i.3 Mordant and Amauia: Sir Mordant is first named at 49.9, Amavia not until ii.45.8. Their names are glossed by the poet at 55.4-5.

i.1.1 Architect: Combines an echo of ‘Archimago’ with the Greek root τ𝜀κτων tektōn builder, from τ𝜀χνη technē art or craft, emphasizing the techniques and technology of deceit (cf. wyle, artes, meanes, engines, practick witt, stales, traynes, spyals, and snares in the ensuing lines).

i.1.2 Princes late displeasure: At I.xii.35-36 Una’s royal father has Archimago clapped in irons.

i.1.2–i.1.9 bands . . . shackles emptie lefte: At Rev 20:1-3 an angel is said to bind Satan for a thousand years, after which he is ‘loosed . . . for a little season’. Lexically, ‘bands’ in early modern English are not yet distinct from ‘bonds’ (see Glossary), which may either unite or imprison: cf. I.xii.34.4, where Una describes Archimago’s purpose as ‘breaking of the band betwixt us twaine’ (herself and Redcrosse), and I.ix.1.9, where Arthur is said to have ‘redeemd the Redcrosse knight from bands’.

i.1.3 suborned wyle: At I.xii.25-28 Archimago bears false witness against Redcrosse, to which Una responds at 34.1 that he has been ‘suborned’.

i.1.5 Eden landes: The kingdom Una will inherit is first identified by its rivers (I.vii.43.6-9), then named in the ‘falsed letters’ addressed to Una’s father as ‘most mighty king of Eden fayre’ (I.xii.26.1).

i.1.6 Redcrosse explained this obligation at I.xii.18.

i.1.7 caytiues: Either the hands belong to wretches (Hamilton 2001 suggests ‘menials’) or Spenser is referring to Archimago’s erstwhile captors as ‘captives’, less a transferred epithet than a reversed one. Cf. ‘her captive Parents deare’ (I.xi.1.2) in contrast with ‘victorious handes’ at 2.6.

i.1.9 cleene: Archimago escapes ‘cleene’ in the sense of ‘entirely’ (also, no doubt, ‘dexterously’), but the word combines complex senses related to the opposition in the early cantos of Book II between mixture and purity. Compare 10.4, ‘virgin cleene’, ii.arg.4, ‘banish cleane’, and Guyon’s failed effort at ii.3.4 to ‘cleene’ Ruddymane’s ‘guilty hands from bloody gore’.

i.2.9 At I.xii.42 the narrator speaks of the narrative itself as a ‘weather-beaten ship’, with the break between books figured as its temporary harbor.

i.3.2 food: 16th-c spelling of ‘feud’ suggests that Archimago feeds on hatred.

i.3.6 fayre fyled tonge: At. I.i.35.7 he ‘well could file [smooth or polish] his tongue’; this usage may recall Chaucer’s Pardoner and Pandarus, both of whom file their tongues (CT Gen Pro 712; T&C 2.1681).

i.5.2 to win occasion: An innocuous phrase, but it foreshadows the emergence of a full-blown allegory of Furor and Occasion in canto iv.

i.5.4–i.5.5 5.4-5 Archimago transfers his enmity from Redcrosse to Guyon according to the network of alliances forged by the knights and their virtues, symbolized by the ‘goodly golden chayne, wherewith yfere / The vertues linked are in lovely wize’ (I.ix.i.1-2). Here, Archimago both anticipates an alliance not yet pledged and, ironically, in trying to prevent it brings it about (cf. 34.1-2).

i.5.8 A goodly knight: Redcrosse is ‘that godly knight’ at 2.3.

i.5.8–i.5.9 5.8-9 Archimago’s first view of Guyon finds no chink in his armor.

i.6.2 countenance demure: Echoes the description of Fidelia and Speranza at I.x.12.4.

i.6.5 an Elfin borne: A fairy rather than a human knight like the Saxon Redcrosse (I.x.65.1-5) or the ‘Briton Prince’ Arthur (I.pr.2.6, where ‘Briton’ may be taken as synonymous with ‘Welsh’).

i.6.8 Sir Huon: Protagonist of a popular 13th-century French romance, a version of which was translated into English in the early decades of the sixteenth century. Since Oberon will later be identified with Henry VIII (II.x.75-76), this allusion may trace Guyon’s knighting to the generation preceding Spenser and his queen, suggesting that Huon ‘came with’ Oberon to Faeryland in a literary sense when he was ‘translated’ into English literature during the reign of Henry VIII. Since Huon is a principal source for Spenser’s notion of Faeryland, the poet may here be tipping his hat to the vernacular romance tradition.

i.7.2 comely: In ME usage, ‘applied in courtesy to those of noble station’ (OED).

i.7.2 Palmer: A pilgrim, so called because travelers returning from the Holy Land sometimes carried palm leaves. Also a flat piece of wood used by the stricter Elizabethan schoolmasters to spank recalcitrant students on the palms of their hands.

i.7.2 clad in black attyre: At I.i.4.5-6 the narrator describes Una covered with ‘a blacke stole . . . / As one that inly mournd’, a phrase recalled at xii.41.9 when Redcrosse, returning to Faerie court, ‘Una left to mourne’.

i.7.4 stire: Cf. v.2.9, where the word clearly describes the effects of a spur. With a possible play on ‘steer’, given the Palmer’s tendency to manage Guyon.

i.7.8–i.7.9 7.8-9 Cf. the tensions in the opening procession of Book I, where Una rides slowly on a donkey while Redcrosse both spurs his steed and reins it in. Both passages reflect the tradition descending from Plato’s Phaedrus in which the passions are represented as a horse resistant to the bit.

i.7.9 with equall steps: With steps matching the pace of the aged Palmer; perhaps with a contrastive allusion to Aen 2.724, where Ascanius accompanies his father out of Troy non passibus aequis (‘not with equal steps’).

i.8.1

St. 8-34 Each book of the 1590 FQ begins by separating virtuous companions: first Una and Redcrosse, then Guyon and the Palmer, and in III a group consisting of Arthur, Timias, Guyon, and Britomart. In Books I and II this effect is accomplished through the combined efforts of Archimago and Duessa.

Guyon’s encounter with Duessa is modeled in part on an episode in Book 4 of Trissino’s L’Italia Liberata dai Goti in which the knight Corsamonte, on his way to free a band of his comrades held captive by the enchantress Acratia, is deceived by another enchantress, Ligridonia, posing as a wronged maiden. (For a detailed account, see Lemmi 1928, excerpted in Var 2.443-44.)

i.8.1–i.8.2 8.1-2 In contrast with his initial impression of Guyon as impregnable (5.8-9), Archimago spies an opportunity in the tension between the Palmer’s ‘slow pace’ and the knight’s ‘trampling steed’.

i.8.2 weened well to: The verb ‘to ween’ was still current in Elizabethan usage, but the combination ‘weened well’ is more common in ME.

i.8.5 faire countenance: The 1596 reading, ‘a faire countenance’, probably reflects compositorial uncertainty as to whether ‘countenance’ is disyllabic or trisllabic.

i.8.9 humble misers sake: Archimago, an old man asking the knight to ‘stay your steed’, slyly imitates the Palmer. (‘Miser’, from the Latin adjective for ‘unfortunate’, here means ‘miserable person’ rather than one who hoards wealth.)

i.10.3–i.10.9 10.3-9 Archimago here retells the stripping of Duessa (I.viii.46). As the Spenserian narrator’s rival for control over the storyline, he relates Duessa’s exposure as if it were Sansloy’s assault on Una I.vi.4-6. Cf. also Rev 17:16, where the ten horns of the beast ‘shall make [the whore] desolate and naked’, glossed in the Geneva Bible as foretelling the overthrow of Rome by formerly subject nations.

i.10.3 lewd rybauld: These terms have a range of meanings, but context suggests ‘lascivious, sexually unprincipled villain’.

i.10.3 aduaunst: Only in the following line does it become clear that the word is an adjective modifying ‘lust’ rather than a verb with ‘rybauld’ as its subject, a stylistic effect in which ‘advaunst’ seems to retreat as the reading moves forward.

i.10.5–i.10.8 10.5-8 The syntax is: ‘to spoil her corpse, so fair . . . as never more fair was seen on earth with living eye’. Multiple inversions push the stylistic tension between advancing and retreating so far as to endanger comprehension, even as ‘percing speech’ and ‘piteous mone’ (9.5) have made the listener impatient for information. Archimago is already exploiting the weakness he has spied (8.1-2).

i.11.2 knight: Archimago hasn’t said the ‘lewd rybauld’ was a knight. Guyon, ‘halfe wroth’ (11.1), is leaping to conclusions.

i.11.6 drew: Cf. ‘tract’ at 12.7.

i.12.1–i.12.3 12.1-3. Cf. Malory VI.10: ‘‘What?’ seyde Sir Launcelot, ‘is he a theff and a knyght and a ravyssher of women? He doth shame unto the order of knyghthode, and contrary unto his oth. Hit is pyté that he lyvyth’’ (163).

i.12.4 fact: From L factum thing done, the neuter perfect passive participle of the verb facere to do.

i.12.7–i.12.9 12.7-9 Cf. II.pr.4.4-5, ‘n’ote without an hound fine footing trace’. Guyon is on the wrong track, following the wrong hound.

i.12.7 tract: From the Latin trahere to drag or draw. In connection with ‘footing’ and the attendant pun on metrics, the secondary sense of tract as ‘treatise’ (from L tractatus) may contribut to the sustained analogy between the action narrated in the poem and the action of reading it.

i.12.9 chaleng: OED recognizes the use of this verb as a technical term for the baying of hunting dogs only from the late 17th-c, though the present instance would seem to qualify. Earlier meanings include impeach, reprove, and call to account.

i.13.3 that crafty Squyre: First reference to Archimago as Duessa’s squire.

i.13.4–i.13.5 13.4-5 More misdirection: Archimago as bloodhound promised to conduct Guyon to the ‘treachour’ knight, but takes him instead to see Duessa in her supposedly ravished state—extending his strategy of plying the knight with passionate outcries and provocative imagery while frustrating his desire for information.

i.13.9 blubbered: ‘Blubber’, facetious in modern usage, is conventional in ME and early modern descriptions of weeping; cf. ‘blubbred face with teares’ (III.viii.32.3).

i.14.8 doe dew: This homophonic doubling signals the pervasive concern of Book II with obligation, the performance of revenge, and the conspicuously unstated alternative of baptism, figured in Redcrosse’s combat with the dragon as balm flowing from a tree that ‘overflowed all the fertile plaine, / As it had deawed been with timely raine’ (I.xi.48.4-5). The repetition here introduces ‘dew’ as a key term, repeated at 22.9, 25.4, 28.9, 40.6, 47.7, 57.5, 60.7, and ii.1.2, all in variations on the sense of obligation or propriety. This series culminates in the Palmer’s reference to fountains ‘from their source indewd’ with secret powers, and ‘with moisture deawd’ (ii.6.1, 4), which returns to the baptismal ‘dew’ of I.xi.48, but in a mystified, paganized version.

i.15.5 dreriment: Coined by Spenser from ‘dreary’, by analogy to merry/merriment. Synonyms are ‘drerihed’ and ‘dreriness’, all three frequently said to be ‘ghastly’.

i.17.7 read: Guyon also ‘mis-reads’ the man in the continued analogy between the narrated action and the action of reading (see 12.7-9n).

i.17.8 gentle Lady: The status of the victim defines the crime.

i.18.3 With ‘soone’ in the next line, ‘short’ stresses the knight’s impatience.

i.18.9 quartred all the field: Divided the surface of the shield into four equal parts.

i.19.1 by my head: An oath common from ancient times but proscribed in the gospels: ‘Neither shalt thou sweare by thine head, because thou canst not make one heare white or blacke’ (Matt 5:36).

i.19.1 Guyon: First mention of the knight by name in the narrative proper.

i.19.2 amis: In early modern usage the adverb, meaning ‘wrongly’, is sometimes a noun meaning ‘evil deed’.

i.19.6 I present was: Cf. FQ Letter 66-73.

i.19.8 Th’aduenture of the Errant damozell: The first occurrence of this title (cf. III.i.24.7). In Book I the term ‘errant’ is applied only to the knight.

i.20.5 20.5 Guyon seems to be tripping over his proverb. The distinction between ‘wrongs’ that can be mended and ‘shame’ that cannot be is difficult to apply to a wrong that shames the victim: cf. 17.8, ‘her wrong through might’, 18.2, ‘who hath ye wrought this shamfull plight’, and 20.7, where Guyon invites the lady to ‘see the salving of your blotted name’.

i.21.9 well aguisd: Here linked to its rhyming partners ‘disguysd’ and ‘devisd’ to stress that the appearance is plausible but false; contrast 31.9, where the Palmer describes Redcrosse as seeming ‘goodly . . . aguizd’ with the device on his shield.

i.22.1–i.22.7 Cf. I.viii.45-50.

i.22.1 forlorne and naked: Cf. Rev 17:16, ‘desolate and naked’.

i.22.9 reuest: From L vestire to clothe. In 16th-c usage, specifically to vest in ecclesiastical robes, a sense immediately relevant to Duessa as the Catholic Church. Controversy over the use of priestly vestments was a central theme of the English Reformation; dissenting priests were stripped of their vestments when excommunicated.

i.23.4 irrenowmed: Part of a contrast between shame and fame that runs throughout the stanza: cf. ‘praise and fame’, ‘advaunced hye’, ‘against his praise’.

i.23.9 23.9. Archimago attacks not only the protagonists but the ideal form of the poem itself, targeting the alliances among virtues and their patron knights that form the joints in the poem’s allegorical armature. See 5.4-5n

i.23.9 vertues like: If ‘vertues’ is a plural noun, ‘similar virtues’; if it is a possessive, the phrase may be construed as ‘affection for virtue’, ‘virtue’s similitude’, or ‘virtue’s equal’.

i.24.1 now he Guyon guydes: As opposed to 7.8, where the Palmer ‘ever with slow pace the knight did lead’. The use of present tense, abandoned in the next line, accentuates the return to present action after three stanzas of background information.

i.25.2 fact: See 12.4n.

i.25.3–i.25.4 in secret shrowd, / To fly the vengeaunce: Archimago’s description of the Redcrosse knight’s physical and moral disposition transvalues the description provided by the narrator in the preceding stanza. See 10.3-9n.

i.25.4 outrage dew: ‘Due’ can be seen to modify ‘vengeance’ (the vengeance due for his outrage), but its proximity to ‘outrage’ is ironically apt to describe the stripping of Duessa as originally characterized by the narrator.

i.25.9 25.9 Guyon here attacks without first issuing a challenge, in bad form.

i.26.1–i.26.9 26.1-9 In describing the knights’ near-combat, Spenser echoes OF 36.37-38, where Bradamante almost attacks Ruggiero.

i.26.2 embrace: The etymology (Fr bras arm) and the common meaning (‘to clasp in arms affectionately’) play against ‘warlike armes’, a reminder that these combatants ought to be embracing in the usual sense.

i.26.3 rest: ‘A contrivance fixed to the right side of the cuirass to receive the butt-end of the lance when couched for the charge, and to prevent it from being driven back upon impact’ (OED).

i.26.5 in equall race: Echoing 7.9.

i.26.6 affrap: A Spenserianism for which OED records one other instance (III.ii.6.4). Probably formed from ‘frap’, to strike upon.

i.27.1 27.1 The contrasting accents on the repeated word (mercí, mércy) distinguish between human pardon (from OF crier merci I cry you pardon) and divine mercy.

i.27.4 shame mine honour shent: Cf. his condemnation of Redcrosse at 11.2.

i.28.7 that heauenly Mayd: Guyon will identify the image on his shield to Arthur at II.ix.4.1-2. Redcrosse, having attended Faery court in Cleopolis, recognizes it.

i.28.9 28.8 Upton hears in the phrase ‘decks and armes’ a Virgilian echo: a golden coat of mail given by Aeneas as a prize during the games is described as decus et tutamen in armis (‘a glory [ornament] and defense in battle’; Aen 5.262). The echo is both aural (decus . . . in armis) and conceptual, since both phrases balance the functions of ornament and armament, as does the phrase ‘faire defence’ at the end of the line.

i.29.1 at one: With a suggestion of ‘atone’.

i.29.3 comportaunce: OED gives this as the earliest recorded use; from L comportare to carry together, emphasizing mutuality.

i.29.6 saliaunce: OED records only this instance.

i.29.8 gouernaunce: The action of temperance in regulating the passions. This word appears seven times in FQ, all in Book II.

i.29.9 you guided: See 24.1n.

i.30.1 St. 30 The opening and closing references to ‘shame’ in this stanza mark it, together with its repeated companion terms ‘blame’, ‘fame’, and ‘praise’, as a thematic keyword for the episode. Cf. the culminating exchange between the Palmer and Redcrosse at 32.1 and 33.2.

i.30.5 red: See II.pr.2.2n.

i.30.7 30.2,7 The lamely repeated rhyme stresses Guyon’s chagrin at having been deceived and marks his belated recognition that he chose the wrong guide (cf. 7.8-9, 24.1, 29.9 and notes).

i.31.1 earnest vnto game: A loosely formulaic phrase (cf. I.xii.8.7) familiar from Chaucer and the vernacular romance tradition.

i.31.3 By this: The elliptical phrase allows ‘by this time’ to suggest as well ‘by this means’ (Hamilton 2001). Post hoc/propter hoc equivocation is frequent in FQ; here it marks the Palmer’s return as a consequence of Archimago’s flight.

i.31.3 his aged Guide: This designation for the Palmer confirms a second thematic keyword for the episode (see 30.2,7n; also 32.6-8n and 33.4-5n).

i.31.5 perfect cognizaunce: Complete recognition, in contrast to the series of missed and belated recognitions leading up to it. The sense of cognizaunce as a heraldic badge or token is also relevant, although here the narrator specifies that the Palmer recognizes Redcrosse because he has seen him at Faery court.

i.31.9 aguizd: See 21.9n.

i.32.1–i.32.5 32.1-5 Confirms the promise revealed to the Redcrosse knight on the Mount of Contemplation at I.x.55-61.

i.32.1 32.1 Cf. Phil 4:4, ‘Rejoyce in the Lord alway, againe I say, rejoyce’, as well as Luke 10:20, ‘rejoyce, because your names are written in heaven’.

i.32.4 32.4 Cf. Paul’s reference to ‘my felowe laborers, whose names are in the boke of life’ (Phil 4:3); also Rev 3:5, 13:8, 17:8, 20:12, 21:27.

i.32.6–i.32.8

32.6-8 See 7.9n and 26.5n. Having got off on the wrong foot, Guyon here starts over from the proper ‘marke’. ‘Race to ronne’ recalls the language of steps, haste, and delay that pervades the episode. It also echoes 1 Cor 9:24, ‘Knowe ye not, that they which runne in a race, runne all, yet one receiveth the price? so runne, that ye may obteine’, and Heb 12:1-2, ‘Wherefore, let us also, seing that we are compassed with so great a cloude of witnesses, cast away everie thing that presseth downe, and the sinne that hangeth so fast on: let us runne with patience the race that is set before us, Loking unto Jesus the autor and finisher of our faith, who for the joye that was set before him, endured the crosse, and despised the shame, and is set at the right hand of the throne of God’.

Taken together, lines 6-7 imply both that Guyon’s quest follows upon Redcrosse’s, beginning where he left off, and that Guyon is starting over from scratch.

i.32.8 32.8 This line culminates the emphasis on guidance (see 31.2n) as it completes the Palmer’s reprise in stanzas 31 and 32 of the episode’s key terms.

i.33.4–i.33.5 33.4-5 Cf. Luke 17:10, ‘So likewise ye, when ye have done all those things, which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duetie to doe’. Redcrosse’s modesty here may be less than modest, since readers of Book I can hardly fail to recall that much of what he did, he did as he ought not. His language may therefore be truer than he knows: not only ‘attribute nothing more than goodwill to me’, but more accurately, ‘more than you attribute goodwill to me, attribute nought: nothing, nothingness, and sin’. Cf. I.x.1.8, ‘If any strength we have, it is to ill’. The doctrine of imputed grace, whether in Luther or in Calvin, stresses the unqualified surrender of individual will to divine initiative.

i.33.6 pageant: This theatrical term, repeated at 36.2, anticipates the repetition of ‘spectacle’ in ‘Pitifull spectacle’ at 40.1 and 40.9. Together these references evoke a pagan milieu of ritual and tragedy as one important context for the episode. Cf. ii.1.2, ‘due rites’.

i.33.6 next ensewes: The poem’s time-scheme is symbolic rather than realistic. FQ Letter 70-74 indicates that Guyon’s quest begins the day after Redcrosse’s (cf. 31.6, ‘late avizd’), yet here Guyon setting forth encounters Redcrosse returning. The poem is consistently inconsistent in treating its parallel quests as both simultaneous and sequential.

i.34.2 34.2 On the linking of the virtues, see I.ix.18.9n and 5.4-5n.

i.34.7–i.34.9 34.7-9 These lines epitomize the moral lesson of the episode. The pairing of ‘intemperaunce’ with ‘wrath’ suggests the traditional distinction between concupiscible and irascible passions (those caused by pleasure, such as lust, and those caused by pain, such as wrath). Duessa’s role in provoking Guyon, preceded by Archimago’s vivid description of her violent rape, demonstrates how intimately the two passions may be related.

i.34.9 his hasty steps to stray: See 12.7-9n.

i.35.5–i.35.9 35.5-9 This episode varies from the account given in FQ Letter 70-74, suggesting a late revision. At ii.43, a further account of how Guyon’s quest was initiated will accommodate the change. The episode offers an elaborate set of parallels to that of Fradubio and Fraelissa in Book I (ii.29-45), signaled by a number of verbal echoes. For examples cf. I.ii.29.8-9 with II.i.35.6 and I.ii.31.1 with II.i.35.7.

i.35.8 dolefull lay: A sad song or lyric, and hence a conspicuously literary periphrasis for ‘lament’; cf. the ‘Doleful Lay of Clorinda’ (1595).

i.35.9 their forward steps they stay: Cf. ‘hasty steps to stray’, ‘he stayd his steed’, and ‘equall steps’ (7.9, 9.1, and 34.9).

i.36.1

st. 36-56 The episode of Mortdant and Amavia has been persuasively interpreted as an allegory based on the Pauline account Mosaic law in Romans 7 (Kaske 1993, 1999). The principal characters appear to be derived from the 1576 Geneva glosses to Romans. Chapter 7 opens with a similitude meant to explain the dominion of the Law over a man ‘as long as he liveth’:

2. For the woman which is in subjection to a man, is bounde by the law to the man, while he liveth: but if the man be dead, she is delivered from the law of the man.

3. So then, if while the man liveth, she take another man she shalbe called an adulteresse: but if the man be dead, she is free from the Law, so that she is not an adulteresse, though she take another man.

4. So ye, my brethren, are dead also to the Law by the body of Christ, that ye should be unto another, even unto him that is raised up from the deade, that we should bring forth fruite unto God.

Amavia, refusing to be delivered from ‘the law of the man’, remains bound to Mortdant under the Law even after his death. The gloss to Romans 5:14 contains a similar hint for the character of Ruddymane. The verse reads, ‘But death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them also that sinned not after the like maner of the transgression of Adam, which was the figure of him that was to come’. The ‘like maner of the transgression of Adam’ refers to enacted sin; the verse asserts that, by virtue of original sin, death reigned even over those who personally committed no transgression. The gloss explains, ‘he meaneth yong babes, whiche neyther had the knowledge of the law of nature, nor any motion of concupiscence, much lesse committed any actuall sinne’.

i.36.1–i.36.3 36.1-3 These lines are echoed by Robert Greene in Selimus, Emperor of the Turks (1594): ‘O! you dispensers of our hapless breath, / Why do ye glut your eyes, and take delight / To see sad pageants of men’s miseries?’ (1278-80). The noun ‘dispensers’, with its familiar pun on the poet’s name, offers a rhetorical wink-and-a-nod to insiders (see Cummings 1971: 95, along with CV 5.3, FQ II.ix.29.1 and xii.42.8, and notes).

i.36.3 pageaunts: Cf. 33.6.

i.36.4 36.4 ‘As obliged by the heavens to live while despising life’ or ‘as obliged by the heavens to suffer life’s malice’.

i.36.6 36.6 Cf. Aen 4.660, where Dido stabs herself with the cry ‘Sic, sic juvat ire sub umbras’ (‘Thus, thus I go gladly into the dark’). Spenser’s line, along with basic elements of the situation (the bloody hands, the lover’s suicide) may be travestied in Thisbe’s death speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘O sisters three, / Come, come to me / With hands as pale as milk. / Lay them in gore, / Since you have shore / With shears his thread of silk’ (5.2.323-28). The amorous lyric quality in Amavia’s wooing of death at once parodies her name (see 55.3-5n) and recalls the rhetoric of Despair in passages like I.ix.40.

i.37.1 froward: Cf. ‘forward steps’ (35.9); forward/froward and toward/fromward form pairs analogous to ‘concupiscible’ and ‘irascible’ (34.7-9 and note).

i.37.8 embrewd: Cf. 50.9. For the hands stained with blood, see Vewe: ‘As they vnder Oneale crye—Landergabo that is the bloddye hande whch is Oneales badge’ (2187-89). Upton first noted this connection, offering a passage from Camden’s Annales to gloss the historical allegory: ‘Thus did Shan Oneal come to his bloody end: A man he was who had stained his hands with blood, and dealt in all the pollutions of unchaste embraces.—The children he left by his wife, were Henry and Shan: but he had several more by O-donnell’s wife, and others of his mistresses’ (31-32). Hadfield and Maley 1997 add that ‘the bloody hand is the traditional symbol of Ulster’ (59).

i.37.9 pledges: Children, considered as symbols of love and duty between their parents, were called ‘pledges’ (cf. I.x.4.9), but here Amavia describes her child’s bloodstained hands as tokens of her own innocence. Cf. also 34.2, ‘With right hands plighted, pledges of good will’. The series witness . . . attest . . . pledges figures a legal scenario in which the baby is called upon to bear witness, with its bloody hands offered as a guarantee, or bond, subject to forfeit if the witness does not testify.

i.38.7 her bleeding life: Cf. Aen 9.349, purpuream . . . ille animam (‘his red life’); the dying Rhoetus in this passage also cum sanguine mixta / vina refert moreins (‘dying casts up wine mixed with blood’).

i.39.2 the thick: OED cites no instance earlier than 1681 for the figurative meaning ‘point of greatest intensity’, but Guyon does find himself ‘in the thick of it’ in that sense as well.

i.39.4 halfe dead, halfe quick: Echoing the biblical expression ‘the quick [living] and the dead’ (Acts 10:42, 2 Tim 4:1, 1 Pet 4:5). With its rhyme-partner ‘thick’, quick also echoes SC March 73-74: ‘Tho peeping close into the thicke, / Might see the moving of some quicke’.

i.39.7 goreblood: ‘blood shed in carnage’ (OED)

i.39.7 thick: May modify either the stream or the blood.

i.40.1 spectacle: Cf. 33.6 and 36.3 and note the repetition in line 9. The emphasis on pity suggests a tragic perspective and prepares for repeated echoes in the following stanzas of the death of Dido in Aen 4.

i.40.3 hart: Following the image of the ‘gentle Hynd’ at 38.6, the pun on ‘hart’ as ‘stag’ is unavoidable.

i.40.4 ray: Beray, meaning defile or befoul, although the abbreviated form makes it just possible to read ‘array’, clothe. Cf. ii.3-10, where the fountain refuses any defilement.

i.40.5–i.40.9 40.5-9 Editors have seen these lines as echoing Ezek 16, where the personified ‘word of the Lord’, instructing the prophet to ‘cause Jerusalem to knowe her abominacions’, declares: ‘And when I passed by thee, I sawe thee polluted in thine owne blood, and I said unto thee, when thou wast in thy blood, Thou shalt live: even when ye wast in thy blood, I said unto the, Thou shalt live’ (16:1-2, 6). The Geneva gloss reads in part: ‘whereby is ment that before God wash his Church, and give life, there is nothing, but filthines and death’. This would associate Ruddymane with the Pauline subject prior to baptism, but a more likely reference for the episode is found in the Geneva gloss to Romans 5:14 (see st. 36-56n), which associates Ruddymane with the subject not only prior to baptism but ‘without the Law’. Spenser may also be recalling Gower’s Confessio Amantis: ‘The child lay bethende in hire blod / Out rolled fro the moder barm, / And for the blod was hot and warm, / He basketh him aboute thrinne’ (3.312-15).

i.41.3 with blood besprincled: Presumably Amavia’s blood.

i.41.5 yett being ded: The phrase works in overlapping grammatical constructions: (1) ‘rosy red did paint his cheeks, yet [despite his] being dead’; and (2) ‘yet [despite his] being dead, he seemed to have been a goodly personage’. The phrase sits oddly at the stanza’s pivot point (line 5), but rather than turning from life to death or from appearance to reality, the lines sustain a gruesome incongruity. First Amavia’s blood, soiling the grass and besprinkling her lover’s armor, contrasts with the blood still animating his ‘ruddy lips’ and ‘red . . . cheekes’; then the false appearance created by this coloring is dispelled by the qualification ‘yett being ded’, followed by the past tense of ‘Seemd to have beene’—only to return in the next line’s description of him as ‘Now in his freshest flowre’. The reference to ‘loves rage’ returns us to Amavia and her fury in preparation for the adversative of the alexandrine (‘But that’), which reasserts the actuality of the knight’s death. This dissonance-effect carries over from the description of the bloody babe in the second half of st. 40.

i.41.6 41.6 The subject of the verb, ‘he’, is elided.

i.41.8 41.8 Cf. ‘bold furie’ (57.8); there may also be an echo of Jer 51.7 (‘therefore do the nacions rage’; see 52.2n).

i.42.1 St. 42 Guyon responds with fear, then pity (cf. ii.1.3, ‘their sad Tragedie’).

i.42.6–i.42.9 42.6-9 Cf. I.iii.8.3-5 for the transformation of Una’s lion by pity.

i.43.1 St. 43-44 Cf. the Dwarf’s efforts to revive Una when she hears of Redcrosse’s defeat at I.vii.21-25.

i.43.2–i.43.3 43.2-3 Cf. Aen 4.687: atros siccabat veste cruores (‘stanching with her robe the dark streams of blood’).

i.43.5 in her veynes did hop: Cf. A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.287-88 with s.d.: ‘Ay, that left pap, / Where heart doth hop: [Stabs himself.]’.

i.44.2–i.44.3 44.2-3 Proverbial (Smith 1970, no.123), but gruesomely inappropriate to a knife-wound.

i.44.5 impatient smart: Cf. 40.1 and note. The phrase condenses physical pain with the mental pain of unwilling suffering.

i.44.8–i.44.9 44.8-9 The phrase ‘untimely date’, meaning premature end of life, leaves its rhyming partner, ‘help never comes too late’, dangling helplessly. (For the proverb, see Smith 1970, no. 379). ‘Untimely date’ may also echo Virgil’s description of Dido’s death at Aen 4.697 as ante diem subitoque accensa furore (‘hapless before her day and fired by sudden madness’). If so, the allusion is especially poignant since the belated ‘help’ that comes to Dido finishes off her suicide out of pity.

i.45.4–i.45.5 45.4-5, 9 Cf. 36.7, ‘loathed light’.

i.45.7 she nothing drad: Unlike ‘one out of a deadly dream affright’, she did not dread anything ‘deadly’. Cf. I.i.2.9; given the typically chivalric context for the phrase, its irony here is mordant.

i.46.3 46.3 Cf. Aen 4.690-91: ter sese attollens cubitoque adnixa levavit; / ter revoluta toro est (‘Thrice rising, she struggled to lift herself upon her elbow; thrice she rolled back on the couch’). Cf. also I.vii.24.1-4 and GL 3.46.1-4: Gli apri tre volte, e i dolci rai del cielo / cercò fruire e sovra un braccio alzarsi, / e tre volti ricadde, e fosco velo / gli occhi adombrò , che stanchi al fin serrarsi (‘Three times he strove to view heav’n’s golden ray, / And raised him on his feeble elbow thrice, / And thrice he tumbled on the lowly lay, / And three times clos’d again his dying eyes’; trans. Fairfax).

i.46.4 46.4 Cf. Aen. 4.686: semianimemque sinu germanam amplexa fovebat (‘and, throwing her arms around her dying sister’).

i.46.9 46.9 Versions of this proverb appear at I.ii.34.4 and I.vii.40.9 (see Smith 1970, no. 761).

i.47.1–i.47.5 47.1-5: Cf. Aen 4.688-89: illa gravis oculos conata attollere rursus deficit; infixum stridit sub pectore volnus (‘She, essaying to lift her heavy eyes, swoons again, and the deep-set wound gurgles in her breast’); GL 3.45.7-8: e gli occhi, ch’a pena aprir si ponno, / dura quiete preme e ferreo sonno (‘And lifted up his feeble eyes unneath, / Oppress’d with leaden sleep of iron death’; trans. Fairfax).

i.48.4 redrest: Presumably through vengeance, as in Guyon’s oath at 61.7-8.

i.48.5 infest: From L infestare and the related noun infestus hostile or aggressive.

i.48.9 die with you in sorrow: Cf. Aen 4.678-79: eadem me ad fata vocasses; / idem ambas ferro dolor atque eadem hora tulisset (‘Thou shouldst have called me to share thy doom; the same sword-pang, the same hour had taken us both!’).

i.49.2–i.49.3 49.2-3 Amavia’s congealed tears invert Rev 7:17 (repeated at 21:4), ‘and God shal wipe away all teares from their eyes’, presumably because of the impiety ascribed to her in line 2.

i.49.6 sence: The primary meaning here is ‘comprehension’, but the word is slippery in context since Amavia’s sorrows may in part be defined by her failure (and Mordant’s) to surpass the bodily senses. Cf. II.pr.4.4 and note.

i.49.7–i.49.9 49.7-9 The language of pricking and green grass echoes both our first glimpse of Redcrosse (I.i.1) and Arthur’s description of the sensual ‘jollity’ that precedes his dream of Gloriana (I.ix.12.5-13.3).

i.49.9 Sir Mortdant: This spelling anticipates the poetic etymology at 55.4, deriving from L mors death and mortuus dead in combination with dare to give. (The English word ‘mordant’ actually derives from French and Latin roots meaning biting or corrosive.) Spenser’s etymology associates the knight with Adam as the source of original sin. Cf. 32.6-7, where the Palmer tells Redcrosse that their quest begins where his ended, Redcrosse having just exited from ‘Eden lands’ after his victory over sin and death. Cf. also Rom 5:12: ‘by one man sinne entred into the worlde, and death by sinne, and so death went over all men: for asmuche as all men have sinned’.

i.50.2 50.2 Cf. I.ii.31.7: ‘O too deare love, love bought with death too deare’. The Fradubio episode is parallel to this one in many respects, particularly as a cautionary tale about the dangers of exclusively sensual love and an allegory of life without baptism.

i.50.3 equall: Cf. 49.2. Cf. also Matt 5:45 and Ezek 18:25 on God’s treatment of the just and the unjust.

i.50.5–i.50.9 50.5-7 See 49.7-9n.

i.51.2–i.51.4 51.2-4 Precursors to Spenser’s Acrasia include Trissino’s Acratia (spelled ‘Acrazia’ in the index; Var 2.444), Tasso’s Armida (GL 16), Ariosto’s Alcina (OF 6-8, 10), and Homer’s Circe (Od 10). Her name corresponds to the Greek noun 𝛼κρασ𝜄α akrasia lack of self-control. As ‘false enchauntresse’, she condenses the roles of Duessa and Archimago into a single figure.

i.52.2 dronken mad: Cf. Jer 51:7: ‘Babel [Babylon] hathe bene as a golden cuppe in the Lords hand, that made all the earth drunken: the nacions have drunken of her wine, therefore do the nacions rage’. The Geneva gloss adds ‘By whom the Lord powred out the drinke of his vengeance, to whom it pleased him’. Cf. Rev 14:8: ‘And there followed another Angel, saying, Babylon that great citie is fallen, it is fallen: for she made all nations to drinke of the wine of the wrath of her fornication’; also 17:4, ‘And the woman was arayed in purple and skarlet, and gilded with golde, and precious stones, and pearles, and had a cup of gold in her hand, full of abominations, and filthines of her fornication’. These suggest a link a link between Acrasia’s charmed cup (55.3) and Duessa’s ‘golden cup’ at I.viii.14 based on taking literally the Biblical trope of spiritual fornication.

i.52.3 words and weedes: Cf. the Palmers’s restraining ‘words’ at 34.7, and the ‘Palmers weed’ that Amavia puts on. The ‘weedes’ here are drugs; cf. Virgil’s reference to the potentibus herbis of Circe (Aen 7.19), following Od 10:290, where Hermes warns Odysseus, ‘She will mix thee a potion, and cast drugs into the food’ (τευξει τοι κυκεω, βαλεει δ’ εν φαρμακα σ𝜄τῳ, teuxei toi kykeō baleei d’ en pharmaka sitō).

i.52.6 52.6 Amavia here ascribes Mordant’s delinquency to original sin rather than to any special moral failing on his part. She echoes biblical usage of ‘flesh’; cf. Matt 26:41, Rom 6:19, and especially Rom 8.

i.53.1–i.53.3 53.1-3 Nine months had passed.

i.53.5–i.53.7 53.5-7 Lucina is the Roman goddess of childbirth and hence a poetic term for ‘midwife’. To say that ‘she came’ and that Amavia’s midwives were ‘the Nymphs’ is either literally true or, more likely, a euphemistic way of saying that there was no midwife. The repetition of the name would reinforce this irony. Cf. the birth of Tristram in the Morte D’Arthur (Malory 8.1).

i.54.5 54.5 Cf. Rom 7:7: ‘I knewe not sinne, but by the Law’.

i.54.6–i.54.7 54.6-7 Amavia, dressed ‘in Palmers weed’ (52.8), here plays the Palmer’s role.

i.55.3–i.55.6 55.3-6 Cf. arg.3 and 49.9 and notes. The inscription functions as a riddle to which the solution is the names of the characters, although ‘Amavia’ seems to elide or compress L Amaviva. The name has been glossed as combining L amo I love + vita life with L amavi I have loved and the Hebrew Heváh: ‘And the man called his wives name Heváh, because she was the mother of all living’ (Gen 3:20); it may also echo John 12:25, ‘He who loveth his life, shall lose it’. The name ‘Amavia’ may also recall ‘Amata’, wife of Latinus and mother of Lavinia, whose suicide is described at Aen 12.593-611. Bacchus is the Greek god of wine; the Nymph, unexplained at this point in the narrative, will be identified by the Palmer at ii.7-10. Acrasia’s curse uses the ‘linke’ between Bacchus and the Nymph to destroy that between Mordant and Amavia.

i.55.3 cup thus charmd: See 52.2n; cf. the golden cup of Fidelia at I.x.13.2-5.

i.55.3 him parting she deceiud: Cf. Rom 7:11 ‘For sinne toke occasion by the commadement, and disceived me, and thereby slew me’.

i.55.6 55.6 Upton cites Heliodorus, Ethiopica: καθαρας σοι τας νυμφας ως σοι φίλον και ακοινωνητους του Διονυσου (Katharas soi tas numphas hōs soi philon kai akoinōnētous tou Dionysou, translated by Upton ‘I drink to you the nymphs that are pure and unlinked with Bacchus’; 5.16.1.4). For the dilution of wine with water as a conventional emblem of temperance, and for the allegorical reading of water as doctrine and wine as ‘ardent will’ (Pierre Bersuire, Morale reductorium [1517]), see Fowler (1960: 147-48). Fidelia bears a ‘cup of gold, / With wine and water fild up to the hight’ at I.x.13.2-3, alluding to the wine and water mingled in the communion chalice. On this symbolism cf. John 19:23, ‘And there followed another Angel, saying, Babylon that great citie is fallen, it is fallen: for she made all nations to drinke of the wine of the wrath of her fornication’; also 1 John 5:6, ‘This is that Jesus Christ that came by water and blood: not by water onely, but by water and blood: and it is that Spirit, that beareth witnesse: for that Spirit is trueth’.

i.55.9 dead suddeinly he downe did sincke: Cf. Rom 7:9-10: ‘but when the commandement came, sinne revived, But I dyed: and the same comandement which was ordeined unto life, was founde to be unto me unto death’.

i.56.1 56.1 The timing and abruptness of Amavia’s death emphasize that losse of love, to her that loves to live entails loss of life.

i.57.2 57.2 Guyon’s moralizing response proclaims the spectacle of Mordtant and Amavia to be an emblem of mortal human nature.

i.57.6 her: Probably refers either to ‘feeble nature’ or to 'passion' rather than to ‘reason’.

i.57.7–i.57.9 57.7-9 The distinction between irascible and concupiscible passions, first evoked at 34.7-9, becomes explicit in this formulation.

i.58.1 (said he): Ambiguous, indicating either that the Palmer replies or that Guyon continues to speak

i.58.1 squire: Square, an instrument used by carpenters to measure angles, and a common emblem of temperance as ‘golden mean’ (hence ‘golden squire’). Cf. Fowler (1960: 143). The reference to Aristotle’s notion of virtue as a mean between vices of excess and deficiency anticipates the schematic allegory to follow in canto ii.

i.58.4 Nor . . . tene: ‘Nor seethe in disheartened grief and sorrowful vexation’. Church 1758 proposes emending frye to fryze (freeze).

i.58.9 in the meane: ‘In the meantime’ (pending ‘eternall doome’); the echo of line 2 suggests that to bury Amavia is temperate in its deferral of judgment. Watkins finds in the discussion about burying Amavia a recollection of Virgil’s lines describing Proserpine’s hesitancy to cut the lock of hair that will release Dido into death (Aen 4.696-99; Watkins 1995: 121-23). Punning on the Aristotelian definition that will organize the next canto—temperance as a mean between excess and deficiency—Spenser here emphasizes the temporality of temperance; see ‘Introduction’ 00 on the Pauline and Lutheran notion of patience as suffering in hope.

i.59.1 equall doome: Cf. 36.2, 49.2, and 50.3.

i.59.2 the commen In of rest: Death is an inn because the travelers who stop there are en route to their final destination.

i.59.6–i.59.9 59.6-9 At Aen 6.321-330, the Sybil explains to Aeneas that unburied souls cannot cross the river Styx to gain their final rest for a hundred years, and he ‘pit[ies] in soul their cruel lot’ (sortemque animi miseratus iniquam; 332).

i.59.6 teene: Possibly a variant spelling of the verb ‘tine’, meaning ‘to close; to enclose in something; to hedge in’ (OED). ‘Buriall’ would then be a noun modifier, and the line might be paraphrased, ‘But religious reverence doth [with] burial enclose both alike’.

i.59.9 59.9 Echoing ‘good and bad’ from line 2, Guyon here asserts that to lie ‘unburied [because] bad’ is as shameful as to die in sin.

i.60.1 St. 60-61 The act of burial corresponds to the office of the sixth beadman in the House of Holiness (I.x.42), though Guyon carries out a ceremony at odds with Christian practice. In 61 his oath of vengeance and his ritual mingling of blood, earth, and hair strongly mark the pagan character of his ‘Religious reverence’ (59.6), and of his response to the episode more broadly. This emphasis on pagan ritual and revenge sorts oddly with Guyon’s recognition at 27.6 of ‘The sacred badge of my Redeemers death’ on the shield of the Recrosse knight, but there too Guyon was intent on revenge, a motif that recalls the argument of Despair in Book I: ‘life must life, and blood must blood repay’ (ix.43.6).

i.60.1–i.60.4 60.1-4 The two ‘bodies’ have a single ‘closed eye’, and seem to be placed together in a single grave (‘it’, 60.3).

i.60.1 to engraue: To entomb, with a latent pun on inscription that, like the motif of revenge, recalls Despair’s combined emphasis on the law and the ‘table plain’ in which the torments of the damned are depicted (I.ix.47.5, 49.6-9).

i.60.3 sad Cypresse: Cf. I.i.8.9, ‘the Cypresse funerall’. In glossing SC Nov 145, E.K. refers to Cypress as ‘used of the old Paynims in the furnishing of their funerall Pompe. and properly the signe of all sorrow and heavinesse’; in Arcadia Sidney refers to ‘Cypresse braunches; wherewith in olde time they were woont to dresse graves’ (1590, 308). Cf. Aen 3.63-4, stand Manibus arae, / caeruleis maestate vittis atraque cupresso (‘altars are set up to the dead, made mournful with sombre fillets and black cypress’).

i.61.2 61.2 Cf. Aen 4:704 on Iris’s release of Dido from suffering: dextra crinem secat (‘with her hand shears the lock’).

i.61.5–i.61.6 61.5-6 Cf. Ruth 1:17: ‘Where thou dyest, wil I dye, and there wil I be buryed. the Lord do so to me and more also, if oght but death departe thee and me’, echoed at 1 Sam 3:17. The care of widows and orphans is the office of the seventh beadman in the House of Holiness, I.x.43.

i.61.8 guiltie blood: The guilt is Acrasia’s insofar as she causes the bloodshed; original sin would also make the blood itself a source of guilt, but cf. ii.4.4 and 4.10, where the Palmer will apparently reject this reading. Christian teaching would likewise hold Amavia guilty of shedding her own blood, a reading the present context resists.