LECTURE NOTES: Long Day's Journey Into Allegory--The Faerie Queene

Slides #1 & #2. Portrait of Edmund Spenser (artist unknown); 1839 English gold coin depicting Queen Victoria as Una with motto, "may God guide my footsteps" (this coin was never actually circulated)

EDMUND SPENSER (1552-1599)

In a letter Spenser wrote to his friend Gabriel Harvey in 1580, he asked, "why a God's name may not we, as else the Greeks, have the kingdom of our own language?" Writers of Spencer's generation were determined to prove that English was second to no other language in beauty, dignity, and versatility. Spencer's means toward this end was to turn away from foreign and classical authors and to seek a literary model in Chaucer, whose work he praised as "the well of English undefiled." The Faerie Queene abounds in anachronisms--for example, the y-prefix in past participles like ycladd. Moreover, Spencer incorporated a lot of English words that Chaucer would have used in his poetry but which had fallen out of usage by the 16th century--for example, whilome ("before"), areeds ("advises"), and weene ("know"). Finally, Spenser also employed archaic spelling for some words that were still in common usage to make the language of the poem seem more antique, such as eyen for "eyes." Not everyone was happy with these experiments--Sidney did not "allow it" (see what he has to say about Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar in his Defense), Ben Jonson claimed Spenser "writ no language," and in the 18th century Samuel Johnson described the language of The Shepheardes Calendar as "studied barbarity."

As the Introduction to Spenser in our Norton Anthology tells us, "Spenser cannot be put into neatly labeled categories. His work is steeped in Renaissance Neoplatonism but is also earthy and practical. His is a lover and celebrator of physical beauty yet also a profound anlayst of good and evil in all their perplexing shapes and complexities. In his early days he was strongly influenced by Puritanism, remained a thoroughgoing Protestant all his life, and portrayed the Roman Catholic church as a demonic villain in The Faerie Queene; yet his understanding of faith and sin owes much to Catholic thinkers. He is a poet of sensuous images yet also something of an iconoclast, deeply suspicious of the power of images (material and verbal) to turn into idols. He is an idealist, drawn to courtesy, gentleness, and exquisite moral refinement, yet also a celebrant of English nationalism, empire, and martial power. He is in some ways a backward-looking poet who paid homage to Chaucer, used archaic language, and compared his own age unfavorably with the feudal past. Yet as a British epic poet and poet-prophet, he points forward to the poetry of the Romantics and especially Milton--who himself paid homage to the 'sage and serious' Spenser as a 'better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas'" (616).

I have included the gold coin above, which was struck early in Queen Victoria's reign--1839--in order to provide a piece (literally, a "gold piece") of British material history that illustrates the important place of Spenser's Faerie Queene in England's national cultural imagination well after the century in which the epic was written (in fact, if you want some idea of how important Spenser's epic poem also was to publishers and visual artists well after the 16th century, follow this link: The Classic Text: Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene). The coin depicts the young Victoria (at this time, twenty years old) as Spenser's Una (or "Truth") accompanied by the lion who guards her chaste virtue (and this is also the lion of the British standard--the lion who guards the empire and also makes it strong, as well as the lion who is often present in the legend of St. George, England's patron saint, upon whom Spenser modeled his Red Crosse Knight).

Slides #3 & #4. St. George and the Dragon (Paolo Ucello, 14th c.); knife being handed to Elizabeth by one of her courtiers after a hunt because "the Prince or chiefe" always makes the first cut (woodcut, from The Booke of Hunting, 1575)

The Renaissance woodcut and medieval painting above provide an interesting pictorial diptych through which to "think" Book I of Spenser's Faerie Queene--think of them as the two "paste-downs" of an imaginary book that we are constructing for our reading of "The Legend of the Knight of the Red Crosse" (a "paste-down" is a piece of paper that is glued to the inside of the front and back covers of a book); therefore, in our imaginary book these two images "bookend" the Legend and also "enclose" and "enwrap" it. In Ucello's painting, which was created in the century Spenser's art sought to reconnect with--Chaucer's 14th century--we see the St. George of early Christian legend who rescued the princess of a town in 3rd/4th-century Libya (although, note the distinctly medieval Continental costuming of the figures in Ucello's depiction) from a dragon who was terrorizing that town and eating all the citizens. Even more important, after St. George saved everyone, they were so happy they all converted to Christianity. The "real story," of course, is that Libya is a predominantly Muslim country and has been for a long time (North Africa, generally, has been predominantly Muslim since the 7th century--give or take various rampaging Ottoman Turks, Christian Templar knights, Italian colonizers, and even Hitler), but that never stopped medieval Christians from trying to convert those they saw as "heathens," whether Jewish or Muslim or otherwise--usually by the sword, which meant, "convert or die" (or, even more horrible, "die and get out of the way"--that's a different "story," isn't it [?], and not altogether irrelevant to Spenser's epic). If you are curious about the religious Crusades launched in Europe from the 11th through 13th centuries, follow this link: Medieval Sourcebook: The Crusades. What this all means, of course, as with all fabulous tales, is that the dragon is never really a dragon, but rather, something more sublimely terrifying that can't be readily visualized, such as human greed and rapaciousness, or, the dark erotics of power (or . . . the Muslim? or . . . the Jew?).

The key to remember here is that Ucello's St. George represents a medieval fictionalization of a real 2nd/3rd-century Cappadocian "George" who was a soldier in the Roman army under Diocletian (245-313) who persecuted the Christians. When this George complained about Diocletian's violence against the Christians, he was promptly thrown in prison, tortured, and beheaded, and he became, of course, an instant martyr for the early Christian cause. But how did St. George become the patron saint of England? That would be because, in yet another "legendary" story, his spirit apparently appeared to the Christian army at the Battle of Antioch, and also to King Richard the Lion-Hearted during the First Crusade against the Saracens ("Saracen" = "Muslim" = Spenser's "Sarazin" = "Sansfoy" = "without faith").

Our second "paste-down" shows Elizabeth I in a hunting scene and I have included this in conjunction with Ucello's painting because it depicts another kind of violence done with a pointed weapon by the woman who, along with Red Crosse knight, forms the "dynamic duo" of Spenser's grand allegory and "darke conceit"--for Elizabeth was Spenser's "Belphoebe," his "Gloriana," and his "Faerie Queene" all rolled into one. She was, for Spenser, quite literally the "sun rising in the sky of history" toward which everything in England and the world would turn and bend. And that is why Spenser's epic is also a romance, between Spenser and his beloved queen, but also between Red Crosse and the Faerie Queene (and therefore, also between the Christian faith and England). As the Norton Anthology editors tell us in their Guide for Instructors, "For Spenser and many of his readers, the triumph of English Protestantism over Spanish Catholicism in the age of Elizabeth I was quite literally the historical fulfillment of biblical prophecies and ushered in a new age in which England would be, as Isaiah (42.6) had prophesied of Israel, a light among the nations" (52). And finally, Spenser's epic is also a romance with a kind of peculiar ending, for although Red Crosse and Una are "betrothed" ("the knitting of loves band"), Red Crosse leaves the festivities surrounding their engagement to return to his queen while Una stays behind and mourns. And this is because, in Spenser's epic, the past is the future and the end is really just the beginning, and yes, Elizabeth I is the "new" St. George.

Slide #5. "The Redcrosse Knight overruled by Despair but timely saved by Una" (illustration by William Kent for 1751 edition)

Spenser wrote the greater part of The Faerie Queene in Ireland (1580s-1590s), where he served an oppressive and brutal colonial regime as the secretary to the new English governor of Ireland, Lord Grey of Wilton (Spenser mainly worked at odd jobs in the judicial bureaucracy). According to Elizabeth Fowler, in her Yale lecture "The Faerie Queene Among the Disciplines," Ireland was in a "terrible and terrified state" when Spenser was there working and writing his epic. Fowler also tells us that in Spenser's prose tract on Ireland he wrote "about an English captain who bragged about placing the severed heads of recently executed Irish rebels along the pathway to his tent so that if any local person came to beg a favor from him, she or he would be suitably undone by seeing the heads of her relatives or neighbors on the way to her English governor." Spenser himself, in his own writings on Ireland, did support the policies of the oppressive British regime, which included massacre, the burning of homes and crops with the intention of starving the inhabitants, and the forced relocation of whole communities, and in 1598, during an uprising in Munster where Spenser lived with his wife and infant child, Irish rebels burned down Spenser's house, forcing Spenser and his wife to flee back to England where Spenser died in 1599. His child apparently did not survive the fire. But was Spenser always 100% committed to the policies of the colonialist regime? Fowler writes:

Violent political conquest was as morally vexed a topic in medieval and early modern political philosophy as it is today. The law of nature allowed that power could be derived from military conquest (obviously power is derived from military conquest still in, say, Bosnia), but the question was posed, and remains: can it be morally justified? The English prided themselves on their  “mixed” constitution: English political philosophers called their polity a commonwealth, and sharply distinguished its form from absolute, tyrannical monarchy because the power of the crown was seen as limited by the power of the commons and by what is called the English common law, a body of customs and precedents. It was thus a limited monarchy, where the consent of the people (or at least some of them) was considered to be the source of the crown’s dominion. For example, Magna Carta is a series of legal documents from the thirteenth century that expresses the fundamental, constitutional nature of this consent. English political apologists claimed that their idea of the commonwealth was superior to the indigenous political structures of Ireland, which they called barbaric. They also claimed that Irish political leaders had surrendered to conquering English troops centuries earlier. But with the persistent rebellions of sixteenth-century Irish chieftains, could it reasonably be claimed that the primary virtue of the commonwealth, government by consent, was being conveyed by the English? Can you extend the benefits of consensual government to the natives by means of military force? It’s an oxymoron. Can we bring a democratic government to Somalia with tanks? Such a government is supposed to arise out of its citizens, so imposing it by force can be in some contradiction to the principles of democracy.

We could ask the same questions regarding U.S. policy, more recently, toward Afghanistan and Iraq--e.g., did the bombing campaigns in Afghanistan change its government for the better? Will war turn Iraq into a democracy? To sum up here, we'll agree that The Faerie Queene was written in a context of real, actual, and horrible colonialist violence, and also that Spenser was both a loyal advocate and mouthpiece for the colonialist regime while also functioning, perhaps, as the artist who raised in his epic the troubling questions Fowler outlines above, for which Spenser did not necessarily provide pat or easy answers. In other words, as Fowler also tells us, "the political imagination of The Faerie Queene is various and searching." And that is why Red Crosse's greatest enemy, as illustrated by William Kent above, is not Errour or Duessa or Lucifera or Orgoglio or even the dragon--it's himself. It's not the serpent in the cave, but the serpents of the mind.

THE BRASS TACKS

The Spenserian Stanza

Allegory

Defintions by Spenser's Contemporaries

from George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesie (1589)>

allegory is "a long and perpetual Metaphore" (in other words, as regards Spenser’s Faerie Queene, allegory is a metaphor that the poem elaborates to such a great degree that it becomes an aspect of the plot)

from Sir John Harrington (1561-1612)>

"The ancient Poets have indeed wrapped as it were in their writings diverse and sundry meanings, which they call the senses or mysteries thereof. First of all for the literal sense (as it were the outermost bark or rind) they set down in manner of a history the acts and noble exploits of some person’s worthy memory: then in the same fiction, as a second rind and somewhat more fine, as it were nearer to the pith and marrow, they place the moral sense profitable for the active life of man, approving virtuous actions and condemning the contrary. Many times also under the selfsame words they comprehend some true understanding of natural Philosophy, or sometimes of politic government, and now and then of divinity: and these same senses that comprehend so excellent knowledge we call the Allegory, which Plutarch defineth to be when one thing is told, and by that another is understood."

The Four Levels of Allegory (adapted from Elizabeth Fowler, "The Faerie Queene Among the Disciplines")

• Literal or Historical: you might think of this as having to do with the language of a particular passage. It could be the language of truth and duplicity encrypted in the very names of Una and Duessa, or the suggestive association of Una with the reformation English church and Duessa with Islam and the post-Reformation Catholic church. Also, sometimes the monster Errour stands for . . . error (mistakes in judgment), and the "man of hell, that cals himselfe Despaire" is . . . despair (depression).
• Allegorical or Typological: this level considers whether the allegory is activating any conventional, especially Biblical, grid or system of reference—such as the association of Una’s parents with Adam and Eve. They are redeemed by Red Crosse when he slays the dragon (Satan on this level), and marries Una (the one true church, according to this level).
• Moral or Tropological: ask yourself what a normative or prescriptive reading might be (in other words: what is the larger moral I can take away with me from this story?). A Christian soldier should slay the monster of error and remain faithful to the church, for example. There is no firm, single interpretation at this level, either, despite what you might think. Even the church fathers recognized that it was legitimate to gloss the same allegorical passages both in bono AND in malo: as either a cautionary tale or an ideal moral prescription. Thus the false church could be resisted and Red Crosse errs in falling for the so-called "Fidessa," but the historical adherence of the English congregation to the Pope before Reformation was part of the divine plan.
• Anagogical or Eschatalogical: this is the level of interpretation that seeks divine, prophetic, mystical and apocalyptic meanings. The Faerie Queene has an ecstatic, prophetic mode that requires treating the poem as if it were something like a sacred or a ritual text.

Slide #6. St. George and the Dragon (Raphael, 1505-06)