Title: Britomartis: See FQ Letter 78-80, where the name appears first in its longer form, rarely used by Spenser, and then in the more frequent shortened form as ‘Britomart’. It appears in Callimachus, Pausanius, and an anonymous Latin poem, Ciris (attributed to Virgil in the sixteenth century) on which Spenser draws extensively in canto ii below; the name is also regularly glossed in Renaissance dictionaries in terms relevant to Spenser’s legend (Starnes & Talbert 1955:86-87). The classical ‘Britomartis’ was a nymph of Diana who fled into the sea to escape the pursuit of Minos and was later worshipped in Crete under the name ‘Dictyna’. See Virgil, Ciris 283-309; Pausanias, Desc. of Greece II.xxx.3; Callimachus, Hymn to Artemis 189-205. For further discussion of classical precedents, see Var 3.330-39. The name also suggests a compound, Briton + martial and so links the patron of Chastity to Mars as well as to Diana.

1.1 it falls me: ‘It falls to me’, in contrast to the rising motion with which the poet elevates chastity to a rank ‘far above the rest’ of the virtues. See Comus 212-14, where Milton equates ‘chastity’ with charity in the sequence of the Christian graces as prescribed by St. Paul at 1 Cor 13:13: ‘And now abideth faith, hope, and love, even these thre: but the chiefest of these is love’. On chastity’s preeminence, see also the events narrated in stanzas 5-8 and 20-29 of canto i.

1.2–1.3 fayrest . . . Faery: See II.pr.4.6n on Spenser’s affinity for this wordplay in connection with Elizabeth as an embodiment of the poet’s vision.

1.4 Forreine: Primarily ‘from another country’, sustaining the fiction that Faeryland is a geographically locatable principality (see II.pr). But the word’s range in early modern English also includes the senses ‘out of doors’, ‘outside the home’ (i.e., not ‘domestic’), ‘not of one’s own household’, ‘belonging to another’, and ‘irrelevant, dissimilar’. Here it stands in opposition not merely to territorial England but to the sacred interiority of the queen’s person.

1.4 exprest: See 2.1, xi.arg.4, and xii.21.1-2n.

1.5 shrined: Enclosed, with suggestions of religious veneration and also of writing, since shrine is etymologically identical with the ‘scryne’ of the Muses at I.pr.2.3, last seen at II.ix.56.6 in the keeping of Eumnestes.

1.6 liuely: Vividly; in lifelike manner; feelingly; with a suggestion that the virtue animates or gives life to ‘each perfect part’.

1.7–1.8 to all Ladies . . . Neede but behold: ‘To all ladies professing chastity, it [would be] necessary only to witness.’ Cf. ‘what needes me’ (1.3) and see OED s.v. ‘need’ v2, 4.a: ‘With to and noun phrase of the person affected’, as in the example ‘all that nedes to a priest’. Spenser’s clause begins with its prepositional phrase, ‘to all Ladies’; its verb, which technically should be third-person singular with the understood subject ‘it’, becomes plural instead by attraction to Ladies.

1.8–1.9 pourtraict . . . pourtrayd: Spenser’s form links ‘portrait’ to its etymology in L tractare to draw or pull, and hence to ‘tract’, the track or trail by which beasts are followed and the ‘fine footing’ by which a reader may locate Faeryland without a bloodhound (II.pr.4). Its approximation to the related form ‘protract’ underlines its associations with temporal deferral and with the verb ‘expresse’. See II.viii.43.3n and II.ix.33.8-9.

1.9 liuing art: Cf. ‘formd so lively’ (1.6) and ‘life-resembling’ (2.2). The phrase suggests ‘art of imitating life’, ‘skill of any living artist’, ‘vital or animated art’, and ‘art of living’. The elaborate chiastic patterning in lines 1.4-2.2 (‘exprest . . . pourtraict . . . pourtrayd . . . living art . . . . living art . . . expresse’) suggests the problem of mimesis that concerns the poet, and glances forward to ‘mirrours more then one’ (5.6).

2.1 liuing art: Cf. ‘formd so lively’ (1.6) and ‘life-resembling’ (2.2). The phrase suggests ‘art of imitating life’, ‘skill of any living artist’, ‘vital or animated art’, and ‘art of living’. The elaborate chiastic patterning in lines 1.4-2.2 (‘exprest . . . pourtraict . . . pourtrayd . . . living art . . . . living art . . . expresse’) suggests the problem of mimesis that concerns the poet, and glances forward to ‘mirrours more then one’ (5.6).

2.3 Zeuxis or Praxiteles: Preeminent painter and sculptor, respectively, of female beauty in antiquity. See DS Ladies 1-4

2.4 dædale hand would faile: The earliest usage recorded by OED of a related cluster of English words (e.g., ‘Daedalian’) derived from the mythic craftsman who designed the Cretan labyrinth, and whose name in Greek (δαιδάλου) means ‘cunningly wrought’. Cooper Thesaurus glosses ‘Daedala’ as ‘the generall denomination of Images wrought’, while Calepine Dictionarium adds references to Lucretius and Virgil. Cf. Ariosto, OF 34.53.5; Tasso, GL 12.94.6; Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 1.7 and 5.1451; and Virgil, Georg 4.179. For the failing and fainting of Daedalus’ hand, see Aeneid 6.30-33 (bis cecidere manus, ‘twice the hands fell’), echoed in the phrase ‘it falls me here’ (1.1).

2.5 his error: From L errare to wander, an etymology that draws the labyrinth into the Daedalus allusion not as a sign of artistic skill (as in Spenser’s predecessors) but as another trope for his failure.

2.6 The paragone, or rivlary, between visual and verbal arts is a recurrent motif in FQ and a literary topos that goes back to Homer’s Iliad. Cf. II.xii.50.6n and Am 17.

2.7 picturing the parts of beauty daynt: In raising the question of how to portray the heart (1.8-9), Spenser is implicitly setting the aesthetic challenge of the Legend of Chastity against the recurrent emphasis in the Bower of Bliss on voyeurism, or ‘lust of the eye’ (note that Acrasia sucks Verdant’s soul out through his eyes, not his lips, at II.xii.73.7). Cf. II.pr.2.9, ‘fruitfullest Virginia who did ever vew?’

3.3 3.3 The poet’s presumption here would parallel that of Icarus, who similarly stretched too high with his feathers (‘humble quill’).

3.8 3.8 For similar language describing allegory, see FQ Letter 4, 9, 21-25, and 34-35; see also Heb 10:1 on the Law as ‘having the shadowe of good things to come, and not the very image of the things’, and the Geneva gloss.

3.9 3.9 Suggesting a historical dimension to the allegory in which the poet may ‘fit’ his ‘antique praises’ of fictional personae to contemporaries such as the queen (historically ‘present’ although absent from the text). See FQ Letter 33-37 on representations of Elizabeth in the allegory. If these praises are also ‘antic’ (a common pun), they may involve unacknowledged mischief on the author’s part—another motive for the indirection he is defending in this proem and in the passages from FQ Letter cited above.

4.2 Thy selfe thou couet: The phrasing hints at a narcissistic dimension to the desire for a depiction based on physical likeness. The scarcely varied rhyme of pictured (past participle) with pictured (preterite) reinforces the hint.

4.3–4.4 Who can . . . that sweete verse: Another mixed construction (see 1.7-9n), this time shifting agency from the ‘gracious Servant’ to the verse.

4.5 gracious seruaunt: Sir Walter Ralegh. See DS Ralegh, Colin Clout 164-66, and Ralegh’s ‘The 21th and last booke of the Ocean to Scinthia’. Spenser’s is the first recorded mention of Raleigh’s verses to Cynthia; in the words of a recent editor of Ralegh’s verse, ‘it is the purest speculation to identify what [Spenser] described in The Faerie Queene with any poem of Ralegh’s now extant’ (Rudick xlix).

4.7–4.9 4.7-9 The imagery teasingly aligns the slumbering poet with Verdant (II.xii.72-73), and so indirectly allies Ralegh’s portrait of the queen’s beauty with the Bower’s persistent appeal to the visual imagination (see 2.7n).

5.1 delitious: Voluptuous; pleasing to the bodily senses; echoing II.xii.85.7, ‘joyes delicious’. A reminder that poetry which praises beauty does not solve the mimetic problem of how to represent chastity.

5.2 rusticke Muse: Cf. DS Ralegh 3, 5, where Spenser describes his poem as ‘this rusticke Madrigale,’ protesting that Ralegh himself is ‘onely fit this Argument to write’.

5.3–5.4 let him mend, / If ought amis: See CV W.R. 3-7 for Ralegh’s answer.

5.4 her liking may abuse: ‘May impose upon or take advantage of her favor’.

5.6–5.9 5.6-9 See 3.9n and FQ Letter 33-37. For ‘Belphoebe’ see Ralegh, ‘The 21th and last booke’, lines 271, 327; for ‘fashioned’, see FQ Letter 7-8. The distinction between the queen’s rule and her chastity corresponds to that in constitutional law between the royal body politic and body natural. The queen’s chastity is probably ‘rare’ in the sense of ‘exceptional’ rather than ‘seldom appearing or seen’, but the language is not wholly unambiguous—and of course the proem has been preoccupied from the start with the delicate decorum of rendering visible the rarefied virtue enshrined in the queen’s heart.

5.6 mirrours more then one: The phrase seems at first to refer to the contrast the proem has been developing between Spenser’s poetry and Ralegh’s, but it turns out in lines 7-9 that the two mirrors offered are both found in FQ. Raleigh drops out of view as the modifying phrase slides from ‘mirrours’ to the queen, doubling Elizabeth into ‘more then one her selfe’.