-9). Similar boats appear in OF 30.11 and
GL 14.57-65.
5.2liquid: As a modifier for air or sky, a distinctively
Spenserian usage, following poetic use of L liquidus by Virgil, Horace, and other
Roman authors.
5.7apply: From nautical senses of L applicare ‘to bring (a
ship to a destination), to land’ (OED).
6.1wanton: Implying a promiscuity not limited to sex.
6.3purpose:‘That which is propounded; a proposition, a
question, an argument; a riddle’ (OED). Phaedria’s purpose lacks, as it were,
purpose.
6.4merry tales: A phrase that appears in the titles of popular
jestbooks like Merie tales by Skelton, one of four volumes Spenser lent Gabriel
Harvey in 1578.
6.4faine: From L fingere to shape or pretend.
8.3souenaunce: From L subvenīre to come into the mind.
8.8–8.9
8.8-9 Cf. the role of Medina at ii.27-32.
9.3and what that vsage ment: cf. I.iii.32.8, ‘what the Lyon
ment’.
9.4cott: ‘A small roughly-made boat, used on the rivers and lakes
of Ireland; a “dug-out”’ (OED).
9.7Phædria: From Gk φαιδρος phaidros glittering,
cheerful; cf. arg.1. Familiar from Euripides, Seneca, Ovid, Virgil, and Renaissance
mythographers as the name of the ‘wanton stepdame’ (I.v.37.5) whose destructive passion
led to the death of the chaste Hippolytus.
10.2Idle lake: Cf. Gen 14:3, ‘the salte Sea’, for which the Geneva gloss reads: ‘Called also
dead Sea, or the lake Asphaltite nere unto Sodom and Gomorah’. Joseph Wybarn in 1609
seems to be making this connection when he refers to those who have ‘drowned themselves
in the dead sea of pleasure’; a marginal gloss beside the phrase refers readers to
‘The Legend of Phaedria in the 2. booke of the Faeyerie Queene’ (Sp
All, 120).
11.3waste and voyd: Cf. 11.9-12.1 for its fertility.
11.4floted: Cf. Conti Myth 9.6 on the island of Delos as
instabilis per illud tempus, sub vndis forte e delitescebat (‘unstable and at
that time as it happened hidden under the waves’; 273.33); also Aen 3.73-77, and
Met 6.189-91. Other classical references to floating islands are found in
Homer, Herodotus, Pindar, Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, Hyginus, and Lucian. Early
maps show floating ‘Isles of St. Brandan’ in various parts of the Atlantic, and European
navigators went in search of them. See Hereford Mappa Mundi, Richard of
Haldingham (1280); Paolo Toscanelli’s World Map (1476); Erdapfel globe, Martin
Behaim (1492); one helpful source is Peter De Roo’s History of America Before
ColumbusAccording to Documents and Approved Authors; J.B. Lippencott Company; 1900; the
first chapter of the second volume is completely dedicated to the legend and history of
the islands.
12.1–12.2
12.1-2 Cicero, in de Oratore, imagines Odysseus, when Calypso and Circe offer him
immortality, declaring his preference for ut Ithacam illiam in asperrimis saxulis,
tamquam nidulum (‘that Ithaca of his, lodged like a tiny nest upon the roughest
of small crags’; I.196); cf. Od 9.29-36. Transferred to a simulacrum of the Bower
of Bliss, the simile insinuates the locale’s seductive allure as a false image of the
home one longs for.
12.6–12.7
12.6-7 Initiates a series extending into st. 13 that inventories the bounty of the island
entirely through negation. Cf. Gen 2:5: ‘And every plant of the fielde, before it was in
the earth, and every herbe of the field, before it grewe’.
12.7arborett: The first recorded use in OED.
13.1
St. 13 Cited by Robert Alott in England’s Parnassus (1600) as an example of ‘the
choysest Flowers of our Modern Poets’ (475). The first six lines had been adopted by
Thomas Watson in 1593 for The Tears of Fancie (51).
13.4ditt: From ME ‘dite’ (something written) by association with
‘ditty’ (song).
14.6head disarmd: Literally unhelmeted, but the comical pun calls
attention to the idea that Cymochles’ mind is defenseless.
14.8fearing not be harmd: Ellipsis for ‘not t’ be harmd’, with the
contraction assimilated to the final ‘t’ in ‘not’.
15.1
St. 15-17 Phaedria’s song mingles allusions to classical, Biblical, and Italian
precedents, including the Lotus-eaters in Od 9, Gen 3:10, Matt 6:25-34, and the
Siren’s lullaby to Rinaldo in Tasso (GL 14.62-64).
15.1–15.3
15.1-3 ‘O man, who takes toilsome pains, behold how the flowers, etc., make themselves an
example to you’.
15.4–15.5
15.4-5 ‘While nature, not at all envious, throws them forth out of her fruitful lap’.
16.2
E.K. glosses flowre deluce as ‘Flowre delice, that which they use to misterme,
Flowre de luce, being in Latine called Flos delitiarum’ (SCApr 144). L deliciae delights, charms.
16.3to them . . . yield: I.e., ‘yield to their example’.
16.9
16.9 ‘She leaves all the worrying to Mother Nature’.
17.1–17.2
17.1-2 Echoing Ps 8:6-8, to which the Geneva gloss reads, ‘By the temporal gifts of mans
creation he is led to consider the benefites which he hathe by his regeneration through
Christ’.
17.7Who shall him rew, that: ‘Who is going to pity the man
that’.
18.2worldly: 1596 ‘worldly’, of which wordly is an archaic
form, as in Skelton’s phrase ‘wordly wondre’ (Vox Populi xi.38).
18.7slouthfull: Echoing its root-word ‘slow’.
18.7griesy: 1596 ‘griesly’. Related forms, both similar to the
modern ‘grisly’, horrible; in context (cf. slouthfull), 1590 also puns on
‘greasy’. Cf. agrise at 46.7.
19.5where him she byding fond: ‘Where she found him waiting’.
19.6tooke a boord: In colloquial use, ‘sexually accommodated’.
19.7–19.9
19.7-9 Cf. 4.8-9, ‘but Atin by no way / She would admit, albe the knight her much
did pray’. Phaedria’s gondola responds to her wishes, suggesting that her motions are
self-willed (see st. 10); hence Guyon’s ‘guide’ (20.1) must be excluded. Cf. xii.3.1,
where the Boatman rowing Guyon and the Palmer to Acrasia’s island bids the Palmer ‘stere
aright’.
20.3obaying to her mind: See st. 5n.
21.1guize: Cf. ‘style’ at 22.1.
23.2–23.5
23.2-5 Cf. what the narrator says about winds and tides at 20.8-9, and Phaedria’s own
comments on her navigation at 10.2-9.
24.6fields did laugh: Cf. Ps 65:13, where pastures and valleys
‘showte for joye, and sing’ because they are covered with sheep and corn; the Geneva
gloss adds, ‘That is, the dumme creatures shall not onely reioyce for a time for Gods
benefites, but shal continually sing’. For discussion of this echo and comparison of
eight different English translations of the Biblical passage, see Shaheen (1976: 52,
190-91). Cf. Petrarch’s phrase Ridono i prati (RS 310.5, ‘the meadows
laugh’), Lucretius’ invocation to Venus in De Rerum, tibi suavis daedala
tellus / summittit flores, tibi rident equora ponti (‘for you the wonder-working
earth puts forth sweet flowers, for you the wide stretches of ocean laugh’; 1.7-8), and
Arthur’s memory of the day he dreamed of Gloriana: ‘The fields, the floods, the heavens
with one consent / Did seeme to laugh on me, and favour mine intent’(I.ix.12.8-9).
25.4natiue musicke . . . skilful art:Yet another
intertwining of ‘natural’ beauty with (potentially malicious) artifice.
26.2
26.2 Hamilton 2001 suggests plausibly that Guyon’s ‘posture declares his control over the
fountain of affections’. John Bulwer in Chirologia (1644) catalogues the hand
upon the heart as gesture LII, Conscienter affirmo, glossing it as a token of
‘sincere asseveration’ (88-89).
27.5steme: OED cites this as the sole instance in which the
sense ‘to emit, send out in the form of vapor’ is used figuratively to mean ‘evaporate’.
Hamilton 2001 suggests ‘steep’ or ‘dissolve in steam,’ implying that ‘steme’ works with
‘quench’ in the next line to portray the ‘molten heart’, plunged into a cold bath of
sloth, expending its heat in steam.
28.7–28.9
28.7-9 Echoing Deut 28:26, ‘And thy carkeis shal be meat unto all foules of the ayre’,
one of the ‘threatenings’ levelled against those who defy the Mosaic law. The Geneva
gloss stresses that the disobedient will be ‘cursed bothe in thy life and in thy death’
because the burial here denied is a ‘testimonie of the resurrection’. Cf. also the
taunts between David and Goliath in 1 Sam 17:44 and 46.
29.2importune: Perhaps with ‘untimely’ or ‘inopportune’ as a
secondary sense.
29.4valew: ‘Value’ and ‘valor’ are etymologically so intertwined
in ME and early modern usage that the phrase inevitably suggests a moral as well as
martial equivalence between the combatants.
29.5haberieons dismayld: ‘Knocked the metal plates off their
sleeveless coats of mail’.
29.5dismayld: ‘Divested of armor’, with the punning sense
‘unmanned’.
29.9giambeux: Hamilton 2001 suggests that this spelling may derive
from Chaucer, CT Thopas 875.
32.1
St. 32-36 Cf. Medina’s intervention at ii.27-32.
32.3feld: The reflexive use of ‘felled’ is not recognized in
OED.
34.5scarmoges: The ‘cruell’ game may disarm her skirmishes or they
may disarm the game; this ambiguity of syntax, together with the hypallage between her
erotic ‘game’ and the knights’ combative ‘scarmoges’, anticipates the extended troping
of love as combat in the ensuing lines.
34.6–34.9
34.6-9 It is difficult to escape the implication that Phaedria is here proposing a sexual
encounter in which she will yield a ‘pleasaunt victory’ to both knights, leaving them
nothing to fight over. Since hypallage is Greek for ‘interchange, exchange’,
there may be a witty subtextual parallel between Phaedria’s rhetoric and her sexual
ethos.
35.6–35.9
35.7-9 Cf. the invocation to Cupid at I.pr.3.7-9.
36.2extremities: Cf. ii.38.4, ‘The strong extremities of their
outrage’.
36.3
36.3 Prov 15:1, ‘Soft answer putteth away wrath: but grievous wordes stirre up
angre’.
37.3he light did pas: ‘Light’ modifies either ‘he’ or ‘pass’, from
Phaedria’s point of view, but from Guyon’s it modifies ‘delight’, to which it is drawn
by the internal rhyme.
37.5solemne sad: Cf. the description of Redcrosse at I.i.2.8.
37.9amoue: The narrator uses a relatively uncommon sense (‘To
remove [a person or thing] from a position; to dismiss [a person] from an office’) to
characterize Phaedria’s displeasure at her failure to ‘amove’ Guyon in the more usual
sense of arousing him.
38.3The which: Referring to her ‘swift bote’.
38.9shard: I.e. the lake regarded as a ‘perlous’ break in the
continuity of ‘terra firma’.
39.9famous enimy: Presumably Pyrochles.
40.4passion fraile: an ellipsis for ‘passion that, strong in
itself, makes human nature frail’
40.7which him late did faile: OED labels this construction
‘the dative of the person’, citing as another example the King James rendering of 1
Kings 2:4, ‘There shall not faile thee . . . a man on the throne of Israel’. The
preposition to is understood.
40.9delayd: cooled, quenched; postponed
41.1
St. 41-42 At OI 3.1.20-21, Mandricardo dashes through fire and leaps into a
fountain to save himself.
42.6flasht: For the mingling of fire and water, see v.2.4-5n. The
syntax of lines 6-7 is latinate, with ‘the waves about’ serving as the object of both
‘flasht’ and ‘swept’: i.e. he flasht the waves about (with his raging arms) and his
armor swept the waves about (so that it was washed clean).
43.6Harrow . . . and well away: A cry of alarm; cf. Chaucer, ‘John
. . . gan to crie “Harrow!” and “Weylaway! / Oure hors is lorn(CT
Reeve 4071-73).
43.7dismall: Echoing L dies mali evil days; two days of
each month were so designated in the medieval calendar. 1590 gives this line as
‘What dismall day hath lent but this his cursed light’, a reading that is both
nonsensical and hypermetrical; 1596 revises to ‘What dismall day hath lent this cursed
light’. There is no evidence as to whether the change is compositorial or authorial; we
take it to be compositorial, and prefer to correct by removing ‘but this’. It is
possible that the untenable 1590 reading resulted from a two-stage misconstrual of
manuscript copy. If Spenser originally wrote ‘What dismall day hath lent vs [or ‘his’]
cursed light’, and then added ‘this’ and ‘his’ [or ‘vs’] side by side above the line as
possible replacements, the compositor could have misconstrued the unfinished revision as
an insertion (stage one misconstrual). At the same time, he misread ‘vs’ as ‘but’: the
heavily inked descender on a secretary hand ‘v’ makes it possible to read it as a ‘b’,
and Spenser’s own terminal ‘s’ resembles the rounded form of a terminal ‘t’.
43.8damnifyde: Cf. modern ‘indemnify’.
44.1
St. 44 In the details of immersion and of death as a means ‘to respyre’, there is a
generalized allusion to the language of Romans 6 on baptism. Cf. i.55.3, 55.9 and
notes.
44.2implacable: Accented on the first syllable.
45.4And dying dayly, dayly yet reuiue: a cruel parody of Paul’s
instructions about daily death (Rom 12:1, 1 Cor 15:31).
45.8his owne health remembring now no more: Parallels the lack of
‘sovenaunce’ at 8.3.
46.6–46.9
46.6-9 For the muddy waters of Cocytus (Cocyti stagna) in the classical
underworldseeVirgil (Aen 6.323-30). In Tasso, Armida’s castle is
surrounded by an asphalt lake (GL 10.61-62, acque . . . bituminose e calde / e
steril lago) in which nothing can sink. Cf. also the Stygian marsh in Dante,
Inf 7.108-130.
50.2bedight: ‘Dight’ has a specifically scriptive range of
meanings, ‘from L dictare to dictate, compose in language, appoint, prescribe,
order; in med L to write, compose a speech, letter, etc’ (OED).
50.3liuer: The liver was considered the seat of the passions.
50.9Phlegeton: In the classical underworld, a river of fire.
51.9algates: Hamilton suggests ‘otherwise’, a sense not recorded
in OED. Usually, ‘in any case’ or ‘by all means’.