3 Carle: churl (the fisherman)
3 Proteus: Sea-god known as a prophet (iv.25), shape-shifter, and shepherd of Neptune’s aquatic flocks; prominent in a wide range of classical texts (see Lotspeich 1965; Giamatti 1984:115-50).
4 Paridell: From ‘Paris’, the Trojan prince whose abduction and adulterous love of Helen occasioned the Trojan War; the termination is conventional but in the context of canto ix may gather in echoes of ‘idle’ and ‘idol’; cf. 11.2-3 and notes.
1.4 whom I write vpon: The incongruous image of the poet literally writing on the damsel’s body may—by humorously questioning his relation to the character—emphasize the recurrence in lines 1-3 of a markedly Chaucerian comic pathos as the narrator pretends to stand outside the story he tells, a hapless witness to its events (cf. I.iii.1-2). In a more sinister vein the image anticipates Busirane’s penmanship in canto xii (31.2-4).
1.5 plonged: Florimell will be literally submerged in the action of canto viii. With the compassionate melting of the narrator’s heart in line 2, the ‘affliction’ appears to be an internal condition that flows between characters as well as an external set of circumstances. Florimell’s immersion recalls and literalizes Britomart’s apostrophe in III.iv to a ‘sea of sorrow’ that is similarly both inside and outside her (see iv.7.6 and 8.1 notes).
1.5 affliction: Suffering, but the derivation from L affligere carries the etymological sense ‘cast down’, something both the fisherman and Proteus do to Florimell in the action of canto viii.
1.7 hart of stone: Alluding to the Biblical and Petrarchan trope of writing on the heart (2 Cor 3:3; Ezek 11:19, 36:26; RS 72), which must be softened to receive an imprint—a recurring topos in Book III. Here it reinforces the literal sense of its rhyming-partner ‘whom I write upon’.
1.8 finde: Ellipsis: ‘find it within itself to’; ‘find means to’; also, as Hamilton suggests, ‘invent’ in the rhetorical sense, referring once again to the poet’s agency as the author of her grief.
2.3 th’abridgement of her fate: ‘The shortening of her lifespan’ (determined by the fates).
2.7–2.9 2.7-9 Compare the similar conjectures of Satyrane at vii.31.4-5 and 35.5-6 and of the witch’s son at 3.3-7 below. This element of the story may have been suggested by Ovid’s account of Pyramus and Thisbe (Met 4.55-166, esp. 96-108).
2.7 2.7 See vii.61.7n.
3.4 His former griefe: See vii.20.
3.5–3.6 3.5-6 ‘Would have torn his heart entirely out of his breast’; ‘would by all means have torn his heart out of his breast’.
4.3 a secret mew: See vii.22.1, ‘her hidden cave’.
4.4–4.9 4.4-9 Entertaining spirits in her cave, the witch is reminiscent of both Merlin (III.iii) and Archimago (I.i). As ‘maisters of her art’, the spirits are her mentors: although she has the power to ‘conjure [them] upon eternall paine’, she needs their counsel.
5.1

st. 5

Spenser’s story of the false Florimell may have been inspired by a classical narrative (attributed to the Greek poet Stesichorus and taken up by Euripides in his play Helen) according to which Paris absconded to Troy with a phantom while the real Helen remained in Egypt under the protection of King Proteus (Roche 1964:152-67). Given the prominence of the sea-god Proteus in Florimell’s adventures, and the immediate proximity of these adventures to Spenser’s fabliau-treatment of the Helen story in canto ix, an allusion does seem likely.

5.1 aduise: Given the proximity of ‘deviz’d’ in the next line, we accept 1596 ‘advise’ in place of 1590 ‘device’ as correcting a printer’s error.
5.3–5.6 5.3-6 A similar rivalry between art and nature is prominent in the Bower of Bliss, where the seductive powers of art are linked to the influence that ‘guilefull semblants’ (II.xii.48.6) wield over the fantasy. The Bower thus offers an implicit genealogy for the false Florimell, one that traces her effect on male characters to her status as a sexual fantasy. See 7.9n.
5.9 So liuely and so like: Echoing Archimago’s creation of the false Una in the opening canto of Book I (45.2-5). The emphasis on the false Florimell’s similarity to her original plays against the assertion that her ‘like on earth was never framed yit’: she is remarkably like Florimell, but nothing is like her. The reference to the ‘many’ taken in by her appearance anticipates the action of IV.v.
6.1

st. 6

Spenser’s description of the false Florimell’s creation implies a combination of alchemy and witchcraft: Mercury is a staple of alchemical processes, and the witch’s journey to a distant mountain-range famous for its snow recalls Medea’s nine-day journey to gather magical herbs on Ossa, Pelion, Othrys, Pindus, and Olympus (Ovid Met 7.216-36). These arcane practices are fused in a parodic literalization of the Petrarchan blazon, which inventories the physical beauties of a mistress by way of far-fetched similitudes. Compare Spenser’s handling of this convention in Amoretti (e.g. 15, 17, and 21), where he acknowledges in the opening sonnet that his beloved ‘derived is’ from Helicon, the haunt of the Muses. The allegory of poetic invention implied in the creation of the false Florimell may be recognized by Ralegh, who imitates Spenser’s fiction (unless Spenser is imitating him; the dating of Ralegh’s poem is uncertain) in a lyric found in different forms in two early seventeenth-century manuscript miscellanies:

Nature, that washt her hands in milke and had forgott to dry them, Instead of earth tooke snow and silke at love’s request to try them, If she a mistress could compose to please loves fancy out of those. (Rudick 1999: 113)

Cf. the contrast between true beauty and ‘mixture made / Of colours faire, and goodly temp’rament / Of pure complexions’ in HB 64-98.

6.4 the Riphœan hils: A mountain range mentioned by various classical authorities (and Renaissance dictionaries, e.g. Thomas Cooper 1565) who differ as to its location but agree that it is blanketed in snow.
6.6 Mercury: In alchemy, the prima materia from which substances are formed.
6.8 vermily: A scarlet color derived from cinnabar, the ore from which mercury is extracted. In simulating a ‘lively sanguine . . . to the eye’ it creates a false erotic appeal, since sanguine (blood) was the humor whose predominance was thought to signify an amorous disposition.
7.3 arret: Cf. 10.9, ‘in charge to her ordain’d’. OED identifies this sense as ‘a false use of Spenser’s, due to misunderstanding the obs. arrett to the charge of ’.
7.7 golden wyre: Cf. the ‘cords of wire’ that bind the Squire of Dames at vii.37.8.
7.9

the carcas dead: Implying that sexual desire for mere appearances might as well be necrophilia. Compare HB 82-87:

Or why doe not faire pictures like powre shew, In which oftimes, we Nature see of Art Exceld, in perfect limming every part. But ah, beleeve me, there is more than so That workes such wonders in the minds of men.

8.1

st. 8

As a female impersonator, the witch’s ‘wicked Spright’ may glance at the Elizabethan theater’s practice of training boys to play women’s roles.

8.3 8.3 See Rev 12:3-9. Explicitly Christian references—as opposed to Biblical echoes and allusions—are infrequent after Book I, as the legends of Temperance and Chastity typically unfold in a classical and pagan world. For the most conspicuous exception to this tendency, see II.viii.1-8.
8.6 to fashion: Spenser’s preferred verb for the activity of poetic making; see III.ii.16.9n.
8.8 counterfesaunce: Counterfeiting, from Fr contrefaisance.
8.9 8.9 Cf. the narrator’s reference at xii.26.3-4 to ‘phantasies / In wavering wemens witt, that none can tell’. The male spright who so well knows the wiles (if not the fantasies) of ‘wemens wits’ is himself the author and performer of misogynistic tropes of femininity.
9.1–9.3 9.1-3 The shift from ‘Him shaped’ to ‘her saw’ calls attention to Spenser’s usual practice as illustrated (for instance) at i.4.3, where Britomart, dressed in armor, is referred to as ‘him’: gender refers to a socially encoded appearance, not to essence or anatomy. This emphasis on the viewer’s experience echoes the description of Archimago’s disguise at I.ii.11.9: ‘Saint George himselfe ye would have deemed him to be.’
9.4–9.5 9.4-5 See 5.3-9 and notes.
9.8–9.9 9.8-9 See 5.9n.
10.4–10.7 10.4-7 At v.53-54 the narrator enjoins his female readers to ‘frame’ to themselves ‘a faire ensample’ of Belphoebe’s incomparable chastity. Here the imitation of Florimell’s chastity amounts to parody, as the behavior, emptied of its ethical content, is strategically deployed to mimic Florimell while holding out false hope to the Churl. Meanwhile ‘retain’d’ seems to modify the absent grammatical subject of ‘clipping’, ‘joyed’, and ‘forgot’: as the Churl loses himself in his infatuation with a fantasy, he literally disappears from the syntax of lines 1-7.
10.5 rebutted: Elsewhere used in descriptions of armed combat, e.g. I.ii.15.9.
10.8 shadowes: Britomart complains at ii.44.3 that in loving an image she is condemned to ‘feed on shadowes, whiles I die for food’. The Churl, in pointed contrast, dies for shadows.
11.2 Idole: Object of adoration, with a secondary sense of ‘likeness’: as a simulacrum of merely physical beauty, the False Florimell is an idol twice over. The term has considerable resonance. In the Iliad Homer says that ‘Apollo of the silver bow fashioned a wraith [eidolon] in the likeness of Aeneas’ self and in armour like to his’ (5.449-50: αὐτὰρ ὃ εἴδωλον τεῦξ᾽ ἀργυρότοξος Ἀπόλλων / αὐτῷ τ᾽ Αἰνείᾳ ἴκελον καὶ τεύχεσι τοῖον; autar ho eidōlon teux’ argurotoxos Apollōn / autō t’ Aineia ikelon kai teuxesi toion). The book of Leviticus contains repeated warnings against the making of ‘idoles’ (19:4, 26:1, 26:30), echoed in the Wisdom of Solomon 15:4-6.
11.3 idle: Echoing ‘Idole’ in the preceding line to mock the emptiness and vanity of the Churl’s idolatry.
11.7 despaire: Used ironically; Braggaddocchio has no ‘hope’ of military exploits because he is cheerfully void of the desire to perform them (as a knight, he’s hopeless).
11.8 Proud Braggadocchio: Last seen in II.iii alternately hiding from Belphoebe and trying to assault her; see notes to arg.1 and 10.1 in that canto. The last of these links Braggadocchio to Ariosto’s Mandricardo, whose abduction of Doralice (OF 14.38-63) is parodied in Braggadocchio’s seizure of the False Florimell.
12.4 disparagement: Misalliance (from Fr parage, ‘equality of rank’).
12.5 bloody . . . boldly: Sheer hyperbole, since Braggadocchio’s spear would be about as ‘bloody’ as he is bold in attacking an unarmed peasant.
12.8 Villein: Feudal term for a serf; here, one who is basely born.
13.3–13.5 finding litle leasure . . . without stay, / And without reskew: Sustaining the facetious tone of the episode, these lines emphasize Braggadocchio’s hurry to get away with his prize, despite the lack of resistance from the Churl. Cf. 14.1-2, where the knight finds leisure to woo once he is sure there will be no pursuit.
13.8–13.9 13.8-9 See the description of Florimell as ‘the fairest Dame alive’ at i.18.8, and contrast the Dwarf’s praise of her at v.8, emphasizing her chastity and virtue; Braggadocchio, congratulating himself on appearances (‘seem’d’), values the False Florimell because she enhances his prestige among other males. Meanwhile the ambiguity of the verb phrase ‘possessed of’ leaves open the possibility that the knight is as much possession as possessor: cf. van der Noot, ‘Neither meane I to touch those that are rich, or have great possessions: but those onely which are possessed of their goodes, whose money is their maister’ (Theatre, ‘A Briefe Declaration’ 86-88).
14.2 gentle purpose: Echoed by Milton, PL 4.337-38: ‘Nor gentle purpose, nor endearing smiles / Wanted, nor youthful dalliance’.
14.7 14.7 Cf. the emphasis on ‘seeming’ at 10.4 and 13.8.
14.6–14.9 14.6-9 For the corresponding resolve on the part of Florimell herself, see 42.1-5 below. Adapting to the chivalric pretensions of her companion, the False Florimell here elevates her chastity to a higher pitch than she used to entertain the Churl (10.4-7)—although the construction ‘as seeming’ does not distinguish between the knight’s inferences and the his lady’s performance of chastity, as these merge in the free indirect style of the narration.
15.1 kindnes: Affection, sustaining the facetious tone and echoing Chaucer, LGW 665-67: ‘ye that speken of kyndenesse, / Ye men that falsly sweren many an oothe / That ye wol dye if that youre love be wroothe’.
15.1 treated: Dealt, discussed, with an ironic glance at the sense ‘negotiated’.
15.4 hollow lay: Its hollowness is figurative, transferred from Braggadocchio, whose hollow courage magnifies the sound of the strange knight’s horse.
15.6 Capons: castrated roosters
15.7–15.8 15.7-8 Parallel verbs link the counterfeiters: he ‘faynd’ while she ‘seemd’.
16.1 that straunger: Not named until he and the False Florimell return to the narrative at IV.ii.4.5-9.
16.4 excheat: ‘Escheat’ is a legal term for land that reverts to the lord of an estate when his tenant dies without a legal heir; on the pattern of diction that associates the False Florimell with property, see Zurcher (2007: 70-71).
16.5 16.5 ‘Undergo battle with him, without further parley’ (cf. 15.1 and note).
17.1

st. 17

There is a revealing failure of logic in Braggadocchio’s challenge to the unnamed stranger. The initial—and in Braggadocchio’s case, entirely spurious—contrast between words and blows, winning and stealing, breaks down in lines 4-5, which might be paraphrased ‘But if you want to fight, run away’—advice that Braggadocchio will himself promptly heed.

17.2–17.3 17.2-3 Cf. 13.4-5.
18.1 needes thou wilt: ‘You insist that you will’, ‘you are determined to’.
18.7 bloody launce: Cf. 12.5; the expression grows still more incongruous in the next two lines. The ‘blood’ on Braggadocchio’s lance is purely rhetorical.
19.3–19.4 19.3-4 The ‘lovely lode’ is morally as well as physically ‘light’, hence easily transferred from knight to knight.
19.6–19.9 19.6-9 False Florimell turns the tables on her captor by entrapping him.
20.6 that cruell Queene: ‘fortune straunge’
20.9 new waues: Strengthening the metaphoric link between Florimell’s misfortune, her distress, and the physical environment that mirrors these; see 1.5 and notes.
21.4 carelesly: Contrast Florimell as ‘the carefull Mariner’ at 20.3; here the mild weather lends her a false sense of security.
21.6 Dan: A respectful term of address deriving from L dominus and equivalent to Span don, Ital donno, Fr dom.
22.2 22.2 ‘And saw his fishing-boat carried with the tide’.
22.5–22.6 22.5-6 Echoing both Florimell’s first appearance at i.16.5-7 (‘All as a blazing starre’) and Una’s unveiling at I.xii.23.1-3 (‘The blazing brightnesse of her beauties beame’).
23.1

st. 23-33

Spenser’s lustful fisherman imitates the assault of the old hermit upon Angelica in Ariosto, OF 8.48-50. Elements of this Ariostan episode are redistributed among several episodes in Book III: see iv.8-10, vii.21.7-23, and notes. (The Fisherman’s assault, followed by the intervention of Proteus, also parallels Una’s near-rape and rescue at I.vi.3-7.) Spenser recasts Ariosto in a number of ways: his fisherman is not impotent (25.3), and Angelica, drugged by the hermit, remains inert during his failed assault whereas Florimell fights tooth and nail.

23.4 corage: See glossary entry; spirit, but also specifically sexual arousal, as at II.xii.68.9 (where the bathing maidens show Guyon ‘many sights, that corage cold could reare’) or Chaucer CT Gen Pro 10-11 (where birds in the springtime are said to stay awake all night, ‘So priketh hem nature en hir corages’).
23.7 father: See vii.26n. Florimell’s addresses the fisherman as ‘father’ to convey humility and respect, and perhaps also to foretstall the stirrings of his ‘old corage’.
23.7 note: See glossary entry.
24.1–24.6 24.1-6 A ‘cock-bote’ is a small ship’s-boat, not for use on the open sea. As the fisher’s grinning indicates, he hears other meanings in the language of lines 2 and 4. Cf. Donne, ‘Air and Angels’ 18: ‘love’s pinnace overfraught’.
25.3 stocke: Cf. Ariosto’s reference to the old hermit’s destrier (‘steed’) unable to raise its head (OF 8.49-50): Spenser’s fisherman apparently manages to ‘overgo’ Ariosto’s hermit (Letters 41) by achieving an erection. The rejuvenation of his ‘drie withered stocke’, considered apart from the ethical context of the action, is in itself a natural good, echoing the rejuvenation of forms in the Garden of Adonis (vi.33.1-4).
25.6 Rudely: Cf. 23.6, 25.9. The Fisherman’s assault is condemned as a breach less of morals than of manners (26.1). ‘Rudenes’ in Elizabethan usage might extend from incivility to violence bordering on the barbaric, but it also implies that these qualities, resulting from a lack of education or refinement, may be remediable; rudeness in this sense is directly opposed to the ‘gentle discipline’ in which Spenser seeks to ‘fashion’ both his characters and his readers (FQ Letter 8-10).
26.3 26.3 Proverbial (Smith 1970, no. 755) and comically apt, the metaphor at once extends the implicit concern with fashioning character and plays off the equine conceit in Ariosto.
26.6 26.6 A parodic echo of Una’s resonant exhortation to the Redcrosse knight, ‘Add faith unto your force, and be not faint’ (I.i.19.3).
26.8 Beastly: Escalating from ‘rudely’ (25.6).
27.6–27.9 27.6-9 The narrator’s outburst of sympathy for Florimell is undercut by the excesses he over-zealously imputes to the Faerie knights apostrophized in st. 28.
28.1

st. 28

Sir Satyrane was last seen at the close of the preceding canto; Peridure is not a character in FQ, though he appears in Geoffrey (9.12); Calidore will appear as the patron knight of courtesy in Book VI. The knights’ hyperbolic aggression (their imputed willingness to destroy whole kingdoms to avenge the actions of a fisherman) belongs to Spenser’s sustained interrogation of the male response to imperiled feminine beauty. In Book III this motif begins with Florimell’s first appearance (see i.18-19.2 and notes) and continues in Satyrane’s combat with the witch’s hyena-like beast, his short-circuited encounter with the giantess Argante, and his bantering complicity with the Squire of Dames, all in canto vii.

28.5 28.5 Church 1758 conjecturally emends ‘Towres’ to ‘Townes’.
29.2–29.5 29.2-5 Characteristically for the world of FQ, the ‘voluntary grace’ of a seemingly Christian ‘high God’ appears in the form of the pagan deity Proteus, whose motives are no less mixed that those of the absent knights he replaces. His ambiguous ‘rescue’ of Florimell takes the place of the Arthurian intervention found in the eighth cantos of the other books.
29.8 Proteus: Appears at iv.25-37, where Cymoent misinterprets the ‘double sences’ of his prophecy concerning her son Marinell (28.8). For Proteus as shape-shifter, see Homer Od 4.456-58 and Virgil, Georg 4.387-95, 406-10, where he must be bound and forced to prophecy instead of escaping through metamorphosis. Spenser’s ambiguous prophet in canto iv appears rather to import mutability of form into the speech act of prophecy itself. In the Renaissance, Proteus is variously allegorized as the passions (Giamatti 1984: 116) or as prime matter ‘in its infinite receptivity to form’ (Norhnberg 1976: 586).
30.3 frowy: The first use attested in OED is Thomalin’s reference in the July eclogue of SC to goats that ‘like not of the frowie fede’, where E.K. glosses ‘frowye’ (as he spells it) to mean ‘mustye or mossie’. 1609 alters ‘frowy’ to ‘frory’ (frosty), which appears again at 35.2 when Proteus kisses Florimell with ‘frory lips’.
30.3 hore: ‘Hoar’ sometimes means ‘moldy’, a meaning that ‘frowy’ seems to solicit, and it may recall the ME noun ‘hore’, meaning filth. The line might be paraphrased ‘An aged sire with head all moldy white’.
30.8 Phocas: Gk and L for ‘seal’. Thomas Cooper 1565 notes that Proteus is ‘the god of the sea, whom Homere nameth to be the heardmen of the fishes called Phocae’ (s.v. ‘Proteus’; cf. Od 4.404-5). Virgil refers in Georgics to Neptuno . . . immania cuius / armenta et turpis pascit sub gurgite phocas (‘Neptune, whose monstrous herds and unsightly seals he pastures beneath the wave’; 4.394-95); Spenser’s ‘scaly Phocas’ appears to conflate this description with a nearby reference to Proteus as magnum qui piscibus aequor / et iuncto bipedum curru metitur equorum (‘who traverses the mighty main in his car drawn by fishes and a team of two-footed steeds’; 4.388-89).
31.2 card: See II.vii.1. The ‘Fishers wandring bote, / That went at will’ (31.1-2) reflects his own lack of self-control, much as Phaedria’s unpiloted pleasure-craft is said at II.vi.5 to ‘slide’ according to her wishes (cf. 24.7, ‘his boat the way could wisely tell’).
31.8 driues his heard astray: The semantic surprise of a shepherd whose staff ‘drives his heard astray’ may occasion an allegorizing of Proteus’s waywardness, or it may prompt an effort to recuperate the phrase by reading ‘heard astray’ as an eliding construction (‘heard [having gone] astray’). For evidence that one contemporary reader’s ear was caught by this forcing of the adverb in a context of sexual coercion, see Two Gentlemen of Verona, where Proteus, having compared Speed to a sheep, parries a sexual innuendo with the words ‘Nay, in that you are astray’ (1.1.104). The play contains many reminiscences of this scene from FQ.
31.9 dismay: The subject of the verb is elided and carried over from the preceding clause, ‘[he] did much dismay’).
32.3 blubbred face with teares: ‘Face blubbred with teares’; cf. I.vi.9.3.
33.1

st. 33

The use of hawks and dogs in tandem was an established technique of falconry (see Hamilton, citing Turbervile 1575).

33.3–33.5 33.3-5 Cf. Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica 8.32-35: ecce autem pavidae virgo de more columbae, / quae super ingenti circumdata praepetis umbra / in quemquem termes hominem cadit (‘But lo! the girl, like a frightened dove, that caught in the vast shadow of a hawk falls trembling on some man’).
34.2 accourage: Cf. 32.4, ‘her heart nigh broken was’.
34.2 bold: Proteus is the subject of the verb, despite his effort to restore Florimell to that position by making the boldness and the courage hers.
35.2 frory: See 30.3n.
36.5 aggrate: Please, with the suggestion that Proteus’s punitive measures have as much to do with seduction as with justice; compare the anger of Ariosto’s Proteus, who rapes the daughter of a king and then sends his orcs to ravage the land when she is put to death (OF 8.52-57)
36.6 he: The fisherman, but the ambiguity is pointed.
36.8 cast: Echoing line 3, the verb that named the god’s intention to punish now describes the final act of punishment. There is a further irony in that fishermen typically ‘cast’ their nets.
37.1

st. 37

Spenser echoes here Virgil’s description of the cave of Proteus (Georg 4.18-22), but displaces the cave from the shore to the ‘bottom of the maine’, the traditional dwelling-place for nereids and sea-gods: cf. Georg 4.321-22, mater, Cyrene mater, quae gurgitis huius / ima tenes (‘Oh mother, mother Cyrene, that dwellest in this flood’s depths’), and Homer Il 18.36, where Thetis hears Achilles groan ‘as she sat in the depths of the sea beside the old man her father’ (ἡμένη ἐν βένθεσσιν ἁλὸς παρὰ πατρὶ γέροντι; hēmenē en benthessin halos para patri geronti). Cf. the description of Cymoent’s bower ‘Deepe in the bottome of the sea’ (iv.43 and 43.2n), with its echoes of the same episode in Georgics.

37.9 Panope: Panopea is mentioned by Hesiod as one of the surpassingly beautiful daughters of Nereus and Doris (Theog 240-50) and by Virgil as one to whom sailors pray (Georg 1.434-5); Spenser’s invention, making her an aged housekeeper, may reflect a playful domestication of her name’s etymology (from Gk πανόπτης panoptēs, ‘the all-seeing’; Hamilton suggests παν + L ops worker).
40.1 40.1 Recalling Archimago disguised as Redcrosse at I.ii.11; we are told at ii.10.2-4 that Archimago ‘by his mighty science . . . could take / As many formes and shapes in seeming wise, / As ever Proteus to himselfe could make’. On Proteus as shape-shifter, see 29.8n, I.ii.10n, and Ovid Met 8.730-37.
40.6 preuaile: May mean ‘gain mastery, dominate’, or less forcefully, ‘succeed in persuading’.
40.8–40.9 40.8-9 Cf. 34.1-2; from ‘speaches milde’ to ‘sharpe threates’, Proteus has gone from rescuer to attacker, completing the trajectory Florimell’s fear had earlier ascribed to Arthur.
41.5 eend: A ME form of ‘end’ that survives as a dialect form in the 16th c.
41.9 41.9 Cf. Argante’s threat of ‘eternall bondage’ (vii.50.7).
42.1–42.5 42.1-5 For the False Florimell’s simulation of Florimell’s chastity, see 14.9; for the allegorical equation of defloration with death, see vii.31.8-9n.
42.5 remoue: Withdraw her love; cf. III.i.26.9, ii.40.8, and Shakes Sonn 116.4.
42.6–42.9 42.6-43.7 The direct address to Florimell as ‘Most vertuous virgin’ associates her with Elizabeth and identifies her steadfastness in love as an exemplary moment in the poem’s celebration of chastity. Cf. v.53-54 and Ariosto, OF 29.26-30.
43.1–43.7 42.6-43.7 The direct address to Florimell as ‘Most vertuous virgin’ associates her with Elizabeth and identifies her steadfastness in love as an exemplary moment in the poem’s celebration of chastity. Cf. v.53-54 and Ariosto, OF 29.26-30.
43.4–43.5 43.4-5 See ii.29.9n. The emphasis on writing in the hearts of women echoes v.52.7, where God plants the flower of chastity ‘in gentle Ladies breste’, even as it is counterpointed by Florimell’s resistance to Proteus (‘So firmely she had sealed up her brest’, 39.5). This trope reaches back through the praise of Belphoebe and the sufferings of Britomart to the poet’s opening declaration in the proem to Book III that chastity ‘is shrined in my Soveraines brest’, where ladies ‘Neede but behold the pourtraict of her hart’ (1.5, 8). This pattern of echoes and repetitions implicates the poetic project of ‘fashioning’ chastity—in the sense both of representing its image and of inspiring readers to emulate that image—as perilously akin to the less idealized forms of erotic persuasion that play across the narratives of Book III.
43.8–43.9 43.8-9 Picking up the narrative thread from the end of canto vii.
44.3 himselfe: Presumaby the Squire, but contrast Satyrane’s response to the Squire’s ‘discourse’ at vii.57.5-6 and 58.5 to the narrator’s here, and see vii.61.4-5n.
44.4 to be slayne: Something he was unable to do earlier (see vii.32.8-9 and note).
44.7 pricking: With sexual connotation; see I.i.1, I.ix.12.5-7 and notes.
45.4 45.4 In the progress of the Seven Deadly Sins at the House of Pride, Lechery bears ‘in his hand a burning hart’ (I.iv.25.3).
45.6 Paridell: See arg.4n along with 11.2-3 and notes.
46.4–46.6 46.4-6 Marinell’s ‘ruine’ is ‘late’ in more than one sense; on the narrative inconsistency of Florimell’s flight preceding its cause, see v.10.1-2n, and note the reappearance in ‘forth’ of the particle for-, associated in canto v with Florimell’s precipitate flight.
46.9 46.9 The apostrophe signals a gliding elision of ‘y’ into ‘i’ across the boundary of the close-parenthesis.
47.1–47.6 47.1-6 Cf. Cymoent’s too-hasty belief that Marinell has been slain (iv.36-40). The oxymoronic overtones of ‘surely doubt’ (emphatically dread) undercut the certainty the phrase nominally expresses.
47.7 knights of Maydenhead: See II.ii.42.4n.
47.8 repent: May be construed as ‘mourn’, but implicates the knights in Florimell’s supposed death.
48.6

doubt so sore: ‘Dread so intensely’; cf. the play on ‘sore’ and ‘sory’ at 47.8-9.

Upton 1758 conjectures from this phrase that 47.5 should read ‘sorely doubt’.

49.2 T’haue: We accept the 1596 reading here as a correction of 1590, ‘To have’.
49.6 49.6 Satyrane’s diction gravitates toward conviction: ‘certeine’ and ‘sure’ are synonymous, ‘losse’ and ‘decay’ (death) all but so.
49.9 Distaynd: See vii.31.8-9n.
50.2 50.2 ‘Unless God turns these sad signs to good omens’.
50.4–50.5 50.4-5 See v.10.1-2n on the repetition of for-, here associated with Paridell’s reluctance to accept premature conclusions about Florimell’s fate.
50.9 speed: Success (cf. 51.2, ‘Well may ye speede’), but context suggests that ‘success’ and ‘zealous hast’ (51.7) may amount to the same thing (‘Ne long shall Satyrane behind you stay’).
51.5 wayne: With a pun on the verb sense ‘decrease’, as at I.v.41.2.
52.4–52.5 52.4-5 See Heale (1990: 210-11) on the law of hospitality.
52.6–52.7 52.6-7 It may seem odd that the Squire of Dames first directs the knights to ‘yonder castle’ for shelter and then explains why they won’t find it there, but his emergence as a secondary narrator seems to be the main point. This role was flagged to the reader’s attention in the close of canto vii, where the Squire’s retailing of the Innkeeper’s tale from Ariosto precedes (and in some sense perhaps causes) the escape of the hyena-like beast that Satyrane had bound with Florimell’s girdle. As the narrative turns back to Satyrane and the Squire at the end of canto viii, Spenser’s narrator disapprovingly reminds us of the Squire’s ‘long discourse of his adventures vayne, / The which himselfe, than Ladies more defames’ (44.2-3); the reminder prepares us for the Squire’s resumption of his role as storyteller as it carries over, now, into canto ix.