4 Gyaunt (1590): No editor has ever regarded this reading as anything but a compositor’s error; foul-case e for c and n for u in the preceding lines further evince a lapse of care in typesetting the Argument. Yet given the character of Argante’s tyrrany (described in st. 50), it is a curiously apt mistake: since gyn- derives from the Gk γυνή gynē (‘woman’), a female ‘gyaunt’ might logically be a ‘gynunt’.

1.1 Like as an Hynd: Cf. iv.49.4, ‘Like as a fearefull Dove’; the narrative resumes where it left off. Cf. Spenser’s transformation of both the motif and the simile of erotic pursuit in Am 67, ‘Lyke as a huntsman’.

1.2 a rauenous beast: Continuing the play with hysteron proteron in the narrative of Florimell’s flight (see v.10.1-2n), the text here introduces a figurative beast that anticipates the hyena-like creature to come (22.7-9). The description also echoes Horace Odes 1.23.9-10, where a pursuing lover seeks to convince Chloe atqui non ego te tigris ut aspera / Gaetulusve leo frangere persequor (‘my purpose is not to crush thee like a savage tiger or Gaetulian lion’). For echoes of Ariosto and Golding’s Ovid in the earlier description of Florimell’s flight, see notes to i.15-19.

1.3 1.3, 6 See iv.50.4-5 and note for the sense that Florimell’s emotions act upon her as if from without. This becomes more explicit at 2.5-6, ‘as if her former dred / Were hard behind, her ready to arrest’. As Phaon at II.iv.30-32 finds himself pursued by his own fury, Florimell is chased by her own fear.

1.6 1.3, 6 See iv.50.4-5 and note for the sense that Florimell’s emotions act upon her as if from without. This becomes more explicit at 2.5-6, ‘as if her former dred / Were hard behind, her ready to arrest’. As Phaon at II.iv.30-32 finds himself pursued by his own fury, Florimell is chased by her own fear.

2.4–2.8 2.4-6, 7-8 The enjambments in these lines, as at 1.4-5, lend urgency to Florimell’s flight. Cf. the use of enjambment at 3.6-7, together with the repetition of ‘force/perforce’, to evoke the collapse of the spent palfrey.

2.6–2.8 arrest . . . wrest: Like Arthur but for opposite reasons, Florimell passes a sleepless and exhausting night. The ‘rest’ she misses is teasingly evoked in the rhyming pair ‘arrest/wrest’.

2.7–2.9 2.7-9 Horses in Spenser regularly embody their riders’ passions; here Florimell’s loss of the reigns indicates that she is ‘carried away’ by her own fear.

2.8 wrest: The force of ‘wrest’ as an action of twisting suggests that the reins would be wrapped around a rider’s hand.

3.5 3.5 The line echoes a familiar proverb; cf. I.i.32.6-7, ‘what so strong, / But wanting rest will also want of might?’; SC Sept 240-41, ‘What ever thing lacketh chaungeable rest, / Mought needes decay, when it is at best’; Ovid, Her 4.89, Quod caret alterna requie, durabile non est (‘That which lacks its alternations of repose will not endure’); and Chaucer, CT Merchant 4.1862-63, ‘For every labour somtyme moot han reste, / Or elles longe may nat endure’.

3.6–3.7 3.6-7 See 2.4-6, 7-8n on the use of enjambment.

4.1 forst: Echoing ‘force . . . perforce’ from 3.7.

4.3 4.3 Another proverb. Cf. iii.53.3, ‘And our weake hands (need makes good schollers) teach’ [1596: ‘And our weak hands (whom need new strength shall teach)’], and Smith (1970, no. 571).

4.4 launce: OED suggests that Spenser may have coined this usage, for which no other examples are given, from L lanx the scales of a balance. It seems likely that Tasso mediated this derivation: see the play on ‘lance’ in GL 20.50.1-3, Così si comatteva, e ‘n dubbia lance / co’l timor le speranze eran sospese. / Pien tuto il campo è di spezzate lance (‘Thus fought they long, yet neither shrink nor yield, / In equal balance hung their hope and fear: / all full of broken lances lay the field’; trans. Harrington).

4.5 4.5 ‘Fortune makes the miseries of mortals her sport’; paraphrasing Ovid, Ex Ponto 4.3.49, Ludit in humanis divina potentia rebus (‘heavenly powers find sport in human affairs’). FQ Letter 118-20 lists among the ‘many other adventures . . . intermedled . . . as Accidents . . . the misery of Florimell’.

4.8–4.9 subiect to . . . ouercame: The valley lies below the hillside and is covered by the woods; the connotations of conquest and subjugation are not, at first, obviously motivated, although they echo the language of mastery in 2.7-8.

5.1 5.1 1609 emends to th’tops; meter requires that one or the other of the definite articles be contracted.

5.2 litle: The little valley (4.8), where Florimell spies a little smoke that turns out to come from a little cottage (6.2), introduces a motif of quaint miniaturism. The effect is reassuring: reversing the tendency of Florimell’s terror to magnify ‘every leafe, that shaketh with the least / Murmure of winde’ (1.4-5), it implies that she is recovering her composure.

6.4 In which a witch: A note of forced hilarity diminishes the sense of danger that might otherwise attend the discovery of witchcraft.

7.2 on the flore: Like her ‘wilfull want’ (6.5), the witch’s seat on ‘the dustie ground’ implies a perversely chosen self-abasement; the language of 4.8-9 begins in retrospect to gain pertinence.

7.3 gin: Aphetic form of ‘engine’: a stratagem or trick.

7.4–7.9 7.4-9 The witch is more frightened by Florimell’s supernatural beauty (and sudden appearance) than Florimell is by the wretched appearance and strange behavior of the witch; the note of forced hilarity at 6.4 seems in retrospect to set a comic tone for the encounter, in which terror passes from Florimell to the witch (cf.2.5, ‘her former dred’, with 7.9, ‘dread her sence did daze’).

7.4 stound: Fit of astonishment, here transferred to the ‘suddein’ appearance that causes it, and leaves the witch ‘astound’.

8.2 what deuill: Continuing the odd comedy of the scene, the witch’s question to Florimell gives literal weight to what would otherwise be casual profanity.

8.4 8.4 Given her history in Book III, Florimell may find it reassuring, not to say refreshing, to be ‘unwelcomed, unsought’. Cf. the turn in lines 6-7 of Am 67.

8.5–8.9 8.5-9 Florimell speaks here for the first time in the poem. Although ‘full of doubtfull thought’, she answers with a mildness that indicates composure, and her words, although they portray her as harmless and submissive, assert her control over the encounter with the witch. The phrase ‘be not wroth’ functions at once as entreaty and command.

8.6 Beldame: Cf. ii.43.1.

9.2 let fall: The phrasing hints at an intentionality behind Florimell’s tears, as if the ‘silly Virgin’ (8.7) knows how to use her prepossessing beauty (and manifest helplessness) to advantage. Her ‘christall eyne’, ‘orient perles’, ‘snowy cheeke’, and artfully soft sighs (9.1-5) prove stronger than the witch’s ‘wicked gin’ (7.3).

9.7 pitteously appall: Suggests the force of Florimell’s pathos, which induces the witch to respond in a way contrary to her nature. The rare use of ‘appall’ in the sense of ‘quell’, together with the reversal of sense in the phrasing (quell with pity = quell pitiably) plays into the scene’s emphasis on a reversal of mastery.

10.2 womanish compassion: This moment of feminine solidarity between incongruously matched women extends the comedy of the scene in which Florimell extracts tenderness from an unlikely source.

10.3 her suffused eyes: Echoing Virgil’s description of Venus as she complains to Jove about the sufferings of Aeneas, lacrimis oculos suffusa nitentis (‘her radiant eyes all dim with tears’; Aen 1.228).

10.5 nothing quaint: ‘Not at all dainty’.

10.9 of tempest gon: ‘Escaped from a storm’.

11.1

st. 11

On the ‘surmise of divinity’ topos in FQ, see II.iii.33n. Spenser is again associating Florimell with Venus (cf. 10.3n).

11.3 11.3 Cf i.15.6, ‘Her garments all were wrought of beaten gold’.

12.1–12.2 12.1-2 The epithet ‘wicked’ follows with striking incongruity upon the witch’s humble adoration of divine beauty; its repetition then sets up the comedy of a ‘wicked sonne’ who is ‘The comfort of her age’.

12.3 loord: Cf. SC July 33, ‘thous but a laesie loord’.

13.1 vndertime: ‘Undern-time’, an archaic expression used for various times of the day; in Malory, it refers to afternoon or evening.

13.4 adaw: Another archaism, used by Spenser to mean ‘daunt’ although in ME usage it meant ‘awaken’.

13.5–13.8 13.5-8 Three successive enjambments suggest the disorientation of the witch’s son; he too is overawed by the sheer splendor of their guest, as the affect of ‘terrour’ completes its circuit from Florimell (1.5) to the witch (7.6-9) and finally to him. The simile comparing him to one ‘which hath gaz’d / On the bright Sunne unwares’ may echo Socrates’ description of prisoners freed from the cave of shadows and drawn into the sunlight (Plato, Republic 7.515d-e).

14.2 mister wight: Kind of creature; he is asking his mother not who Florimell is, but what she is.

14.6–14.9 14.6-9 A ghost recently returned from Hades (‘Stygian’ refers to the river Styx) would presumably be disoriented, especially if, as Hamilton suggests, it bears a ‘larger reference’ to the Reformation dissolution of Purgatory.

15.1

st. 15-20

The passion of the witch’s son for Florimell in this episode is analogous (in a comic vein) to that of Timias for Belphoebe in canto v. These two episodes, flanking the purely naturalistic description of sexuality in the Garden of Adonis (see vi.41n), place erotic desire in a distinctly human and social context, emphasizing disparities of rank as if they were differences of kind like the species-forms in the Garden. They also bracket the paradisal freedom of utterance in the Garden (see vi.43.7-9n) with matched episodes in which a lover of inferior station is unable ‘to utter his desire’ (16.4). This challenge is one the poet himself confronts initially in the proem and recurrently throughout Book III: how to find a language adequate to the perils of speaking as a male about the sexual or psychological interior of a noble woman (see pr.5.6-9n). Britomart finds her own desire for Artegall unspeakable, both in her initial confession to Glauce and again when she enters Merlin’s cave; his prophecy in canto iii develops one response to the challenge, as it lends both voice and legitimacy to Britomart’s desire by installing it within a dynastic narrative.

15.2–15.3 embace / Her goodly port: ‘Let down her aristocratic bearing’.

15.5 familiare: Retains its link to the root ‘family’.

15.8–15.9 15.8-9 On the antithesis of love and lust, see iii.1 and v.1-2.

16.5 caytiue: ‘Caitiff’, wretched both in the sense of ‘base’ and that of ‘miserable’; the original sense, deriving from L captivum, suggests that the churl’s thought is imprisoned within him by his inability to ‘utter his desire’. This sense is expressed in his gift to Florimell of squirrels in chains (17.6-8).

16.6 16.6 The churl’s ‘soft sighes, and lovely semblaunces’ are incongruous because these are Florimell’s charms, ridiculous in him; because they belie the ‘outrageous fire’ he conceals within; and because they scarcely match the ‘brutish lust’ ascribed to him by the narrator (15.9).

16.7–16.9 16.7-9 The Churl’s ‘resemblaunces’, in which he hopes that Florimell will ‘aread’ his ‘affection entire’, extend the comic treatment this passage gives to the predicament of the poet-lover, desperate to be acknowledged but equally threatened by the risk of being misconstrued. The language here tempers the narrator’s avowed contempt for the Churl’s ‘affection bace’ (15.7) with a hint of sympathy for his ‘affection entire’.

16.7 entire: See glossary. OED notes that it is difficult to distinguish examples of the sense ‘complete, total’ from examples of the sense ‘genuine, sincere’; presumably the latter sense would apply to the Churl’s ‘affection’ only in his own view, not that of the narrator. OED adds that Spenser in particular develops an added sense that converts ‘intimate’ into ‘inward’ (see Am 85.9, ‘Deepe in the closet of my parts entyre’); this sense may be reinforced by the emphasis on the Churl as tongue-tied lover.

17.2 17.2 Cf. the overtly sexualized fruit of the Bower of Bliss, ‘Some deepe empurpled as the Hyacine’ (II.xii.54.7). The Churl’s ‘wildings’ (17.1) are slightly less explicit, but still recognizable ‘resemblaunces’ (16.8) of his passion. Neither OED nor EEBO records an instance of ‘empurpled’ prior to Spenser; the word recurs in canto xii, where drops of blood ‘empurpled’ Amoret’s breast (33.5), and in the description of Lust at IV.vii.6.5-6, where his ‘huge great nose’ is said to be ‘dreadfully empurpled all with bloud’.

17.3–17.6 17.3-6 Caroling birds and garlands in the poem have by now a history of association with courtship and erotic desire, beginning with the entry into the ‘wandring wood’ at I.i.8.1-4, the Redcrosse knight’s erotic dream of Una (i.i.48.9), and his dalliance with Duessa (I.vii.3.4-5 and 4.2-5). Here these darker connotations are muted by the surprise that love has instilled aesthetic impulses in the supposedly ‘beastly’ churl. The association in this episode of the Churl, the caroling birds, and the themes of bondage and constrained utterance may suggest a link to Lydgate’s fifteenth-century beast-fable, “The Churl and the Bird.”

17.6–17.9 17.6-9 The image of squirrels in bondage shows a surprisingly literary bent in the Churl, who seems to have read Petrarch’s Trionfi. Like the image of him as choirmaster to ‘young birds’, the ‘resemblaunce’ of Churl to squirrel participates in the episode’s motif of miniaturization: in contrast to the ‘ravenous beast’ of Florimell’s fearful imagination (1.2) and its pending embodiment in the Hyena-like beast (st. 22), the Churl’s beastliness is rendered small, cute, and harmless, as if Florimell has wandered briefly into a Disney animated feature. At the same time, these lines participate in the episode’s sustained send up of the poet-lover. The effect is at once complex and delicate, for the Churl remains an object of ridicule even as he accrues sympathy; meanwhile some of the ridicule bends back toward Ralegh and even Spenser himself, insofar as the Churl offers a ‘resemblaunce’ to their respective courtships of Elizabeth.

17.7 conquered: For the reversal that has taken Florimell from panic to control, see 5.2n, 7.4-9n.

18.9 18.9 See 2.7-9 for the Palfrey’s ‘late miswandred wayes’.

18.9 remeasure: Retrace, presumably now with a restored sense of riderly control related to the motifs of magnification and miniaturization.

19.3–19.6 19.3-6 Upon resuming her journey, Florimell reverts to the affective state that formerly motivated it, as if terror were her default mode.

20.3–20.5 20.3-5 The Churl’s reaction is more grossly physical than that of Timias at v.45-48 but is similarly self-punishing; in 1596 Timias, having offended Belphoebe through his attentions to Amoret, will come closer to the self-mutilating behavior described here (IV.vii.39-41).

20.7–20.9 20.7-9 The witch’s fears for her son strikingly resemble those that Arthur Gorges, writing to William Cecil in 1592 about Ralegh’s imprisonment over his marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton, will profess for his disgraced cousin: ‘for I feare Sr. W. Rawly; wyll shortely growe Orlando furioso; If the bryght Angelyca persever agaynst [hyme] a l[y]tt[le] lon[ger]’ (MS Ashmole 1729, F 177, endorsed 26 July, 1592; copy by Birch in Addit. MS 4106, F 62; cited and transcribed, Sandison 1928, 657-58). Ralegh’s ‘Angelica’ in this political romance is not his new wife but his queen.

21.1

st. 21

Compare Glauce’s efforts to cure Britomart, ii.48-51 and iii.5.3-5.

22.1

st. 22

The appearance of the witch’s beast marks a sharp turn away from the comic tone of the episode, almost as if the blow suffered by the witch and her son with the loss of ‘their fayre guest’ (19.8) turns them from hapless admirers of divine beauty back into evil monsters, or as if Florimell’s fear triggers the emergence of the beast. Both impressions may be accurate: Florimell leaves ‘For feare of mischiefe, which she did forecast’ (18.4), but it is not clear from the previous description of their behavior that she should fear either of her hosts. The beast’s appearance, seeming to confirm her fears, may as easily be their consequence as their cause; for the hysteron proteron motif, see 1.2n and v.10.1-2n.

22.1 22.1 First mention of the witch’s ‘hidden cave’.

22.5 queint elect: ‘Elect’ means ‘chosen’; ‘queint’ may mean ‘elegantly’, ‘craftily’, or ‘strangely’, with the variable sense of the adverb sliding to modify the spots themselves: e.g. ‘elegantly chosen’ suggests ‘chosen for the sake of elegance’. Since ‘queint’ is a quality of style associated with contrived language, the phrase may describe itself. The ‘thousand spots’ suggest sin (Jer 13:23, 2 Pet 2:13, Jude 1:12), but ‘spots’ in this context are stains or blemishes, whereas the quaintly chosen colors of the witch’s beast seem ornamental as well—perhaps deceptively so.

22.8–22.9 22.8-9 The ‘Hyena of Lust’, as the beast is conventionally nicknamed, is not really a hyena, though it is more like a hyena than anything else—a signature Spenserian equivocation identifying it as less a hyena than a hyena-similitude. The textual genealogy of this chimerical beast is mixed: it owes something to the Orc in Boiardo (OI 3.3; see Blanchard in Var 3.263); something to medieval bestiaries, which link hyenas to changeableness, hypocrisy, and sin; something to the hyena of Ecclus 13:18, identified by the Geneva glossators as ‘a wilde beast that counterfaiteth the voyce of men, and so entiseth them out of their houses and devoureth them’; and something to the epistles of Peter, which gloss not only his spots (see 22.5n) but also his diet: ‘For all flesh is as grasse, and all the glorie of man is as the flower of grasse’ (1 Pet 1:24). Spenser’s lines at once literalize the concept of lust as a carnal ‘appetite’ and suggest, by way of the Biblical echo, that flesh is not a spiritually nourishing diet, for as 1 Pet goes on to say, ‘The grasse withereth, and the flower falleth away. But the worde of the Lord endureth for ever’ (1:24-25). On the hyena’s taste for human flesh see Topsell, Histo. Animal 343.

23.2 her: Florimell, here and throughout the stanza, except in line 6.

23.5 her beauties scornefull grace: Cf. ‘the glorie of man’ (22.8-9n).

23.6 swifte as word: For earlier hints that the beast, for all the carnality of its appetite, is at least figuratively a creature made of words, see the notes to st. 22.

23.7 her footing trace: See II.pr.4.4-5 for the trope of tracking as interpreting the text, complete with the pun on metrical ‘feet’. Ironically, the keen-scented beast appears to be a better reader than the ‘witlesse man’ of the proem to Book II (3.4).

23.8 his perfect sent: Given the repetition of ‘from her went, / Went forth’ (23.6-7), it is hard to avoid hearing a pun on the part participle of the verb ‘send’ in the beast’s ‘perfect sent’.

24.4 24.4 ‘She shunned the beast no less than she dreaded death’.

24.9 wex areare: Paradoxically, to ‘increase backward’, not to wax but to wane—a turn of phrase that captures the dynamic of hysteron proteron hinted at throughout the episode.

26.1

st. 26

For Myrrha’s seduction of her father Cinyras, see ii.41.1n and Ovid Met 10.431-80, esp. 475-76, describing her flight. In Ovid this story leads into that of Venus and her mortal lover Adonis, who is the offspring of this incestuous union (cf. I.i.9.6n and Met 10.489-524, esp. 524, describing Adonis’s beauty as avenging his mother’s passion). For Daphne’s flight from Apollo see Ovid, Met 1.525-552; Spenser has previously echoed this passage in connection with Florimell’s flight (see iv.46.4-5n). The combination of wickedness with fearful innocence in this double simile puts a number of ambiguities into play, as the repeated phrase ‘Not halfe . . . Nor halfe’ manages indirectly to suggest that Florimell is the sum of her counterparts. The reference to Myrrha, anticipating Florimell’s repulse of the aged fisherman’s lust, repeats the hysteron proteron motif in which fear seems to summon its objects into existence; see st. 22n and viii.23.7, where Florimell addresses the fisherman as ‘father’.

26.4 th’AEgæan strond: Daphne did not literally flee along the shore of the Aegean Sea; her flight was set in the vale of Tempe, through which flows the river sacred to her father Peneus. The phrase may apply in what OED recognizes as a ‘poetic’ usage (‘strond’ as country or region, especially a foreign one), or it might refer to the river’s bankside; it anticipates Florimell’s arrival at the seashore in line 5.

26.5 26.5 Among the ambiguities put in play by the double simile (see st. 26n) may be the implication that Florimell is linked to her monstrous pursuer by more than fear: cf. Ovid’s comment on Daphne, auctaque forma fuga est (‘Her beauty was enhanced by flight’; Met 1.530).

26.5 yond: OED identifies the sense ‘furious, savage’ as distinctively Spenserian (see II.viii.40), and speculates that it derives from a misunderstanding of Chaucer’s line, ‘Beth egre as is a Tygre yond in Ynde’ (CT Clerk 4.1199).

26.9 26.9 Cf. 4.3, ‘Need teacheth her’, etc. The alexandrine combines proverbs (Smith 1970 nos. 246, 571) and echoes previous images that associate Florimell with birds (iv.49.4, vii.10.9).

27.1

st. 27

Spenser echoes a version of the myth of Britomartis. See ii.30-51n for his earlier recourse to the pseudo-Virgilian Ciris for one version of the story; here he echoes a different version, one reported (and dismissed) by Diodorus Siculus, in which Britomartis, pursued by Minos, ‘fled into some fishermen’s nets’ (Bib Hist 5.76). These allusions indirectly associate Florimell’s flight with one aspect of Britomart’s more complex and ambivalent response to erotic experience.

27.1 It fortuned: Spenser characteristically equivocates between chance and providence as guiding the course of events in his poem; here the equivocation extends to the identity of the ‘high God’, who may be Jupiter, given the predominance in Book III of the classical pantheon. ‘It fortuned’ is also the first of several echoes that link this and the following stanzas to I.vi.20-21 (20.1, ‘It fortuned a noble warlike knight’).

27.8 shallop: Cf. the ‘Gondelay’ (gondola, II.vi.2.7) described at II.vi.5.1 as Phaedria’s ‘shallow ship’.

27.8 floting strand: Transferred epithet: strand near which the boat is floating.

28.2 forward hope: The beast’s ‘forward hope’ is a counterpart to the tendency of Florimell’s terror to ‘wex areare’ (24.9)

28.8–28.9 28.7-9 See I.vi.19.8-9n. The worship of Una by fauns and satyrs is less rapacious than the beast’s lust for flesh, but the comparable ease with which the animal is substituted for the rider in each situation implies a latent continuity between forms of idolatry. The echo also anticipates Sir Satyrane, who first appeared in canto vi of Book I and whose impending arrival here will mark the transition between episodes.

29.1

st. 29-61

The narrative leaves Florimell afloat in the shallop with a sleeping fisherman; her story will be resumed in canto viii.

29.9 lich: Archaic form of ‘like’; to the ‘goodly Swaine’, seeming and being are the same labor.

30.6 30.6 For the parentage and upbringing to which the knight’s shield and coat of arms refer, see I.vi.20-30.

30.9 greedily: As a half-satyr, Sir Satyrane is, like his armor, somewhat unrefined, a figure whose humanity and noble intentions coexist with a strong alloy of animal spirits. (At I.vi.22-23 we learn that Satyrane’s father raped his mother and held her in sexual captivity until the son was born). That he runs ‘greedily’ to encounter the beast suggests that he shares some of its nature; cf. ‘forward hope’ (28.2) and ‘greedily long gaping’ (28.4).

31.1

st. 31

See 28.7-9 and note above. The beast substitutes the palfrey for its rider; Sir Satyrane infers the reverse of this substitution, fearing that the palfrey ‘rent without remorse’ (31.3) indicates a similar fate for its rider.

31.6–31.7 31.6-7 Contrast 29.6-7: ‘in . . . courtly services tooke no delight’. Satyrane’s services to Florimell are chivalric: knightly rather than courtly.

31.8

31.8-9 her golden girdle: Florimell’s girdle, or ‘cestus’, has an elaborate classical genealogy. It was customary in Greek antiquity for a bride to wear a marriage girdle (κεστός kestos) which the groom would loosen on the wedding-night. The loosening of the girdle in Homer is similarly a prelude to sexual intercourse when Poseidon, impersonating the river-god Enipeus, lies with Tyro: ‘And he loosed her maiden girdle, and shed sleep upon her. But when the god had ended his work of love, he clasped her hand’ (Od 11.246-47). Homer’s Venus wears a girdle that embodies her power of arousing desire; Hera borrows it under false pretenses to seduce Zeus (Il 14.214-21). In Ovid, Ceres learns her daughter Persephone’s fate when the nymph Cyane shows her the girdle that fell from Persephone when she was carried by Dis into the underworld (Met 5.470). Spenser will supplement this history with his own invention when the girdle reappears in Book IV (v.3-6).

Florimell’s chastity remains intact, but the loss of her girdle, like the fate of her palfrey (see st 31n), presents Sir Satyrane with an ominous sign ‘that did him sore apall’ (31.9; cf. 35.5-6, ‘the implacable wrong, / Which he supposed donne to Florimell’).

32.6 corrupted flesh: Cf. vi.32.7, ‘sinfull mire’, and vi.33.4, ‘Fleshly corruption’. These echoes identify the beast with flesh as the lodging-place of original sin. (On the Pauline conception of ‘the flesh’ see Introduction 00).

32.8 32.8-9 The beast resembles both Furor (II.iv.6-10) and Maleger (II.xi.35-46) in drawing strength from opposition. See 30.9n for the suggestion that the Beast is allegorically a part of Sir Satyrane’s own nature, a suggestion sustained by the ambiguous pronouns of st. 32 and 33 as well as by the association of the beast with the flesh (32.6n).

32.9 thresh: As harvest-labor, this threshing anticipates in its futility the agricultural simile of st. 34.

33.3–33.4 33.3-4 See 32.8-9n. All three episodes linked through these echoes involve knights in combat with misrecognized elements of their own fallen nature.

33.5–33.9

33.5-9 In ‘Hurling his sword away’ Sir Satyrane imitates Arthur’s combat with Maleger (II.xi.41.6-7), except that he throws his sword ‘furiously’ rather than ‘lightly’ (II.xi.41.7). He leaps ‘lightly’ onto the beast, but in so doing becomes its rider, a situation that recalls the ambiguous mirroring between Florimell and her palfrey as Satyrane grows ‘enrag’d’ while the beast ‘Rored, and raged’. An element of burlesque enters into the scene as the frustrated knight heaps strokes on an ‘underkept’ bestial element (33.8) that belongs partly to his own nature: thus the ‘great cruelty’ with which the beast roars refers at once to its suffering and to Satyrane’s punitive violence (see 35.7).

Cf. Boiardo’s description of Orlando in combat with a dragon: Al fin con molto ardir gli salta addosso, / E calvalcando tra le coscie il tiene; / Ferendo ad ambe mano, a gran tempesta / Colpi raddoppia a colpi in su la testa (OI II.iv.19.5-8, ‘At last, he mounts its back. He holds / It by his thighs. He rides. He’s bold. / His two hands flail—a hurricane. / He hits its head. He hits again’).

34.1

st. 34

The simile in this stanza expands a proverb echoed in Guyon’s combat with Furor at II.iv.11.9: ‘The bankes are overflowne, when stopped is the flood’ (Smith 1970, no. 731). It also echoes the simile comparing Maleger’s arrows to ‘a great water flood’ at II.xi.18.4-9, and recalls the contrasting simile of the ‘fire, the which in hollow cave / Hath long bene underkept’ that describes Arthur’s resurgence in that battle (32.1-2). All three passages echo Ovid’s description of the wrath of the Theban king Pentheus: Sic ego torrentem, qua nil obstabat eunti, / Lenius et modico strepitu decurrere vidi; / At quacumque trabes obstructaque saxa tenebant, / Spumeus et fervens et ab obice saevior ibat (‘So have I seen a river, where nothing obstructed its course, flow smoothly on with but a gentle murmur; but, where it was held in check by dams of timber and stone set it its way, foaming and boiling it went, fiercer for the obstruction’; Met 3.568-71). The allusion to Ovid comes to Spenser by way of Ariosto’s description of Ruggiero’s anger in a confrontation with Mandricard (OF 26.111).

34.2 enclose: Contain; Hamilton notes that this synonym (in OED sense 11a, ‘To restrain, hold in, keep in check; to hold back, keep back, hinder [from an action, etc.]’) would perfect the otherwise un-enclosed b-rhyme. Cf. A Vewe, ‘to Contayne the / unrulye people from a thowsand evill occasions’ (lines 460-61).

34.3 his wonted mood: Half-personifying the flood, whose usual water-line is figured as ‘his’ normal affective state. This momentary internalization of the flood’s ‘violence’ (34.2) sustains the pattern of hints linking Sir Satyrane to his beastly opponent (see 32.8-9n, 33.3-4n).

34.4–34.5 34.4-5 Hamilton associates Florimell, adrift at sea and then imprisoned underwater (canto viii), with the ‘fruitfull plaine’ overflown, noting that the setting for the action is a tideland.

34.7–34.9

34.7-9 Spenser’s ‘wofull husbandman’ has a number of antecedents, including the villan (peasant) in Ariosto’s version of the obstructed-river simile (st 34n). Another Ariostan precedent appears in the description of the fall of Bizerta:

Con quell furor che ‘l re de’ fiumi altiero, quando rompe talvolta argini e sponde, e e che nei campi Ocnei s’apre il sentiero, e i grassi solchi e le biade feconde, e con le sue capanne il gregge intiero, e coi cani i pastor porta ne l’onde . . . . (OF 40.31.1-6)

‘It was as when the Po, proud king of rivers, goes on the rampage: he breaks his banks, forces his passage into the fields of Ocnus where he carries away in his flood the fertile ploughland and fruitful crops, entire flocks complete with their sheepfolds, herdsmen and sheep-dogs all pell-mell’.

Together these Ariostan similes match the double inflection of Spenser’s flood as at once an internal state (34.3n) and an external event compared to physical combat. Behind all three passages lies Ovid’s description of the flood with which Jove destroys the human race. Spenser’s lines are much closer to the Ovidian original than to either of Ariosto’s imitations of it: sternuntur segetes et deplorata coloni / volta iacent, longique perit labor inritus anni (‘The standing grain is overthrown; the crops which have been the object of the farmer’s prayers lie ruined; and the hard labor of the previous year has come to naught’; Met 1.272-73).

34.9 idle boone: vain gift or offering

35.1 So him he held: The simile undercuts the assertion. Dodge 1897 thought that ‘Spenser’s comparison is imperfect, since the Beast is finally subdued—a good example of his indifference to exact illustration’ (201), but the dissonance within the similitude may suggest that Sir Satyrane’s victory over the beast is less complete than it seems.

35.1 amate: Quell; but cf. II.ix.34.4 for the alternative sense ‘To be a fellow or mate to; to be a match for, to match, equal’ (OED). For Spenser’s tendency to play on the various meanings of ‘mate’ and ‘amate’, see SC Dec 53 (‘Love they him called, that gave me checkmate’) and FQ I.i.51.4 (‘the blind God, that doth me thus amate’) and ix.12.2 (‘my selfe now mated, as ye see’).

35.7 35.7 Another hint of reciprocity between Sir Satyrane and the beast. Whereas earlier the beast grew stronger as the knight weakened ‘through infirmity’ (33.3-4), now the knight seeks to prolong his assault even though the Beast is submitting ‘meekely . . . unto the victor strong’.

36.1–36.4 36.1-4 On the girdle, see 31.8-9n; Satyrane’s use of it to bind the beast develops its significance as an emblem of ‘chaste’ or well-governed desire. Unlike the anonymous ‘he that strives’ without success to ‘enclose’ the flood in the preceding simile (34.1-2), the girdle represents not a complete repression of desire but a channeling of it in marriage: it is made both to bind and, at the right time, to be loosened.

36.5–36.9 36.5-9 The beast’s binding and submission recall St. George’s use of the princess’s girdle in The Golden Legend: after overthrowing the dragon, George ‘sayd to the mayde / delyver to me your gyrdel and bynde hit about the necke of the dragon / and be not aferde / whan she had doon soo the dragon folowed hyr as it had been a make [ie, meek] beest and debonayr’ (tr Caxton: EEBO image 165, foL Clvii).

36.6 like a lambe: Recalls the opening of Book I, where Una leads a lamb ‘in a line’ (I.i.4.9). The Golden Legend is a precursor to both episodes: Una accompanies the lamb because she too is a sacrificial figure. The townspeople in the St. George legend, running low on sheep, switch from offering the dragon two sheep to offering one sheep and a child. St. George arrives to rescue the king’s daughter when her lot is chosen.

37.1

st. 37

The Giantess bearing a captive squire reverses the image of Dis carrying away Persephone (see 31.8-9n), and seems to contrast with the beast as a figure of female rather than male lust. As such she and her victim travesty the maternal eroticism of Venus cherishing Adonis in the Garden. The episode qualifies any simple gendering of its contrasts, however: the beast was created by a female ‘maker’ (35.9) and is bound with an emblem of feminine chastity in marriage, while the ‘bold knight’ who pursues the Giantess (37.4; ‘He’ at 43.8), and who alone can threaten her, will be revealed as an armed virago on horseback, like Britomart. This reversal, akin to the moments when Britomart is mistaken for a male, may be echoed in the name ‘Argante’ (47.2) if it alludes to the male knight in Argantes in Tasso.

37.8 cords of wire: As Hamilton notes, ‘wire’ is a term Spenser normally reserves to describe women’s hair, e.g. Belphoebe’s ‘yellow lockes crisped, like golden wyre’ (II.iii.30.1). For the conventional trope that turns such golden ‘locks’ into literal fetters, see Am 37.

38.2 38.2 In his haste to rescue the ‘dolefull Squire’ (37.6) from female lust, Satyrane forfeits the hard-won control he has just gained over male lust.

38.5 nathemore for thy: ‘None the more for that’, i.e. Satyrane’s opposition doesn’t cause the Giantess to miss a beat.

39.7 Geauntesse: This spelling may allude to the mythic origin of giants as offspring of the earth (Gea; cf. SpE s.v. ‘giants’).

39.9 39.9 Alluding to the pre-Reformation theology which saw oaths and curses, because they typically index some part of God’s body (e.g. ‘swounds’ = ‘his wounds’), as literally dismembering that body.

40.1 yron mace: The giant Orgoglio wields an uprooted oak tree as ‘His mortall mace’ (I.vii.10.9).

40.4 sun-brode shield: Guyon bears a ‘sunbroad shield’ at II.ii.21.5.

40.4–40.5 40.4-5 Satyrane’s spear strikes the Giantess’s shield but does not pierce it.

40.6 beame: Cf. 1 Sam 17:7: ‘And the shafte of his [Goliath’s] speare was like a weavers beame’.

40.6 like a mast: Tasso describes the Saracen knights Argantes and Tancred as bearing noderose antenne (‘knotty masts’) for lances (GL 6.40.2).

41.4–41.9 41.4-9 Spenser here (as at Rome 20) confuses Mount Olympus with the city of Olympia, an error he may derive from Conti Myth 5.1 (see Lotspeich 1932, s.v. ‘Olympus’). The ‘marble Pillour’ is the turning post in a chariot-race. In the Iliad Nestor advises his son Antilochus, τῷ σὺ μάλ᾽ ἐγχρίμψας ἐλάαν σχεδὸν ἅρμα καὶ ἵππους . . . ἐν νύσσῃ δέ τοι ἵππος ἀριστερὸς ἐγχριμφθήτω, /ὡς ἄν τοι πλήμνη γε δοάσσεται ἄκρον ἱκέσθαι / κύκλου ποιητοῖο: λίθου δ᾽ ἀλέασθαι ἐπαυρεῖν, /μή πως ἵππους τε τρώσῃς κατά θ᾽ ἅρματα ἄξῃς; tō su mal’ henchrimpsas helaan sxedon harma kai hippous . . . en nussē de toi hippos aristeros enchrimphthetō, / hōs an toi plēmnē ge doassetai akron hikesthai / kuklou poiētoio: lithou d’ aleasthai epaurein, / mē pōs hippous te trōsēs kata th’ harmata haxēs (‘Pressing hard on it drive your chariot and horses close . . . let the near horse draw close to the post so that the hub of the wheel seems to graze the surface–but avoid touching the stone, lest perhaps you wound your horses and wreck your chariot’; 23.334-41). Ovid, Ars Amatoria, recalls this passage in the line Metaque ferventi circueunda rota (‘the goal that the glowing wheels must round’; 396), as does Horace in referring to metaque fervidis / evitata rotis (‘the turning-post cleared with glowing wheel’; Odes 1.1.4-5).

42.3 martelled: Hammered. The ‘martel de fer’ (war-hammer) was a type of mace; Ariosto uses this word to describe Ruggiero hammering on Rodomont in the single-combat that culminates OF (46.131.3).

42.9 42.9 The sexual innuendo is appropriate to a knight of female lust.

43.1–43.3

43.1-3 The combination of alliteration and repetition (‘him pluckt perforse, / Perforse him pluckt’) underlines the comedy of the moment; if the first episode in this canto plays with motifs of exaggeration and diminution (see 5.2n), the image of Satyrane plucked from his saddle by a giantess evokes a humorously literal incongruity of proportions: the knight who moments ago wielded a spear ‘in bignes like a mast’ (40.6) suddenly seems as small as a child.

The humor is reinforced by the Virgilian allusion, which adds yet another gender-reversal. In the Aeneid Tarchon, infuriated by the exploits of the virago Camilla, berates his own troops by questioning their virility, whereupon haec effatus equum in medios, moriturus et ipse, / concitat et Venulo adversum se turbidus infert / dereptumque ab equo dextra complectitur hostem / et gremium ante suum multa vi concitus aufert (‘he spurs his horse into the midst, ready himself also to die, and charges like a whirlwind full upon Venulus; then tearing the foe from his steed, grips him with his right hand, clasps him to his breast, and spurring with might and main, carries him off’; 11.741-44). This allusion may be routed through Berni’s 1542 imitation of the Virgilian passage: In questo temp il gigante Orione / Preso sene portava Ricciardetto, / Lo teneva pe’ piedi il ribaldone: / Chiamava forte ajuto il giovanetto’ (‘At that moment the giant Orione carried off the captured Ricciardetto; the large evil man held him by the feet, the young man cried loudly for help’; Rifacimento dell’Orlando innamorato 1.4.97.3-6).

43.2 his wauering seat: Transferred epithet: ‘the seat in which he was wavering’.

43.4–43.5 43.4-5 Satyrane now replaces the ‘dolefull Squire’ in the giantess’s lap (37.6).

43.6–43.9 43.6-9 See st. 37n. The pursuit of a fleeing Argante by the still-unnamed ‘knight’ forms a series with the earlier pursuits in Book III: that of Florimell, first by Arthur and Guyon, then by the witch’s beast, and that of the Forster by Timias. In each instance, the relation of pursuer to pursued raises questions about the relation of chastity to desire (see III.i.arg.2n).

44.2 44.2 Repeats her previous discarding of the ‘dolefull Squire’ at 38.9.

44.7–44.9 44.7-45.2 Continuing the facetious tone of the episode (see 43.1-3n).

45.1–45.2 44.7-45.2 Continuing the facetious tone of the episode (see 43.1-3n).

45.5 cheuisaunce: Identified in SC Maye 92 gloss as a Chaucerian term for chivalric achievement, particularly as it leads to reward.

46.6 yron bands: Formerly ‘cords of wire’ (37.8).

47.2 Argante: The name of Spenser’s giantess may come from Tasso GL, where Argantes is a Saracen knight (see 40.6n); from Boccaccio Genealogia 4.16, which lists ‘Argente’ among the names of Hyperion’s daughter Luna; or from Layamon’s Brut, where it refers to the elven queen of Avalon (2.750; see Anderson 2008: 127-30). Frantz in SpE suggests a derivation ‘from Gk αργός argos ‘shining’ or ‘swift’, with a suffix underscoring her gigantism’; Anderson proposes the relevance of the Gk homonym meaning ‘idle’, ‘yielding no return’.

47.3–47.5 47.3-5 The wars of the Titans and giants against Jove are narrated in Hesiod (Theog 617-35) and Ovid (Met 1.151-63) and discussed by Renaissance mythographers (whose accounts vary). See Lotspeich (1932, s.v. ‘Giants’, ‘Titans’); Starnes and Talbert (1955:74-75); and SpE s.v. ‘Titans’.

47.6–47.8 47.6-8 Cf. ‘Typhæus sister’ at Theatre sonn 11.4 and note. Virgil mentions Typhoeus among the giants borne partu . . . nefando (Georg 1.279, ‘in monstrous labor’) from the earth. In Ovid the daughters of Pierus, challenging the Muses to a singing-match, celebrate the exploits of terrigenam . . .Typhoea (Met 5.325: ‘Typhoeus, sprung from the lowest depths of earth’) in the battle of the gods and giants. The story of Typhoeus’s incestuous union with Gea is Spenser’s invention, embedded in the etymology that links ‘incest’ to unchastity (L incestum); these in turn are opposed to Florimell’s girdle by way of an implicit etymological pun linking L castus chaste, to cestus (see 31.8-9n and 36.1-4n).

48.2–48.4 48.2-4 Ollyphant: The name comes from Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas: the titular knight journeys to Fairyland, where he encounters ‘a greet geaunt’ whose ‘name was sire Olifaunt’ (7.807-08). In La Chanson de Roland, ‘Oliphant’ is the name of Roland’s ivory horn, carved from an elephant tusk. Anderson 2008 adds the suggestion ‘destructive fantasy’, from Gk ὄλλύω holluō (‘destroy’) + φαντασία phantasia (‘imagination’) (page ref), drawing on Berger 1988, who suggests ‘an etymological cypher composed of the Greek ollumi--“to die, destroy, lose something”--and phant, that is, “destructive fantasy”’ (186).

48.4 Chylde: In ballads and romances, an honorific title for a high-born youth intending knighthood. In 1596 this line reads ‘And many hath to foule confusion brought’, perhaps because Chaucer’s Sir Thopas does not slay Olifaunt before the tale is broken off.

48.4 Chylde: In ballads and romances, an honorific title for a high-born youth intending knighthood. In 1596 this line reads ‘And many hath to foule confusion brought’, perhaps because Chaucer’s Sir Thopas does not slay Olifaunt before the tale is broken off.

48.5–48.9 48.5-9 The in utero copulation of foetal giants reenacts—and redoubles—the incest of their conception; as a fable of ‘monstrous’ birth, it travesties the account of Amoret and Belphoebe at vi.2-4. These two fables of conception and parturition frame between them the cosmic allegory of insemination, gestation, and parturition in the Garden of Adonis.

49.4–49.5 to deuoure Her natiue flesh: See 22.8-9n on the trope of lust as carnivorous.

50.2 thrust: Thirst (by metathesis); the sexual connotations of ‘thrust’ are also evoked.

51.1

st. 51-61

This inset narrative is adapted from the Inkeeper’s tale in Ariosto OF 28. An anecdote, perhaps apocryphal, holds that John Harington translated the tale and circulated it among the ladies in the royal court. Elizabeth is said to have ‘punished’ him by barring him from the court until he had finished translating the rest of the poem (Park 1804, 1.10). When Harington published the completed translation in 1591, he took note of Spenser’s imitation:

The hosts tale in the xx viij booke of this worke, is a bad one: M. Spencers tale of the squire of Dames, in his excellent Poem of the Faery Queene, in the end of the vii. Canto of the third booke, is to the like effect, sharpe and well conceited; in substance thus, that his Squire of Dames could in three yeares travell, find but three women that denyed his lewed desire: of which three, one was a courtesan, that rejected him because he wanted coyne for her: the second a Nun, who refused him because he would not swear secreacie, the third a plain countrey Gentlewoman, that of good honest simplicitie denyed him. (373)

Spenser’s imitation may allude to Harington’s escapade, but the anecdote serves even if apocryphal to illustrate the point of Spenser’s allegory, which calls attention to the circumstances of the tale’s telling and reception, and in this way reflects critically upon its circulation as a tale that is recurrently both disavowed and retold.

51.6 Columbell: Cotgrave 1611 defines Fr colombelle as ‘a Pigeon, or yong dove’; L columba dove + bella pretty. The dove is sacred to Venus.

51.9 Squyre of Dames: Coined by Spenser, perhaps alluding humorously to the office of the ‘Squire of the body’, who attended to the person of the monarch or other dignitary. In later usage, a disparaging phrase for a man devoted to the company of women.

52.3 martiall law: Commonly a reference to measures imposed to secure public order, but probably here the sense is ‘law of arms’, the chivalric code of combat.

52.6 Palladine: From ‘Pallas’, one of the epithets of Athena, and Fr paladin, knight errant, originally one of the twelve peers of Charlemagne; by extension, any famous champion.

52.8–52.9 52.8-9 Similarly, Satyrane must use Florimell’s girdle, a symbol of female chastity, to bind the ‘Hyena of Lust’ at 36.1-4.

53.1–53.3 53.1-3 The transition pointedly contrasts the quest that ‘well beseemes’ Palladine with the less seemly exploits of the Squire, introduced with a plea that the hearer ‘pardon all amis’ (53.5).

53.5 53.5 Compare Ariosto’s elaborate disavowal of the Host’s tale, OF 28.1-3, and Harington’s repeated apologies for it (Preface ¶7, Canto 28 Arg, Canto 43 notes).

53.6–53.7 serue . . . seruicis: Key words in the tale that follows, deriving from chivalric usage in which a lover’s subservience to his lady is modeled on the fealty of a vassal to his liege lord. The exact nature of the lover’s ‘servicis’ traditionally lend these terms a moral ambiguity (in husbandry a male animal is said to ‘serve’ the female), which the Squire’s narrative quickly exploits (see e.g. 54.6, 55.1).

54.1 her grace: In courtly usage, a term whose ambiguity resembles that of ‘service’. It may refer to the favor of a sovereign or other lord (by analogy to the unmerited grace of the Christian god), but when this sense, already worldly, is extended by way of the fealty-analogy to a lady and her lover, the sense of ‘grace’ as sexual favors comes into play.

54.6 doe seruice: See 53.6-7n.

54.8–54.9 54.8-9 The lover’s subservience (53.6-7n) here turns to triumph as the ladies, represented by their names and love-tokens, are converted into trophies.

55.5 good partes: A reference to the genitals is also implied.

55.9 55.9 Compare the double bind of the Squire’s predicament both to the custom of the Castle Joyeous (III.i.27) and to the story of the queen’s witty ‘punishment’ of Harington for circulating a translation of this very episode at court (51-61n). As Park 1804 observes, ‘such a mode of punishment . . . was increasing the nature of the offense’ (10), and in this—whether the wit in question is that of Elizabeth or of some later fabricator—it plays upon the perversity of Colombell’s commandments.

56.1–56.2 56.1-2 In taking him all over the world, the knight’s ‘labour’ and ‘travel’/traveill’ anticipate Sir Satyrane’s jesting comparison to the labors of Hercules (61.4).

57.1–57.5 57.1-5 In the Orlando furioso, Astolfo and Jacondo find none at all.

57.5 laughing: A sign of Satyrane’s complicity in the bawdy tale’s circulation, his laughter (like his bantering tone in the lines that follow) confirms that he is ‘pleasd to pardon all amis’ (53.5).

57.7 curtesie: Sir Satyrane joins the game of euphemism and double-entendre that characterizes the diction of the Squire’s tale.

58.2 Courtisane: Playing on ‘curtesie’ (57.7).

58.4 a Iane: A small silver half-pence coin, like the tale itself introduced to England from Italy. Chaucer’s Sir Thopas wears a robe that ‘coste many a Jane’ (CT Thopas 7.735).

58.5 58.5 See 57.5n; Satyrane’s complicity increases as the tale unfolds.

58.6 to chose: It is unclear whether the ‘choice’ glanced at is that of the woman who elected the nunnery or that of the listener (‘if you please’).

58.7 Chappellane: Chaplain, a clergyman who conducts services in the private chapel of a noble household or other institution; the implication is that the Squire has offered to conduct yet another form of ‘service’ (see 53.6-7n) in her ‘private chapel’.

61.1

st. 61

Satyrane’s facetious comparison of the Squire’s quest to the labors of Hercules (61.4) gains irony from the proverbial ‘Choice of Hercules’, a classical exemplum of virtue supplied by Xenophon (Memorabilia 2.1.21-33). Satyrane may slso be thinking of Pausanius, who reports: ‘Hercules, they say, had intercourse with the fifty daughters of Thestius, except one, in a single night’ (Description of Greece 9.27.6).

61.4–61.5 61.4-5 The abruptness of the transition back to the main narrative, accentuated by the couplet rhyme, implies that Satyrane’s complicity in the Squire’s discursive unchastity (the circulation of a libidinous tale) causes the beast to break the girdle: in effect, his laughter has freed the beast.

61.7 broke his band: When the beast returns to the witch in canto viii he is still ‘Tyde with her golden girdle’ (2.7); in 1596 ‘golden’ becomes ‘broken’ for consistency’s sake—but the girdle still reappears at IV.ii.25.9 worn by Satyrane ‘for her sake’, a detail which may be simple narrative inconsistency but which aligns suggestively with other hints of an affinity between the knight and the beast.