The Spenser Archive Prototype

Sir: Guyon is the only protagonist in the FQ thus entitled on the title page of his legend.

antique: ancient

1.2 antique: Also ‘antic’, i.e. ludicrous or grotesque. Cf. Donne, Elegy 9, ‘The Autumnal’: ‘Name not these living death-heads unto me, / For these, not ancient, but antique be’ (43-4). This wordplay introduces an ambiguity that runs throughout the proem, which pretends to worry about whether Spenser’s fiction possesses the dignity and authority of antiquity or is merely a gothic extravagance.

history: narrative

1.2 history: In early modern usage, either factual (the modern sense) or a purely imaginary (a common synonym for ‘story’).

Of some: by some

1.6 liuing aire: A good example of the freedom with which Spenser commonly transfers epithets, here from ‘none’ to ‘aire’, and of the distinctive quality this freedom lends to the verse: half-animating the air itself, such phrasing contributes to a pervasive fluidity in the boundary between allegorical agents and their physical environments.

1.9 antiquities: Cf. I.pr.2.3-4, imploring the muse to ‘Lay forth out of thine everlasting scryne / The antique rolles, which there lye hidden still’.

1.9 no body: Anticipating the contrast between faith in that which is unseen and knowledge that is available to the senses (the body), elaborated in st. 3 and 4.

2.1 better sence: As opposed to the senses through which a ‘body can know’ (see 4.4n).

aduize: consider

2.2 red: A favorite word of Spenser’s both for its convenience in rhyming and for its lexical range. Here primarily a synonym for its rhyming partner ‘discovered’, it also suggests the activities of conjecture, interpretation, declaration, and, of course, construal of a text. Its range is suggested by the way Spenser punningly enfolds the verb into its rhyming partners ‘discover-red’ and ‘measur-red’.

late age: recent ages, as opposed to antiquity

2.6 Indian Perú: Early explorers had believed that Peru was India. By 1590 the difference was well understood. The passage thus suggests, through the rhyming play on ‘red’ and ‘discovered’ (with its accented last syllable), that Peru was initially both discover-read and misread.

2.8 Amazons huge riuer: Francisco de Orellana in 1541-42 was the first European to sail the Amazon.

2.9 fruitfullest Virginia: Named after Elizabeth in 1584. The epithet combines colonial motives, asserting the economic value of newly discovered lands, with a Protestant adaptation of the Virgin Mary’s paradoxical status as fecund virgin.

3.3–3.8 3.3-8 Spenser is here imitating Ariosto, OF 7.1 and Chaucer, LGW Prol. 12-15. Spenser fuses these more or less playful references with an echo of Heb 11:1: ‘Now faith is the grounde of things, which are hoped for, and the evidence of things which are not sene’; the rest of chapter 11, an extended definition of faith, is evoked more broadly in the proem. Hamilton 2001 also notes a reminiscence of Giordano Bruno’s astronomical speculations in the 1584 treatise De l'Infinito Universo e Mondi (‘On the Infinite Universe and Worlds’). This fusion of literary, religious, and scientific allusions creates an ambiguous, distinctively Spenserian tonal irony.

misweene: misconceive, suppose incorrectly

happily: by chance or good fortune

4.1–4.5 4.1-5 The keen-scented hound tracking textual "feet" is a Renaissance commonplace applied to the seeker of rare manuscripts or to the humanist editor filling in manuscript lacunae (Passannante 2011: 90), but Spenser in these lines appears to be tracking the source in Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 1.400-409. An emphasis on moving beyond the realm of perception is distinctive to both passages, and Spenser’s “certain signes” may echo vestigia certa from Lucretius.

4.1 yet: Culminating the series of four begun at 3.1 (‘Yet all these were’), this yet stretches the adversative sense of its predecessors into a temporal notion of prolonging, integral to the argument that the unseen may be what we haven’t seen yet.

4.2 certein signes: Cf. John 4:48: ‘Then said Jesus unto Him, Except ye se signes and wonders, ye wil not beleve’. Extends the resonance of the allusion to Hebrews in st. 3.

4.2 here sett: May refer to the positioning of words in a piece of writing or to the setting of type on the page.

4.2 sondrie place: Playing the geographical sense of ‘place’ against its use as the designation for a passage in a text, familiar from the glosses to the Geneva Bible. ‘Place’ in this sense is a vernacular equivalent for the more learned expression loci communes.

4.3 ne let him then admyre: The romance topos of the marvelous, canvassed extensively in Italian Renaissance criticism, passes into travel narratives and other New World discourses as a trope of discovery (Greenblatt 1992). Spenser’s proem has evoked the wonder of geographical discovery in a characteristically ambiguous register, half-serious and half-playful, that lends this phrase its edge of irony: the reader who would ‘wonder’ at newly discovered worlds (3.9) should not wonder at the inadequacy of his common sense to apprehend the marvels of Spenser’s text.

4.4 sence: Powers of interpretation (cf. 2.1, ‘with better sense’, and 3.4, ‘witless man’), but playing also on the five senses, or ‘wits’ and the ‘common sense’ that synthesizes them (thus Thomas Wilson 1553 says that ‘The common sense...is therefore so called, because it geveth judgement, of al the five outwarde senses’ [112]). These ‘outward’ or bodily senses were contrasted with the ‘inward sense’, i.e. faculties of mind or spirit. This ambiguity concentrates into a single word the playful pretense that Faeryland is a geographical location like Peru, able to be discovered by the outward senses, rather than a textual ‘place’ (4.2n) accessible only to the intellect.

n’ote: might not

4.5 n’ote: A pseudo-Chaucerian contraction for ‘ne mote’, might not. (See glossary entry.)

4.5 fine footing: Elusive tracks or artful metrics—an ambiguity parallel to those of ‘red’, ‘place’, and ‘sence’. The line may thus be paraphrased ‘That can’t track fancy (poetic) footwork without a bloodhound’. In 1596 Spenser will repeat the pun on ‘footing’, referring to Faeryland as ‘these strange waies, where never foote did use, / Ne none can find, but who was taught them by the Muse’ (VI.pr.2.7-9).

4.6 fayrest: Spenser more than once links ‘faery’ (4.1, 8) to ‘fayre’ (4.7) and ‘fayrest’ as if it expressed the comparative degree of a beauty whose superlative is embodied in the queen (cf. 1.pr.2.5). This ambiguity cuts against the wordplay elsewhere in the proem that tends to disembody Faeryland, and thus implies that it can be ‘red’ in both senses (intellectually as well as corporeally; see 4.4n) only in Elizabeth.

4.7 this fayre mirrhour: A favorite metaphor of Spenser’s, elaborated in all but one of the proems and in many other texts; for examples, see Am 7 and 45, HL 196, and HB 181, 224. Here its seeming simplicity is complicated by the association between ‘fayre’ and ‘Faery’, by the implication that Elizabeth is the mirror in which Faeryland may be ‘red’, and by the assertion in the immediately following lines that Faeryland reflects the past as well as the present.

4.7–4.9 4.7-9 According to early modern constitutional theory, the monarch possesses two ‘bodies’: the personal body of the mortal individual and the undying ‘body politic’, through which the monarch personifies the realm. These lines evoke the body personal in Elizabeth’s ‘face’ and the body politic in her ‘realmes’, concluding with her lineage, which traces the genealogy of each.

5.2 couert vele: Echoes biblical accounts of Moses veiling his face to temper the ‘glory’ or radiance that shone from it after he spoke with God (Exod 34:30). At 2 Cor 3:13 St. Paul reinterprets the passage allegorically, suggesting that what Moses hid was not the radiance but its fading. If there is also a glance at the legal term femme covert (the legal status, or rather non-status, of a married woman), it would carry strong irony, given the queen’s unmarried state. Both vele and shadowes echo standard Renaissance discussions of fiction in general and of allegory in particular.

5.2 shadowes light: Shadows that are trivial or facetious (continuing the pretense from st. 1 that fiction is somehow disreputable), in contrast to the rhyming use (at 5.5) as illumination. But the paradox of ‘shadowes light’ reintroduces the sense of illumination as a secondary reference, and it thus plays against the superficial sense of ‘light’ as trivial.

5.8 Guyon: The name may come from heroes of French romance, particularly the medieval metrical romance Guy of Warwick, where the name ‘Guy’ is regularly varied to ‘Guyon’ for rhyme; Guy’s two-part career, as questing knight and then as pilgrim, offers a template for the pairing of Guyon and the Palmer in Book II (King 2007). Guy was especially well known because the English earls of Warwick, Robert and Ambrose, claimed descent from him (Cooper 2007: 185). The name also echoes Gihon, one of the four rivers of Paradise, associated with Temperance (Fowler 1960), and may additionally, as Camden thought, recall Ital guido guide (1605:82). In the Golden Legend it is glossed as ‘wrestler’ (1955:112). See SpE s.v. ‘Guyon’.

5.9 rule: The term has a range of meanings here, among them the fundamental principle of temperance, the body of writings that make up its lore, the standard by which it is measured, and its reign or governance.

5.9 goodly doth appeare: Cf. ‘to some appeare’ (3.9). This verbal echo belongs to the pattern of contrasts running throughout the language of the proem, suggesting that Temperance will ‘appear’ to the inward rather than the outward senses. This suggestion is reinforced by the rhyming partner ‘heare’(5.8), since hearing Guyon’s adventures is an activity of the common sense whereas the rule of Temperance can appear only to the intellect (see 4.4n).

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.

conning: cunning

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).

cancred: ulcerated; figuratively, ‘infected’ with evil

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.

caytiues: caitiffs’

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’.

algates: altogether

late ygoe: not long ago

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.

offend: injure or attack (in biblical use, to stumble)

drifte: purpose

engins: contrivances

practick: crafty; experienced; concerned with practice (opposed to ‘theoretic’)

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).

credit: reputation, credibility

stales: decoys

traynes: snares or baits

priuy spyals: secret spies

ketch him at a vauntage: the modern idiom would be ‘catch him at a disadvantage’

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.

demure: sober, reserved

amate: dismay

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’).

mickle worship: great honor

lists: bounded space of combat

debate: armed encounter

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.

als: also

comely: appropriate or suitable

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’.

stire: stir

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.

aread: conjecture

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’.

weened well to: thought he would

vncouth wyle: unrecognized trick

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.

clew: ball of yarn or thread

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.)

languorous constraynt: sorrowful affliction or compulsion

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’.

aduaunst: put forth, put into action

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.

corps: body

sheene: beautiful

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.

drew: dragged

i.11.6 drew: Cf. ‘tract’ at 12.7.

bent: aimed

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).

fact: deed

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

treachour: traitor

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.

tract: trace

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).

bedight: clothed or furnished

For thy: therefore

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’.

teene: grief

bespake: said to her

liefe: dear

wayment: bewail or lament

voluntarie: self-willed (cf. ‘wilfull bent’), but also freely chosen, deliberate

reaue: plunder

read: judge or pronounce

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.

or her wrong: or wrong her

read: declare

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

short: speedy

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’.

ywis: indeed, certainly

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

enterpris: undertake

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.

fairely quit him: fully acquit himself

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’.

saluing: cleansing

As: i.e., disguising herself as

well aguisd: suitably dressed

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.

late: recently

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.

habiliments: accessories

irrenowmed: not famous

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’.

engine: stratagem

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.

fact: deed

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.

do him rew: make him regret it

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.

pricke: spur

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.

embrace: to mount (a shield) on the arm

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).

rencounter: encounter in battle

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.

hardiment: daring, or a daring deed

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

inclyning: yielding, bowing, or adopting a favorable disposition

me behoueth rather to vpbrayd: ‘it is appropriate to scold me instead’

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.

at one: reconciled

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

beuers: visors

comportaunce: conduct

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

saliaunce: sally or assault

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.

fond encheason: silly reason

infamous: deserving infamy; detestable

faitour: impostor

ill bested: badly off

red: declared

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.

late auizd: recently observed

aguizd: arrayed

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.

pageant: allegorical tableau or procession

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.

mote yee thee: may you thrive

as well can wish your thought: Either ‘as well as your thoughts can wish’ or ‘as your thoughts may well wish’.

thewes: moral qualities; habits of conduct

courteous conge: ceremonious farewell

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

steedy: steady (because held with a firm grip); trusty

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.

yfere: together

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.

dearnly: dismally

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).

carelesse: negligent or uncaring

doome: verdict

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’.

warne death from: forbid death to, order death away from

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.

froward: unfavorable; adverse

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).

thee deignes to hold in liuing state: sees fit to keep you alive

embrewd: soaked; dyed; defiled

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.

thrild: pierced

Hynd: doe

launched: lanced

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’).

the sad pang: death-spasm

straict: straight, immediately

the thick: thicket; densest part of the wood

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.

smart: sharp physical pain; grief or affliction

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).

embay: soak

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.

lusty hed: lustiness, exuberant vitality; also lustfulness

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’).

starke: rigid, unyielding

attone: at once

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

grudging: growling or grumbling

courage: heart or spirit

stoupe: submit

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.

sad: heavy

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).

sight: sighed

foltring: faltering

lett: hinder

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

infest: attack

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

priefe: proof; test or trial

cast to compas: try to accomplish

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.

equall: impartial

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.

Vouchsafed: were graciously willing

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.

fordonne: put to death

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.

forbeare: part with, surrender

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.

repriue: redeem

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’.

well: wellspring, fountain

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.

wreath: twist aside

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

tyre: attire

her basest part: the passions

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).

doome: judgment

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.

vouchsafe: allow

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’).

embraue: adorn

vtmost obsequy: final ceremony

Bynempt: swore

ay: ever

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.

2 face: Personification; the rhetorical term for personification, ‘prosopopoeia’, from Gk προσωπον pr𝜊sōpon face or person (from προς pr𝜊s to + ωψ 𝜊ps face) and ποι𝜀ω poiein to make.

2 golden Meane: Refers to Aristotle’s concept of virtue as a mean between the excess and deficiency of a given quality (Nic Eth 2.6-9). Cf. Horace on the aurea mediocritas (Odes 2.10.5).

3 Extremities: The extremes of excess and deficiency, as at 38.4; also the hands as they flank the ‘face’.

cleane: completely

4 cleane: Cf. ‘clensd’ (arg. 1).

1.3 sad Tragedie: Cf. ‘pitifull spectacle’ (i.40.1, 9).

1.3 vptyde: The awkward sense of neatly tidying up, in contrast to the dénoument (unravelling) proper to tragedy, extends to the unapt repetition of up as the knight picks the ‘litle babe’ up off the ground, and prepares for the shocking incongruity of the child’s blissful obliviousness to the ‘sad Tragedy’ of its birth.

blandishment: alluring behavior

innocent: ignorant

1.7 innocent: Ironically not ‘innocent’ in a spiritual sense, as the surrounding language of blood and guilt insists with its repeated implication of original sin.

2.2 in . . . balefull ashes bred: Cf. the phoenix, a common Renaissance emblem of resurrection.

liuelyhed: inheritance

2.6 2.6 Links the baby with its bloody hands to the bleeding branch in the Fradubio episode at I.ii.30.6-9.

2.7–2.8 2.7-8 Cf. John 15:6, ‘If a man abide not in me, he is cast forthe as a branche, and withereth’. Guyon’s conclusion (‘Such is the state of men’) might seem to assume the absence of grace, in contrast to the implications of the phoenix; like the texture of allusion to Romans in this and the previous canto, the metaphor of the babe as a branch torn from its trunk—in contrast to the conventional image of the genalogical tree—depicts life itself as a form of death.

3.1 St. 3-4 The image of the phoenix (2.6) recalls the well in which Redcrosse is restored at I.xi.29-30 (cf. the simile comparing the ‘new-borne’ knight to an Eagle at I.xi.34). Guyon’s failed effort to wash the baby’s hands in this well has been diversely interpreted as an allegory of baptism and of Mosaic Law. See The Thirty Nine Articles IX, on original sin; XVI, on sin after baptism; and XVIII, on the insufficiency of the Law for salvation. Paul discusses these topics in Rom 5-7; see esp. 6:2-4: ‘Howe shall we, that are dead to sinne, live yet therein? Knowe ye not, that all we which have bene baptized into Jesus Christ, have bene baptized into his death? We are buried then with him by baptisme into his death, that like as Christ was raysed up from the dead to the glorie of the Father, so we also should walke in newnesse of life’. The language and imagery of these cantos suspend Temperance in the interval between baptism-into-death and resurrection into newness of life.

3.3 3.3 Cf. I.viii.40.3, ‘Entire affection hateth nicer hands’.

diuerse: leading in different directions

3.9 diuerse: Cf. I.i.10.9. Refers to the alternative hypotheses set forth in the next stanza; figuratively, plays out the characteristic pun on 'maze' in Spenserian 'amazement'.

in lieu of: in place of

4.3 in lieu of innocence: This interpretation of the stigma contradicts the hypothesis that the babe smiles on his dead parents 'As . . . innocent / Of that was doen' (1.7-8). The infant’s shocking combination of inherited guilt and ignorance of sin suggest to Paul’s description of life prior to the Mocaic law (Rom 7:9, ‘For I once was alive, without the Law’).

4.4 Imprinted: Cf. the pun on 'engrave' at i.60.1 and note; as a token of divine wrath the stigma would similarly be associated with the motif of revenge and the rhetoric of Despair at I.ix.47-49.

4.5 bloodguiltinesse: Normally, ‘guilty of bloodshed’, but here perhaps ‘guilt inhering in the blood’; see 3.4 and i.61.8 and notes. The word occurs twice more in FQ, at 30.3 and at II.vii.19.5.

4.6–4.8 4.6-8 These lines treat Mordant and Amavia as a single body: because he drank, ‘they dronk’, and ‘their blood’ is infected. In line 8 they become a single ‘tronck’. See i.60.1-4n.

4.6 charme and veneme: Cf. i.52.3, ‘words and weedes’.

4.7 4.7 The conjecture of 'secret filth' infecting the parents' blood implies venereal disease.

4.9 4.9 Since the bodies have not been dead long enough to decay their stench calls for explanation, although the 'great contagion' of this conjecture may blur the line between a natural cause like disease and a supernatural cause like sin.

at gaze: bewildered

to bord: to address

5.1 to bord: From the sense of coming up alongside a ship in order to go aboard.

hart amated: emotionally confounded

5.4 5.4 'Out of your ignorance you build up great wonderment/a great prodigy', referring at once to the conjectures of st. 4 and to the 'wavering wonder' that gives rise to them.

vertues: powers

5.8–5.9 5.8-9 ‘Whoever has the knowledge to have selected among waters based on their secret powers has been able to use them to effect wonders far beyond the ordinary’.

indewd: invested

6.1 indewd: The pun on the rhyming partner (invested with dew = in-dewed) aptly folds the action of supplying moisture back into the 'sourse', Dame Nature's breast.

6.2 great Dame Nature: A frequent character in medieval allegories from Alain de Lisle’s De Planctu Naturae to Chaucer’s Parlement of Fowles, the goddess Nature appears at TCM vii.5.1 and disappears at vii.59.9; Alain and Chaucer are mentioned at vii.9. Faunus, Diana, and another nymph (Molanna) also figure in TCM, along with an etiological fable about rivers.

6.5 Floraes painted lap: Flora is the Roman goddess of flowering plants, associated with natural fertility; cf. her image in Boticelli’s Primavera. Contrast her appearance in Redcrosse’s lustful dream (I.i.48.9) and E.K.’s reference to her as a Roman prostitute (SC March gloss to 16).

6.6 guifte of later grace: Echoing Rom 5:15: ‘But yet the gift is not so, as is the offence: for if through the offence of one, many be dead, muche more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man Jesus Christ, hathe abunded unto many’.

6.8 vertue: Cf. 5.6.

7.1 St. 7-9 Cf. the enchanted well and indwelling nymph at I.vii.4-6. Spenser may base the fable of the well’s nymph on the legend of St. Winifred. For Drayton’s account of ‘the sacred fount of Winifrid’, see Polyolbion 10.124-164. There is a corresponding well in the episode from Trissino that Spenser draws on in Book II (L’Italia 4.673-697; see i.8-34n).

hartlesse Hynd: timid doe

7.4 hartlesse Hynd: With a pun on ‘hart’ as stag, ‘doe without a mate’.

Robucke: the male of a species of deer found in Europe and Asia

7.5 Dan Faunus: See 6.2n. Faunus is a wood-god, identified with Pan and associated with fertility but also specifically with amorous pursuit: Horace calls him Nympharum fugientum amator (‘lover of the flying nymphs’; Odes 3.18.1).

7.7 chace: Since the stanza form calls for a ‘b’-rhyme to end line 7, editors often emend to ‘pray’ (prey) or ‘ray’. Some who consider the repetition of ‘chace, / And chaced’ to be deliberate have devised interpretations for the violation; Kellogg and Steele 1965 note ‘four other passages in Book II, and nine altogether in The Faerie Queene, in which the early editions give a non-rhyming word in a position where an obvious synonym would rhyme . . . . The other imperfect rhymes in Book II are at ii.42.6, iii.28.7, viii.29.7, and xii.54.7’.

8.2 of shame affrayd: See i.20.5, 30.1-9 and notes.

8.4 Diana: The goddess of chastity and of the hunt. The nymph’s invocation of Diana and subsequent metamorphosis mark this episode as a self-conscious imitation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; often cited are the transformations of Daphne in Book 1, Arethusa in Book 5, Biblis in Book 9, and Acis in Book 13.

8.7 dismayd: With its rhyme-partner ‘mayd’, emphasizes the paradox that the nymph can remain a maid (virgin) only by ceasing to be a maid (girl).

8.8 mate: The play on 'mayd' and 'mate' suggests by way of a pun that the miraculous well left Guyon 'amated' at 5.3 because its singularity derives from the nymph's refusal to be 'amated' (matched, joined) by Faunus. The fountain’s nymph is, therefore, figuratively the antithesis of the water that mixes with wine in the curse Acrasia uses to deceive Mortdant: ‘So soone as Bacchus with the Nymphe does lincke’ (i.55.6 and note).

9.3 old conceiued dreads: Implicitly contrasting the conception of unchanging ‘dreads’ with the sexual conception that the maid refuses.

vertues: moral qualities; natural properties

tryde: proven

10.2–10.9 10.2-9 The Palmer’s interpretation of the bloody hands as a testament to Amavia’s ‘innocence’ neglects the Christian belief that suicide is a mortal sin; his sense of them as a ‘sacred Symbole’ calling for ‘revengement’ violates the Biblical injunction against revenge, and aligns Amavia uncomfortably with Duessa, in the preceding episode, as a distressed damsel appealing for vengeance. (See i.37.8n for the topical allusion in the 'bloody hand'.)

10.5 innocence: See 1.7-8, 4.3, and i.37.6-9. In the theological allegory, the mother 'in her last testament' bequeaths not innocence but original sin.

10.7 Symbole: OED identifies this as the earliest recorded use of the word in its modern sense to mean something that stands for something else.

10.7 dwell: Cf. Romans 7.17, 'the sin that dwelleth in me'.

moniment: warning or memorial

sell: saddle

11.7–12.4 11.7-12.4 The import of Guyon’s loss is suggested by the shared etymology of ‘chivalry’ and ‘cavalry’ from L caballarius horseman. In Le Morte Darthur, Sir Lamerok berates his brothers, unhorsed in jousting, by demanding ‘What is a knyght but whan he is on horseback? For I sette nat by a knytht whan he is on foote’ (10.48).

barbes: protective coverings for the chest and flanks of a war-horse

double burden: his own armor and that of Mordant

12.7 Built on a rocke: Cf. the ‘wise man, which hathe buylded his house on a rocke’ at Matt 7:24.

13.4 by equall shares in equall fee: The sisters inherit equal shares and equal rights to hold those shares.

Drew them in partes: divided them into factions

13.7–13.9 13.7-9: Cf. Aristotle: ‘the extreme states are contrary both to the intermediate state and to each other, and the intermediate to the extremes’ (Nic Eth 2.8).

14.4 Medina: From L mediana in the middle, and perhaps also medens physician. Cf. SC Julye 234, Thomalin’s emblem, In medio virtus, glossed by E.K. with reference to ‘the saying of olde Philosophers, that vertue dwelleth in the middest, being environed with two contrary vices’. At Julye 236 this motto is counterpoised by Morrell’s emblem, In summo foelicitas, which replies to Thomalin’s ‘with continuaunce of the same Philosophers opinion, that albeit all bountye dwelleth in mediocritie, yet perfect felicitye dewlleth in supramacie’. The philosophers in question, who start out in the plural and then seem to coalesce into a single figure, are apparently Aristotle and Plato respectively.

enterprize: take in hand

14.9 enterprize: From L inter between and prendere to take.

courted: paid courteous attention to

15.6 15.6 ‘Beyond what would normally be the rational capacity of one so young’ (the paradoxical excess of the golden mean).

her selfe . . . did frame: directed her efforts and actions

16.4 wanton: Has a wide range of possible meanings, from ‘undisciplined’ to ‘amorous’ to ‘lewd and lascivious’.

16.5 Accourting: Cf. ‘comely courted’ at 15.2 above; this courting may simply be extravagant (‘lavish’), or it may be amorous. OED cites only this instance.

countenaunce: make a show of or pretend

16.8 countenaunce: OED cites only this instance for the sense ‘make a show of or pretend’.

17.2 Huddibras: The ‘great . . . name’ of an early English king whose role in Briton moniments resembles that of Medina rather than of his namesake in this episode: ‘Next Huddibras his realm did not encrease, / But taught the land from wearie wars to cease’ (x.25.4-5). The knight’s name associates him here with his chief quality (Huddi hardy + Fr bras arm) and with his armor of ‘shyning bras’; cf. Job 6.12, ‘is my flesh of brasse?’

17.8 17.8 He was more temperamental than courageous.

18.1 Sansloy: Last seen at the close of I.vi engaged in combat with Sir Satyrane.

20.3 middle space: Medina’s proper turf.

20.5 the scorned life to quell: Their rage is ultimately suicidal.

20.6–20.7 20.6-7 See 12.6-9n and 20.5n; the conflict between extremes not only disturbs the occupants of the castle but threatens its foundations (‘raysd’ = ‘raised’, but the secondary sense ‘razed’ threatens).

fouldring: flashing

20.9 fouldring: From L fulgere to flash and fulgur lightning-flash.

enraunged: arranged in an orderly fashion

21.5–21.9 21.5-9 The anticlimax of ‘to understond’ emphasizes the comedy of Guyun’s rushing in wielding sword and shield complete with Homeric epithet (‘sunbroad’) in order to ‘pacifie’ the combatants—not ‘as well he can’ (which the meter would favor), but ‘well as he can’, which turns out to be not very well. Having lost his horse and borne his armor as a ‘burden’ (12.4), Guyon is learning the limited value of armor and weapons in achieving temperance.

lybicke: Lybian

22.6 lybicke Ocean: Presumably the desert with its wave-like dunes, since bears and tigers would be unlikely to fight in a literal ocean.

surbet: footsore, bruised

22.7 surbet: Cf. III.iv.34.5.

24.1–24.9 St. 24 Cf. Ariosto, OF 21.53.1-6: Come ne l’atro mar legno talora, / che da duo venti sia percosso e vinto, / ch’ora uno inanzi l’ha mandato, et ora / un altro al primo termine respinto, / e l’han girato da poppa e da prora, / dal più possente al fin resta sospinto (‘As a ship on the high seas will sometimes be driven and buffeted by two winds, and one wind will thrust it onwards until the opposing wind blows it back whence it came; and it is slewed round, stem and tern, by the winds until the stronger of the two prevails’).

conduct: handling

25.5 dismade: Dismayed, i.e. discouraged, but the secondary pun ‘dis-made’ undercuts the narrator’s double . . praise (25.9) by suggesting that Guyon’s intervention partakes of the same destructive impulses that motivate the combatants. Cf. 20.5-7 and notes, and note further how Guyon ceases to be differentiated from the other two knights in 26.1-27.1, where the adjectives ‘valiaunt’, ‘miserable’, and ‘furious’ apply equally to all three.

darraine: engage in (combat)

26.2 darraine: With an emphasis (ironic, here) on the orderly drawing up of ranks in preparation for battle (cf. ‘enraunged’, 21.4).

26.3 triple warre: Cf. 13.7-9n.

iarre: strife

27.1 St. 27-33 Cf. IV.iii.46-52, where Cambina reconciles Triamond and Cambel.

27.2–27.3 tresses torne, / And naked brest: Conventional signs of grief.

bad: past tense of ‘bid’ (command)

28.2 bad: The line-ending floats ‘not good’ as a momentary (and apt) possibility.

Pursew the end of: not put a stop to, but fight to the finish of

reuoke: restrain, hold in check; or call back (to a state of reason)

fell: ferocious

29.2 Erinnys: The Erinyes (Roman name, Furies) are spirits of vengeance in Greek myth. Cf. ‘mortal vengeaunce’ and ‘fowle revenging rage’ at 30.4 and 30.9, as well as i.61.7, ii.10.8, and the repetition of ‘bloodguiltinesse’ cited in ii.4.5n. See also E.K.’s gloss to SC Nov 164 naming the three Furies.

29.2–29.3 29.2-3 At Aen 7.456-57 one of the Furies, Allecto, flings a torch at Turnus et atro / lumine fumantis fixit sub pectore taedas (‘and fixed in his breast the brand, smoking with lurid light’).

parts: attributes

thrust: stab

29.6 thrust: By metathesis, a 16th-c form of ‘thirst’.

liefest: dearest

iarre: strife

31.1 louely concord: See IV.x.34-35.

31.3 31.3 Cf. i.57.7-8, ‘The strong it weakens with infirmitie, / And with bold fury armes the weakest hart’.

31.7 Oliue girlond: Cf. SC Apr 124, ‘Olives bene for peace’.

meeds: rewards

appall: subdue

abase: bow

requests: petitions

32.7 requests: Subjects petitioning the king were heard by a part of the council called the Court of Requests.

32.8 as a law: Compare the legal language here with allusions to passages on the law in Rom 7, glossed at i.54.5, 55.3, and 55.9.

32.9 32.9 I.e., they gave their word as knights to observe the terms of the treaty.

treague: truce

33.3 treague: From medieval Latin treuga and Goth triggwa, covenant.

grace to reconcile: to restore good feeling or mutual regard

33.5 grace to reconcile: L gratiam reconciliare.

to spoile Themselues of soiled armes: to take off their armor, soiled in combat

froward: stubborn, perverse

all were they: although they were

34.6–34.8 34.6-8 Cf. Ps 39:11, ‘When thou wt [with] rebukes doest chastise man for iniquitie, thou as a mothe makest his beautie to consume: surely every man is vanitie’.

grutch: grouch or grudge

frett: consume

th’ vtter: the outermost

cheare: hospitality

35.1 Elissa: From Gr ελασσων elassōn (‘too little, inferior’). Cf. 34.9: having ‘too little’ appetite for pleasure, she presumably considers the ‘cheare . . . too mutch’.

solace: enjoyment

froward: hostile

gouernaunce: conduct

36.1 Perissa: from Gr περισσoς perissos (‘too much, excessive’), would be the sister who ‘thought her [Medina’s] cheare too litle’ (34.9). Throughout these stanzas Spenser plays with the irony of apparent opposites that actually mirror each other.

light: frivolous; also, wanton or unchaste

36.4 measure in her mood: In late medieval music ‘mood’ is a technical term used in describing aspects of rhythm, as for example in the singing of psalms. OED cites Sternhold et al. 1572: ‘To set out a full and absolute knowledge of the nature of the Scale: what moodes there are, & how many: what is perfection, what imperfection . . .’ (sig. Aviiv).

36.5 poured out in pleasure: Cf. I.vii.7.2, where Redcrosse lies ‘pourd out in loosnesse’.

exceeded her owne might: outdid herself

tire: attire

pranck: adorn

mineon: companion kept for sexual favors

francker franion: less restrained paramour

parts: qualities

37.6 Malecontent: A common character-type in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama; eventually (1604) the title of a play attributed to John Marston.

hardiment: boldness

extremities: points of utmost intensity

38.4 extremities: Cf. arg.3n.

outrage: extravagance

38.5–38.7 forward . . . froward: Cf. i.37.1n.

accorage: hearten

kept . . . her selfe in heed: kept watch over herself

attempered: harmonized

39.3–39.4 39.3-4 The turn from feasting to storytelling is repeated several times in Homer and Virgil, e.g. Il 1.469, Od 8.430-32, Aen 1.723, Aen 8.184-85.

39.8–39.9 39.8-9 Cf. Aen 2.1-2: Conticuere omnes intentique ora tenebant. / inde toro pater Aeneas sic orsus ab alto (‘All were hushed, and held their gaze bent upon him; then from his lofty couch father Aeneas thus began’).

lofty siege: place of honor

shene: bright

sustene: sustain

40.9 40.9 Echoing Ps 85:10, ‘Mercie and trueth shal mete: righteousnes and peace shal kisse one another’.

Idole: image

41.9 Idole: It is conventional to say that a monarch is the earthly resemblance of God’s magnificence. It is possible as well to suspect that offering ‘sacred reverence’ to a mortal ‘idol’ might evoke the sense, ‘Any thing or person that is the object of excessive or supreme devotion, or that usurps the place of God in human affection’ (OED), but the poet is careful not to say so.

41.9 magnificence: Identified in FQ Letter as ‘the perfection of all the rest’ of the virtues, and as represented ‘in the person of Prince Arthure’ (38-39).

42.4 Order of Maydenhead: Una tells Arthur that she was drawn to Gloriana’s court to seek aid against the dragon by the fame of ‘that noble order hight of maidenhed’ (I.vii.46.4), alluding to the Elizabethan Order of the Garter. For subsequent references see II.ix.6.6 and IV.iv.17-25.

42.6–43.9 42.6-43.9 This account revises the version given at FQ Letter 49-52 and 70-74, where the Palmer arrives at court with the infant Ruddymane already in hand.

42.6 make: The rhyme-scheme calls for ‘hold’, and some editors emend.

42.7 42.7 Traditionally the year was thought to begin on March 25, but Spenser begins SC in January, and more than half of the ‘Generall Argument’ is given over to a defense of this choice. If Gloriana holds her feast on the twelve days of Christmas, then this line probably refers to January 1.

44.1–44.2 44.1-2 Three months have passed.

44.4 roiall presence: Referring to the Presence Chamber, where the Queen, surrounded by her attendants, received visitors.

44.4 entrold: Cf. Zurcher 2007: ‘a curious and apparently textually corrupt word . . . that has excited the confusion and creativity of editors for three centuries. Its situation as a rhyme-word at the end of the fourth line of its stanza . . . links ‘world’ to ‘hold’ and ‘told’, which without . . . some phonetically hingeing or elastic word cannot be knit successfully together; its function as a phonetic bridge, with the trill moving metasthetically between ‘entrold’ and ‘entorld’ (a feat more straightforward in Elizabethan pronunciation than our own), strongly suggests that Spenser intended this exact spelling. . . . [T]he word itself also combines . . . enroll and enter--the Tudor legal senses of which words make semantic sense in a passage where Guyon is swearing a sacred oath to avenge the loss of Ruddymane's parents . . .’ (52).

45.1–45.4 45.1-4 Medina already knows the moral she wants the story to illustrate.

bale: suffering

45.5 45.5 I.e., misfortune or evil often leads to or procures good results when treated as an example.

46.1–46.3 46.1-3 Cf. SpE s.v. ‘constellations’. Orion has set beneath the horizon, followed in the night sky by the constellation Hydra.

wist: knew

1 Braggadocchio: Adds an augmentative suffix from Italian to the English ‘brag’, perhaps reflecting a common Tudor prejudice against ‘Italianate’ manners. Coined by Spenser, the name became an English noun meaning boastful swagger.

4 Belphœbe: Prefixes the Italian bella handsome to the Greek name for the goddess of the moon; cf. ii.44.1, where ‘faire Phebe’ anticipates and translates the name. Cf. also FQ Letter 36-37, where Spenser explains his invention of the name as an epithet for Queen Elizabeth ‘according to your owne [Ralegh’s] excellent conceipt of Cynthia, (Phoebe and Cynthia being both names of Diana)’.

1.7 behight: One of Spenser’s creative archaisms. Here may mean named or mentioned, with reference to Guyon’s account of his quest at dinner the night before (ii.43-45). But since the OE meaning is to promise or vow, the sense ‘pledged’ is also relevant.

1.9 many-folded: Cf. Il 7.220, where Ajax carries ‘a shield of bronze with sevenfold bull’s hide’ (χαλκεον εταβoειον, o οι Τυχ𝜄ος καμε τε𝜐χων; chalkeon etaboeion, o oi Tuchios kame tenchōn). The epithet ‘seven-folded’ is picked up by classical poets (e.g. Ovid, Virgil); it reappears at II.v.6.2-3 (Guyon’s ‘seven-folded shield’) and III.ii.25.7 (Arthegall’s ‘shield enveloped sevenfold’).

Congè: formal farewell

coniure: put under oath

2.3 coniure: Etymologically, ‘swear together’.

all that gentle noriture ensueth: everything that follows from, or is proper to, an aristocratic upbringing

2.8 Ruddymane: Combining ‘ruddy’ with L manus hands to translate the epithet ‘bloody-handed’.

2.8–2.9 2.8-9 The narrator seems unaware that teaching Ruddymane vengeance might be inconsistent with his training in ‘vertuous lore’ (because vengeance is sinful or belongs to the Christian God).

3.1–3.5 3.1-5, 9 The halting rhythm and the pun on ‘boot’ suggest an amused perspective on Guyon’s predicament, while the Palmer footing it ‘no more alone’ recalls the knight’s too-hasty response to Archimago and Duessa in canto i. These suggestions are gathered up in the final line of the stanza, where we read that Guyon ‘rushed in on foote’ to aid Amavia, abandoning his horse and spear.

3.3 Patience perforce: Proverbial (Smith 1970, no. 598).

kestrell kynd: a small breed of hawk that supports itself by facing into the wind

4.4 kestrell kynd: As a term of contempt it means something like windbag: thus Nashe in 1596 refers to ‘One of these kistrell birds, called a wind-sucker’ (Saffron Walden Kij). Making Braggadocchio into a species of hawk, the phrase recalls by way of a pun the argument’s statement that he ‘is of fayre / Belphoebe fowle forlorne’.

vaine: vein

4.5 vaine: With a pun on ‘vainglory’.

4.9 full light: ‘Light’ functions both as an adverb meaning ‘nimbly’ and as adjective meaning, in a military sense, ‘lightly armed’, while also suggesting that Braggadocchio lacks gravitas. ‘Full light’ is thus a complex oxymoron: being altogether or entirely frivolous, he is fully empty.

5.1 iollity: Carries a range of meanings including festivity, sexual pleasure, gallantry, splendor, jocularity, and, most immediately relevant, insolent presumption. The concentrated assonance of the back-vowels helps make the point, reinforced by the link between ‘swell’ and the wind-sucking behavior of the kestrell (4.4n).

5.4 personage: Close in range of meanings (physical appearance, image) to ‘person’, but more important-sounding. The personage is what Braggadocchio impersonates, taken in by his own imposture.

portaunce: carriage or bearing

gree: favor

5.9 t’aduaunce his first degree: To get a promotion, now that he has knighted himself.

6.3 auaunting: Boasting, with an ironic echo of ‘advaunce’ (5.9).

6.3 brauery: Both bravado (looking back to ‘avaunting’) and finery (looking forward to line 4).

6.4 6.4 Cf. 4.4n.

pranck: show off

ranck: headlong, recklessly

7.6 dead dog: A Biblical insult specific to the books of Samuel: 1 Sam 24:14, 2 Sam 9:8, 2 Sam 16:9.

thrall: slave or prisoner

Miser: wretch

Offall: piece of refuse

8.9 hold of him in fee: Legal phraseology (to hold land by virtue of one’s submission to a feudal lord) marking the scene as a parody of the homage ritual.

liegeman: vassal sworn to the service of his feudal lord

10.1

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.

10.2 vaunting eye: Translating the name ‘Braggadocchio’ through a pun on Ital occhio eye (Hamilton 2001).

10.3–10.4 10.3-4 Note the echo of 4.5 in ‘Vaineglorious’ and the expansion of 4.4 (‘kestrell kind’) in ‘when fluttring wind does blow / In his light winges, is lifted up to skye’—amplifying both the argument’s anticipatory pun on ‘fowle’ and the name ‘Trompart’ as associated with bellows and trumpet.

10.5 10.5 Cf. arg.2-3.

10.8–10.9 10.8-9 Honor as the reward of virtue (opposed to honor ‘without desert’) is most highly regarded among those who are nobly descended; or, honor as the reward of virtue carries its blossom (praise) within its seed (noble deeds).

11.2 Archimage: Last seen at i.25 provoking Guyon to attack Redcrosse.

11.4 thondring with his feet: With Braggadocchio in the saddle, even the horse’s gallop turns to bombast; the pun on ‘feet’ extends the parody of epic poetry (cf. 10.1n).

Eftsoones: promptly

11.7–11.9 11.7-9 Archimago’s adversarial role both mirrors and opposes the linking of the virtues; cf. i.5.4-5n and i.34.2n.

12.3 golden sell: Repeated from ii.11.6.

sell: saddle

12.6 through hard assay forgone: ‘Lost in a difficult adventure’ or ‘renounced in a difficult test’. ‘Despight’ in line 8 may favor the first possibility, whereas at 17.6-9 Braggadocchio will elaborate the second.

12.7–12.8 12.7-8 ‘Has sworn never to wear another sword until he has avenged himself of that outrage’.

weened well: confidently supposed

foyle: defeat

Tho: then

louting: bowing down

13.7–13.8 13.7-8 Archimago’s lies typically misrepresent events that have occurred in the narrative, as if he were competing with the narrator for control over the course of the story; cf. i.10.3-9n and 11.7-9n.

gin: either the general quality of cunning or a specific trick

wreak: punish or avenge

14.3 14.3 As if their lives had been entrusted to him.

doughtie valiaunce: stout courage

meed: reward

areed: declare

prowest: worthiest; most brave or gallant

approu’d: tested or proven.

15.7 hard assay: Cf. 12.6.

16.7 to quayle: I.e. to daunt or overawe. Given the way bird-references flock to Braggadocchio it is difficult not to hear a pun on ‘quail’.

wotest: know

17.3 on euen coast: Hamilton 2001 compares FQ 1596 IV.iii.24.8 on equall cost, suggesting that the phrases may mean either on level ground or on even terms.

17.6–17.9 17.6-9 A more boastful explanation than the one offered by Trompart at 12.6-8. Cf. OF 14.43 and 23.78, where Ariosto’s Mandricardo, armed only with a spear, swears he will bear no sword but Orlando’s.

17.7 17.7 Comically echoing ‘Seven at one stroke’, the motto of the ‘brave tailor’ in a folktale from the ‘Jack’ cycle. See SpE s.v. ‘folklore’.

Perdy: a mild oath

18.1 Perdy: From ME ‘par dieu’, ‘by God’.

bliue: promptly

purchase to: obtain for

18.9 what mote that Monster make: What could bring about that wonder (L monstrum marvel or prodigy).

of: off

20.4 20.4 Cf. Ps 53:5, ‘There they were afraied for feare, where no feare was’; Lev 26:36, ‘the sounde of a leafe shaken shall chase them’; and Wisd Sol 17:1-18, ‘whether it were an hyssing winde . . . these feareful things made them to swone’.

bug: ghost, scarecrow, or hobgoblin

20.5 20.5 FE corrects ‘vnto’ in this line to ‘greatly’. 1596 and 1609 read ‘their haire on end does reare’, which we take to be authorial revision rather than correction of compositorial error.

faine: dissemble

Eft: then or soon (archaic)

21.3–21.4 21.3-4 In Sidney’s New Arcadia the shepherd Dametas ‘fell down flat of my face’ when frightened by a bear, and is seen ‘lying with his breast and head as farre as he could thrust himselfe into a bush: drawing up his legges as close unto him as hee coulde: for, like a man of a very kind nature, soone to take pittie of himselfe, he was full resolved not to see his owne death’ (ed. Dennis 1970, 83-84). Sidney left the revision of his New Arcadia (published in 1590) unfinished at his death in 1586. It is not known whether Spenser saw a copy in manuscript.

Eftsoone: then or soon (archaic)

great worth: elevated rank

stately portance: dignified bearing

21.9 stately portance: Contrast with the ‘gay portaunce’ (5.7) that Braggadocchio ascribes to the court.

21.9 borne of heauenly birth: The surmise of divinity is a frequent motif in Spenser. See SC Apr 163-65 and note, where the emblems trace this courtly compliment back to Aeneas’s wondering recognition of his divine mother, Venus, disguised as a maiden huntress in the woods outside Carthage. Many of the terms used to describe ‘Eliza’ in Colin’s song reappear in the description of Belphoebe. The phrasing ‘borne of . . . birth’ is pure redundancy unless the verb also suggests the past participle of ‘bear’ (carry, endure), a nuance supported by the proximity of ‘portance’, which means ‘bearing’. At Aen 1.405, Aeneas recognizes the disguised Venus by her stride: et vera incessu patuit dea (‘and in her step she was revealed, a very goddess’).

22.1

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.

22.3–22.4 22.3-4 Her face shines (L clarus) without blemish because the four humors are well-blended in her physical constitution. Cf. Song Sol 4:7, ‘Thou art all faire, my love, and there is no spot in thee’.

22.5–22.6 22.5-6 Cf. SC Feb 130-32, ‘Lilly white, and Cremsin redde, . . . Colours meete to clothe a mayden Queene’. The pairing of lilies and roses, frequent in Renaissance poetry, goes back to Song Sol 2:1, ‘I am the rose of the field, and the lilie of the valleis’. Its use to describe the complexion of the face, also conventional, may owe something to Song Sol 5.10, ‘My welbeloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest of ten thousand’. Also influential are Virgil’s description of Lavinia’s blush, mixta rubent ubi lilia multa / alba rosa (‘white lilies blush with many a blended rose’; Aen 12.68-69) and Ovid’s description of Corinna’s blush, Quale rosae fulgent inter sua lilia mixtae (‘Like roses gleaming among the lilies where they mingle’; Amores 2.5.37).

22.7 ambrosiall: Resembling ambrosia, variously the nectar, food, or ointment of the Gods, which has the power to confer immortality; cf. Virgil’s description of Venus: ambrosiaeque comae divinum vertice odorem / spiravere (‘and from her head her ambrosial tresses breathed celestial fragrance’; Aen 1.403-4).

22.8–22.9 22.8-9 Belphoebe’s cheeks evidently combine the powers of the well and tree of life in Eden (I.xi.30.1, 48.7-8). As indirect royal praise, this stanza’s hyperbolic attribution to Elizabeth of both divinity and the power to convey it to her beholders comes perilously close to blasphemy—or mockery. As Sidney in the New Arcadia drily observes of the queen of Laconia, ‘She was a queen and therefore beautiful’ (The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Evans 159).

23.1–23.2 23.1-2 Expanding the epithet ‘Cleare as the skye’ (22.3n), these lines will be echoed in FH, where ‘lampe’ and its forms recur as figures for eyes, beauty, light-giving heavenly bodies, Christ, and God’s Beloved (e.g. HL 131, HB 59, HHL 170, HHB 274). This pattern reflects both the Neoplatonic definition of beauty as light and the biblical associations of ‘lamp’ (which appears some three dozen times from Exodus to Revelations).

23.2–23.9 23.2-9 The conventional notion of female beauty as a fire kindled in heaven, which is then darted out through the eyes to pierce the beholder’s gaze, is elaborated in FH, which also develop the contrast between the effects of cupidity (HL 106-140) and those of chaste love (HL 169-203). Spenser seems to be glancing at Ariosto’s description of Alcina’s eyes: intorno cui par ch’Amor scherzi e voli, / e ch’indi tutta la faretra scharchi / e che visibilmente i cori involi (‘around which Love seemed to play and flutter, and from whence he would empty his quiver, and which would visibly steal hearts’; OF 7.12.4-6; trans. modified from Waldman 1974).

persant: piercing

bereau’d: took away

24.1–24.6 24.1-6 Presumably Love has not yet engraved any triumphs in the broad, white expanse of Belphoebe’s forehead, since her face remains ‘withouten . . . blot’ (22.3) and the infinitive verbs (for Love . . . to engrave, / And write) suggest rather an inviting prospect than a finished inscription. All good and honour must therefore be red in the blank smoothness of the tablet’s untouched, virginal surface rather than in the text of Cupid’s battles and triumphs—all the more likely if, as 23.9 informs us, Belphoebe’s majesty breaks his warlike instruments. Less elaborately, Ariosto compares Alcina’s fronta lieta (‘serene brow’) to terso avorio (‘polished ivory’; OF 7.11.7). Tasso mentions Clarise’s fronte d’avorio (‘brow of ivory’; Rin 1.55.5), while of the Queen of Media he says, Sembrava a lei ch’Amor quivi locato / Tutte le sue vittrici insegne avesse, / E quale in carro suol di palme ornato / Trionfator altier, lieto sedesse (‘It seemed that Love had leased to her all his triumphant insignia, and that in his carriage ornamented with palms, the proud victor sat happily’; Rin 9.15.1-4).

table: tablet

24.7 dropping honny: Cf. Song Sol 4:11, ‘Thy lippes, my spouse, droppe as honie combes’.

rubins: rubies

24.8 rubins: Cf. Am 15.8, ‘if Rubies, loe, hir lips be Rubies sound’, and 81.10, ‘The gate with pearles and rubyes richly dight’. This and the lily-rose image from 22.6 are conventional enough that echoes may be incidental, but both occur together with the ivory brow in a single stanza of Tasso (Rin 1.55); cf. also RS 737.1-2: Quell’Angelica voce che si frange / tra bianche perle e bei rubini ardenti (‘That angelic voice [voice of Angelica] that breaks forth between white pearls and [bei] fiery rubies’; Rizzoli 1.713). Ariosto combines coral and pearls with the lily and rose in the description of Isabel: interotta da fervidi signiozzi, / che dai corali e da le preziose / perle uscir fanno i dolci accenti mozzi. / Le lacrime scendean tra gigli e rose (‘ardent sighs kept interrupting the flow of soft words which issued brokenly from her coral lips, which parted to disclose such precious pearls. Her tears descended between lily and rose’; OF 12.94.2-5; trans. Waldman, modified in last line).

24.9 siluer sound: ‘Silver’ is one of Spenser’s favorite adjectives: cf. SC June 61 and note.

25.1–25.2 25.1-2 Cf. Am 40.3-4: ‘on each eyelid sweetly doe appeare / an hundred Graces as in shade to sit’, and SC June 25 gloss: ‘thys same Poete in his Pageaunts sayth. An hundred Graces on her eyeledde satte. etc.’.

belgardes: amorous glances

25.3 belgardes: Coined by Spenser from Ital bel guardo, ‘lovely look’.

25.3 retrate: Either retreat (from Fr retraite and L retrahere) or portrait (from Ital ritratto). For Spenser’s repeated play on the etymology of drawing and the metaphor of tracking, see II.i.12.7n. Here the combination of portraying-and-withdrawing repeats the dynamic of Love’s inscription at 26.1-6.

25.6–25.7 25.6-7 Cf. I.iv.2, ‘Mirrour of grace and Majestie divine’; this echo followed closely by ‘soveraine’ brings the reference to Elizabeth near the surface. She is a reflection both of her God’s grace and of his majesty, and (therefore) a reminder of her mortal subjects’ allegiance to their sovereign. For the link between ‘moniment’ and L monere to remind see glossary.

25.8–25.9 25.8-9 The inexpressibility topos makes explicit the back-and-forth between inscription and erasure or withdrawal reflected in the preceding lines. Spenser has translated (and intensified) Ariosto’s reference to painting: Di persona era tanto ben formata, / quanto me’ finger san pittori industri (‘She was so beautifully modeled, no painter, however much he applied himself, could have achieved anything more perfect’; OF 7.11.1-2).

descriue: describe or write down

Camus: tunic

26.5 Purfled vpon with many a folded plight: Ambiguous because of the doubled prepositions, and because ‘purfled’ can mean either ‘embroidered [upon]’ or ‘bordered [with]’. The simplest construal is to read as if a comma separated upon from with, which then would begin a new descriptor. Thus unfolded, the line might be paraphrased, ‘Embroidered and having many pleats’.

aygulets: spangles

26.9 26.9 The pattern of writing/withdrawing in the blazon, made explicit by the inexpressibility topos, is now made literal by the unfinished alexandrine, ‘broken’ like Cupid’s darts (23.9). Other half-lines appear at II.viii.55.9, III.iv.39.7, III.vi.26.4 (1590 only), and III.ix.37.5.

27.2 embayld: Spenser appears to be fusing the verbs ‘bale’, to hoop or bind, and ‘embay’, to surround. In TCM he will refer to Faunus in the custody of Diana’s nymphs as ‘within their baile’ (VII.vi.49.2); he uses the verb embay several times to describe immersion in a liquid, most recently at II.i.40.7 where Ruddymane ‘did embay / His little hands’ in his mother’s blood.

27.3 gilden buskins of costly Cordwayne: Knee-boots made of fine leather (named for the Spanish town of Cordova, where it was made), ornamented with gold-leaf.

bendes: bands

entayld: engraved

curious antickes: elaborately wrought grotesque figures

aumayld: enamelled

Before: in front

entrayld: interwoven

27.7–27.9 27.7-9 As Hamilton 2001 notes, this description suggests virginity (‘that none might see’) and thus evokes the phrase ‘virgin knot’. Ariosto has little to say about Alcina’s attire; it is her biondo chioma lunga that he describes as annodata (‘her long blond tresses . . . gathered in a knot’; OF 7.11.3). Tasso describes Clarice’s gambe snelle / sino al ginocchio ricoprendo ornava / di cuoio azzurro, e qual con aurei nodi / era da poi legato in mille modi (‘slender legs, up to the knee adorned with a covering of sky-blue leather, which was tied with golden knots a thousand ways’; Rin 5.13.4-8). For the Virgilian echo, see 22-31n.

28.1–28.4 28.1-4 Cf. Song Sol 5:15: ‘His leggs are as pillers of marble, set upon sockets of fine golde’, and 1 Cor 6:19: ‘Know ye not, that your bodie is the temple of the holie Gost . . .’. Given the discreet but persistent attention in the preceding lines to Belphoebe’s ‘golden fringe’ and ‘fouldings close enwrapped’, the ‘temple of the Gods’ supported by these ‘faire marble pillours’, which typologically represents the body as a whole, may be somewhat comically localized in the genitals. In such a reading, the festival crowds resorting to the temple become a preposterously indecorous image, perhaps travestied from the description of Dido’s first approach to Aeneas: regina ad templum, forma pulcherrima Dido, / incessit, magna iuventum stipante caterva (‘the queen, Dido, moved towards the temple, of surpassing beauty, with a vast company of youths thronging about her’; Aen 1.496-97).

port: gait or bearing

28.5 port: Cf. ‘stately portance’ (21.9).

28.7 play: The stanza-form calls for a b-rhyme here (cf. ii.7.7n); Church 1758 suggests ‘sport’.

Knit: fastened

bauldricke: leather belt or girdle

29.5 bauldricke: Derived from the cingulum militare given by Roman emperors when awarding knighthood to equestrian soldiers. For the traditional use of the baldric as a symbol of knighthood (and in some contexts of chastity or temperance), see Leslie (1983:172-74).

Athwart: across, usually (as here) diagonally

29.5–29.7 29.5-7 For a visual analogue of Spenser’s emphasis on the baldric as accentuating Belphoebe’s breasts, see the band running across the breast of the Virgin Mary in Michelangelo’s first Pietá.

29.7 young fruit in May: Ariosto describes Alcina’s breasts as due pome acerbe, e pur d’avorio fatte, that vengono e van come onda al primo margo, / quando piacevole aura il mar combatte (‘a pair of apples, not yet ripe, fashioned in ivory’, that ‘rose and fell like the sea-swell at times when a gentle breeze stirs the ocean’; OF 7.14.3-5, trans. Waldman). The Chorus in Tasso’s Aminta sings about a golden age when naked virgins unveiled le poma del seno acerbe e crude (‘the young and unripe apples of their bosoms’; I.2.692).

29.8–29.9 29.8-9 Cf. Ariosto: Non potria l’altre parti veder Argo: / ben si può guidicar che corrisponde / a quel ch’appar di fuor quel che s’asconde (‘Argus himself could not see them entire, but you could easily judge that what lay hidden did not fall short of what was exposed to view’; OF 7.14.6-8, trans. Waldman).

crisped: curled

30.1–30.5 30.1-5 Tasso says that Rinaldo saw il crin parte ondeggiar al vento / parte in belli aurei nodi avolto e stretto (‘part of the hair to flutter in the wind, and part in lovely golden knots tightly wound’; Rin 1.54.3-4). For the Virgilian echo, see 22-31n.

flouring: blossoming

30.7 flouring: Combines ‘flowering’ and ‘flourishing’, both from L florere.

rude: natural, uncultivated

30.8 rude: Cf. line 6.

30.8–30.9 30.8-9 For a visual analogue to this description see Boticelli’s Primavera.

31.1–31.2 31.1-2 Another echo from the first book of the Aeneid (see 21.9n and 28.1-4n), once again alluding to Dido’s appearance on her first approach to Aeneas: qualis in Eurotae ripis aut per iuga Cynthi / exercet Diana choros (‘Even as on Eurotas’ banks or along the heights of Cynthus Diana guides her dancing bands’; 1.498-99). Eurotas is the principle river in Laconia, named after a legendary king of the region; Cynthus is a hill on the island of Delos where the goddess Diana was born, from which Roman poets derived the epithet ‘Cynthia’.

31.5–31.6 that famous Queene / Of Amazons: Penthesilea, at whose picture Aeneas is gazing when Dido approaches him: ducit Amazonidum lunatis agmina peltis / Penthesilea furens mediisque in milibus ardet, / area subnectens exsertae cingula mammae, / bellatrix, audetque viris concurrere virgo (‘Penthisilea in fury leads the crescent-shielded ranks of the Amazons and rages amid her thousands; a golden belt binds her naked breast, while she, a warrior queen, dares battle, a maid clashing with men’; Aen 1.490-93).

31.6 whom Pyrrhus did destroy: Most classical authors report that Penthesilea was slain at Troy by Achilles, not his son Pyrrhus. The exception is Dares Phrygius in de bello Troj (Upton 1758, qtd Var 2.218), but as Upton points out, this exception was the version that entered into the romance tradition, where Spenser would have found it echoed by Lydgate, Caxton, and Sir Philip Sidney.

31.7–31.9 31.7-9 According to Apollodorus, Proclus, and other classical sources, Penthesilea was first seen by Priam when she came to be purified of guilt for the accidental slaying of her sister Hippolyte while hunting (the fate that threatens Braggadocchio in Spenser’s episode). Presumably ‘The day’ refers forward to line 8, not backward to line 6: Caxton and Lydgate, for example, both report that Penthesilea fought with Pyrrus and the Myrmidons for a month before she was slain (III.96; Troy Book IV.4260-64). Spenser does seem to have picked up details from Caxton’s account: the verb ‘succour’ appears there in connection with Penthesilia (‘When she knew that the Greeks had beseiged Troy, she went to succor it with a thousand Virgins, for the love of Hector’; III.93), and at the end of her first day’s combat with the Greeks, ‘Queen Penthasilia returned into the City with glory and honour where King Priamus received her with joy, and gave her many rich jewels’ (The Destruction of Troy, in Three Books [ed 1670], III.94).

hartlesse: without courage or passion

Groome: a male servant

32.8 right haunch: Tasso’s Clarice is likewise pursuing a deer wounded entro la spalla destra (‘in the right shoulder’; Rin 1.53.8).

32.8 stedfast arrow: An arrow well-trimmed for accurate flight. Cf. Ascham 1545: ‘To make the ende compasse heauy with the fethers in fliyng, for the stedfaster shotyng’ (2.127).

33.1 St. 33 Following closely the address of Aeneas to Venus:‘nulla tuarum audita mihi neque visa sororum, / o—quam te memorem, virgo? namque haud tibi voltus mortalis, / nec vox hominem sonat; o dea certe!’ (‘None of thy systers have I heard or seen—but by what name should I call thee, O maiden? for thy face is not mortal, nor has thy voice a human ring; O goddess surely!’; Aen. 1.326-28; cf 21.9n). Tasso’s Rinaldo asks Clarice qual che vi siate, o donna o dea (‘whatever you may be, woman or goddess’; Rin 1.58.6). The topos originates with Odysseus’ address to Nausicaa: ‘I beseech thee, O queen,--a goddess art thou, or art thou mortal?’ (Od 6.149-50).

33.7 goodlyhed: Excellence either of appearance or of character (a deferential mode of address).

mewd: hidden

34.3 mewd: Hawks and falcons are ‘mewed’, or enclosed in a cage, while moulting; barnyard poultry are ‘mewed’ for fattening.

to marke the beast: to pinpoint its location

stowre: predicament

wight: creature or being

emprize: chivalric undertaking

35.6–35.9 nest . . . crest . . rowze: Cf. arg.3-4n, 4.4n, and 10.3-4n, reinforcing the sense of ‘rowze’ (both technical and rare) as a reference to the action of a hawk in ruffling its feathers. Cf. I.xi.9, where the dragon shaking his scales is compared to an eagle that ‘His aery plumes doeth rouze’.

36.1 St. 36 The mock-epic simile in this stanza unpacks the diction of 35.6-9 while reversing the species implied: Braggadocchio is no longer hunter but prey (or no longer ‘Scarcrow’, as at 7.1, but scared crow). These passages culminate a series of jesting references to birds at arg.4, 6.4, 7.1, 10.3-4, and 34.3.

silly: defenseless

36.7 fowle: Pun intended.

prune: preen

transmewd: transmuted

37.4 transmewd: Echoing ‘mewd’ at 34.3.

38.2 38.2 Braggadocchio awkwardly conflates Belphoebe’s ‘words’ with the ‘deeds’ and ‘vertue’ they praise (37.8-9)—as might be expected of one whose deeds exist only in words.

38.8 Aboue the Moone: Cf. ‘O fairest under skie’ (38.1), and Aen. 1.379: fama super aethera notus (‘my fame is known above the stars’).

38.9 with laurell girlond cround: Cf. I.i.9.1-2, ‘The Laurell, meed of mightie Conquerours, / And Poets sage’. As a conqueror who awards himself the laurel for purely verbal feats of arms, Braggadocchio offers a moment of sly self-parody by the poet whom Helgerson describes as a ‘self-crowned laureate’ (1983); cf. 10.1n.

39.1 St. 39 Cf. st. 5; Braggadocchio is himself en route to the court, where he hopes ‘to be receiv’d / For such as he him thought, or faine would bee’.

39.9 is fit . . . is fitt: Cf. 37.4, ‘Soone into other fitts he was transmewd’.

40.1 St. 40 The irony of putting this speech into the mouth of a character identified with queen Elizabeth is unmistakable. For precedents in Boiardo and Tasso, see OI 2.1.36-36 and GL 17.61-63.

40.6–40.7 who his limbs with labours, and his mynd Behaues with cares: Who exercises his limbs with activity and regulates his mind with attention to serious matters (as Spenser’s own paraphrase in the next two lines suggests).

she: honor

41.7–41.9 41.7-9 Reprising the contrast from Book I between the House of Pride (iv.2.8-9) and the House of Holiness (x.5.9), which in turn restate Matt 7:13-14. These passages also echo Hesiod, Works and Days 287-91: ‘Badness can be got easily and in shoals: the road to her is smooth, and she lives very near us. But between us and Goodness the gods have placed the sweat of our brows: long and steep is the path that leads to her, and it is rough at the first’.

42.5–42.6 42.5-6 At this point Braggadocchio corresponds neither to Aeneas beholding Venus in the Aen nor to Ruggiero greeting Alcina in OF, but to Ruggiero when Angelica escapes from his grasp (11.1-9).

bastard: debased; unauthorized

43.1 Pesaunt: Here, a broad term of abuse implying both low social status and contemptible character.

43.7 fowle blott: For the pun on fowle, see the notes to the argument and subsequent references throughout the canto; blott signifies ‘disgrace’.

43.9 leaue so proud disdayne: Presumably Braggadocchio should mean to say that she leaves ‘with so much’ proud disdain; what he actually says is that she leaves the disdain behind, which implies that it is his, not hers (at 46.6-9 it passes over to Guyon’s horse). He projects his own affect onto Belphoebe more coherently in line 6, ‘Ne car’d he greatly for her presence vayne’.

Perdy: a mild oath

grace: mark of divine favor

Weening: supposing

cheualree: knightly skills of combat, esp. (as here) horsemanship

erne: yearn

Furor: madness fueled by anger

1 arg.1 Aquinas writes that ‘the first reaction of anger is called wrath; enduring anger is called ill-will; when it seeks an opportunity for revenge it is [furor] . . . the Greek word θυμωσις thymosis, which in Latin becomes furor, may imply both quickness to anger and a firm intention to obtain revenge’ (Summa I, qu. 21, art. 108-11, translation modified).

2 occasion: See OED for the personification of Occasion in 15th- to 17th-c usage, typically as a figure representing opportunity—a commonplace that dates back to late antiquity in the Roman poets Ausonius and Phaedrus, appears in the Greek Anthology, and is illustrated in contemporary emblem books such as Whitney (1586, no. 181, In Occasionem). Given the extended allegory of sin and the law in canto i, with its texture of allusions to Romans 5-7, the mention of ‘occasion’ here will also recall Paul’s celebrated definition of the law as the ‘occasion’ of sin (Rom 7:8); the provocative inversion of causality on which Paul insists (the law creates sin) foreshadows the repeated compounding of cause and consequence in this episode. Cf. also Paul’s admonition against using ‘liberty as an occasion unto the flesh’ (Gal. 5:13-16).

3 Phaon (Phedon 1596): Phaon is the young man addressed by Sappho in Ovid’s Heroides 15. Phedon is mentioned by Aulus Gellius (Noctes Atticae 2.18) and by Ficino (In convivium 6.16) as a handsome young man rescued by Socrates from sexual slavery.

vulgar . . . seed: the common people

pretence: purpose or intention

borne: carried; born;

natiue influence: birth rather than training

1.5 natiue influence: ‘Seed’ and ‘blood’ stress ancestry, but ‘influence’ also suggests the effect of the stars at nativity.

1.7 skill to ride: Etymologically, chivalry, originally a synonym for ‘cavalry’, but in extended use a term for both the military skills and the ethos of gallantry specific to armed knights in the late Middle Ages.

faine: ‘pretend’ (feign), with a play on ‘wish’ (fain)

menage: handle

1.9 As a noun, ‘menage’ names the ability both to ride horses and to train them.

2.2 2.2 The repetition of ‘menage’ emphasizes the allegorical connection, reinforced by the ambiguity of the pronoun ‘his’, between the knight’s horse and the knight’s passionate nature. 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, or in the first canto of Book II, where Guyon rushes ahead leaving the Palmer behind. Such passages reflect the tradition descending from Plato’s Phaedrus in which the passions are represented as a horse resistant to the bit (cf. 34.1-2, ‘most wretched man / That to affections does the bridle lend’). Here the passion in question is pride, humbled by the need to go on foot; in canto i, it was anger leading to haste.

yeed: go

2.3 yeed: In ME, ‘yeed’ is the past tense of ‘go’; the infinitive ‘to yeed’ appears only in pseudo-archaic usage by 16th-c poets.

slide: go astray

2.6–2.9 2.6-9 Cf. the Palmer’s moralization of the polarity of strength and weakness at i.57.7-9; both passages reflect Aristotle’s concept of virtue as a mean between the excess and deficiency of a given quality (Nic Eth 2.6-9).

3.2 3.2, 5 See 10.2-5n. Spenser’s equivocations echo the simile describing Aeneas’s glimpse of Dido in the underworld: qualem primo qui surgere mense / aut vidut aut videsse putat per nubila lunam (‘even as, in the early month, one sees or fancies he has seen the moon rise amid the clouds’; Aen 6.454). Milton echoes this echo in a conspicuously Spenserian moment at the close of PL 1, when ‘Some belated peasant sees / Or dreams he sees’ a fairy dance by moonlight (781-88).

agree: conciliate

3.4 in hast it to agree: For Guyon’s tendency to respond ‘in haste’, see i.13.1-2, i.39.2, ii.25.1, and especially ii.21.6-7.

3.5–3.7 3.5-7 In ‘Slander, A Warning’ (an essay widely known in the Renaissance), Lucian describes a painting by Apelles that shows Slander ‘haling a youth by the hair’ (Works 4.2). He explains that Apelles—falsely accused of conspiracy and nearly executed—transformed his experience into an allegorical painting. For a full account of the Renaissance literary and pictorial tradition to which Lucian’s brief essay gave rise, see Cast (1981).

4.1

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).

4.1–4.2 4.1-2 Cf. Lucian’s description of Penitence, as translated by Melanchthon: A tergo, lugubri habitu, pullata laceraque Poenitentia subsequitur (‘Following behind in mourning guise, black-robed and with torn hair, comes [I think he named her] Repentance’). Bull conjectures that Spenser read pullata as ‘filthy’ rather than ‘black’ (1997, n10).

n’ote: could not, a contraction of ‘ne mote’

walke: ‘move briskly’ (unlike her feet)

5.1 5.1 Cf. Jas 3.6: ‘set among our members . . . [the tongue] defileth the whole bodie, and setteth on fire the course of nature, and is set on fyre of hell’; to which the Geneva gloss adds ‘the intemperancie of the tongue is as a flame of hel fyre’.

raught him: ‘brought him’, from ME past tense of ‘reach’ in the sense of ‘give, pass’ (OED).

impetuous: rash

6.3 6.3 See ii.21.5-9n for Guyon’s previous effort to pacify with force.

6.4 mighty hands: Cf. Medina’s contrast between ‘mighty hands’ and ‘rightful cause’ at ii.29.8-9.

6.8 6.8 The madman’s lack of governance (7.2) is anticipated here in the disarticulated flailing of his hand-to-hand combat, which resembles a tantrum.

wist: knew

6.9 auengement: Trisyllabic.

mickle: much

7.2 gouernaunce: See i.29.9n for the link to Guyon’s rash anger in the opening episode of Book II.

7.4 wyde: Echoing the efforts of passion ‘from the right way . . . to draw him [Guyon] wide’ (2.7).

blent: blinded

7.7 reason blent through passion: Cf. I.ii.5.7, ‘The eie of reason was with rage yblent’.

7.8 at randon: Randomly; from OF randir to run fast, hence also impetuously (cf. 6.3).

menaging / Of armes: skilled handling of weapons

8.3–8.4 menaging / Of armes: Cf. 1.9, 2.2; Guyon’s skill is contrasted to the madman’s lack of governance (7.2).

nathemoe: not at all

more enfierced: provoked to greater fierceness

8.8–8.9 The first of several suggestions that in wrestling with the figure of rage Guyon wrestles himself.

villein . . . clownish: peasant . . . rustic

9.1–9.2 villein . . . clownish: Cf. the emphasis on social class in st. 1, and note the contrast between ‘clownish fistes’ and ‘manly face’.

in the place: right then and there

9.4 in the place: For the figurative treatment of space in this episode, see 32.4n.

emboyling: boiling, agitated

vnbrace: loosen

10.2–10.5 10.2-5 Echoing the equivocations at 3.2 and 3.5, the Palmer tells Guyon that he only ‘seems to see’ Furor. Having personified both Furor and Occasion as embodied agents whose features, actions, and accoutrements call for interpretation, the allegory now insists they are not really embodied agents after all. Spenser’s allusion to the ‘Calumny of Apelles’ topos, with its emphasis on the artistic processes of embodiment and depiction (see 3.5-7n), anticipates this self-conscious undoing of personification. The Palmer’s decoding sheds light as well on the motif of inverted cause and consequence (st. 4-5n), which complements the transposition of self and other whereby Guyon misreads his own affective state as an embodied adversary (8.8-9n).

10.6–10.9 10.6-9 Here as often, names are disclosed not when a character first appears, but in a climactic moment, to signal that the character’s nature has been revealed. In this instance, the moment of naming confirms an interpretation in which personification as such is revealed to be a symptom of rage.

10.9 10.9 The Palmer seems less concerned that Guyon repress anger’s consequences than that he discern its causes. To disentangle self from other in dealing with rage is also to clarify the relation of causes to consequences.

11.1 St. 11 Cf. 2 Cor 11:12: ‘that I may cut away occasion, from them which desire occasion’. The Palmer’s advice that anger needs to be prevented (L pre + venire to come before) arrives belatedly, much as Occasion, with whom he says Guyon ‘Must first begin’, trails after the fury she provokes, introduced with the words ‘And him behynd’ (4.1). On the episode’s play with hysteron proteron, see the notes to 10.2-5 and st. 4-5.

amenage: domesticate

11.2 amenage: From ménage as household, but cf. 1.9, 2.2, and 8.3-4. The emergence of this term as a motif underlines the allegory of horsemanship as anger-management.

corage: wrath

eath: easy

ydle: unoccupied

wood: mad

11.9 11.9 Blocking a river without stopping its source will cause it to flood. Cf. Smith (1970, no. 731), ‘The stream (current, tide) stopped swells the higher’, and Prov 17:14, ‘The beginning of strife is as one that openeth the waters; therefore or [ere] the contention be medled with, leave off’. The Palmer’s advice points to the consequences (flooding) of not attending to causes (stopping the source).

emprise: undertaking

hent: seized

12.2–12.3 12.2-3 Belatedly realizing the proverb ‘to seize occasion by the forelock’ (Manning and Fowler 1976: 264).

n’ould she stent: she would not cease

12.4 n’ould she stent: ‘n’ould’ is a contraction of ‘ne would’, ‘stent’ a form of ‘stint’.

he: Guyon

12.9 an yron lock: Evoking the branks, or scold’s bridle, ‘a kind of iron framework to enclose the head, having a sharp metal gag or bit which entered the mouth and restrained the tongue’ (OED).

13.3 the last help: Both Furor and (as lines 4-5 retroactively suggest) the hands she uses to summon him.

note: could not

defaste: undone

14.3 defaste: The sense ‘destroy, demolish’ reflects the Latin roots of the word (de + facere to make, to do). Given the canto’s emphasis on allegorical personification, the sense ‘mar the face, disfigure’, with its proximate etymology in Fr deffacer (de + face face), suggests that Furor’s defeat is accomplished by undoing the personfication that had given a face and body to an affective state.

at earst: promptly

quaild: daunted

re’nforst: reinforced

15.1–15.2 hundred yron chaines . . . And hundred knots: See Jupiter’s prophecy of the Augustan pax in Virgil: Furor impius intus / saeva sedens super arma et centum vinctus aënis / post tergum nodis fremet horridus ore cruento (‘within, impious Rage, sitting on savage arms, his hands fast bound behind with a hundred brazen knots, shall roar in the ghastliness of blood-stained lips’; Aen 1.294-96).

strakes: streaks

15.5–15.6 15.5-6 Wrath’s eyes similarly give off sparks of fire in the House of Pride (I.iv.33.5-6).

15.5–15.9 15.5-9 The red of Furor’s eyes, the copper of his hair, and the yellow- or orange-brown of his beard are all conventional signs of an irascible temperament. Humoral theory ascribed this temperament to an excess of choler, called ‘yellow bile’ and often associated with the color red.

ranck: extreme

16.1 Guyon Furor had captiud: On the episode’s deliberate confounding of self and other, see notes to 8.8-9 and 10.2-5. The question whether Guyon will ‘captive’ Furor or be ‘captivd’ by him has been the crux of the passage; here, the juxtaposition of names underlines the reversibility of the syntax even as context resolves the question.

16.4 Lying on ground, all soild with blood and myre: The posture of this ‘wretched Squire’ echoes that of the prostrate Mortdant in canto i: cf. ‘the soiled gras’ upon which ‘the dead corse of an armed knight was spred, / Whose armour all with blood besprincled was’ (41.1-3).

16.5 respyre: Literally, to breathe; figuratively, ‘To breathe again, after distress, trouble, etc.; to recover hope, courage, or strength’ (OED).

16.7 recured: Combining the senses of ‘cured’ and ‘recovered’.

16.9 caytiues: Wretch’s, villain’s, but the more specific sense ‘captive’s’, followed by the doubling of ‘thrall’, emphasizes the circularity of Furor as a form of self-captivity or self-defeat.

17.1 St. 17-35 The following inset narrative derives from Ariosto (OF 4.42-6.61) and reappears in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (see Evans 2010 on the relations among the three texts). Spenser’s is the only version related in the first person. Tales of friendship destroyed by love (or love destroyed by false friendship) have a distinguished history that includes Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ and Shakespeare’s Othello. The story recalls Archimago’s use of a fabricated tale and a disguised female to provoke Guyon at II.i.9-30, and his earlier use of disguised sprights to enrage Redcrosse at I.ii.3-6.

17.2–17.5 17.2-5 These lines introduce a self-exculpating motive that reappears throughout the squire’s tale.

whelming: engulfing

17.5 whelming: In earlier usage, the mention of Fortune refers to the downward turn of her wheel; the sense of submerging under water also recalls Fortune’s association with the sea in the emblem books. Using the term to describe her ‘lap’ may recall the Palmer’s complaint to Gloriana that the ‘wicked Fay’ Acrasia had ‘many whelmd in deadly paine’ (ii.43.3-4), especially as it anticipates the reiterated association of the Bower of Bliss with various female laps (v.36.3, vi.14.6-7, vi.15.4-5, xii.76.9). Fortuna and Occasion were sometimes described as beautiful (or depicted as nude) to emphasize their potentially deceptive allure.

17.6 weake wretch: Either one who is helpless and miserable or one who is morally feeble and hence contemptible.

mischiefe: misfortune

trech: trick

17.8 trech: Not in OED; probably formed from ME ‘treche’, to deceive or betray. The c-rhymes in this stanza are revised or corrected in 1596, replacing ‘her guileful trech’ with ‘through occasion’ to rhyme with ‘weakest one’ and ‘light upon’.

18.3 18.3 The shared breast of their nurse identifies the two as foster-brothers.

Attonce: together

19.1 It was my fortune: Echoes both the opening of st. 18, ‘It was a faithless Squire’, and the emphasis on fortune and ‘hap’ in st. 17. The squire, who characterizes ‘Misfortune’ in terms of female sexual allure (17.5n) even though he knows his male friend to be the source of the ‘guilful trech’ (17.8) that brought him to mischief, fails even now to distinguish his fortune from his misfortune.

partake: inform

20.1 Philemon: From Gk φιλημων philēmōn affectionate. A common Greek proper name, it became the title of ‘The Epistle of Paul to Philemon’ and hence a Christian name of some currency in 16th-c England.

priuitie: personal business, intimacy, or secrets

grace: favor

21.1 grace: Cf. ‘gratious’ (20.4), meaning courteous or benevolent, with a secondary sense of charming or pleasing.

Affyaunce: betrothal

21.6 mariage make: Cf. Epith 216-17: ‘sacred ceremonies . . . / The which do endlesse matrimony make’.

falser: very false

toward: approaching

22.2 toward: The related sense ‘favorable or propitious’ is also relevant.

assynd: allotted

distaind her honorable blood: stained her family’s honor

stay: pause

22.9 stay: Phaon’s diction in this stanza is marked by legalisms, including treason, assynd, bynd, and stay.

23.2 sad: Relevant senses include wise, discreet, sober, grave, mature, sorrowful, and distressing.

23.2 infixed: Used twice previously in the poem, both times to describe the action of stinging, first by Errour’s brood (I.i.23.6) and then by the Dragon in Eden (I.xi.11.8). Cf. ‘out wrest’ (23.5) and ‘mortall sting’ (33.5).

engreeued: ‘filled with grief’

23.4 engreeued: Given the legal coloring of Phaon’s diction in this passage, the sense ‘made into a grievance, taken as a ground of accusation’ may be relevant (OED).

23.6 sacred band: Cf. 18.6. Phaon’s language reflects a set of attitudes and social practices characteristic of early modern friendship in one of its specific forms: a learned tradition, with classical and medieval roots, in which the formal exchange of vows solemnizes a degree of intimacy, intensity of affect, and sense of mutual obligation that modern custom more often reserves to the marriage relation or domestic partnership.

boorded: approached

boulted: sifted

24.2 boulted: The proverb means that Philemon has found out the truth. Spenser may be echoing Chaucer, CT Nun’s Priest 7.3240: ‘But I ne kan nat bulte it to the bren’.

24.3 groome of base degree: A groom is a serving-man or other male of inferior position. Phaon and Philemon have both been identified as squires (16.2, 18.1), a rank just below knighthood. The distance between Phaon’s rank and that of the groom is real, then, but may be less than the distance between himself and his lady of ‘great degree’. His phrasing recalls the ME romance ‘The Squire of Low Degree’, which similarly turns on a deception that keeps the squire apart from his beloved, the king’s daughter.

partener Paramoure: partner by way of sexual desire

24.4 partener Paramoure: The adverbial sense of ‘Paramoure’ reflects its derivation from OF par amour, by or through love. Spenser here plays the sexual sense against the polite usage in which it meant ‘for the sake of love’ or ‘if you please’. Partener glances at its synonym ‘parcener’, familiar in such standard legal phrases as ‘parcener per le cours de commune ley’ and ‘parcener per le custome’ (partner in the course of common law, partner by custom). Spenser’s mock-legalese implies that the ‘groome of base degree’ is a ‘parcener per amour’, that is, a joint tenant in Claribell by virtue of an adulterous liaison.

that: that which

nearer moue: more closely affect

25.1 gracelesse: Unregenerate, lacking decency; cf. 21.1, 20.4, and 25.4, ‘more pleasing to appeare’.

embosome: cherish; conceal

25.6 Pryene: From L prae before + iens going. Gk πυρ pyr ‘fire’ is also suggested by the reference to ‘blazing pride’ at 26.3. Note the alliterative link to ‘proud through praise’ at 27.1.

25.7–25.9 25.7-9 Cf. 17.4-8, 19.1 for the recurrent emphasis on fortune.

deface: outshine

25.9 deface: Immediate context suggests the sense ‘outshine by contrast’, but the word and its etymology also link Phaon’s tale to the preceding episode’s concern with the poetics of ‘impersonation’ (see 14.3n).

blent: blinded

26.3 blent: Cf. 7.7. She blinds ‘their blazing pride’ by outshining it. In ME the verb can also mean to conceal or put out of sight.

26.5 Claribell: From L clara famous or bright + bella beauty.

26.7 as thou art: The rhyming pair (‘all her art’) pointedly contrasts the being ascribed to Pryene with the artifice attributed to Claribell—ironically, since Pryene will soon be dressed in Claribell’s identity.

26.8 26.8 Pryene’s impersonation of Claribell, mingling social advancement with pride in ‘gorgeous geare’, recalls the themes of Braggadocchio’s knightly imposture in the previous canto (see esp. iii.5) as well as the emphasis throughout this canto on the trope of allegorical personification.

treachour: traitor; deceiver

27.3 treachour: At 17.8 Phaon ascribed the ‘guilful trech’ to Fortune; here he more properly ascribes it to Philemon, but the accusation still serves to shift his own guilt onto another.

27.3 did remoue: Hamilton suggests ‘moved again’ (2001), although OED does not record such a usage. Alternatively, Phaon may be saying that Philemon ‘transferred’ the deception to him; ‘Me leading’ suggests that Phaon is as much self-deceived as betrayed by another.

engin: plot, scheme

27.6 27.6 Phaon does not recognize himself as the subject of ‘his’ tragedy.

proper: own

weend: supposed

assayd: afflicted

28.7 assayd: According to OED influenced by ‘assail’.

28.8–28.9 28.8-9 ‘I would rather suffer death ten thousand times than the pain of jealousy and the shame of disgrace’.

28.8 deathes: Disyllabic.

28.8 priefe: Proof, test. The action of passing through (‘proving’) death is central to Book II, from the allegorical tableau of Mortdant and Amavia in canto i to Guyon’s swoon in canto viii and Arthur’s confrontation with Maleger in canto xi.

gealous worme: serpent of jealousy

repriefe: disgrace

chawing: chewing; ruminating

29.6–29.7 29.6-7 ‘For when, asked the cause of my outrageous deed, I laid out [my justification] for all to see . . .’.

30.1–30.5 30.1-5 The movement from ‘my selfe’ to ‘him’, reinforced by the repetition of ‘first’, shows Phaon displacing the cause of his ‘hellish fury’ to a source outside himself, in keeping with the self-exculpatory motives of his tale. In replacing himself with another as the source of his rage, Phaon enacts the reversal central to the allegory in this canto (see 10.2-5n).

vengeable despight: cruel injury

30.3 vengeable despight: Suggesting an outrage that calls for vengeance (cf. 29.2).

faytour: impostor

30.9 washt away his guilt: Sardonic reference to absolution. In a Book marked by failed absolutions (Ruddymane in canto ii, Pilate in canto vii), Phaon’s poison is the one instance of efficacious ‘washing’.

31.4–31.5 31.4-5 Playing on the Latin etymology of the name (see 25.6n).

31.5–31.6 first . . . last: In a canto filled with reversals of sequence (see 4-5n and 10.2-5n), Pryene’s move from first to last in Phaon’s program of vengeance suggests that he imagines himself to be working back from consequences to causes (see 30.1-5n). That his confidence is deluded may be suggested by the phrase ‘poursewing my fell purpose’, which implies that he is chasing his own anger.

31.8 ghastly dreriment: ‘Dreriment’ is coined by Spenser from ‘dreary’, by analogy to merry/merriment; synonyms are ‘drerihed’ and ‘dreriness’. ‘Dreriment’ appears 12 times in FQ, and is ‘ghastly’ a third of the time.

enforst: compelled; reinforced

32.1 32.1 The rage that ‘enforst’ Phaon’s flight takes embodied form as the ‘mad man’ who pursues him. This emergence of the allegorical personification out of passionate delusion reverses, and retroactively explains, the Palmer’s earlier undoing of the personification allegory (see notes to 10.2-5 and 10.9).

32.3 Till: Spenser often uses temporal succession to imply causality.

32.4 in middle space: Allegorically the place where extremes are moderated (see ii.20.3); also the rhetorical space in which the relations of first/last, cause/effect, and self/other are subject to chiasmus, or reversal.

32.5 32.5 The pattern of self/other reversal is mirrored in the chiasmus of the pronoun sequence ‘I her . . . he me’.

Sore chauffed: severely chafed; raged

32.8 32.8 The metaphor acknowledges that Furor’s power arises from Phaon’s ‘heat’.

me doen to dye: they have almost killed me

stubborne handeling: ruthless treatment

mortall: deadly

33.5 mortall: Also, characteristic of mortal existence; capable of depriving the soul of grace (as in ‘mortal sin’).

33.8 diseasd: Afflicted with illness, but the rhyme-partner ‘easd’ calls attention to the broader meaning implicit in the etymology: deprived of comfort, tormented.

34.1 St. 34 For the polarity of strength and weakness as central to temperance, cf. i.57.7-8, ‘The strong it weakens with infirmitie, / And with bold fury armes the weakest hart’, and ii.31.3, ‘Weake she makes strong, and strong thing does increace’.

affections: passions

34.2 the bridle lend: See 2.2n.

betimes: speedily; before it is too late

perfect: mature or complete

34.6 perfect: From L perfectus fully grown.

34.7–34.8 34.7-8 Cf. xi.1.1-4 and the attacks on Alma’s castle in cantos ix and xi.

35.1 St. 35 Abraham Fraunce quotes these lines in full in Arcadian Rhetoric (1588, E3r) as an example of polyptoton, ‘the repetition of a word in different cases or inflections within the same sentence’ (OED). The four passions on which the elaborate patterning of the syntax is based correspond to the four humors: wrath to choler, jealousy to phlegm, grief to black bile, and love to blood.

35.1 do thus expell: This and the verb phrases in lines 6-8 are to be construed as imperatives; cf. Col. 3:8: ‘But now put ye away even all these things, wrath, angre, maliciousnes’.

filth: lust; sins of the flesh

35.4–35.5 35.4-5 ‘The fire bred from sparks, the weed bred from a little seed, the flood bred from drops, and filth bred the Monster’. The lines employ a version of zeugma known as syllepsis: three intransitive clauses are paralleled with a fourth transitive clause, all linked by zeugma to the verb ‘breede’. The effect, in an episode concerned with reversals of sequence, is unsettling.

delay: allay; dilute or temper

outweed: weed out

36.2 mischiefe: Cf. the squire’s self-exculpating accusation against ‘Misfortune’ at 17.8, and ‘Unlucky’ in line 1

36.4 gouernaunce: Cf. Guyon’s ‘goodly governaunce’ (i.29.8n) and Furor’s manifest lack of it (7.2).

36.4–36.5 36.4-5 Cf. John 5:14, ‘Sinne no more, least a worse thing come unto thee’.

read: tell

aduaunce: bring forth; raise up

36.7 Phaon: Ovid’s Sappho, yearning for Phaon, laments Uror, ut indomitis ignem exertibus Euris / fertilis accensis messibus ardet ager (‘I burn—as burns the fruitful acre when its harvests are ablaze, with untamed east-winds driving on the flame’; Heroides 15.9-10).

36.7 aduaunce: With tendentious senses implied: extol, promote, elevate, put forward as a claim. Cf. ‘rayse . . . to honour’ in line 9.

36.8 Coradin: Gray suggests L cor heart + Atin (2006); cf. 42.5.

37.1 37.1 As at 32.3, succession implies causality.

varlet: male servant

37.2 varlet: May be used as a synonym for either ‘groom’ or ‘squire’

37.7 soyld: Cf. Phaon ‘Lying on ground, all soild with blood and myre’ (16.4).

bashed not / For: ‘was unabashed by’

Guyons lookes: Guyon’s glances

37.9 eyglaunce at him shot: Punning on ‘glance’ as a blow or impact, as in Hakluyt: ‘they saile away, being not once touched with the glaunce of a shot’ (1589: 1.153).

38.3–38.4 field . . . wreath: Heraldic terms referring to the surface of the shield and to the ornamental border in which the motto is inscribed.

38.5 Burnt I doe burne: See arg.2n. This riddling motto makes its first person pronoun at once the subject and the object of its doubled verb: ‘I burn (myself/another) because I am burnt’. It thus condenses the play with cause and consequence, self and other, that runs throughout the canto: ‘Having been burnt by another/myself, I burn myself/others as if in an act of retribution’.

redoubted: dreaded or respected

dartes: javelins or light spears

flit: swift

dight: prepared

39.3 place: Cf. the ‘middle space’ of 32.4. The varlet’s belated claim to have preempted this space of figuration extends the canto’s exploration of the relation between preventative and precipitate action.

39.6–39.9 39.6-9 Instead of rising to the bait, Guyon lets go the ‘opportunity’ for rage presented by the varlet’s ‘great boldness’, checking his scorn in order to discover the cause; the internal rhyme ‘not to grow of nought’ emphasizes that Guyon has learned the Palmer’s lesson: ‘who so will raging Furor tame / Must first begin’ with ‘Occasion, the roote of all wrath’ (10.9-11.2).

40.4 to him, that mindes his chaunce t’abye: ‘to him who intends to take his chances’, responding to the challenge at 39.5; ‘abye’ in this sense is influenced by ‘abide’.

assay: proven worth

stay: wait for

41.2 Pyrochles: Gk πυρ pyr fire + οχλεω ochleō to be swept away. The correction in FE, reducing the consonant cluster of ‘Pyrrh-’ to ‘Pyr-’, may be calculated to reduce the possibility that a reader will construe the syllable as metrically promoted. In classical quantitative scansion, a syllable spelled ‘Pyrrh’ might be regarded as ‘long by position’ and therefore metrically prominent; the correction thus seems to confirm that the first syllable is not to be regarded as promoted by its orthography and that the first foot of the line therefore conforms to Spenser’s iambic. (For more on Spenser’s interest in the relation of quantitative meter to English verse practice, see the introduction to Letters).

41.5 Cymochles: Gk κυμα kuma wave + οχλεω ochleō to be swept away. For both brothers’ names, meter suggests that the accent should fall on the second syllable.

41.6 Acrates: See II.i.51.2-4n on the etymology of Acrasia as ‘lack of self-control’.

41.7–41.9 41.7-9 Phlegeton is the river of fire in the classical underworld, crossed by Duessa and Sansjoy at I.v.33.3 on their way to visit Aesculapius. Jarre is discord; Herebus is Erebus, generally the region of the underworld. Hesiod, Theog 123-25, makes Erebus and Night the children of Chaos. In making Erebus the son of Aeternitie, Spenser may be adapting Boccaccio (Gen Deor 1.1), who derives Night from Herebus and Litigium (Jarre), who in turn derive from Demogorgon and Aeternitie.

41.8 41.8 The hypermetric line creates an unusual double alexandrine in this stanza. The isochronic tendencies of these lines build on the marked pattern of repetition begun in lines 6-7 to intensify the archaic theogonic turn given to the brothers’ genealogy.

race: ancestry

Drad: dreaded

42.3 derring doe: Bold action, courage, a usage derived from misunderstanding of the ME idiom, which meant ‘daring [to] do’; cf. SC Oct 65 gloss by E.K., ‘manhoode and chevalrie’.

His am I: i.e. his attendant

42.5 Atin: From Gr ατη atē (‘mischief’ or ‘ruin’), + OF atine incitement to battle (Heiatt 1975: 185); the line thus suggests that Atin is not only Pyrochles’ attendant but his occasion, riding ahead to start the cycle of fury anew. Ate, the Greek goddess of discord who provoked the Trojan War (II.vii.55.4-9) will appear as a character in Book IV.

stead: place

42.8 stead: Cf. 39.3n.

confusion: destruction

behight: commanded

44.1–44.7

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).

rusty: reddish-brown with dried blood

44.6 cause is caught: ‘occasion [for anger] is seized’. In formulating the reversal of sequence by which Pyrochles, already inflamed, looks for a reason to be angry, this phrase condenses the canto’s sustained meditation on cause and effect with its reversals of pursuit.

vpbray: reproach (cause to be blamed)

silly: defenseless

45.5–45.7 45.5-7 Echoing Dido’s bitter reproach to Aeneas: egregiam vero laudem et spolia ampla refertis / tuque puerque tuus; magnum et memorabile numen, / una dolo divum si femina victa duorum est (‘Splendid indeed is the praise and rich the spoils ye win, thou and thy boy [Ascanius]; mighty and glorious is the power divine, if one woman is subdued by the guile of two gods!’; Aen 4.93-95).

thrillant: piercing

46.2 vengeable despight: See 30.3n; here ‘despight’ suggests rather ‘contempt’ than ‘injury’.

intended: guided

empight: implanted itself

46.6–46.8 46.6-8 Cf. Eph 6.16, ‘Above all, take the shield of faith, wherewith ye may quench all the fyrie dartes of the wicked’, and Whitney, Calumniam contra calumniatorem virtus repellit (‘virtue beats back slander against the slanderer’; 1586, no. 138b, trans. Green 1866).

v.2–v.4 arg.2-4 In 1596 these lines are revised to read ‘And Furors chayne unbinds, / Of whom sore hurt, for his revenge / Atin Gymochles finds’ (‘G’ for ‘C’ in Cymochles being an error carried over from the 1590 text). This change extends the summary of the action beyond Atin’s departure, related at 25.4-9, to include his discovery of Cymochles in the Bower, described in st. 28-36.

apply: devote

frame: shape or discipline

v.1.4 stubborne perturbation: Alluding to the Gk etymology shared by the names of the brothers Pyrochles and Cymochles: ὀχλεω ochleō to be swept away, to disturb by tumult.

embatteiled: apparelled for combat

v.2.4–v.2.5 2.4-5 A consistent allegory of the elements fire (anger) and water (desire) attaches to the brothers in this canto, culminating in Pyrochles’ failed baptism (vi.42-51). These lines introduce the motif by mingling the apparent opposites, perhaps to suggest that they are closely related (allegorically brothers) after all; cf. i.34.7-9 for the anticipation of this hint in the combination of wrath and concupiscence that overtakes Guyon in his near-assault on Redcrosse.

stire: stir, excite to action

chaffar: bandy

v.3.2 chaffar: Literally, exchange for profit (cf. Mother Hubberd 1159, ‘He chaffred Chayres in which Churchmen were set’). Cf. i.25.9 and note; Guyon here encounters his own previous error, now objectified in Pyrochles.

v.3.3 prickt: Allegorically the knight is spurring his own animal passions, represented by the horse he rides; cf. 36.1 and 38.9, where Atin pricks the recumbent Cymochles first with ‘his sharp pointed dart’ and then ‘with spurs of shame and wrong’.

smouldring: suffocating

v.3.4 smoke: to go with the ‘sparkling fire’ of 2.6, both suggested by the etymology of the name ‘Pyrochles’ (see iv.37.4-7 and 41.2n)

v.3.7 sturdy: in ME and early modern usage, violent, fierce, or cruel; cf. E.K.’s gloss to SC Feb 149, ‘Sterne strife) said Chaucer .s. fell and sturdy.’

sell: saddle

truncked: truncated

v.4.1 St. 4-5 The accidental beheading of your opponent’s horse is bad form in chivalric romance. For variations on this typical incident, see Bevis of Hampton 1885-98, Morte D’Arthur 10.42, OI 3.8.38, and OF 24.105-6.

shent: scolded

v.5.7 5.7 It is unclear how Pyrochles would know anything about Guyon’s past behavior.

v.6.2–v.6.3 the vpper marge Of his seuenfolded shield: See iii.1.9n. Spenser’s phrase here may translate Aen 12.925, clipei extremos septemplicis orbis, (‘the sevenfold shield’s utmost circle’).

targe: shield

beuer: visor

disarme: disable

v.7.7 disarme: Punning grimly on the idea of cutting the arm off altogether; cf. vi.14.6-7, where Phaedria lays Cymochles’ ‘head disarmed / In her loose lap’.

bate: bit

dint: blow

grieued: afflicted with pain and/or mental suffering

entyre: inwardly and utterly

v.8.4 added flame vnto his former fire: Cf. I.i.19.3 where Una urges Redcrosse to ‘Add faith unto your force, and be not faint’; the alliterative echoes as well as the similar formulation make Pyrochles a parody of holiness; instead of godly virtue to righteous effort, he adds anger to itself.

molt: melted

approued: proven

v.8.7 warlike gyre: A combat maneuver that involves circling sharply around to strike.

saufgard: safety; defensive stance

foynd: thrust

throwes: violent strokes

athwart: obliquely

t’illude: to deceive

v.10.1 St. 10 Cf. Timon of Athens 4.3.336-8: ‘wert thou the unicorn, pride and wrath would confound thee and make thine own selfe the conquest of thy fury’. The lion’s trick is referred to in Julius Caesar 2.1.203-5 and described in Topsell 1607, which also characterizes the unicorn as ‘a beast of an untamable nature’ (p. 557). Job 39:13 asks, ‘Canst thou binde the unicorne?’

v.10.4 him . . . applyes: ‘Places himself in contact with’; possibly a comic echo of the canto’s opening line.

v.10.7 precious horne: Thought to have magical medicinal properties.

fayld: deceived

v.11.1 fayld: From L fallere to decieve; cf. III.xi.46.9, ‘So lively and so like, that living sence it fayld’.

queint: quenched, extinguished

the Saint: Gloriana

v.11.7 the Saint: Cf. i.28.7, ‘that faire image of that heavenly Mayd’, and IV.pr.4.2, ‘But to that sacred Saint my soveraigne Queene’.

offer of: opportunity for

v.12.2 offer of: The irony implicit in ‘offer’ is contradicted by Pyrochles’ cry for mercy in lines 7-9, but cf. his call for death at vi.45.5 and his scornful rejection of Arthur’s offered mercy at viii.51-52.

v.12.8 12.8 ‘Do not judge your force according to the unjust judgment of fortune’ (Hamilton 2001). Smith 1909, following Jortin 1734, suggests ‘but’ for ‘by’.

v.12.9 maugre: A verb expressing defiance: ‘damn her spite’.

v.13.2 aduizement slow: As opposed to ‘hasty wroth’.

th’equall die: impartial luck

v.13.4 th’equall die: With a pun on die.

hazardry: gambling, taking risks

grated: clenched

sandy: yellowish red

v.14.4 sandy: Cf. Furor’s red eyes, copper hair, and tawny beard (iv.15.5-9n).

v.14.9 14.9 ‘Whose bounty he wondered at more than his might, yet he wondered at both’; or, ‘Whose bounty was greater than his might, yet he wondered at both’.

v.15.1 St. 15 The narrator addresses Guyon in similar terms at III.i.7.5-9.

v.15.5 15.5 ‘Yet soon gained far more than he had lost’.

v.15.9 15.9 Cf. Guyon’s self-defeating combat with Furor, iv.8.8-9.

v.16.1 16.1 Echoing Medina’s exhortation, ‘O fly from wrath, fly, O my liefest Lord’ (ii.30.5).

v.16.2 lesser partes: The bodily sources of the passions, internal organs and humors.

iarre: discord

v.16.4 hartmurdring loue: Like that of Mortdant and Amavia.

v.16.7–v.16.9 16.7-9 Echoing Redcrosse’s question to Guyon at i.29.5-9.

dread: dreadfulness

v.17.1 St. 17 Pyrochles misconstrues the allegorical tableau as an opportunity for chivalric rescue. See 3.2n and cf. Archimago’s provocation of Guyon, i.9-11.

v.17.2–v.17.5 17.2-5 It is unclear who could have made this complaint, since Pyrochles arrives just after Atin flees (see 2.9).

bare: unprotected

effort: compulsion

v.17.4 effort: From ‘efforce’; cf. xii.43.6-7, ‘wisdomes power, and temperaunces might, / By which the mightiest things efforced bin’.

assoyled: released

vse: customary behavior

streight: promptly

garre: cause

v.19.7 garre: See E.K.’s gloss SC Apr 1.

v.20.3 20.3 Alluding to the theological point that human nature resists grace; Furor belongs entirely to the ‘lesser partes’ that ‘move’ war within the self (16.1-2).

wood: insane

affronted: confronted

vncouth: strange or unseemly

wroke: avenged

dishabled: belittled

v.21.7 21.7 At i.5.2 Archimago lies in wait for Redcrosse ‘In hope to win occasion to his will’.

entise: incite or inflame

v.21.9 entise: Probably from L titio firebrand.

durt: mud

v.22.6–v.22.9 22.6-9 Cf. Jas 3:6, ‘And the tongue is fire’ and iv.5.1.

v.22.7 Stygian: Relating to the river Styx, or more generally the classical underworld of Hades where Styx and four other rivers ran. Normally Phlegethon is the infernal river associated with fire (cf. ‘flaming Phlegeton’ at vi. 50.9). OED notes that Styx (Gk Στυξ) is etymologically linked to ‘hate’ and ‘hateful’.

disdeignd: regarded with indignation

v.23.9 wretched man: Cf. Rom 7:24 ‘O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’

gan him dight: prepared himself

v.25.4–v.25.9 25.4-9 Atin, having fled at the close of the previous canto (iv.46.9, v.2.1), here flees a second time.

late: lately

v.26.6 for terrour of his name: I.e., ‘to make his reputation more terrifying’.

v.26.8–v.26.9 26.8-9 When Redcrosse fights Sansloy, Sansfoy’s shield is displayed on a tree as the spoils (with Duessa) of the combat (I.v.5.7-8).

v.26.9 Dame: From L domina, suggesting domination or command.

v.27.1 St. 27-35 These stanzas offer a preview of the ‘Bowre of Blisse’, extensively described in the final canto of Book II. A number of specific verbal echoes link the two passages.

v.27.2 Acrasia: See i.51.2-4n for the etymology of the name.

hewes: shapes

mewes: cages

by kynd: by nature

v.28.3–v.28.5 lust and loose liuing . . . he has pourd out his ydle mynd: Cf. I.vii.7.1-3, where Redcrosse pours ‘out in loosnesse’ with his ‘Dame’ Duessa; the lustful activity seems to have a similar weakening effect on both Cymochles and the hero of Book I.

delices: delights

v.28.7 28.7 The mollification of Mars by Venus, derived from the invocation to Lucretius De Rerum (1.1-49) is a common topos in the iconography and Neoplatonic philosophy of the Italian Renaissance that recurs with frequent variations in FQ. Cf. I.pr.3.7-9n.

v.29.1–v.29.2 29.1-2 The idea that art’s imitation of nature can turn into a rivalry is common in early modern discussions of art and literature. Spenser harks back to Ovid’s description of the grotto sacred to Diana (Met 3.155-62), by way of Tasso, GL 16.9-12. Spenser will develop this topos with extensive echoing of both passages in canto xii.

v.29.3 wanton Yuie: Sacred to Bacchus, ivy is wanton because it clings to everything; see I.i.48.9n.

v.29.4 fragrant Eglantine: Sweet-briar, a species of rose featuring ‘strong hooked prickles, pink single flowers, and small aromatic leaves’ (OED).

v.29.5 prickling armes: ‘Eglantine’ derives from L aculentus prickly.

v.29.8 Zephyrus: the west wind; cf. Chaucer, CT Gen Pro, ‘And Zephyrus eke with his sweete breath / Inspired hath in every holt and heeth / The tendre croppes’ (3-5).

pumy stones: lava rock

Traueiler: one who journeys; one who labors

thristy: thirsty

display: sprawl

v.31.2–v.31.5 31.2-5 These lines mingle references to the oak, sacred to Jove (Od 14.327-28, repeated at 19.296, and Met 1.106), and the poplar, sacred to Hercules (Idylls 2.121 and Ecl 7.61; Georg 2.66; Aen 5.134, 8.276-77). Olympick Jove further suggests the olive, used to crown victors at the Olympic Games (Statius, Thebaid 6.5-8).

v.31.5 Nemus: Where Hercules slew the Nemean lion.

comfort: delight, refreshment

v.32.1 displaid: Cf. 30.7.

follies: lewd actions

v.32.6 follies: From Fr folie, akin to the modern theatrical use, as context indicates.

disaray: undress

v.32.7 disaray: With a glance at ‘put into disorder’.

meet habiliments: proper attire

v.32.9 32.9 The description of the damsels as both ‘naked’ and ‘deckt’ may simply mean that they are adorned with jewelry, not garments. But the apparent contradiction, underlined by the juxtaposition ‘naked, deckt’, extends the confusion of art and nature (29.1-2n) to the female body, suggesting that this body is ‘ornamented’ by nature. Cf. the description of Belphoebe, where details of her attire and its highly ornamented description (‘golden fringe’, ‘close enwrapped’ knots, ‘the temple of the Gods’, breasts that ‘through her thin weed their places only signifide’) signify anatomical features not otherwise revealed (iii.26-29).

v.33.1 St. 33-34 Upton identifies these stanzas as a direct translation of GL 16.18-19. The contrast between the aggressive solicitation of the maidens and Cymochles’ feigned slumber emphasizes the perversity of his desire to ‘steale a snatch’ of what is so freely offered.

aggrate: gratify

glancing: casting momentary looks; flashing or shining

v.33.4 dropping like honny dew: Cf. Prov. 5.3, ‘For the lippes of a strange woman drop as an honie combe, and her mouth is more soft then oyle’. The Geneva gloss adds, ‘By oyle and honie he meaneth flattering and craftie intisements’.

v.33.5 bathed kisses: Perhaps an ellipsis for ‘bathed [him with] kisses’.

embrew: soak or pour

sugred licour: sweet fluid

v.33.6 sugred licour: From L liquor liquidity.

v.33.9 all for tryall: Repetition and orthography suggest a pun.

v.34.5 wanton eies: Echoing the ‘wanton Yvie’ of 29.3.

snatch: hurried grab; fragment; portion seized on; a trap or snare

conceipt: fantasy

v.34.6 conceipt: Either the general power of conceiving, or a specific notion. The spelling recalls an etymological link to L capere seize, reinforced by the phrase ‘steale a snatch’.

receipt: recipe or ingredients

v.34.9 receipt: Also ‘act of receiving’, in pointed contrast to Cymochles’ fantasy of seizing.

v.35.1 St. 35 For the topos of rousing an erstwhile warrior from his lapse into sensuality, cf. Aen 4.265-76, OF 7.57-64, and GL 16.32-33.

v.35.6 Acrates: For the etymology linking this name to ‘Acrasia’ see iv.41.6 and i.51.2-4n.

v.36.1 dart: Cf. the poison darts borne by Atin on his first appearance at iv.38.7, and the recurrent association of Pyrochles with ‘pricking’ (3.3n).

v.36.2 36.2 Cf. GL 16.33.2-3: qual viltà l’alleta? / Su su (‘what sloth doth thee infect? / Up, up’; trans. Fairfax).

prowest: worthiest, most brave or gallant

weetlesse: unaware

v.36.6 sencelesse ground: An unconventional instance of transferred epithet, since in fact the ground is senseless.

vtmost grudging spright: final unwilling breath and/or spirit

v.37.7 Furies: See ii.29.2n.

deare dismay: costly defeat

v.38.8–v.38.9 pricketh . . . pricks: See 3.3 note.

immodest: lewd

1 immodest: From L modus measure, by way of immodestus excessive, immoderate. See 37.4 for the only other use in the poem.

1.1 St. 1 Paraphrasing Nic Eth 2.3, to the effect that pleasure is harder to resist than anger. Aristotle adds that both art and virtue address themselves to what is difficult, since the greater the difficulty, the greater the success. The analogy between art and virtue is especially resonant for FQ.

Continence: self-restraint

1.1 Continence: The ability to ‘contain’ appetites and impulses. In Aristotle, ευκραςια eukrasia. Cf. akrasia in i.51.2-4n.

vneathes: not easily

faine: eagerly

1.7 abstaine: Transitive use is unusual, according to OED ‘probably a literary imitation of the trans. use of L abstinere’. It means either that ‘feeble nature’ can hold her enemies at bay or that she can keep herself away from them. The 1596 reading, ‘restraine’, is more conventional and less equivocal.

2.1 St. 2-19 Some narrative details in this episode derive from OI; see Var 2.240-41; Kostic, Spenser’s Sources 272-80 and 368.

Gondelay: Gondola

2.7 Gondelay: A light skiff with cabin amidships, rising to a point on each end.

2.8 arbours: Vines or shrubs trained on a lattice or other framework.

3.4 Pope Ione: Legendary medieval figure reported to have held the papacy in the 9th century while disguised as a man. Cf. Boccaccio, De mulieribus claris CI, De Iohanna anglica papa (‘Joan, an Englishwoman and Pope’). The phrase as merry as Pope Joan was proverbial (Smith 1970, no. 529); Foxe, quoting the proverb, associates its mirth with ‘the pleasures of Venus, Bacchus, and Ceres’ (Actes 1583, 159). Pope Joan was invoked often by anti-Catholic polemicists in the 16th century, but in 1587 the French antiquary de Raemond debunked the legend using methods of humanist textual scholarship, and by 1596 Spenser has replaced this proverb with the phrase ‘that nigh her breth was gone’.

3.7–3.9 3.7-9 Cf. Aristotle’s disapproval of vacuous laughter at Nic Eth 4.8.

barke: ship

painted: artificially colored

5.1 St. 5 Echoing Homer on the ships of the Phaecians, which ‘have no pilots, nor steering-oars . . but of themselves understand the thoughts and minds of men’ (ου γαρ Φαιηκεσσι κυβερνητηρες εασιν, / ουδετι πηδαλι’ εστι, τα τ᾽ αλλαι νηες εχουσιν: / αλλ᾽ αυται ισασι νοηματα και φρενας ανδρων; on gar phaiēkessi kybernētēres easin, / oudeti pēdali’ esti, ta t’ allai nēes echousin: / all’ autai isasi noēmata kai phrenas andrōn, Od 8.557-9). Similar boats appear in OF 30.11 and GL 14.57-65.

liquid: transparent

5.2 liquid: As a modifier for air or sky, a distinctively Spenserian usage, following poetic use of L liquidus by Virgil, Horace, and other Roman authors.

pin: wooden peg

apply: steer

5.7 apply: From nautical senses of L applicare ‘to bring (a ship to a destination), to land’ (OED).

wanton: frivolous

6.1 wanton: Implying a promiscuity not limited to sex.

purpose: conversation

6.3 purpose: ‘That which is propounded; a proposition, a question, an argument; a riddle’ (OED). Phaedria’s purpose lacks, as it were, purpose.

6.4 merry tales: A phrase that appears in the titles of popular jestbooks like Merie tales by Skelton, one of four volumes Spenser lent Gabriel Harvey in 1578.

faine: fashion

6.4 faine: From L fingere to shape or pretend.

toyes: flirtatious behaviors

aguize: deck

plight: braided

frigot: frigate, a small light ship built for speed

souenaunce: memory

8.3 souenaunce: From L subvenīre to come into the mind.

8.8–8.9 8.8-9 Cf. the role of Medina at ii.27-32.

9.3 and what that vsage ment: cf. I.iii.32.8, ‘what the Lyon ment’.

9.4 cott: ‘A small roughly-made boat, used on the rivers and lakes of Ireland; a “dug-out”’ (OED).

9.7 Phædria: From Gk φαιδρος phaidros glittering, cheerful; cf. arg.1. Familiar from Euripides, Seneca, Ovid, Virgil, and Renaissance mythographers as the name of the ‘wanton stepdame’ (I.v.37.5) whose destructive passion led to the death of the chaste Hippolytus.

10.2 Idle lake: Cf. Gen 14:3, ‘the salte Sea’, for which the Geneva gloss reads: ‘Called also dead Sea, or the lake Asphaltite nere unto Sodom and Gomorah’. Joseph Wybarn in 1609 seems to be making this connection when he refers to those who have ‘drowned themselves in the dead sea of pleasure’; a marginal gloss beside the phrase refers readers to ‘The Legend of Phaedria in the 2. booke of the Faeyerie Queene’ (Sp All, 120).

swelling Neptune . . . thundring Ioue: waves . . . storms

waste and voyd: uncultivated and uninhabited

11.3 waste and voyd: Cf. 11.9-12.1 for its fertility.

11.4 floted: Cf. Conti Myth 9.6 on the island of Delos as instabilis per illud tempus, sub vndis forte e delitescebat (‘unstable and at that time as it happened hidden under the waves’; 273.33); also Aen 3.73-77, and Met 6.189-91. Other classical references to floating islands are found in Homer, Herodotus, Pindar, Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, Hyginus, and Lucian. Early maps show floating ‘Isles of St. Brandan’ in various parts of the Atlantic, and European navigators went in search of them. See Hereford Mappa Mundi, Richard of Haldingham (1280); Paolo Toscanelli’s World Map (1476); Erdapfel globe, Martin Behaim (1492); one helpful source is Peter De Roo’s History of America Before Columbus According to Documents and Approved Authors; J.B. Lippencott Company; 1900; the first chapter of the second volume is completely dedicated to the legend and history of the islands.

12.1–12.2 12.1-2 Cicero, in de Oratore, imagines Odysseus, when Calypso and Circe offer him immortality, declaring his preference for ut Ithacam illiam in asperrimis saxulis, tamquam nidulum (‘that Ithaca of his, lodged like a tiny nest upon the roughest of small crags’; I.196); cf. Od 9.29-36. Transferred to a simulacrum of the Bower of Bliss, the simile insinuates the locale’s seductive allure as a false image of the home one longs for.

12.6–12.7 12.6-7 Initiates a series extending into st. 13 that inventories the bounty of the island entirely through negation. Cf. Gen 2:5: ‘And every plant of the fielde, before it was in the earth, and every herbe of the field, before it grewe’.

arborett: little tree

12.7 arborett: The first recorded use in OED.

13.1 St. 13 Cited by Robert Alott in England’s Parnassus (1600) as an example of ‘the choysest Flowers of our Modern Poets’ (475). The first six lines had been adopted by Thomas Watson in 1593 for The Tears of Fancie (51).

ditt: words for music

13.4 ditt: From ME ‘dite’ (something written) by association with ‘ditty’ (song).

fild: filled or defiled

14.6 head disarmd: Literally unhelmeted, but the comical pun calls attention to the idea that Cymochles’ mind is defenseless.

14.8 fearing not be harmd: Ellipsis for ‘not t’ be harmd’, with the contraction assimilated to the final ‘t’ in ‘not’.

charmd: From L carmina song.

15.1 St. 15-17 Phaedria’s song mingles allusions to classical, Biblical, and Italian precedents, including the Lotus-eaters in Od 9, Gen 3:10, Matt 6:25-34, and the Siren’s lullaby to Rinaldo in Tasso (GL 14.62-64).

15.1–15.3 15.1-3 ‘O man, who takes toilsome pains, behold how the flowers, etc., make themselves an example to you’.

15.4–15.5 15.4-5 ‘While nature, not at all envious, throws them forth out of her fruitful lap’.

pompous: magnificent, full of pomp

16.2 E.K. glosses flowre deluce as ‘Flowre delice, that which they use to misterme, Flowre de luce, being in Latine called Flos delitiarum’ (SC Apr 144). L deliciae delights, charms.

16.3 to them . . . yield: I.e., ‘yield to their example’.

stoure: turmoil

16.9 16.9 ‘She leaves all the worrying to Mother Nature’.

17.1–17.2 17.1-2 Echoing Ps 8:6-8, to which the Geneva gloss reads, ‘By the temporal gifts of mans creation he is led to consider the benefites which he hathe by his regeneration through Christ’.

17.7 Who shall him rew, that: ‘Who is going to pity the man that’.

thrist: thirst (by metathesis)

18.2 worldly: 1596 ‘worldly’, of which wordly is an archaic form, as in Skelton’s phrase ‘wordly wondre’ (Vox Populi xi.38).

18.7 slouthfull: Echoing its root-word ‘slow’.

18.7 griesy: 1596 ‘griesly’. Related forms, both similar to the modern ‘grisly’, horrible; in context (cf. slouthfull), 1590 also puns on ‘greasy’. Cf. agrise at 46.7.

wefte: wafted, i.e. sailed

strond: strand, i.e. the shore

19.5 where him she byding fond: ‘Where she found him waiting’.

sad: serious

19.6 tooke a boord: In colloquial use, ‘sexually accommodated’.

19.7–19.9 19.7-9 Cf. 4.8-9, ‘but Atin by no way / She would admit, albe the knight her much did pray’. Phaedria’s gondola responds to her wishes, suggesting that her motions are self-willed (see st. 10); hence Guyon’s ‘guide’ (20.1) must be excluded. Cf. xii.3.1, where the Boatman rowing Guyon and the Palmer to Acrasia’s island bids the Palmer ‘stere aright’.

flitt: swift

20.3 obaying to her mind: See st. 5n.

guize: conduct

21.1 guize: Cf. ‘style’ at 22.1.

reare: begin

iollity: pleasure, with sexual connotation

gibe: taunt

geare: jeer

bonds: boundaries

23.2–23.5 23.2-5 Cf. what the narrator says about winds and tides at 20.8-9, and Phaedria’s own comments on her navigation at 10.2-9.

mote: must

24.6 fields did laugh: Cf. Ps 65:13, where pastures and valleys ‘showte for joye, and sing’ because they are covered with sheep and corn; the Geneva gloss adds, ‘That is, the dumme creatures shall not onely reioyce for a time for Gods benefites, but shal continually sing’. For discussion of this echo and comparison of eight different English translations of the Biblical passage, see Shaheen (1976: 52, 190-91). Cf. Petrarch’s phrase Ridono i prati (RS 310.5, ‘the meadows laugh’), Lucretius’ invocation to Venus in De Rerum, tibi suavis daedala tellus / summittit flores, tibi rident equora ponti (‘for you the wonder-working earth puts forth sweet flowers, for you the wide stretches of ocean laugh’; 1.7-8), and Arthur’s memory of the day he dreamed of Gloriana: ‘The fields, the floods, the heavens with one consent / Did seeme to laugh on me, and favour mine intent’ (I.ix.12.8-9).

25.4 natiue musicke . . . skilful art: Yet another intertwining of ‘natural’ beauty with (potentially malicious) artifice.

martiall guize: armor

26.2 26.2 Hamilton 2001 suggests plausibly that Guyon’s ‘posture declares his control over the fountain of affections’. John Bulwer in Chirologia (1644) catalogues the hand upon the heart as gesture LII, Conscienter affirmo, glossing it as a token of ‘sincere asseveration’ (88-89).

thewed: mannered

part: ‘a piece of conduct, an act’ (OED)

steme: steam

27.5 steme: OED cites this as the sole instance in which the sense ‘to emit, send out in the form of vapor’ is used figuratively to mean ‘evaporate’. Hamilton 2001 suggests ‘steep’ or ‘dissolve in steam,’ implying that ‘steme’ works with ‘quench’ in the next line to portray the ‘molten heart’, plunged into a cold bath of sloth, expending its heat in steam.

28.7–28.9 28.7-9 Echoing Deut 28:26, ‘And thy carkeis shal be meat unto all foules of the ayre’, one of the ‘threatenings’ levelled against those who defy the Mosaic law. The Geneva gloss stresses that the disobedient will be ‘cursed bothe in thy life and in thy death’ because the burial here denied is a ‘testimonie of the resurrection’. Cf. also the taunts between David and Goliath in 1 Sam 17:44 and 46.

importune: violent

29.2 importune: Perhaps with ‘untimely’ or ‘inopportune’ as a secondary sense.

prepard to field: prepared for combat

valew: valor

29.4 valew: ‘Value’ and ‘valor’ are etymologically so intertwined in ME and early modern usage that the phrase inevitably suggests a moral as well as martial equivalence between the combatants.

29.5 haberieons dismayld: ‘Knocked the metal plates off their sleeveless coats of mail’.

29.5 dismayld: ‘Divested of armor’, with the punning sense ‘unmanned’.

spalles: shoulders

entayld: carved or engraved

giambeux: leg-armor

29.9 giambeux: Hamilton 2001 suggests that this spelling may derive from Chaucer, CT Thopas 875.

grudging: aggrieved by

wroke: vindicated from or avenged for

enhaunst: raised

sway: swing

32.1 St. 32-36 Cf. Medina’s intervention at ii.27-32.

feld: cast down.

32.3 feld: The reflexive use of ‘felled’ is not recognized in OED.

wo worth: woe unto

race: descent

authour: source, cause

in bale to sterue: to die in grief

scarmoges: skirmishes

34.5 scarmoges: The ‘cruell’ game may disarm her skirmishes or they may disarm the game; this ambiguity of syntax, together with the hypallage between her erotic ‘game’ and the knights’ combative ‘scarmoges’, anticipates the extended troping of love as combat in the ensuing lines.

34.6–34.9 34.6-9 It is difficult to escape the implication that Phaedria is here proposing a sexual encounter in which she will yield a ‘pleasaunt victory’ to both knights, leaving them nothing to fight over. Since hypallage is Greek for ‘interchange, exchange’, there may be a witty subtextual parallel between Phaedria’s rhetoric and her sexual ethos.

Alarmes: calls to ‘arms’

shend: disgrace

commend: grace or adorn

35.6–35.9 35.7-9 Cf. the invocation to Cupid at I.pr.3.7-9.

36.2 extremities: Cf. ii.38.4, ‘The strong extremities of their outrage’.

36.3 36.3 Prov 15:1, ‘Soft answer putteth away wrath: but grievous wordes stirre up angre’.

clemency: mildness

that other part: the farther shore of the lake

he light did pas: he regarded lightly

37.3 he light did pas: ‘Light’ modifies either ‘he’ or ‘pass’, from Phaedria’s point of view, but from Guyon’s it modifies ‘delight’, to which it is drawn by the internal rhyme.

37.5 solemne sad: Cf. the description of Redcrosse at I.i.2.8.

coy: modest, reserved

That: i.e. so that

37.9 amoue: The narrator uses a relatively uncommon sense (‘To remove [a person or thing] from a position; to dismiss [a person] from an office’) to characterize Phaedria’s displeasure at her failure to ‘amove’ Guyon in the more usual sense of arousing him.

38.3 The which: Referring to her ‘swift bote’.

salied: jumped

shard: gap

38.9 shard: I.e. the lake regarded as a ‘perlous’ break in the continuity of ‘terra firma’.

tracted . . . trade: tracked . . . path, footprints

inuade: assail

39.9 famous enimy: Presumably Pyrochles.

40.4 passion fraile: an ellipsis for ‘passion that, strong in itself, makes human nature frail’

40.7 which him late did faile: OED labels this construction ‘the dative of the person’, citing as another example the King James rendering of 1 Kings 2:4, ‘There shall not faile thee . . . a man on the throne of Israel’. The preposition to is understood.

40.9 delayd: cooled, quenched; postponed

41.1 St. 41-42 At OI 3.1.20-21, Mandricardo dashes through fire and leaps into a fountain to save himself.

stept: steeped

42.6 flasht: For the mingling of fire and water, see v.2.4-5n. The syntax of lines 6-7 is latinate, with ‘the waves about’ serving as the object of both ‘flasht’ and ‘swept’: i.e. he flasht the waves about (with his raging arms) and his armor swept the waves about (so that it was washed clean).

bet: beat

43.6 Harrow . . . and well away: A cry of alarm; cf. Chaucer, ‘John . . . gan to crie “Harrow!” and “Weylaway! / Oure hors is lorn (CT Reeve 4071-73).

dismall: evil or cursed

43.7 dismall: Echoing L dies mali evil days; two days of each month were so designated in the medieval calendar. 1590 gives this line as ‘What dismall day hath lent but this his cursed light’, a reading that is both nonsensical and hypermetrical; 1596 revises to ‘What dismall day hath lent this cursed light’. There is no evidence as to whether the change is compositorial or authorial; we take it to be compositorial, and prefer to correct by removing ‘but this’. It is possible that the untenable 1590 reading resulted from a two-stage misconstrual of manuscript copy. If Spenser originally wrote ‘What dismall day hath lent vs [or ‘his’] cursed light’, and then added ‘this’ and ‘his’ [or ‘vs’] side by side above the line as possible replacements, the compositor could have misconstrued the unfinished revision as an insertion (stage one misconstrual). At the same time, he misread ‘vs’ as ‘but’: the heavily inked descender on a secretary hand ‘v’ makes it possible to read it as a ‘b’, and Spenser’s own terminal ‘s’ resembles the rounded form of a terminal ‘t’.

damnifyde: injured; damned

43.8 damnifyde: Cf. modern ‘indemnify’.

44.1 St. 44 In the details of immersion and of death as a means ‘to respyre’, there is a generalized allusion to the language of Romans 6 on baptism. Cf. i.55.3, 55.9 and notes.

44.2 implacable: Accented on the first syllable.

45.4 And dying dayly, dayly yet reuiue: a cruel parody of Paul’s instructions about daily death (Rom 12:1, 1 Cor 15:31).

45.8 his owne health remembring now no more: Parallels the lack of ‘sovenaunce’ at 8.3.

46.6–46.9 46.6-9 For the muddy waters of Cocytus (Cocyti stagna) in the classical underworld seeVirgil (Aen 6.323-30). In Tasso, Armida’s castle is surrounded by an asphalt lake (GL 10.61-62, acque . . . bituminose e calde / e steril lago) in which nothing can sink. Cf. also the Stygian marsh in Dante, Inf 7.108-130.

Engrost: thickened

agrise: horrify

arming: belonging to the armor of a knight

hath at earst thee hent: has seized you now

secret bowelles: the hidden recesses of the body cavity

bedight: treated

50.2 bedight: ‘Dight’ has a specifically scriptive range of meanings, ‘from L dictare to dictate, compose in language, appoint, prescribe, order; in med L to write, compose a speech, letter, etc’ (OED).

50.3 liuer: The liver was considered the seat of the passions.

50.9 Phlegeton: In the classical underworld, a river of fire.

felly: fiercely

priefe: proof, test

qualifyde: tempered, moderated

51.9 algates: Hamilton suggests ‘otherwise’, a sense not recorded in OED. Usually, ‘in any case’ or ‘by all means’.

1 Mamon: Aramaic for ‘wealth’; see Kellogg and Steele 1965: ‘The Syriac word was misunderstood by some early commentators of the Gospels who interpreted it as the name of one of the fallen angels and, from the New Testament context, the god of earthly wealth’ (8.1-2n). Where the Geneva Bible translates ‘Ye can not serve God and riches’ (Matt 6:24, Luke 16:13), the Bishops’ and other Elizabethan bibles read ‘God, and mammon’. Spenser’s conception of Mammon as both a god of riches and an underworld deity probably reflects the influence of Boccaccio, Genealogia 8.6, which conflates Pluto, the classical god of the underworld, with Plutus, the god of riches; Conti distinguishes the two but does mention that Strabo identified Pluto as the god of wealth (Myth 250). The descent to Mammon’s cave blends allusions to the hero’s descent to the underworld in classical epic (e.g. Od 11 and Aen 6), Satan’s temptation of Jesus in the wilderness (Matt 4:1-11, Luke 4:1-13), and a number of folktale motifs (e.g., taboos against eating food or touching treasures in the underworld; cf. Thompson, Motif-Index 1955, C211.1 – C211.2.2, C542).

delue: excavation

2 threasure: the (perhaps silent) ‘h’ marks the etymology of ‘treasure’ in L thesis aurum, or the ‘placing’ of gold, and so glances at the episode’s biblical concern with where we ‘lay up treasures’ (Matt 6:19-21). Cf. 32.9, ‘before thee laid’, and 33.3, ‘before mine eyes I place’.

hore: hoary, white or grey with age

1.1 St. 1 The simile of the experienced navigator both looks back to the topic of new world exploration in the proem and anticipates the sense of perilous exploration removed from heaven’s light (3.2) that attends upon Guyon’s venture into the subterranean kingdom of Mammon. Cf. 14.1-5.

1.2 a stedfast starre: cf. I.ii.1.2 ‘the stedfast starre’. Typically Polaris, in the constellation Ursa Minor (also referred to as the lodestar, the Northern Star, or the Pole Star; cf. II.x.4.7, III.iv.53.3). The hint of relativity in the indefinite pronoun might reflect awareness that the identity of the star closest to the pole depends upon the position of the observer in space and time. Thus Taylor 1971 reports the common belief that the southern hemisphere also had a fixed star to match Polaris in the north, the idea being that these two stars were like the ends of the earth’s axis (or “axle”) and provided similar navigational aid in their respective hemispheres (162). If Mammon’s cave is deep enough, there might be a reminiscence of Dante’s passage with Virgil through the center of the earth, from the northern to the southern hemisphere, at the close of the Purgatorio.

yblent: obscured

1.4 yblent: Past participle of two different verbs, the first meaning ‘to blind’ and the second meaning ‘to combine’. The first can sometimes mean ‘to conceal’, while the second, in its p ppl, can mean ‘confused’. Spenser’s usage here may itself be a blending of the forms. Cf. 10.5, ‘fowly blend’, and 13.2, ‘confound’.

1.6 card and compas: The ‘card’ is a chart or geographical description; in combination with ‘compas’ it might also refer to a card on which the 32 points of the compass are marked, although this tends to be a later usage.

maysters: masters

experiment: experience

1.7 maysters: A ‘Master Mariner’ was the captain of a merchant vessel; here, navigational instruments are personified as the pilot’s teachers (L magister).

apply: steer

2.1 2.1 The orthographic resemblance of ‘guyd’ to ‘Guyon’ suggests that, like the ‘Pilot well expert’, Guyon deprived of the Palmer will fall back on the ‘card and compass’ of ‘his owne vertues’ as an internalized guide.

2.4–2.5 2.4-5 Guyon comforted with his own virtues may exemplify Aristotle’s description of ‘the Great-minded man’ as one ‘who values himself highly and at the same time justly’ and who prizes his own self-sufficiency (Nic Eth 4.3, 1123b-1125a). The episode tests the limits of self-sufficiency, reached when Guyon collapses in st. 66.

yode: went

reedes: judges

wastfull: uninhabited

desert: desolate

2.9 wildernesse: See Matt 4:1, ‘Then was Jesus led aside of the Spirit into the wildernes, to be tempted of the devil’. The Spirit’s role in leading Jesus into the wilderness is more explicit in other translations. Cf. King James: ‘Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.’ The gloss to the New International Version notes that the Greek for ‘tempted’ can also mean ‘tested’.

Whereas: where

3.6–3.9 3.6-9 Mammon’s description suggests the appearance of a blacksmith; cf. st. 35-36.

3.6 bleard: See Langland, Piers Plowman 5.190 [Text B], where Avarice has ‘two blered eyghen’, and Matt 6:23, ‘if thine eye be wicked, then all thy bodie shalbe darke’. The emphasis through the canto’s opening is on concealment and on vision obscured by layers of darkness, mist, or grime, presumably because ‘Regard of worldly mucke doth fowly blend’ (10.5). Meanwhile the tissue of allusions to the Sermon on the Mount links this episode with Phaedria’s song at II.vi.15-17.

bedight: clothed

4.1 ouergrowne with rust: See Matt 6:19, ‘Lay not up treasures for your selves upon the earth, where the mothe and canker [Bishops’ Bible: “rust”] corrupt’.

4.2 vnderneath enueloped: A gold surcoat surrounds the iron that, beneath the gold, is overgrowne with rust, like another surcoat. The phrasing is difficult but, in its tendency to confound the opposites of ‘underneath’ and ‘enveloped’, evokes the action of the episode, in which Mammon leads Guyon underground to entrap him with the sight of hidden gold. As in the Bower of Bliss, where the ‘Virgin Rose . . . fairer seemes, the lesse ye see her may’ (xii.74.4-6), the secrecy of the treasure adds to its allure.

entayle: ornamental carving

mould: fashioning

antickes: grotesques

told: counted

4.8 feede his eye: Combines the two principal motifs of the canto, feeding (2.4-5) and gazing (3.6 and note).

5.2 neuer could be spent: The treasure is ‘hore’ (arg.2) because it is hoarded, withheld from circulation.

5.3–5.4 5.3-4 Earlier cantos have explored water as a purifying element; in Mammon’s cave raw materials undergo purification by fire. The recurrent emphasis on looking as a kind of feeding suggests an analogous tempering by heat in the form of digestion, an analogy that will become explicit in canto ix.

5.3 rude: From L rudis unwrought—but also ‘inexperienced’, implying by analogy that Guyon himself is ‘purifide’ by the ‘devouring element’ in the course of his ‘long experiment’ (1.7) in Mammon’s realm.

5.4 Mulcibers deuouring element: Mulciber, or Vulcan, is the Roman god of fire.

driuen, and distent: smelted and beaten out

Ingowes: ingots

5.6 Ingowes: In Spenser’s distinctive variation, Hamilton 2001 hears ‘Ingas’, the Elizabethan form of ‘Incas’, famous for the city of gold.

5.7 moniment: ‘image and superscription’ (cf. Matt 22:20-21; Mark 12:16-17; Luke 20:24-25).

5.9 kesars: emperors (from ‘Caesar’); for the conventional doublet with ‘kings’, cf. Teares 570; FQ III.xi.29.9, IV.vii.1.4, V.ix.29.9, and VI.iii.5.7.

7.4 right vsaunce: See Matt 25:14-30, the Parable of the Talents.

Thereat: thereupon

askaunce: sidelong

7.5 askaunce: Indicating ‘disdain, envy, jealousy, [or] suspicion’ (OED). Cf. SC March 21; FQ III.i.41.6, ix.27.3, and xii.15.2.

read: pronounce

7.9 pelfe: Puttenham calls this ‘a lewd terme to be given to a Princes treasure’ (1589: 3.22.217).

8.1–8.2 God of the world . . . god below the skye: See arg.1n and 5.7n. Mammon’s self-description (‘I me call’; cf. 9.6, ‘thy godheads vaunt’) confounds the distinction Jesus draws between worldly and heavenly jurisdictions. Cf. 2 Cor 4:4, ‘the god of this worlde’; John 12:31, ‘the prince of this worlde’.

enuye: refuse

8.5 principality: Cf. Matt 4:8, ‘all the kingdomes of the worlde, and the glorie of them’; also Luke 4:5-6.

8.7–8.9 8.7-9 Contrast the pretense of unfettered bounty in lines 3-4 and 8. The goods for which ‘men swinck and sweat incessantly’ may flow from Mammon ‘into an ample flood’, but the implied direction of the flow (from me into the world) is put in question by the way lines 8-9 move, as it were, upstream to the underground breeding-place of gold. For the tendency of Mammon’s rhetoric to give with one hand what it takes away with the other, see 5.2, 9.5, 10.3, and especially 19.6-9, confirming that Mammon withholds the ‘ample flood’ of wealth from proper circulation.

hollow: empty or concave; vain

8.9 hollow: Cf. ‘the hollow grownd’ (20.8).

8.9 eternall: Mammon ascribes divine attributes to worldly goods, here with implicit self-contradiction, since ‘brood’ as a verb or noun of birth cannot be eternal.

9.1 serue and sew: Cf. Matt 4:9, ‘All these wil I give thee, if thou wilt fall downe, and worship me’.

9.2 these mountaines: Conflating the earth with its ‘brood’ of riches.

9.5 nombred francke and free: The verb takes back what the adverbs purport to give freely; cf. the contradiction noted in 8.7n.

thy godheads vaunt: your divinity’s boast; your boasted divinity

derdoing: derring-do

10.1 derdoing: See ‘derring-do’ in glossary.

suit: pursuit

10.2 vowed daies: Guyon binds himself with a sacred oath at II.i.61.

10.3 bounteous baytes: See 9.5n. Here the noun takes back what the adjective offers, as Mammon’s apparent liberality turns out to be no more than ‘bait’.

witchest: beguile

10.4 witchest: OED records this as the first figurative use of the verb.

blend: blind or defile

10.5 blend: See 1.4n.

10.6 heroicke: OED records only one prior use of the adjective in this sense (Complaynt of Scotlande, 1549), although Sidney and Puttehnam use it to describe a kind of poetry or poet.

10.7 crownes: Also the name of a coin; cf. 5.8-9.

11.4 in twinckling of an eye: Cf. Luke 4:5: ‘The devil . . . shewed him all the kingdomes of the worlde, in the twinkeling of an eye’.

11.6 I kings create: Cf. Prov 8:15, ‘By me, Kings reigne’, with the Geneva gloss: ‘honors, dignitie or riches come not of mans wisdome or industrie, but by the providence of God’.

rowme: appointed place, office, or position

lust: list, i.e. please

read: judge

12.2 roote of all disquietnesse: Cf. 1 Tim 6:10: ‘For the desire of money is the roote of all evil’.

12.9 1590 prints ‘in great dishonour’. The reading we adopt from 1596 is easier to construe, and has been preferred by modern editors; 1590’s ‘in’ implicates the noble heart in the evils it ‘doth despize’.

confound: bring to ruin; throw into confusion

incline: bend; dispose

13.8 13.8 Cf. Marlowe, 2 Tamburlaine 5.2.26: ‘Kingdomes made waste, brave cities sackt and burnt’.

priuate state: private life

14.3–14.4 Caspian sea . . . Adrian gulf: Proverbial for storms. Horace calls the south wind, Auster, Dux inquieti turbidus Hadriae (‘stormy master of the restless Adriatic’; Odes 3.3.4-5). See st. 1n: the simile of the storm-tossed voyager reintroduces the motif that implicitly answers Mammon’s question in the second half of the stanza—men are ‘fond and undiscreet’ because ‘Regard of worldly mucke doth fowly blend’ (see notes to 3.6 and 1.4).

14.7–14.9 14.7-9 ‘[Why do men] complain when they don’t have money, and find fault with it when they do?’

15.1 St. 15-17 For the distinction between need and superfluity and the fall from a golden age of simplicity, see Boethius Cons Phil 2.prose.5 and 2.meter.5; Chaucer, ‘The Former Age’; Ovid, Met 1.89-150.

empeach: hinder

15.6 empeach: This and the two verbs below may reflect the specific phrasing of Chaucer’s translation of the passage from Boethius cited above: ‘thow wolt achoken the fulfillynge of nature with . . . thinges . . . anoyous’ (2.prose.5).

annoyes: interferes with

accloyes: obstructs, chokes

16.3 vnreproued: Contrast with 14.9, ‘complaine, and . . . upbrayd’.

truth: sincerity

soueraine: supreme

16.6 corn-fed steed: Proverbial; cf. Smith (1970, no. 121), citing Gascoigne: ‘cornfed beasts, whose bellie is their God’.

16.6–16.9 16.6-9 I.e. the pride of later age abused her (the age’s) plenty and her increase, to the end of excessive, unrestrained pleasure. Note the repeated feminine pronoun, indicating Guyon’s view that when the ‘antique world’ degenerates from innocence and purity to ‘fat swolne encreace’, it also declines from masculinity to femininity of the sort described by Parker 1987.

17.1 wombe: Cf. 8.9, ‘brood’.

great Grandmother: the earth

17.3–17.4 17.3-4 Mining is here compared to robbing a temple, the etymological sense of sacrilege (L sacra legere to purloin sacred objects).

17.6–17.7 17.6-7 ‘He combined gold and silver into the material cause of his desire’ (OED s.v. ‘matter’); ‘compound’ may also glance at financial senses of the verb that involve agreeing to terms for a payment.

17.8 through his veines: Glancing at the veins of ore mined from the earth; Barkan 1975 notes stanza’s movement ‘from an anthropomorphic cosmos [‘wombe’] to a cosmomorphic human body [‘veins’]’ (212).

wage: pledge; sell for wages

18.5 life for gold engage: ‘Pledge your life in exchange for gold’.

18.9 18.9 Cf. 14.9.

19.1–19.2 19.1-2 Cf. Nic Eth 4.1 (1120a), on the unwillingness of the ‘Liberal man’ to ‘receive from improper sources’. Guyon’s desire to understand (‘Did feed his eyes, and fild his inner thought’, 24.4) is contrasted with Mammon’s desire to possess (‘to feede his eye / And covetous desire’, 4.8-9). Milton, insisting that ‘the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world . . . necessary to the constituting of human virtue’, praises Spenser for bringing Guyon through both Mammon’s cave and the Bower of Bliss (II.xii) ‘that he might see and know, and yet abstain’ (Areop 729).

bereaue: plunder

lott: apportioning (of wealth or fortune)

19.6–19.7 19.6-7 See 1 Cor 2:9, ‘The things which eye hathe not sene, nether eare hathe heard, nether came into mans heart’.

mew: hiding-place; prison

20.1–20.5 20.1-5 See John 1:38-9: ‘And they said unto him, Rabbi . . . where dwellest thou? He said unto them, Come, and se’.

wonne: abode

20.3 wonne: Possibly with a hint of the archaic sense ‘treasure’.

20.6–20.7 20.6-7 The entrance to Mammon’s cave resembles the exits to the House of Pride (I.v.52.7-53) and the castle of Alma (ix.32), and the ‘hinder gate’ of the Gardens of Adonis (III.vi.32.9-33.4), which is both an entrance (to the Garden) and an exit (from the state of life).

20.7–20.9 20.7-9 Cf. Virgil: Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram / perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna ( ‘On they went dimly, beneath the lonely night amid the gloom, through the empty halls of Dis and his phantom realm’; Aen 6.268-9).

21.1 St. 21-25 Spenser’s description of the approach to the underworld draws on Virgil, Aen 6.273-81. Lotspeich 1932: 65-66 adds Statius (see Theb 7.40-62), Cicero (see Nat Deor 3.17), Conti (Myth 622), Chaucer (see CT Knight 1982-2040), and Bocccacio (Genealogia 8.6), which allegorizes Virgil’s House of Dis as a House of Riches.

21.3 broad high way: See Matt 7:13, ‘the wide gate, and broad waye that leadeth to destruction’.

21.4 Plutoes: In Roman mythology, Pluto ruled Hades (see arg.1n).

rayne: realm

21.5–21.6 21.5-6 Cf. 12.7. In general, the personifications of stanzas 21-23 correspond to the evils listed by Guyon in st. 12.

21.5 infernall: 1590 prints ‘internall’, not an impossible reading (cf. III.x.59.8, ‘internall smart’), but one that awkwardly undercuts the work of projection that turns affects into personages throughout the passage.

strayne: grip, wield

22.1 thother side: Cf. Virgil’s adverso in limine (‘on the threshold opposite’, Aen 6.279) in the passage cited above, st. 21-25n.

consort: group

shroud: hide

22.8 Lamenting Sorrow: Cf. the allegorical figure of Sorrow in Mirror for Magistrates (1563), Induction 106-112.

23.1 horror: Like ‘shame’ in the preceding line, uncapitalized in 1590. Only 1609 capitalizes ‘horror’; both 1596 and 1609 register personification by capitalizing ‘shame’. We retain the uncertainty of 1590 because the series of capitalized personifications in stanzas 21 and 22 is preceded, at 20.9, by an encompassing but not quite personified 'dread and horror', suggesting that the mechanism of personification is on display in this passage; cf. II.ii.26.4-9 for a comparable play on the uncapitalized personification of 'love'. As these examples show, the distinction between personified and non-personified abstractions is not absolute: it is more like a spectrum than a switchpoint.

23.3–23.5 23.3-5 On owles and night-ravens as omens, see I.v.30.6-7, Epith 345-6, and SC June 23-24 with gloss by E.K.

dolor: grief, sorrow, or physical pain

23.6 Celeno: Chief of the harpies, defilers of the feast Aeneas and his men prepare in Aen 3. Celeno rebukes the Trojan remnant for offering only war in exchange for the cattle they have slaughtered, and utters the cryptic prophecy that they will not build their city in Italy until famine has forced them to devour the tables they eat from.

24.4 24.4 On the combination of feeding with gazing, see 4.8n and 19.1-2n.

24.6 gaped wide: Cf. Virgil: noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis (‘night and day the door of gloomy Dis stands open’; Aen 6.127).

spoile: plunder

25.7 25.7 Cf. Hesiod: νυξ δ᾽ ετεκεν στυγερον τε Μορον και Κηρα μελαιναν / και Θανατον, τεκε δ᾽ Ὕπνον, ετικτε δε φῦλον Ὀνειρων (nyx d’ eteken stygeron te Moron kai Kēra melainan / kai Thanaton, teke d’ Hypnon, etikte de Oneirōn; ‘And Night bare hateful Doom and black Fate and Death, and she bare Sleep and the tribe of Dreams’; Theog 211-12).

26.1 St. 26-27 The fiend who follows Guyon recalls the ‘fury’ in the ancient Eleusinian mysteries who followed initiates to enforce their observance of ritual procedures; Spenser could have learned about this from Claudian’s De Raptu Proserpinae (early fifth century A.D.) or Pausanias’s Description of Greece (second century A.D.)

26.7 dismall day: from L dies mali evil days; see vi.43.7n.

stalke: stride

26.8 stalke: Includes the sense that he is stalking Guyon.

likte him: pleased him

27.3 likte him: Cf. Ben Jonson’s ‘On My First Son’: ‘For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such, / As what he loves may never like too much’ (11-12).

27.2–27.4 27.2-4 These ‘fatall Stygian lawes’ are derived in part from the myth of Persephone, who remains in the underworld for half the year because she ate seven seeds from a pomegranate (Met 5.530-38), and in part from folktale motifs (see arg.1n).

27.9 >Stygian lawes: Laws of the underworld (from Styx, the river the dead must cross over to enter hell), ‘fatall’ both because they punish with death and because they govern the realm of the dead.

28.3 28.3 Arches of stone are said to ‘hang’ from the vaulted ceiling like pants in tatters. The image evokes something like a ‘natural’ gothic arch.

28.4 Embost: Ornamented with raised surfaces bulging in relief. OED s.v. ‘boss’ records a specifically geological sense ‘applied chiefly to masses of rock protruding through strata of another kind’, although this use is not noted prior to 1605.

28.4 of glorious guifte: Although seemingly offered, this gold is hoarded, not given. Accordingly, the preposition suspends guifte as an attribute of the substance, absent an actual giver, gift, or recipient.

28.5 28.5 I.e. every rift [was] loaded with rich metal.

ruine: collapse

28.6 ruine: From L ruire to fall.

28.7–28.9 28.7-9 Arachne challenged Athena to a weaving contest and was punished by being turned into a spider; cf. Muiop 257-352 and Met 6.5-145. ‘High did lifte’ suggests envy or ambition; ‘cunning’ and ‘subtile’ suggest a trap; ‘smoke’ and ‘clouds’ recall the ‘rust’ and ‘filthy dust’ of 4.1-3 and anticipate the ‘dust and old decay’ of 29.2.

29.1–29.5 29.1-5 These lines reprise several motifs from the initial description of Mammon in st. 3 and 4.

hew: color, appearance, or form

29.6–29.9 29.6-9 Like st. 21-25, these lines echo Virgil’s description of Aeneas’s descent into the underworld: quale per incertam lunam sub luce maligna / est iter in silvis, ubi caelum conditit umbra / Iuppiter, et rebus nox abstulit atra colorem (‘even as under the grudging light of an inconstant moon lies a path in the forest, when Jupiter has buried the sky in shade, and black Night has stolen from the world her hues’; Aen 6.270-72). The Virgilian simile is picked up by Tasso, GL 13.2 and 14.37. Spenser’s ‘lamp, whose life does fade away’ may also echo Ariosto’s finí come il debol lume suole, / cui cera manchi (‘he ended like a weak flame running low on wax’; OF 24.85.3-4).

bends: bands

weene: expect

30.6–30.9 30.6-9 Recalling the valley of bones to which the prophet is transported in Ezek 37, although the ‘dead mens bones’ in this scene will not be resurrected like their biblical counterparts.

31.2–31.3 31.2-3 See Acts 12:10: ‘they came unto the yron gate, that leadeth unto the citie, which opened to them by it owne accorde’. The gate that opens to Peter leads out of imprisonment, not into it.

Commaunded: assigned

33.1 n’ill: ne will, i.e. will not (accept)

33.2–33.4 33.2-4 Guyon’s play on the word happines may allude to the first book of Aristotle’s Nic Eth, where happiness or the ‘chief good’ of the soul is defined.

33.8–33.9 33.8-9 Guyon’s preference for ruling the rich echoes a popular anecdote about the Roman Manius Curius. See Cicero De Senectute 16.56; Elyot retells the story to illustrate a distinction between ‘abstinence’ and ‘continence’ (1531: 3.17).

33.9 sclaue: Archaic spelling preserves the etymology from Med L sclavus.

34.2 greedie pray: Transferred epithet (if Guyon were greedy, the fiend would not lack his prey).

weened: believed, supposed

take . . . assay: touch

34.4 take . . . assay: See arg.1n on the taboo against touching treasures in the underworld.

34.6 34.6 ‘More swiftly than a dove in the clutches of a falcon’.

34.7 34.7 An exclamation directed to the reader.

decay: downfall

34.7 decay: From L de + cadere to fall.

wist: knew of

35.2–35.3 35.2-3 See 31.2-3n.

raunges: fireplaces or grates

pight: placed

35.9 tryde: As a term of art in metallurgy, to ‘try’ is ‘to separate (metal) from the ore or dross by melting’ (OED).

36.1 St. 36 This stanza echoes details from Virgil’s description of the cave beneath Mt. Aetna where Vulcan’s team of Cyclops forge a shield for Aeneas (Aen 8.416-51).

dying bronds: embers

36.5 Vulcans rage: the fire’s heat

scumd: skimmed

36.7 36.7 Milton echoes this line in Paradise Lost at 1.704 in a description of Mammon’s foundry that is indebted to Spenser.

swincke: toil

battailous: combat-ready

37.6 staring: In 15th-c. usage, ‘shining’; cf 7.5 and note.

Till that: until

37.9 Till that: Spenser often uses ‘that’ as a complementizer with prepositions.

Auise thee: think it over

withstood: refused

emprise: enterprise, undertaking

no’te: might not

no’te: Contracted form of ‘ne mote’ (see glossary).

mesprise: misprision, scorn

40.1–40.2 40.1-2 Cf. ‘the gate of Hell, which gaped wide’ (24.6).

40.5 if that: FE lists ‘the that’ as a correction for page 283. We correct ‘if the’; other plausible candidates appear at 42.4, 42.8, and 43.2. See 37.9 above and 49.8 below for other examples of Spenser’s habitual use of ‘that’ as a complementizer with conjunctions and prepositions.

40.6–40.7 40.6-7 For all of the gold in Mammon’s realm, there is also a great deal of iron: see 4.1, 21.7, 23.2, 30.2, and 36.4. Cf. also the ‘later times’ of 18.4 with Met 1.141-44.

weld: wield

stomacke: pride, anger, or stubbornness

portaunce: bearing

41.6 the Titans race: A brood of gigantic immortals, the offspring of Uranus and Ge in Greek mythology, who overthrew their father and were overthrown in turn by their own offspring, Zeus and the other Olympian deities.

deface: discredit, abash, or overshadow

glitterand: glittering

42.1 glitterand: The archaic suffix reflects OE, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon forms (‘-ende’, ‘-and’) out of which ‘–ing’ evolved in the fifteenth century.

hurtle: brandish

42.3 hurtle: OED describes Spenser’s use of the verb in this sense as ‘erroneous’.

42.5–42.9 42.5-9 Cf. Guyon’s encounter with Furor at iv.3-10.

dight: prepare

43.1 43.1 Underlining the irony of Mammon taking over the Palmer’s role.

Carle: churl

Gyeld: guildhall

43.4 Gyeld: On the likelihood of topical references here and elsewhere in the scene to the Royal Exchange, the Templar knights, and the Tower Mint, see Owens 2005: 156-64.

full deare: richly

43.8–43.9 43.8-9 The third of the temptations that Satan offers to Christ in the wilderness includes ‘all the kingdomes of the worlde’ (Matt 4:8). Commentators vary as to how closely Mammon’s temptation of Guyon follows Satan’s three temptations of Christ; parallels would be mediated by the extensive body of medieval and renaissance theology devoted to classifying the temptations. Milton’s treatment of the temptations in Paradise Regained is clearly informed by Spenser’s Mammon episode.

route: crowd

44.3 preaced: An archaic spelling of ‘pressed’; cf. the noun ‘preace’ at 46.5 and 48.2.

44.5–44.9 44.5-9 Cf. Langland’s description of Lade Meed, Piers Plowman B.2.8-17.

44.5 siege: ‘A seat, esp. one used by a person of rank or distinction’ (OED).

44.8–44.9 neuer earthly Prince . . . pompous pryde display: A parody of Christ’s call for simplicity and contentedness in Matt 6:28-29; turning the natural beauty of the lilies (‘even Solomon in all his glorie was not arrayed like one of these’) into an over-abundance of ornamentation and pomp.

46.1 St. 46 The ‘great gold chaine’ held by the ‘woman gorgeous gay’ (44.6) alludes to the golden chain in Homer with which the other gods sought unsuccessfully to pull Jove down from heaven (Il 8.18-27). The image gains historical resonance as both classical and, later, Christian commentators interpret it as a symbol of cosmic order. Lotspeich 1932 cites as precedents for Spenser’s use of the image Plato, Theat 153D; Boethius, Cons Phil 2.meter.8; Chaucer, Troilus 3.1744-1771, and CT Knight A 2987-93; Rom Rose 16988-9; and Conti Myth 116 (64). See also I.ix.1 and note for Spenser’s use of the chain as a positive symbol linking the virtues and their patron knights in an alliance of ‘noble mindes’. His use of the symbol here to suggest avarice follows Conti in combining both interpretations.

sty: ascend

dignity: rank or office

46.9 dignity: ‘Ambition’ was denounced in Elizabethan orthodoxy as a form of rebellion against social order, but if the ranks are links in the chain of ambition, as this line seems to say, then ambition is less a force opposed to hierarchy than its inevitable consequence.

47.1 St. 47 Cf. Colin’s satiric portrait of the English court in Colin Clout 688-730.

49.1 Philotime: ‘love of honor’ from Gk φιλος philos love + τιμη timē honor (cf. Timon, I.ix.4.1-2; Timias, III.i.18.9). Meter calls for the final ‘e’ to be voiced, with the primary accent falling on the second syllable.

49.2 49.2 Cf. ‘greatest god below the skye’ (8.2) and note.

49.6 the gods: Mammon, though himself a Biblical figure, seems to recognize only pagan deities.

lust: wish, but also desire sexually

49.9 works and merits: Alluding to the theological distinction between works and faith; see OED s.v. ‘merit’: ‘Theol. In pl. Good works viewed as entitling a person to reward from God’.

Gramercy: thanks

50.1 Gramercy: An unexpectedly ‘gentle’ reply, compared to the scorn Guyon has exhibited earlier (st.13-17, 33, 39). Perhaps Guyon has overcome Disdayne after all—but the etymology of ‘gramercy’ contains a pointed riposte to Mammon’s last offer, for as OED notes, ‘The primary sense of merci was “reward, favour gained by merit”; hence grant merci originally meant “may God reward you greatly’’’.

50.5 and mine vnequall fate: ‘and [I know] my fate [to be] unequal’ to such an ‘immortal mate’.

yplight: pledged

remoue: disavow

51.2 forcing it to fayne: Ellipsis for ‘forcing [himself] to dissemble it [the wrath]’ or ‘forcing it [the wrath] to dissemble [itself]’.

redd: declared

51.8–51.9 51.8-9 Echoing Proteus’s description of caligantem nigra formidine lucum (‘the grove that is murky with black terror’) through which Orpheus passes upon entering the underworld in his quest to recover Euridice (Virgil, Georg 4.467-68).

52.1 St. 52 In contrast to the description offered by Claudian, De Raptu 2.290, where Pluto is praising the beauties of the realm he promises to his bride. Pausanius says ‘black poplars and willows’ grow there (Desc 10.30.72).

52.2 Gall: Gall Oak whose misnamed ‘fruit’ or ‘oak-apple’ is a gall, or spongy spherical deformation of the leaf-bud caused by wasp larvae.

Heben: black ebony

52.2 Heben: Cf. Georg. 2.117 hebenum, glossed by T. Cooper: ‘A tree whereof the wode is blacke as jette within, and beareth nor leaves nor fruite’ (1565, s.v. ‘Hebenus’). OED cites Gower, Conf. 2. 103, ‘Of hebenus that slepy tre’.

52.3 Hellebore: Used as a purgative.

52.4 Coloquintida: Cf. 2 Kings 4:38-41: Elisha shreds wild gourds into ‘the pot of pottage’ during a famine, but the men who eat from it cry out that ‘death is in the pot’. The Geneva gloss identifies the gourds as ‘colloquintida . . . moste vehement and dangerous in purging’.

52.4 Tetra: Hunt 1883 identifies this as ‘the tetrum solanum, or deadly nightshade’ (85).

52.5 Samnitis: Not known, but Upton 1758 guesses (because the ancient Samnites dwelt next to the Sabines on the Italian peninsula) that it refers to the savin, used because of its poisonous properties as an anthelminthic and abortifacient.

Cicuta: hemlock

52.6–52.9 52.6-9 The friend who attends on Socrates at his death is Crito; Critias was an enemy. Commentators have proposed Xenophon, Hellenica 2.3.56, and Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.40, as sources for an error here.

52.8 last Philosophy: Philosophy of ‘last things’, i.e. the soul’s immortality (which would explain ‘quaffing glad’); philosophy delivered at the point of death.

53.1 Gardin of Proserpina: Cf. Od 10.509-40, where Circe describes the garden Odysseus will pass through on his way to Hades, and st. 52n.

ouerdight: overspread

entreat: occupy herself with

53.5 entreat: Cf. Romeo and Juliet 4.1.40: ‘My lord, we must entreat the time alone’.

54.1

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).

54.5–54.6 54.5-6 Hercules’ eleventh labor, to fetch the golden apples of the Hesperides (‘great Atlas daughters’) is discussed by Conti, Myth 622. The labors of Hercules were typologically associated by many Renaissance writers with Christ’s victory over evil.

54.8–54.9 54.8-9 The story of Hippomemes (‘th’Eubæan young man’) racing for the hand of Atalanta is told by Ovid (Met 10.560-680) and mentioned by Conti, Myth 624-25. Spenser links the apples of Hercules and Atalanta in Am 77, a dream vision of his beloved’s breast that associates the apples of the Hesperides with those of Song Sol 2.5 (‘comfort me with apples: for I am sicke of love’) and distinguishes them from the fruit in Gen (‘yet voyd of sinfull vice’). Cf. the description in the same sonnet of how Cupid transplanted these apples from ‘paradice’ into his own garden. Cf. also Ronsard, Amours 1.145.

sold: derived

55.1–55.3 55.1-3 Ovid tells how Acontius used an apple to trick Cydippe into marrying him (Her 20).

55.4–55.9 55.4-9 References to the apple of discord as the origin of the Trojan War are found in various classical sources; Conti Myth 555 quotes from Lucian, Ovid, Strabo, and Euripides in his summary of the story. (Spenser’s substitution of Ate for the figure of Eris in Greek myth may proceed by way of Conti’s Discordia).

55.6 Idæan: From Mount Ida, the setting for the Judgement of Paris. The apple thrown ‘emongest the Gods’ at the wedding of Thetis and Peleus, inscribed ‘for the fairest’, was claimed by Hera, Athena, and Venus.

fee: wealth

without: beyond

56.8 Cocytus: Gk Κωκυτoς Kōkytos wailing; one of the rivers in the classical underworld.

of: by

shrightes: shrieks

resounden wide: echo into the distance

liquour: liquid

drouth: thirst

couth: could

ment: intended; signified

59.2 ment: The ambiguity raises the question whether Tantalus controls his own meaning— whether he appears as agent or as emblem.

againe: in reply

59.5–59.9 59.5-9 Details of the scene are drawn from Homer (Od 11.582-92), although the fruits after which Tantalus reaches in Homer (pears, pomegranates, apples, figs, olives) would presumably be edible, unlike the ‘golden apples’ in Spenser, which nudge Tantalus in the direction of Midas. Tantalus appears in many classical and medieval texts, often as a symbol of greed: cf. Pindar, Olympia 1; Horace, Satires 1.1; Ovid, Ars Am 2.601-6; Dante, Inf 8.31-39; Boccaccio, Genealogia 1.14; Conti Myth 531-535; Alciati, Embemata 85.

59.6 59.6 Tantalus sought to test the omniscience of the Gods by serving his own son Pelops to them at a banquet. Pelops was restored to life, Tantalus consigned to hell.

59.9 giue to eat: Echoing Mark 6:37, ‘Give ye them to eat’.

60.1 St. 60 See 59.2n above; in this stanza one ambiguity is resolved—Tantalus is told to ‘be’ an emblem—while another ambiguity opens up. In 1590 Guyon instructs Tantalus to be an emblem of ‘mind more temperate’, whereas in 1596 and 1609 the instruction reads ‘Ensample be of mind intemperate’. Either version can make sense: Tantalus may be an emblem of intemperance punished, but if he does ‘abide the fortune’ of his ‘present fate’, he may become an example of ‘mind more temperate’.

60.6–60.9 60.6-9 Cf. Rev 16:9, ‘And men boyled in great heat, and blasphemed the Name of God, which hathe power over these plagues, and they repented not, to give him glorie’. The Geneva gloss identifies the ‘great heat’ of this passage as ‘Signifying famine, drought and hote diseases which procede thereof’.

dye: i.e., eternally

drent: drowned

61.4–61.5 61.4-5 Cf. Isa 1.15: ‘And when you shal stretch out your hands, I wil hide mine eyes from you: and thogh ye make manie prayers, I wil not heare: for your hands are ful of blood’.

61.6–61.9 61.6-9 Pilate’s failed effort to wash his hands of guilt echoes Guyon’s failed attempt to wash the hands of Ruddymane (ii.3).

faynd: ‘fained’ (desired) and ‘feigned’ (pretended)

62.3–62.9 62.3-9 Based on Matt 27: 22-26.

62.5–62.7 62.5-7 Echoing Acts 3:14-15.

doome: verdict

62.8–62.9 62.8-9 Cf. Ps 26.6, ‘I wil wash mine hands in innocencie’, as well as the Geneva gloss to Isa 1:16: ‘By this outward washig [sic], he meaneth the spiritual’.

63.7–63.9 63.7-9 Cf. the stratagem used by Pluto to ensnare Theseus and Pirithous when they journey to Hades to kidnap Persephone: ‘on the pretence that they were about to partake of good cheer Hades bade them first be seated on the Chair of Forgetfulness, to which they grew and were held fast by coils of serpents’ (Apollodorus, Epitome 1.24). Cf. I.v.35.8n and Aen 6.617-18: sedet aeternumque sedebit / infelix Theseus (‘hapless Theseus sits and evermore shall sit’). For a modern retelling that shows the influence of Spenser’s passage, see Lewis, The Silver Chair. Some commentators suspect a reminiscence of the ‘forbidden seat’ of the Eleusinian mysteries, as described (for example) by Clement of Alexandria in ‘Exhortation to the Heathen’: ‘For Demeter, wandering in quest of her daughter Core [Proserpine], broke down with fatigue near Eleusis, a place in Attica, and sat down on a well overwhelmed with grief. This is even now prohibited to those who are initiated, lest they should appear to mimic the weeping goddess’ (32).

64.2 frayle intemperaunce: Transferred epithet: intemperance is itself the frailty.

lust: appetite or desire

64.9 beguile the Guyler: Cf. Piers Plowman 18.159-60: ‘the old law granteth, / That beguilers be beguiled’.

65.6 three dayes of men: Cf. Matt 12:40: ‘For as Jonas was thre dayes, and thre nighs in the whales bellie: so shal the Sonne of man be thre dayes and thre nights in the heart of the earth’. Brooks-Davies 1977 reports that three days ‘was generally agreed by commentators to be the “permitted time” granted to Aeneas’ in the underworld (157; Aen 6.537).

outwrought: completed

For thy: therefore

66.2–66.3 66.2-3 Upton 1758 cites Plutarch’s de genio Socratis as the source for ‘two nights and one day’ being ‘allowed for surveying, according to the sacred mysteries, the infernal regions’ (490; 590A in Plutarch’s text describes the ritual time allowed for underworld exploration).

66.5–66.6 66.5-6 Cf. Marlowe, Tamburlaine: ‘when this fraile and transitory flesh / Hath suckt the measure of that vitall aire’ (II.v.43-44).

1 in swowne: See vii.66.8-9. Varying designations of Guyon’s state may be tracked through the present canto.

2 Acrates sonnes: For the etymology shared by Acrates and Acrasia, see i.51.2-4n.

despoyld: stripped of his armor

Whom: Guyon

1.1 1.1 OED glosses the exclamatory use of ‘and’, ‘expressing surprise at, or asking the truth of, what one has already heard’. Spenser intensifies the sense of wonder by opening with the device, leaving unstated ‘what one has already heard’. A possibility would be 1 Pet 5:7, ‘Cast all your care on him: for he careth for you’. Contrast Virgil, tantaene animis caelestibus irae? (‘Can resentment so fierce dwell in heavenly breasts?’; Aen 1.11). The sense of wonderment at something already there, apprehended yet unapparent, in Spenser’s opening line may intimate the prevenience of grace.

1.2 1.2 Biblical precedent for the ministration of angels may be found at Ps 34:7, Matt 4:11, and Heb 1:14.

euilles: sufferings

1.7 1.7 Cf. Ps 145:9, ‘his mercies are over all his workes’.

1.8 Angels: From Gk αγγελος aggelos messenger.

succour: aid, assist, or bring reinforcements to

flitting: unstable

Pursuiuant: a royal messenger

2.5 militant: Warlike or disposed to combat (cf. ‘Squadrons’); stationed at the end of the clause, ‘militant’ describes the manner of angelic ‘ayd’, but other senses are also available: ‘they militant’ and even ‘us militant’, where the zeugma draws ‘our’ militancy together with ‘theirs’ (the function of grace according to Calvinist doctrine). On spiritual warfare, see 2 Cor 10:4: ‘the weapons of our warrefare are not carnal’. Reformed theology distinguished between the Church Militant, comprised of Christians on earth engaged in combat against sin, and the Church Triumphant, comprised of those in heaven who have triumphed over sin. Cf. Eph 6:11-12: ‘Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the assaultes of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, and against the worldly governours, the princes of the darkenes of this worlde, against spirituall wickednesses, which are in the hie places’.

2.7 2.7 See Ps 34:7: ‘The Angel of the Lord pitcheth rounde about them, that feare him, and delivereth them’.

2.7–2.8 And . . . and . . .and: Polysyndeton, ‘characterized by the number of connecting particles employed’ (Quintilian, Inst 9.3.51). See 1.1n.

2.9 2.9 See Ps 8:4, ‘What is man, say I, that thou art mindful of him? and the sonne of man, that thou visitest him?’ Also 144:3, ‘Lord, what is man that thou regardest him!’, and Job 7:17, ‘What is man, that thou doest magnifie him, and that thou settest thine heart upon him?’

3.2–3.3 3.2-3 Phaedria denies the Palmer passage on her gondola at vi.19.4-9.

whyleare: formerly

efforced: uttered with effort

4.3 efforced: OED cites only this instance.

by and by: immediately

4.7 sunne his threasury: On Mammon’s ‘threasure’, see vii.arg 2n.

4.9 senceles dreame: Transferred epithet, applying properly to the dreamer; a dream with no sensory content would be no dream at all. See arg.1n on the ambiguity of Guyon’s state, and compare Redcrosse on the second night of the dragon battle in Book I, lying ‘as in a dreame of deepe delight’ (50.4) while his wounds are healed by a stream of balm trickling from the tree of life.

5.1 Beside his head: See I.ix.22.1-2, ‘they might perceive his head / To bee unarmd’, and note. Also John 20:12, ‘[Mary] sawe two Angels in white, sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feete’.

5.1 a faire young man: See Mark 16:5, ‘So they went into the sepulchre, and sawe a yong man siting at the right side, clothed in a long white robe’; also the description of Gabriel in Tasso, GL 1.13-14.

equall peares: coevals

5.5 His snowy front: L frons forehead. See Matt 28:2-3, ‘the Angel of the Lord descended from heaven . . . And his countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snowe’.

Phoebus: the sun’s

5.7 winged sheares: A metaphor for the wings, in which the tenor reappears as an adjective modifying the vehicle.

diuerse: multi-colored

5.8 like painted Iayes: Cf. Chaucer, Parl 356, ‘the pekok, with his aungels fetheres bryghte’.

6.1 St. 6 The angel is winged like Cupid, but the simile goes on to specify when the resemblance is apt: when Cupid has laid his bow aside (cf. I.pr.3.5) to play with Venus and the Graces, shadowing Christian agape, divine beauty, and grace. For an account of this simile in the context of a Spenserianian ‘theodicy of Cupid’ that integrates human with divine love, see SpE s.v. ‘Cupid’ and ‘angel, Guyon’s’.

6.1 Idæan hill: Mount Ida; see vii.55.6n.

6.6 his goodly sisters: The three Graces are reputed daughters of Venus (Servius ad Aen 1.720, Boccaccio Genealogia 3.22, Conti Myth 325). Cf. VI.x.22 and Teares 401-6.

6.8 through sleepe beguild: Sleep in Spenser is regularly associated with deception; see ii.46.6-7 and v.34, as well as the extended tableau of the sleeping Verdant at xii.72-80.

7.3 childe: In ME ballads and romances, a young noble awaiting knighthood; Spenser uses the term more generally as a chivalric and slightly archaic title designating a young man of gentle birth.

corage bold respire: again breathe courageous spirit

8.1 8.1 See Ps 91:11, ‘For he shal give his Angels charge over thee to kepe thee in all thy waies’.

arrett: entrust

offend: attack

8.7 offend: From L offedere to strike against.

painted: brightly colored

9.4 as . . . flight: ‘As [if he were a] fowle escapt by flight’.

courd: covered

9.8 courd: We make an exception here to our policy of modernizing u/v orthography because the spelling ‘courd’ appears meant to capture a particular pronunciation (a phonetic reduction) in the service of monosyllabic scansion. The phonetically reduced form of ‘covered’ allows it to merge with ‘cured’. OED identifies ‘cure’ as an elided form of ‘cover’, although ‘cure’ (as in ‘curate’, from L curare to care for) is also relevant. (Cf. recured and note at iv.16.7 and discure as a form of ‘discover’ at ix.42.8.)

9.8–9.9 9.8-9 Cf. Matt 23:37, ‘I have gathered thy children together, as the henne gathereth her chickens under her wings’. The syntax (‘courd it . . . from’) indicates a defensive gesture.

9.9 newly hatcht: For the hatchling as a conventional symbol of the soul’s immortality, see e.g. Camerarius 1590, Symbolorum et Emblamata Centuria 3.69, Nulla mihi mora est (‘death is nothing to me’)

Paynim: heathen

10.2 Paynim: The ‘two sonnes of Acrates’ are not identified as Saracen knights during their earlier appearance in cantos iv-vi.

10.3 10.3 Archimago plays the Palmer’s part, as in the first episode of Book 2.

10.6 two sonnes of Acrates: See arg.2 and i.51.2-4n.

10.7–10.8 10.7-8 At vi. 47-51 the brethren encounter Archimago on the shore of the ‘Idle lake’ (vi.10.1-2).

dearly: heartily; keenly; at a high cost

11.4–11.5 11.4-5 Cf. Prov 26:21, ‘As the cole maketh burning coles, and the wood a fyre, so the contentious man is apt to kindle strife’.

stryful: strife-full

11.4 Atin: See iv.42.5n.

whot: hot

slombred: unconscious; corse: body

11.7 slombred: A Spenserianism. Cf I.vii.15.6, the sole instance cited by OED.

debate: combat

brutenesse shendst: stupidity disgrace

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

caytiue: vile

stile: title

13.7 enuy . . . to barke: Cf. SC ‘To His Booke’ 5, ‘And if that Envie barke at thee’. Early modern envy commonly barks and often bites as well.

14.5 14.5 Proverbial (Smith 1970, no 336).

14.7–14.9 14.7-9 Misapplies a well-known saying attributed to Solon the Lawgiver by Herodotus (Persian Wars 1.30) and Plutarch (Parallel Lives, Solon 37).

recke: care

hire: spoils

blame: bring into disrepute

16.4–16.5 16.4-5 See Mark 15:24 on the soldiers casting lots for Christ’s garments; Faith’s rebuke to the Roman soldier who wounds Christ’s body on the cross in Langland, Piers Plowman: ‘Cursede caytyues! Knighthood was it nevere / To misdo a dead body, by daye nor by nyght’ (Crowley 1550, 18.96-97,); and Achilles’ treatment of Hector’s corpse in Homer (Il 22.375-404).

weed: garments

trap: deck

dight: decked with trappings

16.9 16.9 See Goliath’s threat to David at 1 Sam 17:44, ‘I wil give thy flesh unto the foules of the heaven, and to the beastes of the field’.

heben: ebony

17.7 17.7 For the shield covered to protect onlookers from its blinding brightness, see I.viii.19 and OF 2.55-56.

17.7 Well kend him so far space: Archimago recognizes Arthur from a distance.

amenaunce: bearing

byliue: ‘belive’, immediately

prowest: worthiest, having the most ‘prowess’

Sar’zins: Saracens

18.6 Sar’zins: From late L Saracēni, the people of Arabia. Applied to Muslim combatants in the Crusades; a medieval etymology going back to Jerome derives the term from the name of Abraham’s wife Sarah while identifying the Muslims who bear the name as descendants of Hagar.

19.1 19.1 The first mention of this lack, although Pyrochles is described at vi.41.3-4 as having abandoned his horse.

faine: willingly

Beteeme: yield

kend: understood, discovered

20.5 Medæwart: Herb also known as ‘meadow-sweet’. The etymology of the name is uncertain; see OED s.v. ‘meadwort’.

20.7 Aetna: The location of Vulcan’s forge, where both the sword of Turnus and the armor of Aeneas were made.

20.8–20.9 20.8-9 Virgil reports that the sword of Turnus was tempered in ‘the Stygian wave’ (Stygia tinxerat unda, Aen 12.91); it was also in the ‘Stygian lake’ that Occasion is said to have kindled the fire-brand she brings to Furor (v.22.6-8).

20.8 seuen times: The number of times Elisha tells Naaman to dip himself in the river Jordan to be cleansed (2 Kings 5:10).

20.9 which hidden vertue to it gaue: Cf. the near-total invulnerability conferred upon Achilles when, according to Statius, he was dipped in the river Styx as an infant. (Achilleid 1.133-34, 266-71).

21.3 fone: ME plural of ‘foe’, still current in the 16th-c.

his: its

21.6 Morddure: From L mordere to bite + durus hard, perhaps by way of Fr; cf. English ‘mordant’. Sound evokes also Fr mort death, and English ‘murder’, and may echo ‘Durlindana’, the sword of Orlando in OF.

brond: poeticism for ‘sword’

22.4 22.4 See 20.8-9n above, and v.22.6-9, where Occasion arms Furor with ‘a flaming fyer brond’ that is not a poetically-designated sword but literally a fire-brand: Furor is then ‘armed with fire’.

22.5 His Lords owne flesh: The scriptural resonance of the phrasing, while not a precise echo, does recall the language of passages like John 6:48-60, and in this way touches on the allegory that makes Arthur a type of Christ bringing life to fallen man: ‘Except ye eat the flesh of the Sone of man, and drinke his blood, ye have no life in you’ (6:53). John’s emphasis on this flesh as the only food that can nourish the soul (e.g., 6:48-51 and marginal glosses) may also be relevant to Guyon’s famished state.

22.6 vertuous: Morally righteous, but also having occult powers.

salued: saluted

23.2 salued: Cf. Caxton, ‘He salued theym curtoysly’ (Sonnes of Aymon iii.75.28).

stomachous: angry

demayne: demeanor

23.9 magnanimity: The culminating virtue in Aristotle’s Nic Eth. Cf. FQ Letter 38-40, where Spenser uses ‘magnificence’ to designate the virtue that is ‘(according to Aristotle and the rest) . . . the perfection of all the rest’, and ascribes this virtue to Arthur.

redoubted: feared or reverenced

cace: condition (of his body)

deface: destroy

25.9 deface: If the etymology is taken from L facere, the sense might be ‘undo’.

ghost: soul or spirit

26.7–26.8 26.7-8 On the special power of temperate or temporizing language, see 22.1-2, vi.36.3-5, III.ii.15.5-6, IV.ii.2.5-6, IV.ix.14.6-7, and VI.v.30.6-8.

patronage: guardianship

27.7 Not to debate the chalenge of your right: To ‘challenge right’ is to lay a claim to, or assert a right, so that ‘not to debate the chalenge of your right’ means ‘not to take up the claim (of right) that you have laid/entered’: Arthur indicates that he is not going to dispute the legal basis of the knights’ quarrel with Guyon, but rather ask ‘pardon’ for him on essentially compassionate grounds. At the same time there is a play on the word ‘chalenge’, because medieval trials of right usually took the form of ordeal, including combat. In a chivalric encounter of this kind, a ‘challenge’ is a summoning or defiance offered by one contestant to others. Hence the ‘chalenge’ here might also be ‘an offer of battle, a defiance’, linked to the ‘matter of right’ being contested between the brothers and Guyon; cf. ‘debate’ as combat at 11.9 and 54.6. (On the concentration of legal diction in this episode see Zurcher 2007:70).

28.2 28.2 See Job 9:33: ‘Neither is there any dayesman to lay his hande betweene us’ (Bishops’ Bible; Geneva reads ‘Nether is there any umpire that might laie his hand upon us bothe’.

prolong: delay

let: prevent

deare abye: pay dearly

29.1–29.6 29.1-6 Arthur’s definition of God’s justice in these lines is based on the second commandment, Exod 20:5.

Nephewes: grandson’s

29.3 Nephewes: From L nepos.

bereaue: take away

29.5 bereaue: Normally the thing taken is valued, with the verb expressing a sense of loss.

streightly: strictly

29.7 vpreare: Breaks the rhyme-scheme. Hamilton 2001 notes that ‘“upheaue” would satisfy the “b” rhyme, though that word is never used in the poem while “upreare” is common’.

felon: villain

30.4 Termagaunt: ‘An imaginary deity held in mediæval Christendom to be worshipped by Muslims’ (OED); cf. 33.3.

sad: heavy

no’uld: ne would (would not)

sell: saddle

31.6–31.7 31.6-7 The notion of a ‘law of armes’ goes back to Roman authors, but was revived and elaborated in form of the ‘chivalric code’ by medieval writers like Jean de Meun and Christine de Pizan. To ‘strike foe undefide’ was to attack without first issuing a formal challenge; see i.25.9n.

miscreaunt: misbeliever

defast: disfigured; discredited; erased

bent: aimed

32.5 32.5 Pyrochles lays ‘rude hand’ on Guyon’s shield at 17.1.

stownd: shock, attack

33.3 Mahoune: A form of the name ‘Mohammed’, but also another imaginary deity held in the Middle Ages to be worshipped by Muslims; see 30.4n.

aby: pay for; cf. 28.8.

33.8 Els mote it needes: Otherwise it must (OED s.v. ‘needs’).

doe him small redresse: give him little help

importable: insupportable

his ground to trauerse: to shift his ground

stowre: battle, onslaught

35.4 stowre: Etymologically linked to ‘storm’ (see 48.2).

assay: attack

poynant: piercing

puissant sway: powerful force

36.5 gryde: Cf. SC Feb. 4 E.K. gloss, ‘Gride) perced: an olde word much used of Lidgate’.

plesh: puddle

37.2 his Gods: Termagaunt (30.4) and Mahoune (33.3).

rayle: gush

very felnesse: utter rage

Caytiue: wretch

37.8 brond: See 22.4n.

he: Cymochles

thother: Pyrochles

38.3 The one: conflating the knight (now Pyrochles) with his swordstroke.

38.4 his owner byte: Pyrochles wields Morddure (see 21.6n and 22.5n).

troncheon: spear-stump

th’other: now Cymochles

38.5 troncheon: From L truncus trunk.

hacqueton: jacket worn under the chain mail

importune: inopportune; pressing

dint: blow

38.9–39.2 38.9-39.2 ‘But one of the souldiers with a speare perced his side, and forthewith came there out blood and water’ (John 19:34). For the medieval tradition that locates this wound on the right, see Gurewich (1957: 359b). Cf. 22.5n.

at warde: in a defensive stance

his foot reuoke: retreat

raught: reached

as he it ought: as he who owns it (Guyon)

40.7–40.9 40.7-9 The simile is scriptural: cf. 2 Sam 17:8, Prov. 17:12, Hos 13:8.

wood: mad

yond: savage

40.9 yond: OED suggests Spenser may have misunderstood a line from Chaucer: ‘Beth egre as is a Tygre yond in Ynde’ (CT Clerk IV 1199)’.

throwes: strokes

told: numbered

hart-thrilling: heart-piercing

42.1 St. 42 Imitated from a simile in Ariosto: Chi ha visto in piazza rompere steccato, a cui la folta turba ondeggi intorno,immansueto tauro accaneggiato, stimulato e percosso tutto 'l giorno (‘Imagine a wild bull pent up in a public square, goaded and struck all day long until, in a fit of rage, he breaks out . . . .’; OF 18.19.1-4).

42.2 42.2 ‘Once rancor goads him with rage’.

smitt: smote

43.3 43.3 The portrait on Guyon’s shield is mentioned previously at i.28.7-8 and v.11.7-8.

43.6 For ‘stowre’, see 35.4n.

no’te: ne mote (may not)

appeached: accused

haubergh: armor that protects the neck and shoulders

thore: through (archaic)

renfierst: re-enfierced

45.1 renfierst: OED cites only this instance.

burganet: helmet

45.6–45.9 45.6-9 See the death of Turnus in Virgil, ast illi solvuntur frigore membra / vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras (‘But the other’s limbs grew slack and chill, and with a moan life passed indignant to the Shades below’, Aen 12.951-52).

german: brother

frayd: made afraid

46.8 Harrow and well away: See vi.43.6 and note.

lenger day: a day longer

47.2 47.2 The desire for revenge blends with the desire for death; cf. the confusion of retribution with self-destruction in Pyrochles’ motto (iv.38.5 and note).

47.4 47.4 Pyrochles flies fiercely at Arthur with Arthur’s own sword.

foynd: lunged or thrust

this . . . that: Pyrochles . . . Arthur

Prince Arthur: 1590 prints ‘Sir Guyon’, an error not corrected until 1609.

49.1–49.7 49.1-7 See Tasso’s description of the combat between Tancred and Argante (GL 29.17).

50.2–50.4 50.2-4 Imitated from Virgil Aen 11.721-24; cf. Ovid Met 6:516-18.

Bittur: bittern

50.2 Bittur: A smaller cousin of the heron.

sad melancholy: sullen anger

51.1 great mind: Magnanimity, from L magna great + animus spirit; see 23.9n and Aristotle, Nic Eth 4.3.

decay: destruction

dismall day: day of doom

51.5 dismall day: From L dies mali; see vi.43.7n.

miscreaunce: misbelief

51.6 miscreaunce: Cf. 31.6.

51.7 liegeman: ‘A vassal sworn to the service and support of his superior lord, who in return was obliged to afford him protection’ (OED).

for ay: for ever

valiaunce: valor

souenaunce: memory

52.1 Foole: Cf. Matt 5:22, ‘whosoever shal say, Foole, shalbe worthie to be punished with hel fyre’.

52.2 52.2 Cf. Virgil, utere sorta tua (‘use thou thy chance’; Aen. 12.932). The allusion to Virgil’s Turnus may pass though Tasso’ Argantes at GL 19.26.

52.8–52.9 52.8-9 The elliptical treatment of the decapitating blow in these lines recalls a similar ellipsis in Virgil’s description of the death of Priam, Aen 2.554-58. In combining a reminiscence of Priam’s death with that of Turnus, Spenser here anticipates Shakespeare’s conflation in Hamlet (2.2.468-497) of the same Virgilian moments.

53.2 her sencelesse foe: Transferred epithet: life’s foe is senselessness itself.

53.9 53.9 See Recrosse’s similar address to Una at I.ix.17.4-5.

55.1 the tokens trew: The visible evidence that the Palmer’s words are true.

embayd: bathed

55.2 embayd: Possibly with baptismal overtones.

55.4 the Patrone of his life: Cf. 26.9, ‘thy knights last patronage’; also I.ix.17.6, II.xi.16.9.

55.5 my liege: See 51.7n.

55.9 55.9 This half-line remains in later editions; Church 1758 observes that Arthur may cut Guyon off. If so, then in preempting Guyon’s speech Arthur closes the canto as it opens, with a formal mimesis of the prevenience of grace.

Infant: prince

56.1 Infant: From Span Infante.

56.1–56.3 56.1-3 For the contrasting economies of merit and grace, see 2.8 and vii.49.9n.

56.7–56.8 56.7-8 ‘In this way they devised together a substantial conversation about kindness and the courteous giving of grace’. For ‘aggrace’ as a noun, OED cites only this instance. As a verb it means to convey grace, as at I.x.18.7, where it describes the action of Fidelia in preparing Redcrosse to read scripture.

1–2 arg.1-2 Spenser’s ‘house of Temperance’ as the dwelling-place of the soul finds precedents in Langland’s castle of Anima (Piers P 9.48-52), Gower’s ‘Alme’ and her castle (Mirrour de L’omme, 11281-92, 14713-24), and du Bartas Div Wks 1.6; in Paul’s definition of the body as ‘the temple of the holie Gost’ (1 Cor 6:19); and in Plato’s account of how the body was constructed to house the soul and the passions (Tim 65-75). For a more extensive listing of precedents, see Var 2.285-89. Phineas Fletcher amplifies Spenser’s allegory of the body in The Purple Island (1633); Helkiah Crooke uses the description of Alma’s castle to structure his anatomical textbook Microcosmographia (1615), especially books II-VII (although Crooke, unlike Spenser, in books IV-V does include the ‘parts of generation’).

sober: serious, dignified, sedate

2 sober: The word reappears at 1.4 (cf. i.7.7, ii.14.5).

2 Alma: Ital alma soul; Heb Almah maiden; L alma kind, nourishing.

3 straunger: Because they are new arrivals to the house of Temperance.

1.1–1.4 1.1-4 Cf. 1 Cor 12:24, ‘God hathe tempered the bodie together’.

1.1 Of all Gods workes: Cf. ‘all his workes with mercy doth embrace’ (viii.1.7).

1.1 adorne: In the technical sense of ornament as betokening cosmos, Gods workes decorate the macrocosm by mirroring its structure. (For ornament as ‘cosmic image’, see Fletcher 1964: 108-117.)

1.4 gouernment: Cf. ‘governaunce’ (i.29.8 and note). In the analogy between the body and the body politic, temperance corresponds to government; see 48.9, where the counselors in the tripartite brain counsel Alma ‘how to governe well’, and 59.9, where Arthur reads about the reduction of Briton ‘to one mans governements’.

1.5 indecent: FE corrects 1590 incedent, which better fits the meter and might, as ‘incident’, imply an etymological pun on L in + caedere to fall. The metrical torque on ‘indecent’ suggests a comparable pun on ‘in descent’.

1.6 Distempred: Having the bodily humors thrown out of balance.

incontinent: immediately; concupiscent

his: its

loose: lose

1.8 his: ‘His’ is both the neuter and the masculine form of the possessive pronoun in OE and ME. Spenser is writing on the threshold of the change from ‘his’ to ‘its’ (Shakespeare, for example, varies in his usage), so the pronoun does not decisively distinguish the natural gender of ‘mans body’ as masculine rather than epicene—especially since that body is ‘it’, not ‘he’, in lines 4, 5, and 7.

1.8 loose: Carries a strong scriptural sense: ‘To destroy, ruin, bring to destruction or perdition’ (OED). Hamilton 2001 quotes Elyot on the soul that ‘loseth hir dignitie, and becommith minister unto the sences’ (1946: 119-20).

1.9 this place: ‘A particular part of or location in a book or document’ (OED). The reference to ‘one and other’ is indefinite enough to imply that Alma’s castle may be contrasted with any number of incontinent bodies, including Maleger and the rascal route, the transmogrified lovers in the Bower of Bliss, and the many sunderings of the body politic in the chronicle materials of canto x.

yfere: together

2.3 yfere: Cf. viii.56.7, ‘So goodly purpose they together fond’, and note the internal rhyme with ‘in fayre’.

2.5 with gentle court did bord: Addressed in a courteous/courtly manner.

read: learn, study

2.7–2.8 2.7-8 The portrait on Guyon’s shield is mentioned previously at i.28.7-8, v.11.7-8, and viii.43.2-6.

scord: cut

semblaunt: image; countenance

vertue: power

3.3 liuely -head: the living original of ‘that Ladies head’, with a punning use of the suffix -head, corresponding to modern ‘-ness’ (‘liveliness’) or ‘-hood’ (‘likelihood’); cf. ‘Maydenhed’, 6.6.

bounty: goodness; generosity

3.6 bounty: Cf. 5.4-5.

hew: form

3.5–3.9 3.5-9 Through equivocation, the diction and phrasing here blur the line between spiritual qualities and effects of wealth and power, even as they draw the line more firmly between these and the visible beauty of ‘mortal hew’. As a result the explicit contrast between Gloriana (here and at 5.4-5) and Philotime at vii.44-50 is somewhat hedged.

retraitt: portrait

4.2 retraitt: Coined by Spenser, the word combines ‘portrait’ with ‘retreat’: the visible ‘semblaunt’ incised in the ‘substance’ of the shield retreats from view as it passes over into ‘the beauty of her mind’.

liefe: beloved

liege: feudal lord

4.5 liege: Cf. viii.51.7 and note, viii.55.5.

4.6–4.7 4.6-7 Cf. the language describing Elizabeth at I.pr.4.3-4, Una at I.xii.21.5-9, and the damsels bathing in Acrasia’s fountain at II.xii.65.1-2.

countenaunce: appearance; expression; visage; patronage; repute

amenaunce: conduct

5.9 to die at her desire: The movement away from the visible image in st. 3-4 is qualified by the erotic charge of this phrasing. See the story of Arthur’s dream at I.ix.13-16 and his response to the shield’s image at II.viii.43.1-6.

meed: wages; reward

sold: salary (root of soldier)

6.6 knights of Maydenhed: Mentioned previously at I.vii.46.4 and II.ii.42.1-5. Faery counterpart to the English Order of the Garter, founded by King Edward III in the late 14th century.

remaine: await

6.9 Arthogall: Arthegall, the patron knight of Justice in Book 5.

6.9 Sophy: Gk σοφια sophia wisdom. Hamilton 2001 notes that Drayton mentions a holy Welsh king bearing this name (1931-41: 41:4.482).

7.5–7.6 7.5-6 See i.33.6n and ‘Introduction’ 00 for the symbolic rather than realistic time-scheme of the narrative. The seven solar years mentioned in these lines correspond to the seven years that Alma’s castle has been under siege (12.8), but not to the ‘three years’ Praysdesire says Arthur has sought Gloriana (38.9). 1596 revises these lines: ‘Seven times . . . Hath walkte’ at 7.5-6 becomes ‘Now hath . . . Walkt round’, reducing the number of solar years from seven to one, and ‘three years’ at 38.9 becomes ‘twelve moneths’. These revisions bring Arthur’s reckoning into alignment with Guyon’s: at the corresponding moment in Book I, Arthur tells Una and Redcrosse he has sought Gloriana for nine months (ix.15.9), and at ii.44.1-4 Guyon reports that his quest has been underway for three months. For ‘the Sunne with his lamp-burning light’, cf. Virgil, postera Phoebea lustrabat lampade terras (‘The morrow’s dawn was lighting the earth with the lamp of Phoebus’; Aen 4.6).

7.7 I haue sought the sight: Responding to Guyon’s rhetorical question at 3.1-4.

8.1 Fortune: Iconographic details associated with Fortuna appear in Spenser’s portrait of Occcasion (see iv.4-5n).

cheuisaunce: chivalric enterprise

8.1 cheuisaunce: Cf. gloss by E.K. at SC May 92: ‘sometime of Chaucer used for gaine; sometime of other for spoyle, or bootie, or enterprise, and sometime for chiefdome’.

9.4 subdew: Context suggests ‘achieve’; OED cites only this example.

9.5–9.8 9.5-8 On the differing versions of this story see i.35.5-36.1, ii.42.6-43.9, and the note to each.

wagon: chariot

hospitale: hospice

10.7 10.7 First mention of Guyon on horseback since the disappearance of his ‘loftie steed’ at ii.11.5-7.

auale: dismount

loup: loop-hole

10.9 loup: An opening in the wall of a castle.

11.3–11.5 11.3-5 Cf. Timias’s challenge to Orgoglio at I.viii.3-5.

neare decay: imminent destruction

12.8 Seuen yeares: Cf. 7.5 and 22.7. Commentators have seen the number as alluding to various learned or proverbial sevens: deadly sins, ages of man, ages of the world, days of creation, number of known planets, or the esoteric numerology of the Roman philosopher Macrobius in his Commentary on the Dream of Scipio (1.6).

villeins: serfs

13.2 villeins: Details in the description of these ‘villeins’ reflect Ariosto’s account of the strana torma (‘fantastic throng’) that attacks Ruggiero on his way to the castle of Logistilla, OF 6.60-67. They also resemble Spenser’s accounts in A Vewe of the Irish and their warlike forbears: ‘a flyinge / Enymie hydinge him self in woodes and bogges’ (the Irish, at 3968-69); attacking with ‘atyrrible yell / and Hubbubbe’ (the Scythians and Parthians, at 2175-76); a ‘confused kynde of march in heapes’ (the Irish, at 3211); and ‘feirce rvnninge vpon theire / Enemies’ (the Irish, at 2313-14).

13.6–13.7 13.6-7 Echoing Virgil: Non iam certamine agresti, / stipitibus duris agitur sudibusve praeustis ( ‘Not now do they contend in rustic quarrel with heavy clubs or seared stakes’; Aen 7.523-4).

13.7 rusty: OED 4.a, ‘Lacking polish or refinement’ is relevant in context.

steares: steers

heares: hairs

maine: physical force, as in ‘might and main’

15.4 raskall routs: Common term for a mob; Todd cites its use by Heywood in The First Part of King Edward IV to characterize popular rebellions (1.2.29)

orders: ranks

idle: empty

15.8–15.9 15.8-9 See Virgil’s description of Aeneas trying to combat shades in the underworld (Aen 6.290-94).

16.2 the fennes of Allan: a great bog in central Ireland; New Abbey, the County Kildare property Spenser leased in 1582, was located near its north-eastern border. The simile fuses personal experience with literary allusion: Spenser refers in A Vewe to the attacks of the Irish gnats, ‘whch in the Countrey doe more annoye the . . . rebels, whilst they kepe the woodes and doe more sharpelie wound them then all theire Enemies swords or speares, whch can seldome come nigh them’ (2089-83); Homer compares the Greeks drawn up to attack the Trojan forces to ‘the tribes of swarming flies that buzz about the herdman’s farmstead in the season of spring’ (Il 2.469-73).

equipaged: furnished; ordered by rank

17.9 17.9 ‘Received them graciously, as was fitting’.

18.1 St. 18-19 Spenser’s description of Alma borrows such details as her golden hair and garland of roses from medieval allegories both of courtly love (e.g. Rom Rose) and of the soul (e.g. Pearl). As mistress of the body-castle, Alma corresponds to the ‘rational soul’ as defined by Burton: it ‘includes the powers, and performs the duties of the two other [the sensitive and vegetable souls], which are contained in it, and all three faculties make one soul, which is inorganical of itself, although it be in all parts, and incorporeal, using their organs, and working by them’ (Anatomy 1.1.2.9).

18.9 18.9 As the soul, Alma may be wooed by many but is reserved as the bride of Christ.

19.1–19.2 19.1-2 Cf. Rev 7:9, 13, where the multitude standing before the throne of God are ‘araied in long white robes’; Geneva gloss reads, ‘In signe of puritie’.

Braunched: embroidered

tire: head-dress

Rosiere: the branch of a rosebush

liberall: bountiful

21.1

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 (thro