The proem begins with confusion – “bad vibes” – on earth and in heaven.  The compounding series of descriptions in passive voice in the first stanza even seems confused itself.  Are the disorders on earth and in heaven congruous, or does one cause the other?  Which way does the cause run?

We paused at the idea of “the world … runne quite out of square” (1.7).  The world naturally turns in a circle, so the “square” order is externally imposed.  A circle inside a square historically symbolized God enclosing humanity.  We also recalled the square of magically transformed friendship in the Cambell-Cambina/Triamond-Canacee marriages in Book IV.  Must justice be externally imposed?  We also noted an emphasis on naming, another form of external order.

We also wondered whether the narrator’s complaint is urgently clear-sighted or just a reflexive commonplace complaint.  How should we hear fluctuations in tone like the humor in “fleecy Ram” (5.6)?  Is the poem mesmerized by the prospect of an apocalypse of ancient origin (as in 8), or is this just brushed off as an almost comical confusion?

Artegall is an “instrument” (11.9) of justice, rather than being justice. Does justice rely on an instrument? What does this representation have to do with origin and causation? How does emblem-rich justice relate to emblem-poor friendship? The proem seems to reflect a dissatisfaction with friendship as an insufficiently coherent public virtue – and looks to justice to put things in order.

Time to get those rivers married! Finishing up the Hesiodic catalogue, Spenser/the narrator told us that all the rivers ‘that day in order seemly good / Did on the Thamis attend, and waited well / To doe their dueful service, as to them befell’ (44). We discussed whether this catalogue is in fact orderly, the result of editorial decisions on Spenser’s part (after all, why these rivers and not all the others?), or whether its river-like onrushing shows him, once again, at the mercy of the poem. One moment that does suggest an orderly, curated catalogue comes when the narrator brackets off Scotland with the ‘Twede, the limit betwixt Logris land [England/Wales] / And Albany [Scotland]’ (36). This stanza began with the Tyne, another river in the north of England (think: Newcastle-upon-Tyne), and ends with the blood ‘Of Scots and English both, that tyned on his [the Tweed’s] strand’, ‘tyne’ meaning perish in Scots/northern English dialect. There is a chiasmus in ‘Logris / Albany / Scots / English’, bracketing the Scots within the English (think: Scotland as internal colony [John Kerrigan]). Scotland is one place colonist Edmund Spenser is not willing to go, though he does give us a preponderance of Irish rivers, including the Mulla, which flowed by his estate during his ten-year stay in Eire: ‘And Mulla mine, whose waves I whilom taught to weep’ (41).

We wondered: is this a nature poem? Diana pointed out the geological specificity of the descriptions; yet, at points, culture overtakes nature as the narrator reflects on conventions of naming rivers, such as ‘the stony shallow Lone, / That to old Loncaster his name doth lend’ (39) or the multilingual ‘Awniduff, which of the English man / Is cal’de Blacke-water’ (41). We considered the ‘dewy’ nature of nature in The Faerie Queene: fresh, new, morning-lit. In the description of Medway, her silvery dress looks as if made of stars, yet is also clearly made of silver: the dress’ sprezzatura, like the poem’s, looks effortless but also ‘bewrays’ its own effort, ‘to let men plainely wot / It was no mortall worke’ (45). Here, Idil noted that the onrushing movement of rivers pauses to allow for some tautological moments: ‘Then came the Bride, the lovely Medua came’ and ‘her feet appeared plaine, / Her silver feet’ (47). Progress pauses for beauty; we were moved. Finally, the narrator lists all fifty of Medway’s nereid bridesmaids in a joyous (and at times surprisingly trochaic) display of metrical virtuosity, tiring out his Muse (53) but perhaps not his readers—at least, not these readers. It may be that the pleasure of the Marriage of the Rivers is best understood by reading aloud, among friends.

[EKL]

Continuing with our Hesiodic catalogue of rivers, we came up against questions of aging and time: the Scamander is ‘purpled yet with blood / Of Greeks and Trojans, which therein did die’ (20), seeming to exist in an eternal epic present. ‘[T]he aged Ocean, and his Dame / Old Tethys’ are the parents of all the other rivers (18), yet still living: age here seems to be more genealogical than chronological, so these eldest rivers can be eternally Grandparent Age. (There seem to be only two ages in The Faerie Queene: auncient, or young, hot and ready to be wed. This may be why we haven’t seen our ostensible heroes, Campbell and Triamond, since they were married.)

In a semantically and politically unsettling moment, the narrator gives a call towards colonialism: as men have failed to subdue the Amazons, Britain should be ashamed for failing to subdue the New World and giving the Spanish so much ground (22). The narrator cloaks colonial intention in awkward legalese: ‘The whom the right thereof itselfe hath sold’.

We move from the mythographic catalogue of ancient world rivers to local rivers, into the Anglo-Saxon register of English place names. Spenser draws on the genre of choreography, a place-based history, and tacks back and forth between modes of allegory, simile, and personification, leading to some amusing tautology: ‘the Rother, decked all with woods / Like a wood God’ (33). Alongside the display of learning of the mythographic catalogue, Jeff pointed out a covert realism as this wedding is used for political machinations between dynasties, minor rivers able to hobnob with major ones, etc. We also had a moment of The Real Edmund Spenser, fondly memorialising ‘My mother Cambridge’ (his alma mater, 34), unlike his usual narratorial evasions. Jamie noted that this wedding is eternal: the Medway and the Thames are always meeting, rendering the moment of marriage a stylisation of a spatial rather than a temporal fact. What kinds of futures, therefore, is this wedding opening?—a question for the poem at large.

[EKL]

Spenser simply cannot believe that he has left poor Florimell languishing for so long in Proteus’ dungeon! Trapped by both manmade and natural restraints– chained up and imprisoned at the bottom of a large rock– things look grim for her, as the poem seems to have learned from Amoret’s relatively easy escape from Lust. (All she had to do was make a run for it!) Florimell, after all, is known for fleeing, so maybe both Proteus AND Spenser need to tie her down to keep her where they want her… Spenser’s complicity in her imprisonment is an open question, as he does lament how long she’s been there, but then almost immediately interrupts his renewed attention to her with a long resume-boosting catalogue of rivers in the epic tradition. This poem is full of instances of violence against women, but this is an interesting example of the dangers of narrative neglect. (This kind of cruelty via neglect recurs in Book VI when Spenser narrates Serena’s rescue from the cannibals, in which she is so ashamed of her own nudity that she defers her rescue all through the night by hiding herself even from her hero until the daylight fully exposes her, an image which is the last we see of her in the poem…)

But I wonder if there is also a way in which the catalogue of rivers is *also* a kind of narrative neglect? Not as damaging, perhaps, but in listing every single wedding guest– “all those floods” and “all those Nymphes”– there does seem to be a kind of abdication of narratorial responsibility. He’s not making editorial choices about who is important and who is not. No, sir– Edmund Spenser just reports the facts.

Here at the threshold of the Temple of Venus, we begin with a negation: ‘Not that same famous temple of Diane, […] Nor that, […] Nor all’. John reminded us of Milton’s lines: ‘Not that fair field / Of Enna, where Proserpine gathering flowers …’ (IV.268-69). Scudamour must now pass the brothers, Love and Hate, to get to the twins, Peace and Friendship (not those fair twins, Amoret and Belphoebe, nor those identical friends, Amyas and Placidas). The younger (Love) masters the elder (Hate, xxxii), like Jacob and Esau or Ephraim and Manasseh, though the narrator has been careful to distance us from the Judeo-Christian world as well as the pagan one (xxx) – this is not a simple, anti-Catholic mockery of idol-worship, despite stanza xl. We wondered who Love and Hate’s parents are – one mother, two fathers – and who Peace and Friendship’s father. Lottie pointed out that, in De Rerum Natura, Lucretius personifies Love and Hate as Venus and Mars. Here, we have gone back towards the Empedoclean principles of love and strife, but Spenser’s Love and Hate are still humanoid, not forces, per se.

This canto seems like a parade of set-pieces: the ekphrastic Temple; the hymn to Venus; the description therein of the fertile earth, full of lusty animals, a callback to ‘Sumer is icumen in’. The whole of Book IV feels uneven: two main stories, with misfitting bits at the beginning and the end. What, we wondered, is the relation of the Garden of Venus to Book III’s Garden of Adonis? Is Spenser not done?

Scudamour again asserts his exceptionalism: ‘So did he say, but I with murmure soft’ (xlviii). He finds Amoret surrounded by womanly virtues, including Shamefastness, who never looks up and blushes ‘As if some blame of evill she did feare’ (xxxvi), rather like Canacee, who, with ‘dread of blame and honours blemishment’ keeps watch on her own eyes, ‘of secret foes affrayd’ (way back in Canto 2). Scudamour carries Amoret off, ‘glorious spoil’, against her wishes (an act of rape?), perhaps explaining her subsequent fear at being alone with Britomart and later with Arthur.

[EKL]

Braggadocio & co. fight amongst themselves. There appears to be no discernible motive for this combat, which proceeds in a strange but orderly fashion. An epic simile compares the knights to “the winds” that “From all four parts of heaven doe rage full sore” (23). On the one hand, the image is orderly as the wind comes from four distinct direction and thus reminds us of the earlier stable arrangement of the double marriage in Canto 3. On the other hand, that is a lot of wind, which “all the world confound with wide vprore.” The concluding phrase, “they Chaos would restore” encapsulates this strange conjunction of order and disorder. How does one “restore” “Chaos“?

The knights also “change their sides, and new parts take,” as if this were a sport (26). Is this episode a parody of the tournament? The tournament is evoked by the knights when Britomart intervenes to put a stop to the pointless fighting, and they band against her, resentful of her prior victory. Arthur joins the fray on Britomart’s side, and this brawl is also described in an orderly manner as well: “Foure shared two, and two surcharged  one” (30). “[S]urchaged” is one of many puns in this stanza that compare the exchange of blows to repayment of loans with interest (“vsury”).

Team Britomart wins, and Arthur scolds the other knights for being sore losers (37). Thereafter, we turn to Scudamour whom Britomart “importune[s]…To tell through what misfortune he had far’d.” (41). Why, we wondered, does Britomart want to hear this story? [JY]

We remarked upon the distinct presence of the narrator’s voice in this canto, which opens with a description of three kinds of love: 1. “deare affection vnto kindred sweet” 2. “raging fire of loue to woman kind” 3. “zeale of friends combyned with vertues meet” (1). The third love struck us as strange, and we continued to puzzle over friendship. Is it the most conscious love? Most manly?

Arthur affixes the lopped head of Corflambo back onto his trunk, props the frankensteined body onto a beast, and heads back to the castle. Allie suggested that perhaps the reanimation of Lust—mutilated then reconfigured—might be less an act of destruction, but an act of control. MK suggested that because you cannot stop the body from signifying, this repurposing might likewise be an act of containment.

Upon the house of Poeana, Arthur finds himself once again susceptible to pretty, pretty ladies, but manages to be controlled (Emily).

Arthur commands the Dwarf (ever the subjugated arm of Labor) to open the prison, and Amyas rushes to embrace Aemelia and Placidas. Though Aemelia is evidently capable of distinguishing between the two friends, Poeana is struck “when she them saw embrace (…) For they so like in person did appeare” (10).

As we considered the collapse of Amyas and Placidas in phrases like “this trustee Squire” (3), we asked once more: what is the role and threat of emulation in friendship—where association with someone else can make you interchangeable with a friend, but can also aid in distinguishing your identity? What are the delineations/delimitations between seeming versus being? Allegory versus plot?

Poeana, stripped of “both her sire, / And eke of Lordship, with both land and fee”—particularly, the “losse of her new loue, the hope of her desire”—is mollified by Arthur’s words, capable of calming “her raging heat” (14). Arthur then persuades Placidas to marry Poeana.

After an ambiguous length of time, Arthur decides to proceed with his former quest, taking a fearful Amoret alongside with him. The narrator insists that Amoret, frightened of sexual assault, is needlessly fretful, and not in any real danger from Arthur—

Meanwhile, Arthur and his ladies are back on the road. Sclaunder can’t help following them and railing ‘till she had all her poyson spent’ (xxxv) and ‘Till she had duld the sting, which in her tongs end grew’ (xxxvi). We wondered: is slander something that can run out, and then has to be renewed? Is it a compulsion? We couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for her; she’s likened to a cur biting a stone ‘which passed straunger at him threw’. Why throw a stone at a dog minding its own business? Speaking of dogs, we wondered why Spenser returns to slander in the figure of the Blatant Beast in Book VI. Is representing slander also a compulsion, like the act of slandering?

We tried to think of other times when more than one allegorical figure represents the same concept. Corflambo, riding furiously into view on his camel, seems like another allegory of Lust, though in a less allegorical mode. We wondered whether Muslims are beyond friendship in the poem’s imagination (though Paeana, Corflambo’s daughter, is going to be allowed into the marital fold soon). Corflambo’s kills people by looking at them. The problem with looking at Lust is that you may become lustful. What is the relationship here between looking and being looked at?

I wondered why Arthur can’t carry his own stuff (xxxvii). Unlike a Boy Scout, he doesn’t seem prepared. Jeewon pointed out that Arthur and Sclaunder both exhibit physical weakness: Sclaunder rails until she dulls her tongue, and Arthur is ‘sore annoyd’ by his needments.

Corflambo is chasing (and raging after) a Squire, Placidas. Arthur fortunately slews Corflambo and rescues Placidas, who then tells us his story: that his best friend, a squire of low degree named Amyas, loved a lady (whom we happen to know – it’s Aemelia!), but, having been imprisoned by Corflambo and unable to marry her, he found himself in the hands of Corflambo’s daughter, Paeana. He responded to her advances up to a point (Placidas tells us that Amyas ‘walked about her gardens of delight’, so take from that what you will). This is not good news for Aemelia, but fortunately, BFFs Amyas and Placidas are identical (makes perfect sense), so Placidas was able to sub in for him in prison! Confusingly, he doesn’t use this tactic to break Amyas out, rather tells him some news from the outside world and then leaves again himself (not before accepting some of Paeana’s advances). Corflambo pursues, and here we are. Aemelia is happy to hear tidings of her love, though Placidas amusingly assures everyone that Amyas loves him best (lvii).

The idea of an identical best friend, Mary Kate pointed out, is Ciceronian: the alter idem (other self). This seems like the opposite of Montaigne’s famous line about me being me and him being him (which insists on difference). Jeewon wondered about the economy of switching in this poem. Things being substitutable for other things is necessary for commerce; is it also necessary for social life? In Shakespearean comedy, one body is often as good as another, and Paeana will end up being satisfied by marrying Placidas, not Amyas. Aemelia, however, is not confused: she immediately knows it’s Placidas and not her lover (lxii).

Placidas’s story is continuous and not as mystifying as the narrator often is. Simultaneity seems to be the privilege of the narrator. We’re in a part of the poem over-populated by people telling stories. But is there poetry in The Faerie Queene, or only narrative? No one ever seems to fabulate or make things up, unless they’re a baddie, in which case they may lie.

O Spenserians! I bet you thought I forgot about you! Never fear– the latest (ish) from the FQ awaits…

Arthur goes out riding and finds two ladies, whom we happen to know! Aemylia and Amoret, both in a fairly desperate way… What have they been up to while we have been watching Timias while away his youth in sorrow? Oddly enough, it seems like no time has elapsed for them, prompting us to wonder exactly what happens to the characters, if anything, when we’re not looking. They catch Arthur up on their goings-on and we get the story of their captivity and fight with Lust again. We were not entirely sure what to make of this retelling, which seems fairly unnecessary as far as reminders go, but we wondered about whether the poem might be interested in establishing other narrators, decentralizing the creative power through the introduction of more and more mediators.

Thankfully, Arthur helps the gals and they go off together and find a little cottage where they decide to stay for the night, though unfortunately for really all involved, the cottage belongs to Sclaunder, and she is NOT happy to have them. I kind of felt bad for Sclaunder though. She reminded me a bit of Error, who is just minding her own business when Redcrosse and Una barge into her home. She didn’t seem like an entirely happy figure to me. Some of the allegorical figures don’t seem bothered by the traits that they exhibit, but others, like Care, and maybe, I suggest, like Sclaunder, suffer while fulfilling their allegorical duties. I was specifically taken by the concept of “backbiting” and the fact that the trio are completely unbothered and have a cheery evening in her house while she mopes and scolds and rails at them. She is truly the only one having a bad time.

Then there is this kind of crazy narratorial insertion where suddenly the “I” reasserts itself, in the middle of the canto rather than at the end, to tell us that hospitality just ain’t what it used to be! There was once a time when people behaved well and welcomed each other into their homes and everything was beautiful, but sadly, it is now gone. We wondered why the “I” felt the need to get involved here, and suggested that perhaps it was to make up for the Hag’s lack of hospitality? Maybe the narrator felt the need to take over some hosting duties and set the scene and make us comfortable? But why is the narrator so bothered when none of the characters are? My zany theory was that maybe much like the way that Lust used Amoret as a human shield, the narrator uses himself as a human shield, throwing himself between us and Sclaunder as a way to keep her vice from spreading. Telling us what she says, letting us encounter her, would only multiply her power. Instead, the narrator puts himself between her and us, mediating so that we don’t get exposed to any of that. A quarantine procedure?

Key words: excruciation, overextension, iconoclasm/Catholicism

TL/DR: Spenser constantly allows the form, paths, and emotions of his poem and its characters to wander, before frantically pulling back, far more anxiously than Ariosto. Why? Perhaps he remains constantly transfixed—and troubled—by his own inability—and that of humanity generally (?)—to learn from previous mistakes. So the pat moralism of the opening stanza in this canto is variously complicated in the course of what follows, only for its sententiousness to be reaffirmed—and so on. Another perplexing crux: the efficacy of the ostensibly mystical, overwrought—to call a spade a spade, “Catholic”—imagery of the transfixed heart-jewel Timias dispatches, via mourning dove, to Belphoebe. It works. But isn’t it also a betrayal of Protestant austerity? Then there’s the pesky problem of the couple’s reunion resulting in Arthur wandering all about. We’ll find out what he gets up to later tonight! [142 words]

Our passage focused on Timias, who settled into a serious funk after Belphoebe caught him kissing Amoret’s tears. Naughty boy! Solomon’s line that “the displeasure of the mighty is / Then death it selfe more dread and desperate” suggests that the relationship of squire to beautiful Diana has a more topical political resonance too, perhaps recalling that of Sir Walter Raleigh to Elizabeth.

In any event, our concerns were more formal and thematic, stemming from a key question: why is it that Spenser so often dramatizes the experience of deep, physically felt emotion—“excruciations,” Jeff called them—only to insist upon their resolution, often quickly and sententiously to boot? In this case, the speaker recommends enduring the woeful melancholy of “displeasure” with “sufferaunce soft” and “rigor” till time allays the “sterne remembrance.” (In a conditional Emily helped us parse—“If heaven, then none may it redresse or blame, / Sith to his power we all are subiect borne: / If wrathfull wight, then fowle rebuke and shame / Be theirs, that have so cruell thee forlorne; / But if through inward griefe or wilfull scorne / Of life it be, then better doe advise”—Britomart tacks in a similarly grin-and-bear-it direction. But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that in a poem of such endlessly maddening contradictions—or carefully structured dialectic—Timias ignores her advice and the couple reunites.)

I suggested that we might look to Ariosto (a bit of whose Orlando furioso is included below) and Tasso, Spenser’s two most important forbears for help making sense of The Faerie Queene’s intense anxiety around the topic of emotional and formal entrelacement. While never completely dropping the thread of moral seriousness, the former gleefully entangles his plotlines and emotionally overwrought characters for as long as he can, though eventually Orlando must indeed be cured, and the Saracens, at last defeated. By contrast, Tasso—whose fraught, Bloomian relationship to Ariosto has animated entire monographs—always keeps the telos of retaking Jerusalem in sight; as such, his celebrated digressions do not veer from this narrative trajectory so much as they dilate points along its curve. When even this strategy was found morally suspect—a response that accelerated the poet’s psychic breakdown—Tasso expurgated and then rewrote the epic completely, extirpating its more romantic episodes.

Spenser, Jeff pointed out, takes a different approach altogether. He seems more to operate by way of a logic of “overextension”: his epic speaker indulges the Ariostan passions only to realize how far he’s gone and then to retreat, frantically. Never, however, does the narrator or his characters seem to learn their lesson. Perhaps the atrocities Spenser helped to perpetrate in Ireland partly explain this: Spenser was never confident that—if confronted with similar circumstances again—he wouldn’t act in exactly the same way. Spenser’s “moments of greatest clarity,” Jeff suggested “are also his hardest moments.” And they manifest by way of panicked narrative devices in the FQ itself. (Then again, there’s always the possibility—as Berger reports—that Spenser is also performing these lapses into error self-consciously, with the poise of an experienced teacher, so that we can learn from them—and not fall down these same byways ourselves.)

One of our other major themes—thanks to Sally’s keen focus on the jewel the “turtle Dove” bears to Belphoebe—was Spenser’s competing affinities for intensely embodied imagery and antipapal iconoclasm. Though he’s no friend of the pope, he’s also no Zwinglian image-breaker: he’s too wondrous a creator of captivating pictures himself. (Linda Gregerson’s book, The Reformation of the Subject, is a helpful read on this subject, but perhaps she stabilizes the ambivalences and tensions in The Faerie Queene—and, for that matter, in Paradise Lost—too neatly. By contrast, Joseph Campana’s The Pain of Reformation amplifies them, showing that Spenser’s corporeal rhetoric and attention to the community-making nature of pain and feeling in the FQ works to correct for Protestantism’s disinterest in affect—though in his case, he might give short shrift to the new religion.) For Belphoebe and Timias, anyway, the iconography works: they find each other once again. But of course, their reunion also means that the squire becomes “mindlesse of his owne deare Lord.” That’s a problem. But sometimes, too, refusing care to others—being mindless of them—is a good thing. How do we know the difference? What a pickle!

Favorite couplet: “And have the sterne remembrance wypt away / Of bitter thoughts, which deepe therein infixed lay.” [This, for the “wypt away / infixed lay” contrast John pointed out—and because I’m fascinated by the sonic effect of “therein infixed.”]

Parting thought: I’m endlessly smitten with the sheer capaciousness of Spenserian corporeality: on the one hand, it surreally extends to include the compound unit of knight + armor + steed (as I’ve argued to you all before). On the other hand, it stretches inward to the “motions” that Elizabethans understood to be fully interconnected to the physical form. Where does embodiment begin in the FQ, then, and where does it end? Can there ever be an answer? And does it matter in the end?

Additional reading

(1) Jeff Dolven, “Panic’s Castle,” Representations 1 (Fall 2012): 1-16, 1-2.

“‘Forgetful of his owne, that minds anothers cares” (FQ 1.5.18). … Confronting the book’s epistemological agonies, the narrator, our sole guide and storyteller, makes a sudden, drastic overcorrection, declaring that the only remedy for the hero’s vulnerability to deception is indifference. A problem of knowledge is solved by ethical withdrawal. It is a moment of moral panic expressed as a moral lesson. … Its radical case is not an idea, nor even an affect, but an experience of peril that overwhelms reason and instinct alike. Panic is both halt and spasm, an organismal failure, a sudden devolution that strips us not only of our civility but also of our sentience. … This essay will pursue the hypothesis that panic, and the fear of panic, are the generative principles of The Faerie Queene, and that the narrator’s impetuous disavowal of an ethic of care is part of a pattern of overreaction that determines the poem at every level. … [P]anic can be a kind of structure too, or it can make or at least provoke one. This last idea will need to be approached by stages, stages that will take us from the local trails of the characters up to the invention of the poet himself. Panic first as flight, then as action, then as interpretation, and, finally panic as a structuring principle and the poem as panic’s castle.”

(2) Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, tr. Sir John Harrington (1601, 1607).

But what fell out betweene these warriers fearce,

Within the second booke I do rehearse. (1.81.7-8)

 

Blind god Loue, why takst thou such delight,

^*With darts of diuers force our hearts to wound?

By thy too much abusing of thy might,

This discord great in hu∣mane hearts is found.

When I would wade the shallow foord aright.

Thou draw’st me to the deepe to haue me dround,

From those loue me, my loue thou dost recall,

And place it where I find no loue at all. (2.1.1-8)