2 Artegall: Also spelled Arthegall, his name suggests both ‘art of equity’ (or ‘[thou] art equal’, meaning just or impartial; see SpE s.v. ‘Artegall’) and ‘equal to Arthur’. He is introduced to us by increments: in the present canto, first in the description by Redcrosse, st. 9-10 and 13-14, and then in the narrator’s description of the image Britomart saw in the enchanted mirror, st. 24-25. We learn more about him from Merlin in canto iii, 26-28. He does not join the narrative proper until 1596, when he enters the lists at Satyrane’s tournament in IV.iv and reappears briefly in IV.vi. He returns in Book V as the patron knight of Justice.

3 The wondrous myrrhour: Mentioned at i.8.9 as ‘Venus looking glas’, but associated rather with Merlin when it is described at length in st. 18-21.

1.1

St. 1-3

A similar lament for the lost memory of women’s martial valor begins canto iv. Both passages draw immediately on Ariosto (OF 20.1-3, 37.1-23) and broadly on the Renaissance defense of women (see SpE s.v. ‘women, defense of’).

1.1

St. 1

Unlike Ariosto, Spenser leads not with praise of women’s deeds but with censure of men’s bias. The corresponding passage in Ariosto appears at OF 37.2.4-6, 3.

2.1

St. 2

On women warriors in Spenser and his Italian predecessors, see Robinson (1985). Women’s enforced turn from ‘warlike armes’ to ‘artes and pollicy’ adumbrates the theme of female rule, a subject of wide-ranging controversy in the sixteenth century. For Spenser’s care in hedging his position on the question, see SpE s.v. ‘women, defense of’. The corresponding stanza in Ariosto, which pairs warriors specifically with poets (as if replacing Virgil’s arma virumque with arma cantrixque), opens canto 20 of Orlando Furioso.

2.9 enuy: Here and in line 5 (‘envious’), the term associates the resentful wish to possess another’s good with the underlying spirit of rivalry that inspires it (see II.ii.19.2n).

3.2–3.3 3.2-3 The pairing of Britomart and Elizabeth as exemplars of women’s greatness in the arts of war and peace is emphasized by the syntax, which elides the word precedent from line two but links the uncompleted imperative ‘Be thou’ to the appearance of precedent in line 3 through repetition and zeugma. In this way Elizabeth, although historically belated, manages to serve as ‘precedent’ to her predecessor. Cf. pr.5.5-9, where Gloriana and Belphoebe are named as reflections of Elizabeth.

3.3 precedent: Cf. SC ‘To His Booke’ 3-4.

3.4–3.6 3.4-6 The over-excited combination of anadiplosis (repeating the last word of a clause or line at the beginning of the next one) with internal rhyme offers a comically apt prelude to the poet’s confession that his rhymes are ‘rude and rugged’. On the unsuitability of rhyme ‘both in the end and middle of a verse, unless it be in toys and trifling poesies’, see Puttenham 2.10.

3.8–3.9 3.8-9 Cf. Tibullus, ‘Eulogy of Messalla’: nec tua praeter te chartis intexere quisquam / facta queat, dictis ut non maiora supersint (‘if none but thyself can so embroider the page with thy achievements that what is left is not greater than what is recounted’; 3.7.5-6).

4.1 with Guyon: The mention of ‘that Fairies mind’ in line 4 suggests that the error is not just a momentary slip but the remnant of an earlier version in which Guyon rather than Redcrosse was Britomart’s companion. (Redcrosse discovers on the Mount of Contemplation that he is ‘sprong out from English race, / How ever now accompted Elfins sonne’; I.x.60.1-2). For other traces of unfinished revision in the first half of Book III, see i.arg.3 and iv.45.1-6, both of which suggest an abandoned plan to reintroduce Archimago and Duessa as antagonists to Britomart.

4.5 Briton Maid: The balanced contrast between ‘Fairies mind’ and ‘Briton Maid’ emphasizes a distinction appropriate to Guyon rather than Redcrosse, who is neither Briton nor Fairy but Saxon.

4.7 dissemble her disguised kind: The redundancy has Britomart disguising her disguised sex, perhaps glancing at the limits of her self-knowledge: i.e., the female sexual identity she conceals from others is also hidden from herself.

4.8–4.9

4.8-9 On early modern gender as a property as much of apparel as of bodies, see Orgel (1996: 83-105). These lines are imitated by Fletcher, PI 10.29.1-5:

Thus hid in arms, she seem’d a goodly Knight, And fit for any warlike exercise: But when she list lay down her armour bright, And back resume her peacefull Maidens guise; The fairest Maid she was . . .

4.9 armed was her brest: The phrasing suggests that Britomart’s reluctance to disarm herself (i.42.6-7) is a belated defense against the love-wound she has suffered.

6.1

St. 6

This account of Britomart’s upbringing owes more to Tasso’s description of the Amazon warrior Clorinda (GL 2.39-40) than to Britomart’s actual history.

Spenser’s principal innovation is to have shifted the description into the first person, though he also breaks with Tasso’s second stanza to emphasize Britomart’s British origin and quest for fame. (Here as elsewhere, Fairfax’s translation shows the influence of Spenser’s imitation.)

6.3 stowre: The contrast between the ‘warlike stowre’ in which Britomart says she was brought up and the ‘bitter stowre’ (5.3) that now shakes her like lightning from within belongs to the motif of Britomart’s combative defensiveness, condensed into the pun on ‘armes’ in the previous canto (st. 58-60n) and glanced at just above in the phrase ‘armed was her brest’ (4.9n).

6.6–6.9 6.6-9 Both Britomart’s female identity and the connotations of ‘pleasures wanton lap’ (a phrase that tends to sexualize the fingered needle and thread) are associated for Britomart with the internal ‘stowre’ precipitated by her desire for Artegall. Her reaction to anything that threatens to stir this inner tempest is combative: she would rather be pierced and ‘die’ in battle than in bed.

7.1 All my delight: Not quite all. The implicit wordplay between ‘deedes of armes’ and acta performed ‘in armes’ persists within Britomart’s speeches in spite of her.

7.7 card: See II.vii.1.6n.

7.9 The greater Brytayne: See i.8.7n.

8.7–8.9 8.7-9.2 Britomart’s ambivalence about her ‘mis-saying’ suggests that it may be a parapraxis: as such, it might simultaneously express both the resentful feeling that Artegall, as the cause of her ‘bitter stowre’ (5.3), really has wronged her, and the contrary, presumably disavowed wish that, although he hasn’t dishonored her yet, he would do just that.

9.1–9.2 8.7-9.2 Britomart’s ambivalence about her ‘mis-saying’ suggests that it may be a parapraxis: as such, it might simultaneously express both the resentful feeling that Artegall, as the cause of her ‘bitter stowre’ (5.3), really has wronged her, and the contrary, presumably disavowed wish that, although he hasn’t dishonored her yet, he would do just that.

9.3 vptaking ere the fall: Redcrosse catches her utterance before it hits the ground, so to speak; Spenser’s phrase may express the force of the Latin verb excipere in Virgil when, addressed by Venus, tum sic excepit regia Juno (Aen 4.114, literally ‘then thus took it up queenly Juno’). In declining to entertain her accusation against Artegall, the knight avoids the error that prompted Guyon’s near-attack upon him at II.i.25.8-27.

10.4–10.5 10.4-5 ‘The noble heart never entertains a thought unworthy of itself’—implicitly a rebuke to Britomart.

10.6–10.7 10.6-7 I.e. don’t go out of your way to find trouble.

11.6–11.9 11.6-9 See John 16:21: ‘A woman when she traveileth, hath sorowe, because her houre is come: but assoone as she is delivered of the childe, she remembreth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is borne into the worlde.’ The simile conveys Britomart’s sense of wonder and relief at hearing Redcrosse confirm her fantasy-image, her first external view, so to speak, of something she has long carried within. It is not only immediate (and intimate) in its affective power, but also doubly proleptic, anticipating the dynastic heir she will eventually bear as well as standing in for her first view ‘in the flesh’ of what has till now been for her only a name and an image.

12.7–12.9 12.7-9 The legalese (‘hainous tort’) is ironic given that Artegall will turn out to be the patron knight of Justice. Also ironic is the implication that Britomart’s chastity may have been compromised along with Artegall’s justice (see 8.7-9.2n).

13.9 ‘Whose equal in prowess no living person ever saw’.

14.1

St. 14

Cf. the description at i.3.4-9 of the errancy of Guyon and Arthur, and Isa 1:17: ‘Learne to do wel: seke judgement, relive the oppressed: judge the fatherless and defend the widowe’.

15.1 feeling: This sense appears to originate with Sidney 1586 (Arcadia II.61), picked up first by Lodge 1589 (Scillaes metamorphosis, sig. B4), and then by Spenser 1590 (cf. I.v.24.6, I.vii.38.6).

15.1 sence: ‘The senses viewed as forming a single faculty in contradistinction to intellect, will’ (OED); ‘feeble’ because tied to the body and to the fantasy.

15.2 molten: Cf. Cymochles’ ‘molten hart’ at II.vi.27.5.

15.5–15.6 15.5-6 The image of the enchanter charming a serpent may echo Ps 58.4-5, ‘Their poison is even like the poison of a serpent: like the deafe adder that stoppeth his eare. Which heareth not the voyce of the inchanter, thogh he be most expert in charming’, and Jer 8:17, ‘For beholde, I will sende serpents, and cockatrices among you, which will not be charmed’.

15.9 Cf. SC, Epistle 60-61, ‘So oftentimes a dischorde in Musick maketh a comely concordaunce’, and Smith (1970, no. 185).

16.4 parauaunt: Probably, as Hamilton 2001 suggests, a shortened form of ‘paraventure’.

16.9 fashioned: A key term used by Spenser to characterize his own activity as a poet (FQ Letter 8 and pr.5.8), it refers equally to mimesis and poesis, or to imitating and making.

17.2 fayne: Etymologically linked to the activity of fashioning through the Latin root (fingere to mould) that it shares with ‘fiction’. The implication is that she and Redcrosse are exchanging fictions of Artegall.

17.3 in Brytayne: See i.8.7n.

17.5 engraffed: ‘Engraffed’ awakens the figure latent in ‘grow’, then unfolds it in the lines that follow, introducing the unsettling image, repeated several times in the poem, of a genealogical ‘tree’ growing out of Britomart’s body.

18.1–18.2 18.1-2 The emphasis on seeing keys an extended contrast between Britomart’s experience of the visual as a register of erotic experience, and the voyeurism of the Bower of Bliss.

18.3 18.3 These books are fictional, like Britomart and her story.

18.4 Deheubarth: See Holinshed 1.26: ‘In the beginning it [Wales] was divided into two kingdoms onelie, that is to saie, Venedotia or Gwynhedh (otherwise called Dehenbarth) and Demetia, for which we now use most commonlie the names of South and Northwales’.

18.5 king Ryence: In Malory, husband to Morgan le Faye and brother-in-law to Arthur (157.30-158.22).

18.5–18.9 18.6-19 Spenser’s Merlin finds literary precedent in Book 3 of Orlando Furioso, where he shows Bradamante her progeny. But Ariosto’s Merlin has no mirror; the ‘glasse’ Spenser’s Merlin has devised finds a different precedent in Chaucer (CT Squire 5.132-41). For Merlin as the maker of Arthur’s shield and sword, see I.vii.36 and II.viii.20. Spenser’s Merlin may also figure the mathematician and astrologer John Dee, reputed to be a conjurer, who confirmed Elizabeth’s Arthurian lineage, and once showed the queen a mirror whose unusual ‘properties’ had led to the rumor that he was a magician (Nichols 1823, 1:414-15).

19.1–19.9 18.6-19 Spenser’s Merlin finds literary precedent in Book 3 of Orlando Furioso, where he shows Bradamante her progeny. But Ariosto’s Merlin has no mirror; the ‘glasse’ Spenser’s Merlin has devised finds a different precedent in Chaucer (CT Squire 5.132-41). For Merlin as the maker of Arthur’s shield and sword, see I.vii.36 and II.viii.20. Spenser’s Merlin may also figure the mathematician and astrologer John Dee, reputed to be a conjurer, who confirmed Elizabeth’s Arthurian lineage, and once showed the queen a mirror whose unusual ‘properties’ had led to the rumor that he was a magician (Nichols 1823, 1:414-15).

19.4 So that: As L. Silberman notes, the phrase is ambiguous, and may be construed either as ‘introducing a results clause’ or as meaning ‘provided that’ (1995: 23).

19.6 ne ought mote pas: ‘Nor might anything escape notice’.

19.8–19.9 19.8-9 King Ryence’s ‘looking glasse’ seems to change from one moment to the next. It was ‘Venus looking glas’ at i.8.9, but now is associated with Merlin; it has the properties sometimes of a mirror and sometimes of a crystal ball. The mirror’s antecedents are no less varied. In addition to Chaucer and John Dee commentators have cited Plato’s Phaedrus, Camões’ Lusiad, and Cornelius Agrippa. In the Lusiad, da Gama sees the future in a divinely wrought globe that, like Spenser’s, ‘seemd a world of glas’ (10.77-79). Agrippa discusses optical illusions in Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1.6, 2.1, 2.3) and in Vanity of the Sciences (ch. 26). His work was often cited by John Dee, and his reputation as an expert on magic mirrors seems to have inspired an episode in Drayton’s heroic epistle from Surrey to Geraldine (Works 2.278, Epistle lines 57-64).

19.8 For thy: The logic seems to be that the mirror is shaped like the world because it (potentially) contains all that happens in the world.

20.2–20.9 20.2-9 The story of Phao (from Gk Φαος light) is Spenser’s invention, perhaps based in part on Pharos, the lighthouse constructed at Alexandria by Ptolemy II. The fable of the glass tower (Phao’s ‘bowre’) engages the theme of voyeurism introduced in the Bower of Bliss episode, suggesting that voyeuristic desire is based on a fantasy that combines perfect invisibility with panoptical power. The fragility of this fantasy is suggested both by the vulnerability of the tower’s maker, betrayed by his ‘leman’, and by the vulnerability of the supposedly ‘impregnable’ tower itself, shattered with a single blow.

21.1

St. 21

The military purpose of Merlin’s glass extends Spenser’s sustained treatment of Britomart’s erotic volatility as a switchpoint between concupisciple and irascible impulses—between fantasies of being sexually ‘in armes’ and a defensive reaction of taking up arms (see st. 6 notes). As Hamilton notes, Britomart sees Arthegall in the mirror because ‘he invades her kingdom’.

21.2 gard: The spelling also implicates ‘regard’ in the sense of a look or gaze.

22.2 her fathers closet: Cf. ‘the deare closett of her painefull syde’ (11.7). The repetition signals our movement back from the figurative parturition of the image ‘written in [Britomart’s] hart’ (29.9) to the implied scene of its conception.

22.2 repayre: Context activates the latent etymological sense, from post-classical L repatriare to return to one’s fatherland.

22.4 The phrase applied to Una at I.xii.21.3.

22.6 in vaine: Includes a submerged allusion to Narcissus, although as L. Silberman remarks, ‘Spenser’s joke is that vanity or self-love is not the primary connotation of “vaine” (1995: 24) in context.

22.9 22.9 Echoing 19.4. Together with the pun in 22.6, the emphasis on the ‘looker’ as the anchor of pertinence emphasizes the underlying motive of self-regard. The momentary blocking of this regard is suggested by the comma, which replaces an elided ‘that’ (‘that that mote to her selfe pertaine’) with a metrically awkward caesura, suspending the movement of the verse as ‘that’ searches ‘in vaine’ for its mirror-image.

23.1–23.4 23.1-4 Britomart’s experience of love as compulsion contrasts with her declaration at i.25.7-9 (earlier in the narrative, but later in the action narrated) that love may not ‘be compeld by maistery’.

23.5–23.6 23.5-6 The as/so construction in this stanza joins a curiously mismatched pair of clauses: tyranny and ‘bitter smarts’ are invoked to explain Britomart’s casual and, so the narrator says, altogether typical curiosity as to whom she will marry. Her curiosity makes sense as an instance of love’s tyranny only if we see it as proleptically entailing the aftereffects described in st. 27-44. Cf. the emphasis in st. 26 on the wound already inflicted but not yet felt.

23.9 23.9 Spenser leaves unstated the source of the imperative (‘must lincke’) and of Britomart’s knowledge of it. It may be dynastic, hence something she knows about herself as the ‘onely daughter and . . . hayre’ to a king (22.4), or it may be considered ‘natural’ to maidens as a class (‘as maydens use to done’), hence something she knows about herself as a female.

24.1

St. 24

Britomart’s first glimpse of the knight in the mirror corresponds to our first glimpse of her visage at i.42.7-43, with Artegall appearing as Phoebus here to Britomart’s Cynthia there.

24.2 in complete wize: Cf. Arthur at I.vii.29.6-7, Guyon at II.i.5.8-9.

24.4–24.5 Echoing the descriptions of Guyon at II.i.6.2-4 and Britomart at i.46.1-4.

25.1 couchant: Heraldic: ‘lying with the body resting on the legs and (according to most authors) the head lifted up, or at least not sunk in sleep’ (OED).

25.6 25.6 Upton notes that Spenser here reverses a passage in Boiardo to which Ariosto alludes prominently (OI 3; OF 14.30-31): Mandricardo, a Saracen knight, wins the arms of Hector, the Trojan ancestor of both Charles V and Arthur.

25.7 25.7 On the ‘sevenfold’ shield see II.iii.1.9n. Homer describes the making of Achilles’ arms in a famous passage from which the tradition of ekphrasis develops (Il 18.486-608; see II.xii.45.1n).

25.8 25.8 The ermine as an emblem of chastity belongs to the iconography of queen Elizabeth: see SC Apr 57-58 and Strong (1963: plate 21b). As a signifier of royal status, it ornaments the mantle worn by Malecasta at i.59.8-9; for other references to her royal pretentions see i.32.4, 33.4, and 41.4. Upton saw in these armorial bearings a rebus of Lord Grey’s name, ‘for “griseum” in the barbarous Latin signified fine furr or ermin’ (Var 3.313; see Glossarium Mediæ et Infimæ Latinitatis, 4, s.v. ‘griseum’).

26.2 26.2 Cf. Sidney, Astrophil and Stella: 2.5, ‘I saw, and liked; I liked, but loved not’.

26.2 fastned not: Echoing ‘that same knot’ (23.9), the phrasing suggests that although Britomart consciously ‘fastned not’ on the image of Artegall, the knot is fastened within her. See 31.1, ‘not of nought’, for the reverberations of this echo.

26.3–26.4 vnguilty age . . . vnlucky lot: The juxtaposition of parallel phrases serves to emphasize the combined effects of the innocence that leaves Britomart unprepared for sexual maturation, and the unexpectedness of what feels like a random blow.

26.6 26.6 ‘The greatest danger arises from an unfelt wound’.

26.9 stound: as ‘pang’, ‘shock’, or ‘time of trial’ emphasizes the paradox that amuses the sly archer Cupid, namely that Britomart has yet to feel the pain of a blow which has already fallen.

27.1–27.2 27.1-2 Britomart is literally ‘crestfallen’. The crest as a symbol of knighthood is implicitly masculine and phallic: cf. Gower, Conf 2.329: ‘And on his heed there stont upright / A crest in token of a knight’. Cf. also 25.1 on Artegall’s crest, the ‘figure or device . . . borne by a knight on his helmet’, of which OED observes, ‘As it represents the ornament worn on the knight’s helmet, it cannot properly be borne by a woman’. The implication is that Britomart’s discovery of her desire for Artegall entails a corresponding discovery of her own gender, which she experiences as a sudden loss of virility. That all this should unfold because of an image she has seen in her father’s closet while looking in his mirror (st. 22) further implies that the imaginary ‘masculinity’ lost in this moment has been based in an identification with her father: ‘nothing he from her reserv’d apart’ (22.3), but she has now discovered that he does ‘reserve a part’—namely the object that separates he from her—and that she desires it.

27.3–27.4 27.3-4 Cf. 24.8-9: Britomart, taken by the lure of Artegall’s ‘Portly . . . person . . . much increast / Through . . . honorable gest’, finds her own ‘gest’ and ‘portaunce’ correspondingly diminished. She has lost her swagger.

27.5–27.9 27.5-9 The ailment described in these lines is diagnosed by Burton (Anatomy 3.2.1.2) as both love and melancholy, i.e. love-melancholy.

28.1 pallid: Spenser appears to have coined this word not from L pallidus pale or colorless—the sense it carries in subsequent usage—but from pullus dark-colored.

28.6–28.7 28.6-7 Britomart’s sighs and sorrows are personified as watchmen who ironically ward off any danger of approaching sleep; cf. 29.1-5.

28.8–28.9 28.8-9 Cf. Ps 6:6: ‘I am weary with my groaning; all the night make I my bed to swim; I water my couch with my tears’ (King James Version).

29.6–29.9 29.6-9 Cf. her response to Malecasta’s invasion of her bed at i.62.2.

29.9 fayre visage: The ‘fayre visage’ that torments Britomart when she lies awake manifests itself in her dreams as ‘fantastick sight / Of dreadfull things’.

29.9 written in her hart: Cf. Am 85.9-10: ‘Deepe in the closet of my parts entyre, / her worth is written with a golden quill’. The trope of writing on the heart is Biblical as well as Petrarchan: see 2 Cor 3:3, ‘ye are manifest, to be the epistle of Christ, ministred by vs, and written, not with yncke, but with the Spirit of the living God, not in tables of stone, but in fleshie tables of the heart’.

30.1

St. 30-51

This episode is closely modeled on a passage from the anonymous late-classical epyllion Ciris, attributed to Virgil in medieval and early modern editions. Ciris tells the story of Scylla’s treasonous passion for King Minos, who has laid siege to her father’s city. Merlin’s mirror, given to King Ryence ‘That never foes his kingdome might invade’ (21.3), serves a function analogous to that of King Nisus’s charmed crimson lock of hair: ‘As long as this preserved its nature . . . Nisus’ country and kingdom would be secure’ (123-25). The aligning of Artegall with Minos implicit in this analogy extends the pattern representing Britomart’s erotic experience as a form of combat (see notes to st. 6 and 21). Spenser’s major revision is to undo the Latin text’s substitution of Scylla for Britomartis (daughter of Scylla’s nurse, Carme, and Jupiter), who fled from Minos rather than toward him, and was rescued by Diana. In lamenting Scylla’s dangerous passion, Carme addresses the princess as her alumna (‘foster-child’, line 224; 33.6), and apostrophizing Minos, asks why he is destroying her foster-child as he once before destroyed her daughter (286-96). Spenser’s Britomart fuses the two daughter-figures as she embodies a fight-or-flight ambivalence toward her erotic object. (See Hughes 1929: 348-54; Roche 1964: 53-6.)

30.2 Glauce: From Gk γλαυκη glauke (‘grey’), and γλαυκος glaukos, (‘owl’) (sacred to Athena, hence an appropriate companion for an armed female).

30.3 nest: Bed, but also a place one might expect to find an owl. In the background of the phrase ‘loathed nest’ is the proverb ‘It is a foul bird that defiles its own nest’ (Tilley 1950, B377), which hints at the feeling that a formerly protected space of childhood innocence has been violated—and at the uneasy sense that Britomart herself is the source of the violation. The echo of i.58.6-7 may reinforce this sense: at Castle Joyeous, Britomart made very sure that all the other guests were gone before she ‘gan her selfe despoile, / And safe committ to her soft fethered nest’. These bed-scenes are linked as well by intense ‘unrest’, although the tossing and turning passes from Malecasta in canto i to Britomart in canto ii; and by sudden starting out of bed, although it was Malecasta who startled Britomart in canto i and Britomart who frightens herself in canto ii. These associations retroactively suggest further reasons for Britomart to identify with Malecasta: her own chastity seems to arise as a defense against disturbing intimations of unchastity from within herself.

31.1 not of nought: The wordplay emphasizes the doubleness of ‘nought’, which means ‘nothing’ but also ‘promiscuity or indecency’. For other instances of Spenser’s play on the senses of this word, see the notes to II.i.33.4-5, ix.32.5, and ix.42.4. The narrator’s assurance that King Ryence ‘nothing . . . from her reserv’d apart’ (22.3) continues to unfold its resonance (see 27.1-2n). Insofar as Britomart’s discovery of both her desire and her sexual identity has altered her sense of the ‘nothing’ withheld from her, Glauce’s double negative suggests that the ‘knot’ of desire keeping the maid awake at night arises precisely from her ‘nought’.

32.1–32.3 32.1-3 It is not immediately clear why Glauce should imagine that rivers stop flowing at night. She is echoing Carme in Ciris: tempore quo fessas mortalia pectora curas, / quo rapidos etiam requescunt flumina cursus (‘that hour when the hearts of men rest from weary cares, when even rivers stay their swift courses’; 233-34), but the question remains why Carme would think such a thing. The line echoes Virgil’s praise in Eclogue 8 of ‘the Muse of Damon and Alphesiboeus’, at whose song mutata suos requierunt flumina cursus (‘rivers were changed and stayed their course’; line 4), where the conceit is extravagant but not inexplicable.

32.4 infest: For the aptness of the military sense, see st. 21n. Cf. I.xi.6.2-4, where the poet addressing his muse at once invokes and seeks to ward off ‘That mightie rage / Wherewith the martiall troupes thou doest infest, / And hartes of great Heroës doest enrage’. The rest/infest/brest rhyme in this stanza echoes the unrest/nest pair from st. 30; see 30.3n.

33.6 foster childe: See st. 30-51n for the precedent alumna in the pseudo-Virgilian Ciris.

34.2 34.2 ‘She tightly squeezed and tenderly embraced’ (‘colled’ from L collum neck).

34.8–34.9 34.8-9 The inherent difficulty, even danger, of ‘expressing’ the heart is the keynote of the proem (see pr.2 and 5.6-9 and notes).

36.1

St. 36-38.4

The insistent negatives in these lines (seventeen in all) echo ‘not of nought’ at 31.1, and begin the canto’s sustained reflection on the nothingness that underlies desire. Behind Britomart’s sense of the image as a void may lie a reminiscence of Aeneas in Carthage: animum pictura pascit inani / multa gemens, largoque umectat flumine voltum (‘he . . . feasts his soul on the unsubstantial picture, sighing oft-times, and his face wet with a flood of tears’; Aen 1.464-65).

37.8 gryde: The term has a specifically martial sense, 'to pierce with a weapon' (OED).

39.1

St. 39

The lurid diction and imagery of this stanza suggest that Britomart finds her metaphoric love-wound literalized in the onset of menstrual cramps and bleeding. This image of the female body is one of several places in Book III that show what was excluded from view in the Castle of Temperance (see II.ix.33.5-44.5n). L. Silberman observes that “by introducing menarche to the literary tradition of the Martial Maid, Spenser calls attention to his rewriting of that tradition in a strategy of emphasizing the feminine” (1995: 20).

39.2 See xii.38.4n for the use of this term to describe the location of Amoret’s wound.

40.2 40.2 Glauce’s question makes explicit the repeated implication that Britomart has begun to experience herself as alien or monstrous.

40.9 40.9 See i.54.4n on the relation between love and compulsion.

41.1

St. 41

Glauce’s references to heroines infamous for incest and bestiality emphasize even in denial that Britomart is reacting to her discovery of sexuality as if it were identical with ‘Such shamefull lusts’. Hence ‘Of much more uncouth thing I was affrayd’.

41.1 th’ Arabian Myrrhe: With her nurse’s help, Myrrha used a bed-trick to seduce her father (Ovid, Met 10.431-80).

41.2 Biblis: Driven to madness by an unconsummated passion for her brother, Caunus (Ovid, Met 9.454-634; Ciris 238-40).

41.5 Pasiphaë: The wife of Minos and mother of the Minotaur, which she conceived by concealing herself inside a wooden cow to copulate with a bull.

41.9 bands: bans—an odd usage, since normally it means the opposite (join together, unite in a group). See st. 41n for the sense of contamination persisting within Britomart’s experience of the erotic.

42.8–42.9 Cf. 32.5-9 for a similar analogy between macrocosm (the earth) and microcosm (Britomart’s body).

43.7 43.7 True of Myrrha and Pasiphaë but not of Biblis.

44.1

St. 44

Britomart’s description of her predicament mirrors that of Arthur, of whom it is literally true that he loves ‘a shade, the body far exyld’, and ironically recalls the ‘falsed fancy’ of Malecasta (i.47.5).

44.1 44.1 Britomart here answers Glauce’s question, ‘why make ye such Monster of your minde?’ (40.2).

44.4 entire: Insofar as the term suggests completeness, it is ironically qualified by the strong enjambment.

44.6 Cephisus foolish chyld: Narcissus; see Ovid, Met 3.407-36. Artegall’s image in Merlin’s mirror replaces Britomart’s reflection.

44.8 44.8 The enjambment, which conveys the reflex of ‘His face’ from the surface of the fountain, may also suggest the adverbial use of sheer ‘with vbs. expressing removal, separation, cleavage, etc.’ (OED).

45.4 a watry flowre: Narcissus was transformed into a flower that grows near bodies of water. Cf. Ovid, Met 3.509-10: croceum pro corpore florem / inveniunt foliis medium cingentibus albis (‘In place of his body they find a flower, its yellow centre girt with white petals’). Spenser’s phrasing wittily elides the distinction between the real flower and its watery reflection, in effect taking the disappearance of the real into the image one step further. Cf. 44.3-5, where Britomart imagines herself drained of being by the wasting force of ‘entire / Affection’.

45.7 45.7 ‘There is no shadow not cast by a body’; the phrasing also suggests the mirror-image sense ‘there is no shadow that does not control a body’, an ironically apt reflection of Britomart’s predicament (see 45.4n).

45.9 cyphers: Cf. the ‘cyphres old’ inscribed on Artegall’s shield (25.5). Also another name for ‘nought’: ‘an arithmetical symbol or character of no value by itself, but which increases or decreases the value of other figures according to its position’ (OED).

46.1–46.3 46.1-3 Cf. 36.2, ‘no reason can finde remedy’. Britomart’s passion exceeds the warrant of Temperance.

46.4–46.5 46.4-5 These lines, evoking Britomart’s first appearance in the poem (i.5-8), recall the defeat of Temperance by Chastity even as they characterize Britomart’s masculine pursuit of Artegall as a means to resist her desire for him. This ambivalence between her desire to be Artegall and to obtain him is the ‘knot’ lurking within the canto’s insistent repetition of ‘nott’ (see 31.1n).

47.8 47.8 Translating Ciris 344: inverso bibulum restinguens lumen olivo (‘uptilting the lamp of oil and quenching the thirsty light’).

48.4 their praiers to appele: ‘To make their appeal by way of prayers [to the gods]’.

48.6 the holy herse: Cf. SC Nov 60 gloss: ‘Herse) is the solemne obsequie in funeralles’. Here, by extension, any ritual or ceremony.

49.1 royall Infant: Heir to the throne, not yet old enough to exercise sovereignty. Cf. II.viii.56.1, II.xi.25.7.

49.5–49.9 49.5-9 Glauce’s recipe combines ingredients from Virgil and Ovid with local English herbs. Maplet identifies rue as ‘the Medicinable Herbe: and especially there where as excessive heate is found’; savine as a remedy for ‘all griefs in the inward partes and bowels’; calamint (mint) as a cure for swellings, and dill as a ‘hindrance to issue’ (1567: 60v, 61r, 52r, 40r). According to Burton, Anatomy 3.2.5.1, camphora counteracts lust. Dido’s priestess in Virgil, Aen 4.515-16, uses colt wood to treat her mistress’s passion for Aeneas, while Ovid’s Medea uses milk and blood to seek the favor of Hecate (Met 7.245-47).

50.1

St. 50

Closely follows Ciris 371-373, except that Carme asks Scylla to spit in gremium mecum (‘into thy bosom, as I do’), not ‘upon my face’.

51.1

St. 51

This stanza draws out the implications of ‘reverse’ at 48.9, suggesting that Britomart’s love for Artegall amounts to more than ‘fond fancies’. Glauce’s ministrations are aptly described by Hamilton 2001 as ‘comic withershins’.

51.9 proue: See i.30.1n on the importance of this word in canto i.

52.5–52.6 52.5-6 Britomart is suffering the fate of Narcissus, whose pining for a disembodied image (of himself) gradually disembodied him: see 45.4, 45.7, and notes.

52.6 52.6 The shades of the dead cannot be ferried across the river Styx until their bodies have received burial.