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]

At the tournament’s end, we reflected on its organization. There is team Maidenhead and a team without a name, which raised questions about opposition. What is the opposite of maidenhead in this poem? We had asked a similar question about friendship. Thinking about teams brought into focus other kinds of social organization such as nations (no Irish knights) and civilizations (“salvagesse sans finesse” [39]). Artegall arrives cloaked in woodwork and not only introduces nature into this ritual of organization but also invokes the category of the stranger who comes to this tournament from a prior Book or is on the way to a future one. He meets his match in another stranger knight, Britomart, whose victory is described in an epic simile of a sudden shower on a hot day (47). Traditionally, the shower is coded as male. The simile provides narrative relief as the days of confusing combat end in clarity and refreshment. That left us wondering whether the heat refers to Artegall or the tournament as a whole. Next, “The Ladies for the girdle strive” (v.A). In canto v, we learn how the girdle was made (3, 4), a part elided in its initial description (iv.15). Venus’s loss of the girdle is apparently a moral failure, but then what are we to make of Florimell who lost the girdle in chase? We also learn of Florimell’s provenance—classical, “as they say” (5)—and remain aware that she has been reproduced more recently as false Florimell. How old is Florimell? Who is Florimell? [JY]

The beginning of the tournament puzzled us for a few reasons: its peculiar, half-civilized location on the field or plain (17, 18); the unpredictable combination of individual and mass combat, and the blurry rules of encounter (e.g. Satyrane’s wounding Triamond in the side [24], taking him, it seems, by surprise); and the seemingly arbitrary succession of new knights entering the fray. Cambell and Triamond’s exchange of armor on the second day makes for an exhibition of friendship, but their funny youdaman, no youdaman routine in (36) reads like a parody of the reciprocal geometry achieved at the end of canto iii. It also proves incommensurable with the rules, such as they are, of the tournament (Satyrane is the winner of day one, but an award for day two is frustrated by the friends’ mutual diffidence). There was a general sense of a conflict of codes: are we to judge these events by the (collective) laws of chivalry, or by the (individualizing) canons of Aristotelian friendship? And the tournament itself: is it an allegorical structure with a synoptic meaning, or is it a kind of chaotic trading zone where different hermeneutics meet? There is also the question of Braggadocio’s place (he will not join a team), and then of the girdle as a prize. What to make of the description at the end of (15): the girdle seems to find its value in its materials, even more in its workmanship, and most in…the fact that Florimel possessed and lost it. What of the maker? [JD]