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)

Exit Belpheobe—Timias lays down his arms, “wearing out his youthly years” (41). Whenever knights retreat into the woods they tend to become either delirious (Orlando) or ascetic (Yvain); Timias turns to “willful penury” (41). The poem describes Timias’s retreat lyrically, and it is as if time flows differently in isolation. After he quits questing, Timias becomes self-absorbed, physically and mentally, hiding his face behind unkempt hair. We noted similarities between Timias and other allegorical figures—the overgrown Lust and the single-minded Care. What had been perversions of the poem’s project of coordination have, ever since the termination of the tournament, become the norm. The narrative has split into several strands, and characters pursue idiosyncrasy. Timias remains unmoved even by Arthur’s efforts “to change his wonted tenor” and instead lives out a life of devotional repetition, the arrhythmia of a broken heart (46-47).

We should say that Arthur does not recognize his squire, and Timias treats him ambiguously, “shewing joyous semblance for his sake” (44). Does Timias dissemble joy, or does he find joy in semblance, in withholding himself from Arthur? A similar ambiguity attends Timias’s inscription of “BELPHEBE” (some editions space out the letters), which appears autotelic, yet “he wexed glad, / When he it heard” read (46). Not only then does Timias refuse to rejoin the narrative, but his self-absorption appears theatrical. Does this episode restage the paragone of epic and theater from Canto 3? What does that have to do with friendship? All of us, I hope, have a friend who hates drama. [JY]

Like liquid, Lust, in his arousal (cloth’d?),
As Easter-Cyclops roll’d away the stone.
To fly this time, or to out-cry, not loath’d
By Amoret, when, cutting short her moan,
Of Ovid mindful (similes from Rome),
She left Aemilia in that darkest cave,
And that old woman, for her fit captor grown.
Asymmetry: and Breaking of the Waves,
And sacrifice of Christ, and women’s selves, to save.

Of all these dastard deeds I have not read,
And all these graceless happenings are chance!
(Lest guilt, “complicity”, as Berger said
For her short shrifts and my Cupidious lance,
Or bro-ish Spenser I, at frat-boy’s dance,
To laugh now, or to judge, might yet you test,
To ascertain involvement, and your stance.
Or my narrator, say Histor-New-cists,
Too deep in culture’s crimes, of those times was impressed.)

Since twins abound like Shakespeare’s comedy,
And “face”-“faith” questions (Marlowe’s popular)
The love and strife and farce we might just see,
Were not the violence taken up so far,
And were we not so far from wedding bow’r.
Jealous Belphoebe evermore now rushed,
Since Timias bent over Am’ret dear,
As she herself had bent, but over Lust.
For like my rhymes, all was too casual to be just.

LMP

Canto vii rewinds to explain how Amoret and Britomart become separated, and we began by wondering, what does it mean that Amoret wanders off “for pleasure, or for need” (4)—is she just relieving herself; does such a basic function have an allegorical standing? Or is it under or before allegory; and if so, why does it trigger the lurid allegorical episode that ensures? For it is this pleasure or need that precipitates her, and the reader, into the psychosexual fantasia of Lust, a big-nosed quasi-comical emblem of human genitalia, especially but not only male. The description, in its mix of eating, defecating, and desire, recalls the horror of sexuality that nearly deflects Britomart back in Book III, but it is more cartoonish, laughable. Who is its real audience? (Surely not Chaucer?) The narrator seems at pains to dissociate himself. Amoret cries out only “feebly” (4) when she is seized—we wondered if there isn’t something etiolated about her “little love,” perhaps like Scudamour’s, two characters rarely able to assert will under the pressures of allegory. What to make of Aemylia, and her stage-comedy story of defying her father to run off with a squire of low degree? (That lust should intercept her tryst seems typical of how allegorical encounters function as diagnostic psychomachia—but again, it is less clear how this could be true for Amoret.) Amoret’s complaint, and Aemylia’s initial answer, have at moments an austere, almost metaphysical beauty. But with twenty days of captivity, and seven men eaten, there is also a lot of obscure allegorical signaling going on. “Self to forget to mind another, is oversight” (10) detained us: whence this strange counsel of selfishness? [JD]

A change of scenery (many thanks to the keeper of Castle Logan) and the malaise of break prompted a slow and reflective meandering across a mere 8 stanzas to the end of canto vi. We saw Artegall work his way into Britomart’s heart “with fair entreatie and sweet blandishment” and feminine rhyme (brought her/wrought her). John notes the rhyme echoed those from the beginning of the canto—a feature rendered noticeable by its shorter length. MK brought us back to the book-defining question of friendship; are Britomart and Artegall friends? We discussed how the ambiguity of their relationship depends on gender confusion (with some looking ahead to Book 5’s gender transgression as punishment) and traced some dominant discourses around the problematic of friendship with the help of our resident classical receptionists. Friendship and its gender was an enduring concern in English politics; Will took us through the problem of the polis in English Republicanism and its manifestation in stanza 47, with reference to ‘fate’ and ‘misfortune’ as indexing a kind of natal slavery for women. This prompted a discussion of temporality and terminology: ‘Republicanism before the Republic’ served as a useful formulation to consider an idealized intellectual humanism, distinct from the enactment of these political values.

Some recommendations: Georg Simmel’s “The Adventurer”, from John, on the ideal number of people in an adventure; James Hankins’ Virtue Politics. Some threats: a splinter group on English Republicanism (or, more aptly riffed John, an “Oxymoron Club.”) On to canto 7! [CM]

Our text stretched from 24 to 41 last week: a base on which the work as a whole rests in terms of themes and arc. Here, Brit. and Art. at last meet, and Ed shows his plan to route the streams of love through the fixed, end marked paths of epic, one spouse joined to her chos’n in the end. J. W. put it so: Brit. is the knight of the rom. and the gal of that form which the bard of Chios once sung. She drives on—no truck with err—like the chief’s wife whom the sire of Greek plays brought to life: of a “man’s” mind? But the spur to fight for Brit. was, and will be, an ache b’low the waist. The words of seers comes to a blind date.

Yet this bit also sounds with com.: notes of mirth and hot spice. Why? There’s the rub. Claire looked back to the time-tried loves of mythed courts; J. Y. looked forw’d to those realed plots of 18^th and 19^th c. books. M. K. peered at how Brit. and Art. peer at their mate—as one mirr’r matched to the next, while Em. brought us to care—to those looked out for. Scud. seems ill-fit to the needs of this form, we thought, and S shows his nerves—per the us.—’bout the stage. Jeff helped—per the us. too—with the case of Will, his “erotics of contingency” and the way things sort out in the end. Ed plays by a set of rules at odds with these—at times. To speak of odds: John called up “Care”—the rest here far flung from Scud’s in that place. And I glommed on: the bods of these knights, their feels and sense, pose new quests for us: what’s a blush that can’t be seen? And how does one press down that which bucks the will, ev’n as they voice that which they would like not to. Rest, in the mean time, seems fine here—a thing to be marked! But it’s for the end of a “well-woo’d” bride-to-be: and that new kind of goal draws in a new set of rules.

In canto vi, we did not feel the usual comfort of beginning, even after the seeming promise of refreshment (v.46) following the weariness of canto v. Scudamor enters in a state of “mis-” (vi.2), and his encounter with the “Salvage Knight” (4) had an unusual asymmetry of naming. We puzzled over why we heard the motto of the Knights of the Garter on Scudamor’s lips: how are we meant to evaluate the contrast between a civilizing chivalric code and savage nature? Scudamor’s “misconceipt” (2), along with the jingle of repeated rhyming words (4, 5) suggested an irony in the formality of the Garter code. At the same time, “misconceipt” had a somewhat constructive role, helping Scudamor and Artegall ally against Britomart. What does it mean that their model of friendship is founded on error (and disrupted by romance)?

Turning to the encounter between Britomart and Artegall (10-23), we focused first on its eroticized style (elements of which we could identify in any of the poem’s scenes of combat). Though it happens amidst hectic and confused motives, this meeting of chastity and justice is central to the poem as a whole. Why does it appear in the book of friendship? We paused as a regal Britomart holds a sword over Artegall (23). How highly is the course of their relationship constrained by its parallel to a hypothetical marriage for Elizabeth?

Following Sir Scudamour in his pursuit of Amoret, we return to the mode of high allegory with a visit to Care’s workshop. Figured as a metalworker, Care is the first In Your Face Allegory that we’ve encountered in quite a while– as we jokingly pointed out, his name isn’t even in Latin! But I wonder if there’s something to that– if the obviousness of Care also relates to the other ways in which he is In Your Face.

One of those other ways has to do with his sheer size. He is a huge figure, but he is also described in granular detail as the poem focuses on his hands and material conditions. What, we asked, is the scale on which Care operates? And what is the relationship between care and fastidiousness, the kind of attention to detail given to Care in Spenser’s description of him? What happens to this fastidiousness when it has nowhere to go? Glauce might be an alternative figure for care, long-serving as Britomart’s nurse. But Glauce is also often on the move– she travels with the figures in her care– and perhaps it is this mobility which helps her to avoid the bloatedness of Care. Maybe the discomfort of “care” is a grammatical problem. Perhaps “care” is not meant to be a noun, but instead is most safely encountered as a verb…

Scudamour certainly suffers from encountering Care, the proper noun, spending a sleepless night on his floor and leaving the next morning, both looking and feeling rough.

On the whole, this scene felt curiously extractable, like a set-piece that might be placed anywhere in the poem. (Is this related, I wonder, to the stationary quality of Care? It does not contribute to narrative progression, but instead forms a closed circuit in which worries just bounce back and forth?) But ultimately, it isn’t anywhere– it’s here, in the Book of Friendship, prompting us to wonder whether friendship has anything in common with this ever-labouring figure of Care. Is friendship also something on which one must be constantly working?

We rejoined our friends at the end of the tournament, when the narrator, with uncharacteristic generosity, recounts for us who won on each day, before turning to see which woman will win Cestus (the belt of chastity). Why this ordering of knights and plot?—to civilise the brutality of the fighting that came before? Does poetry (rhyme, stanzas) display a civilising impulse?

In an inversion of the Iliad, when a beauty contest causes a war, fighting now gives way to the pageant. What means of valuing beauty does the poem hold out? We seem to be seeking the ‘fayrest’ lady (ix), but ‘diverse wits affected divers beene’ (xi): as we’ve often seen in Book IV, some think one thing, some think another. However, this system of free thought is upset by the False Florimell, ‘The sight of whom once seene did all the rest dismay’ (xiii). Not only does she outshine the others but makes them seem ‘base and contemptible’ (xiv), a radical shift.

FF fails to keep the girdle on. Does the poem extends sympathy to her in the shame and blame she feels? She has only recently been created: does she understand the misogynistic economy she has entered? Does she know why she is desired and desirable? Does she have interiority? The knights elect to give her the girdle anyway (xx): they value chastity (though how exactly is FF unchaste?—she lost the girdle when chased) less than beauty. She opts to go with Braggadochio: is this a happy ending? What, we wondered, does all this have to do with friendship? What kind of intimacy would be possible with False Florimell? [EKL]