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.)
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.
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’.
Trompart: From Fr tromper to deceive, by analogy to English ‘trump’, ‘trumpant’, ‘trumpery’, also derived from tromper and its forms trompant and tromperie. Parodies the ‘trumpets sterne’ of I.pr.1.4 much as Trompart parodies the function of the epic poet to ‘blazon forth’ praise; the name thus seems to emerge comically from the ‘bellowes’ of the preceding line.
Trompart and Braggadocchio have been read at least since Upton 1758 as glancing satirically at the courtship of Elizabeth by the duc d’Alencon and his agent Simier. For the literary antecedents of these characters in Ariosto, OF, and other texts, see the article on each in SpE.
St. 22-31 These ten stanzas comprise a blazon, or formal pictorial description of female beauty. The primary motive is honorific, but satiric touches can be discerned. The passage interweaves echoes from Tasso’s Rinaldo, Ariosto’s OF, Virgil’s Aen, and Song Sol, which Ponsonby in 1591 (Complaints, ‘The Printer to the Gentle Reader’) says he ‘understands’ Spenser to have translated, although no such text survives.
The Virgilian echoes come from separate but related passages. They include details from the description of Venus as she appears to her son virginis os habitumque gerens et virginis arma (‘with a maiden’s face and mien, and a maiden’s arms’; Aen 1.315): namque umeris de more habilem suspenderat arcum / venatrix dedratque comam diffudere ventis, / nuda genu nodoque sinus collecta fluentis (‘For from her shoulders in huntress fashion she had slung the ready bow and had given her hair to the winds to scatter; her knee bare, and her flowing robes gathered in a knot’; Aen 1.318-20). These details link Belphoebe also to Diana, whom Venus partly impersonates with her virginal disguise; thus when Virgil compares Dido to Diana later in Book 1, the description echoes that of Venus: illa pharetram / fert umero gradiensque deas supereminet omnis (‘she bears a quiver on her shoulder, and as she treads overtops all the goddesses’; 1.500-501). Spenser mingles both passages in the blazon, suggesting that Belphoebe (and allegorically, Elizabeth) combines the beauty of Venus with the chastity of Diana.
st. 4-5 Spenser’s allegorical portrait of the ‘wicked Hag’—not named until the Palmer identifies her as Occasion at 10.9—draws upon literary and iconographic traditions for several related figures, including Occasion, Penitence, Fortune, Envy, Discord, and Punishment. Within these traditions, the attributes, appearances, and accoutrements of such figures continually alter as the concepts they embody are redefined. Kiefer (1979), for example, describes the gradual conflation of Fortune with Occasion in the literature, emblems, paintings, and imprese of the Italian Renaissance, as the medieval view of an arbitrary force imposed upon largely passive victims yields to a rival conception of Fortune as a variable set of conditions to be met and mastered by the resourceful human agent.
Occasion is regularly depicted in emblems as a naked young woman with winged heels, not a lame hag clothed in rags. The lameness of Spenser’s hag in 4.3 may echo a verse from Horace used by Van Veen in Horatii Flacci Emblamata (Plate 27a): raro antecedentem scelestum / deseruit pede Poena claudo (‘Punishment with her lame foot rarely forsakes the fleeing criminal’; Odes III.ii.31-32); it may also echo Homer, who says that the sharp-tongued detractor Thersites was ‘bandy-legged and lame in one foot’ (Il 2.217). See Var 2.225-27 and Manning and Fowler (1976).
Beyond these echoes, Spenser recombines elements from at least three sources, Lucian, Ausonius, and Boiardo. From Lucian he takes the image of the young man dragged by the hair—transferring it from Calumny, a beautiful woman, to his ‘mad man’. (The theme of calumny will resurface when this young man’s story is revealed). Unlike Calumny, Spenser’s ‘wicked Hag’ comes stalking after the young man dragged by his hair, in the place of Lucian’s Penitence. As a provocateur in this oddly trailing position, she reflects a persistent motif in canto iv wherein temporal sequences are reversed.
In Ausonius, Epigram 33, Occasio and Metanoea (Regret) appear together as a before-and-after pair. Boiardo offers a similar conception: Orlando, failing to grasp the forelock of Fata Morgana, is set upon by a hag with a flail who identifies herself as ‘Penitenza’ (OI II.ix.1-20). The forelock is a familiar attribute of Occasion, as in the proverb ‘Seize occasion (opportunity, time) by the forelock’ (Smith 1970, no. 777) and in the emblem tradition illustrating it, e.g. Whitney’s In occasionem: ‘What meanes longe lockes before? that suche as meete / Maye houlde at firste, when they occasion finde. / The head behinde all balde, what telles it more? / That none shoulde houlde, that let me slippe before’ (lines 9-12; see arg.2n).
Spenser joins the forelock of opportunity to the abusive speech of Calumny, the ‘vengeaunce’ visited upon her victims by Punishment, and the trailing position of Penitence. This conception mingles figures of consequence with those of cause, suggesting, for example, a connection between the youth dragged along by his hair in st. 3 (consequence) and the forelock (st. 4) by which ‘cause is caught’ (44.6). This compounding of before-and-after reflects the broad irony by which characters in the canto, having mistaken an allegorical figure for the causes of wrath (arg.2n) as the conventional emblem of an opportunity to be grasped, find themselves pursued by the uncontrolled fury they have sought (cf. 32.1n).
44.1-7 The Palmer’s comment in these lines brings out the implicit irony of an allegorical figure who combines the iconography of strife with that of opportunity (Occasio; see st. 4-5n). Only from the point of view of Atin and his lord, Pyrochles, does strife appear as an opportunity to be ‘caught’ by the forelock. The rhyming pair ‘seeke’ and ‘followes eke’ (like the epithet ‘mad man’, repeated from 3.5) link Pyrochles’ reversal of sequence to the predicament initially faced by Guyon and then elaborated in
Phaon’s tale (see notes to 30.1-5 and 31.5-6).
golden apples: Mentioned by Claudian, De Raptu: est etiam lucis arbor praevives opacis / fulgentes viridi ramos curvata metallo (‘There is, moreover, a precious tree in the leafy groves whose curving branches gleam with living ore’; 2.290-91).
Typology would associate Proserpine’s golden apples with the fruit taken by Eve in Gen 2. Spenser may also allude to the golden bough in Virgil: latet arbore opaca / aureus et foliis et lento vimine ramus, / Iuonini infernae dictus sacer (‘There lurks in a shady tree a bough, golden in leaf and pliant stem, held consecrate to nether Juno’; Aen 6.136-38).
St. 21-32 The balance of the canto is given over to a description and tour of the human body, represented as a medieval castle.
St. 21 describes the material (flesh) from which the walls are built, st. 22 the mystical proportions of the architecture. St. 23 figures the mouth, into which Alma leads the knights (st. 26) as they are allegorically swallowed and digested, rising from the stomach through the breast to the brain. (‘Not where he eats,’ as Hamlet says of Polonius, ‘but where he is eaten’; cf. the recurrent image of feeding the eyes in canto vii.) Meanwhile st. 23-26 describe the lips, chin, beard, moustache, nose, tongue, and teeth. St. 27-28 describe the dining hall (throat), governed by Diet and Appetite, followed in st. 29-31 by the kitchen (stomach), cooled by ‘a great payre of bellowes’ (30.4; the lungs). St. 32.6 mentions a ‘secret’ waste disposal system ‘that none might . . . espy’.
St. 22 Since the seventeenth century this has been the most commented-upon stanza in the poem. William Austin (1637) and Sir Kenelm Digby (1643) have long been identified as the earliest glossators in this tradition, but recent work on Ben Jonson’s marginalia establish Jonson’s copy as the almost certain source of Digby’s elaborate Observations on the 22. Stanza. Jonson identifies the circle as the human soul and the triangle as the body, with the quadrate fixed between them signifying the principal humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile). He also identifies the numbers seven and nine with the ‘Planetes and the Angells which ar[e] distributed into a Hierarch[y] which governe the body’ (Riddell and Stewart 1995, 107, 175-76.)
Specific verbal resemblances link this stanza to a discussion of the nature of the soul in Bryskett's A Discourse of Civill Life (1606), a dialogue in which Spenser figures as a participant. Mills (1973) establishes the probability that the passage in Bryskett is an immediate source for this stanza, and demonstrates the explanatory power for understanding this language of the philosophical context toward which Bryskett points: the ‘mortalist controversy’ inspired by the dispute between Aquinas and the Muslim scholar Ibn Rushd (known in Europe as Averroes) over the relationship among the vegetative, sensitive, and rational souls and the mens, or contemplative soul.
The tradition that assigns occult symbolism to numbers and geometrical forms derives from Plato’s Timaeus and was elaborated in the early 5th century by Macrobius, who glosses seven, for example, as ‘the number by which man is conceived, developed in the womb, is born, lives and is sustained’ (The Dream of Scipio I.vi.62-82; trans. Stahl 112). For further discussion of the intellectual traditions behind this stanza and of the critical tradition it has generated, see Fowler (1964), Mills (1973), Hamilton (2001: 238-39) and D. L. Miller (2006: 148-150).
auoided: expelled; evaded
St. 5-68 Stanzas 5-68.2 contain Spenser’s chronicle of British kings from Brute to Uther Pendragon. Mills (1976) points out that, like the human body, the account of British and Faery dynasties is ‘Proportioned equally by seven and nine’ (ix.22.7). Briton moniments is summarized in 63 nine-line stanzas that list 62 kings (Arthur will be the 63rd), while the Antiquitee of Faery Lond (70-76) takes up seven stanzas, or 63 lines. Hamilton 2001 adds that 63 is the number of the ‘grand climacteric’, a notion that goes back to Greek astrology, mathematics, and philosophy.
Occurring every seven years in life, climacterics were thought to be turning points. The ‘grand climacteric’ (usually the ninth) was seen an especially dangerous moment of crisis. Spenser’s time-scheme, which identifies Arthur allegorically with the advent of Elizabeth, thus implies that both reigns are historically fraught. Since his history is punctuated by lapses of the royal line when monarchs died childless (36.1, 54.1, 61.8), the allegorical advent of Elizabeth/Arthur may be fraught in part because the succession is disrupted.