Sir: Guyon is the only protagonist in the FQ thus entitled on the title page of his legend.

1.2 antique: Also ‘antic’, i.e. ludicrous or grotesque. Cf. Donne, Elegy 9, ‘The Autumnal’: ‘Name not these living death-heads unto me, / For these, not ancient, but antique be’ (43-4). This wordplay introduces an ambiguity that runs throughout the proem, which pretends to worry about whether Spenser’s fiction possesses the dignity and authority of antiquity or is merely a gothic extravagance.

1.2 history: In early modern usage, either factual (the modern sense) or a purely imaginary (a common synonym for ‘story’).

1.6 liuing aire: A good example of the freedom with which Spenser commonly transfers epithets, here from ‘none’ to ‘aire’, and of the distinctive quality this freedom lends to the verse: half-animating the air itself, such phrasing contributes to a pervasive fluidity in the boundary between allegorical agents and their physical environments.

1.9 antiquities: Cf. I.pr.2.3-4, imploring the muse to ‘Lay forth out of thine everlasting scryne / The antique rolles, which there lye hidden still’.

1.9 no body: Anticipating the contrast between faith in that which is unseen and knowledge that is available to the senses (the body), elaborated in st. 3 and 4.

2.1 better sence: As opposed to the senses through which a ‘body can know’ (see 4.4n).

2.2 red: A favorite word of Spenser’s both for its convenience in rhyming and for its lexical range. Here primarily a synonym for its rhyming partner ‘discovered’, it also suggests the activities of conjecture, interpretation, declaration, and, of course, construal of a text. Its range is suggested by the way Spenser punningly enfolds the verb into its rhyming partners ‘discover-red’ and ‘measur-red’.

2.6 Indian Perú: Early explorers had believed that Peru was India. By 1590 the difference was well understood. The passage thus suggests, through the rhyming play on ‘red’ and ‘discovered’ (with its accented last syllable), that Peru was initially both discover-read and misread.

2.8 Amazons huge riuer: Francisco de Orellana in 1541-42 was the first European to sail the Amazon.

2.9 fruitfullest Virginia: Named after Elizabeth in 1584. The epithet combines colonial motives, asserting the economic value of newly discovered lands, with a Protestant adaptation of the Virgin Mary’s paradoxical status as fecund virgin.

3.3–3.8 3.3-8  Spenser is here imitating Ariosto, OF 7.1 and Chaucer, LGW Prol. 12-15. Spenser fuses these more or less playful references with an echo of Heb 11:1: ‘Now faith is the grounde of things, which are hoped for, and the evidence of things which are not sene’; the rest of chapter 11, an extended definition of faith, is evoked more broadly in the proem. Hamilton 2001 also notes a reminiscence of Giordano Bruno’s astronomical speculations in the 1584 treatise De l'Infinito Universo e Mondi (‘On the Infinite Universe and Worlds’). This fusion of literary, religious, and scientific allusions creates an ambiguous, distinctively Spenserian tonal irony.

4.1–4.5 4.1-5  The keen-scented hound tracking textual "feet" is a Renaissance commonplace applied to the seeker of rare manuscripts or to the humanist editor filling in manuscript lacunae (Passannante 2011: 90), but Spenser in these lines appears to be tracking the source in Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 1.400-409. An emphasis on moving beyond the realm of perception is distinctive to both passages, and Spenser’s “certain signes” may echo vestigia certa from Lucretius.

4.1 yet: Culminating the series of four begun at 3.1 (‘Yet all these were’), this yet stretches the adversative sense of its predecessors into a temporal notion of prolonging, integral to the argument that the unseen may be what we haven’t seen yet.

4.2 certein signes: Cf. John 4:48: ‘Then said Jesus unto Him, Except ye se signes and wonders, ye wil not beleve’. Extends the resonance of the allusion to Hebrews in st. 3.

4.2 here sett: May refer to the positioning of words in a piece of writing or to the setting of type on the page.

4.2 sondrie place: Playing the geographical sense of ‘place’ against its use as the designation for a passage in a text, familiar from the glosses to the Geneva Bible. ‘Place’ in this sense is a vernacular equivalent for the more learned expression loci communes.

4.3 ne let him then admyre: The romance topos of the marvelous, canvassed extensively in Italian Renaissance criticism, passes into travel narratives and other New World discourses as a trope of discovery (Greenblatt 1992). Spenser’s proem has evoked the wonder of geographical discovery in a characteristically ambiguous register, half-serious and half-playful, that lends this phrase its edge of irony: the reader who would ‘wonder’ at newly discovered worlds (3.9) should not wonder at the inadequacy of his common sense to apprehend the marvels of Spenser’s text.

4.4 sence: Powers of interpretation (cf. 2.1, ‘with better sense’, and 3.4, ‘witless man’), but playing also on the five senses, or ‘wits’ and the ‘common sense’ that synthesizes them (thus Thomas Wilson 1553 says that ‘The common sense...is therefore so called, because it geveth judgement, of al the five outwarde senses’ [112]). These ‘outward’ or bodily senses were contrasted with the ‘inward sense’, i.e. faculties of mind or spirit. This ambiguity concentrates into a single word the playful pretense that Faeryland is a geographical location like Peru, able to be discovered by the outward senses, rather than a textual ‘place’ (4.2n) accessible only to the intellect.

4.5 n’ote: A pseudo-Chaucerian contraction for ‘ne mote’, might not. (See glossary entry.)

4.5 fine footing: Elusive tracks or artful metrics—an ambiguity parallel to those of ‘red’, ‘place’, and ‘sence’. The line may thus be paraphrased ‘That can’t track fancy (poetic) footwork without a bloodhound’. In 1596 Spenser will repeat the pun on ‘footing’, referring to Faeryland as ‘these strange waies, where never foote did use, / Ne none can find, but who was taught them by the Muse’ (VI.pr.2.7-9).

4.6 fayrest: Spenser more than once links ‘faery’ (4.1, 8) to ‘fayre’ (4.7) and ‘fayrest’ as if it expressed the comparative degree of a beauty whose superlative is embodied in the queen (cf. 1.pr.2.5). This ambiguity cuts against the wordplay elsewhere in the proem that tends to disembody Faeryland, and thus implies that it can be ‘red’ in both senses (intellectually as well as corporeally; see 4.4n) only in Elizabeth.

4.7 this fayre mirrhour: A favorite metaphor of Spenser’s, elaborated in all but one of the proems and in many other texts; for examples, see Am 7 and 45, HL 196, and HB 181, 224. Here its seeming simplicity is complicated by the association between ‘fayre’ and ‘Faery’, by the implication that Elizabeth is the mirror in which Faeryland may be ‘red’, and by the assertion in the immediately following lines that Faeryland reflects the past as well as the present.

4.7–4.9 4.7-9 According to early modern constitutional theory, the monarch possesses two ‘bodies’: the personal body of the mortal individual and the undying ‘body politic’, through which the monarch personifies the realm. These lines evoke the body personal in Elizabeth’s ‘face’ and the body politic in her ‘realmes’, concluding with her lineage, which traces the genealogy of each.

5.2 couert vele: Echoes biblical accounts of Moses veiling his face to temper the ‘glory’ or radiance that shone from it after he spoke with God (Exod 34:30). At 2 Cor 3:13 St. Paul reinterprets the passage allegorically, suggesting that what Moses hid was not the radiance but its fading. If there is also a glance at the legal term femme covert (the legal status, or rather non-status, of a married woman), it would carry strong irony, given the queen’s unmarried state. Both vele and shadowes echo standard Renaissance discussions of fiction in general and of allegory in particular.

5.2 shadowes light: Shadows that are trivial or facetious (continuing the pretense from st. 1 that fiction is somehow disreputable), in contrast to the rhyming use (at 5.5) as illumination. But the paradox of ‘shadowes light’ reintroduces the sense of illumination as a secondary reference, and it thus plays against the superficial sense of ‘light’ as trivial.

5.8 Guyon: The name may come from heroes of French romance, particularly the medieval metrical romance Guy of Warwick, where the name ‘Guy’ is regularly varied to ‘Guyon’ for rhyme; Guy’s two-part career, as questing knight and then as pilgrim, offers a template for the pairing of Guyon and the Palmer in Book II (King 2007). Guy was especially well known because the English earls of Warwick, Robert and Ambrose, claimed descent from him (Cooper 2007: 185). The name also echoes Gihon, one of the four rivers of Paradise, associated with Temperance (Fowler 1960), and may additionally, as Camden thought, recall Ital guido guide (1605:82). In the Golden Legend it is glossed as ‘wrestler’ (1955:112). See SpE s.v. ‘Guyon’.

5.9 rule: The term has a range of meanings here, among them the fundamental principle of temperance, the body of writings that make up its lore, the standard by which it is measured, and its reign or governance.

5.9 goodly doth appeare: Cf. ‘to some appeare’ (3.9). This verbal echo belongs to the pattern of contrasts running throughout the language of the proem, suggesting that Temperance will ‘appear’ to the inward rather than the outward senses. This suggestion is reinforced by the rhyming partner ‘heare’(5.8), since hearing Guyon’s adventures is an activity of the common sense whereas the rule of Temperance can appear only to the intellect (see 4.4n).