The Faerie Queene (102 page)

37.3
themselues
cd
themseles

Canto 12

13.5
Throughout
cd
Troughout

18.9
Hue.
cd
liue

19.9
faine?
cd
faine.

27.4
cry:
cd
cry.

41.2
Hope
cd
H'ope

41.5
tongues
cd
tongnes

MUTABILITIE CANTOS

Canto 6

29.5
Procrustes
[editorial conjecture]
Proscustes cd

Canto 7

4.5
euery – cuery
c

7.8
they – they
c

8.3
as – ar
c

12.1
neuer – neucr
c

12.5
Peleus
[editorial conjecture]
Pelene cd

15.8
esteem – esteeeme
c

36.7
array; – array,
c

40.1
full – full full
c

41.7
Idcean
[editorial conjecture]
laean cd

48.3
disseise – disseife
c

49.8
if-If
c

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Spenser addresses the letter explaining his poem to Sir Walter Ralegh (1552?-1618), adventurer, explorer, poet and favourite of the Queen. Spenser may have met Ralegh as early as 1579 but certainly knew him in 1580-81, when both were in Ireland. When Ralegh left Ireland in 1581 and returned to England, he rapidly became a favoured courtier, the Queen granting him the lucrative posts, Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall and Lord Warden of the Stanneries (the mines in Cornwall and Devon). In Ireland Ralegh also had a vast estate near Spenser's Kilcolman. In 1589 Ralegh came to stay with Spenser; soon thereafter both men returned to England, where Ralegh presented Spenser and his poem to the Queen in hopes that this might earn Spenser preferment.

The letter serves both as a poetics and as a description of the poem. As a poetics it clearly allies Spenser with the ancients' theory that poetry has the double function of instructing and delighting the reader. The classical statement of this theory is Horace, Ars Poetica 333-4, 343-4: the task of the poet is to profit (prodesse) and to delight (dekctare), an aim most successfully accomplished by those who mix the useful (utik) with the sweet (duke):

Omne tulit punctum qui miseuit utik dulci
Lectorem dekctando pariterque monendo.

This theory firmly holds that examples of good and bad conduct can instruct the reader to choose virtue and to avoid vice. Thus Spenser's purpose is to ‘fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline', and his method for achieving that grand design is his ‘historicall fiction, the which the most part of men delight to read, rather for variety of matter, then for profite of the ensample'. Spenser's allowance of the possibility of the reader's not profiting by the example but following only the delight of the fiction is the bow of the allegorist to those who ‘had rather haue good discipline deliuered plainly in way of precepts, or sermoned at large… then thus clowdily enwrapped in Allegoricall deuises'. The position that Spenser defends had been the weak point of all poets at least since the time of Plato, when Socrates subjected poetry to rather severe test in the Ion: what is the usefulness of poetry? It will not teach one to ride horses or to do anything useful.

Spenser's answer is that given by all poets in the Renaissance: ‘For this cause is Xenophon preferred before Plato… So much more profitable and gratious is doctrine by ensample, then by rule.' In the Republic Plato set out a model for the just city by means of precept (‘rule'). In the Cyropaedia Xenophon painted a lively picture of a king who might point the way to virtue by his example. Spenser may, in fact, be recalling Sir Philip Sidney's similar praise of Xenophon:

  For Xenophon who did imitate so excellently as to give us effigietn iusti imperil, the pourtraiture of a just Empyre, under the name of Cyrus, as Cicero saith of him, made therein an absolute heroicall Poeme… not onely to make a Cyrus, which had bene but a particular excellency as nature might
have done, but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses, if they will learne aright, why and how that maker made him.

Sidney considers Xenophon to be using the methods of the poet to make the precept striking, for earlier in the Defense of Poetry he establishes the superiority of poetry to both history and philosophy in this respect. History, which delivers true facts, can provide lively examples: philosophy can provide abstract precepts; but only the poet can combine the example of the historian with the precept of the philosopher.

Spenser sees his' continued Allegory, or darke conceit' in the tradition of the ‘antique Poets historicall' from Homer to Tasso, whose purpose, he implies, is to instil in the reader both the ‘priuate morall vertues' (Ethice) and the public political virtues (Politice). Homer uses Agamemnon in the Iliad for the latter and Ulysses in the Odyssey for the former. Virgil combines both functions in the single epic Aeneid. Ariosto follows Virgil's example by combining both functions in his Orlando furioso (1532). Tasso reverts to the Homeric practice by treating the private virtues in Rinaldo (1562) and the political in La Gerusalemme liberata (published surreptitiously as Il Goffredo in 1580). Spenser's last comment on his poetics provides a further distinction between the historiographer, who must relate his facts sequentially as they happen, and the' Poet historical', who ‘thrusteth into the middest' (Spenser's translation of the Horatian ‘in median res', Ars Poetica 148-9), a device used by all the antique poets historical mentioned, who begin their epics in the middle of the events that a historian would tell seriatim.

As a description of the poem the letter is both more tantalizing and less satisfying. In the first place it describes only the first three books, published in 1590, and it was not changed or expanded for the second three books in 1596. Furthermore, there are manifest differences between the three books described and the actual poem. Nevertheless, the letter is our only source for the original grand plan of Spenser's epic. It was to be twelve books, following the example of Virgil, each book concerned with one of the twelve' priuate morall vertues, as Aristotle hath deuised' and was to be followed by another twelve books on the political virtues, bringing the total to twenty-four books, the number of books in the Homeric epics. Spenser completed six books and part of a seventh (‘The Mutabilitie Cantos', first published in 1609). But even with this bare outline of Spenser's plan we run into difficulties. Aristotle does not mention twelve well-defined virtues, and only Spenser's temperance and justice are treated at any length in Aristotle's Ethics. The problem is solved if we refer Spenser's virtues not to Aristotle but to ‘Aristotle and the rest' (i.e., later classical and Christian philosophers) as Rosemond Tuve has done exhaustively in Allegorical Imagery. Yet even beyond the difficulties of the individual virtues, many critics feel that the original plan was abandoned by the time Spenser published the last three books in 1396, since justice, the virtue of Book V, is clearly a political and not a private virtue.

For his historical fiction Spenser chose the ‘historye of king Arthure', the most famous of the British kings and one of the Nine Worthies: Joshua, David, Judas Maccabeus (Hebrew); Hector, Alexander, Julius Caesar (classical); Arthur, Charlemagne, Godfrey of Boulogne (Christian). Spenser's desire to
‘overgo' Ariosto and Tasso, his two Italian predecessors, who wrote of Charlemagne and Godfrey respectively, may have urged him to choose the one British worthy. At any rate, from the vast body of fable and fact surrounding Arthur, Spenser uses only the story of his birth and the figure of Merlin. Timon, Arthur's teacher, is Spenser's invention, as is Arthur's vision of the Faerie Queene (I.o. 13-15). In fact, Arthur does not play an overwhelming role in the action of the poem as we have it. As magnificence, ‘which vertue for that (according to Aristotle and the rest) it is the perfection of all the rest [of the virtues] and conteineth in it them all', Arthur is called into the fiction to help out the individual knights of each book when they fall short of the virtue required of them (he rescues Redcross in I.8 and Guyon in II.8). The heroine of the poem, the Faerie Queene, or Gloriana, is even more removed from previous (or later) literary associations. She is entirely Spenser's creation and appears in the poem only in one fleeting apparition to Arthur in I.9.13-15. She is glory, the reward of heroic virtue, and hence the proper bride for Arthur, who as magnificence sums up all the virtues. Yet the Faerie Queene is not only glory but also the idealized image of Elizabeth I as the foundation of Spenser's society. Spenser tells us that in the poem Elizabeth ‘beareth two persons', her public role as monarch and her private role as virtuous virgin. As monarch she is figured by Gloriana and as virgin she is figured by Bel-phoebe, a militant Diana, an identification derived (Spenser implies) from the fact that Ralegh titles his poem to Elizabeth The Ocean's Love to Cynthia, another name for Diana or Phoebe. We cannot judge the propriety of Spenser's compliment to Ralegh since only one book of his poem survives.

Spenser ends the letter with a description of the first three books, the action of each initiated at the court of Gloriana, who commands each knight to take up a task on each day of the twelve-day feast she is holding (true only of Books I, II, V, VI). The description of Book I fits well with the poem (although the reader may want to know the full reference to Ephesians, which is chapter 6, verses 11-17, quoted in note to I.1.2). The letter and the poem are at variance with regard to II. The Palmer and Guyon are already together at the beginning, Gloriana is not mentioned, and the episode of the bloody baby is part of the action of cantos 1 and 2. The description of III is even more curious since it treats Sir Scudamour as if he were the main knight of the book whereas he appears for the first time only in canto 11, a difficulty of which Spenser seems to be aware since he describes as ‘Accidents' most of the other adventures of the book: the love of Britomart (cantos 1-3), the overthrow of Marinell (canto 4), the misery of Florimell (cantos 7-8), the virtuousness of Belphoebe (cantos 5-6), and the lasciviousness of Hellenore (cantos 9-10). For a discussion of these difficulties see Roche, Kindly Flame, pp. 195-202, 31-50.

The date of the letter – 23 January 1589 – is actually 1590, since England did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752 and the dating of the new year began on 25 March, L

For the seven poems -written in commendation of The Faerie Queene only two authors have been identified. The first two poems, signed W. R., are by Sir Walter Ralegh, the friend who accompanied Spenser to England for the printing of the poem and its presentation at court.' To the learned Shepeheard', signed Hobynoll, is by Gabriel Harvey, Spenser's friend and mentor at Cambridge, explicitly identified as Hobynoll in The Shepheardes Calender (1579). R. S., H. B., W. L., and Ignoto are still unknown.

A V
ISION

1
Laura: the woman loved by Petrarch, the theme of his poems.

2
Temple: the temple of Vesta at Rome, where the sacred fire of the state
was tended by Vestal Virgins.

A
NOTHER OF THE SAME

2
Philumena: Philomel, the nightingale.

6
eine: eyes.

T
O THE LEARNED
S
HEPEHEARD

1
Collyn: Colin Clout, poetic name adopted by Spenser in The Shepheardes Calender, Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1595) and The Faerie Queene VI.10.

7
Rosolinde: Rosalind, the name of Colin's love.

28
Albion: name for England, from Albion the mythical founder. See II.10.11 and notes, II, 10, headnote.

35
dome: fate.

35
Empyring: ruling absolutely.

F
AIRE THAMIS
S
TREAMS

1
Thamis: the river Thames.
Ludds stately towne: London, founded by Lud.

G
RAUE
MUSES

3
dispenser: pun on the poet's name.

7
Augustus: Augustus Caesar, patron of Virgil. Historically he did not give the laurel crown to Virgil.