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Genre and the Repeal of Queenship in Spenser’s Faerie Queene

TO BEGIN HIS DISCUSSION of the allegory of The Faerie Queene’s Book 5, the great Spenser scholar A. C. Hamilton voices the private opinion of even the most enthusiastic of Spenser admirers. “Spenser’s fiction seems to break down in Book 5,” says Hamilton. “Probably for this reason the book is the least popular.” A few pages later, however, Hamilton slightly revises his assessment of what happens to the poem’s fiction in Spenser’s Legend of Justice. It is not that the fiction has broken down, like some neglected machine in the garden, but that the fiction has been suppressed and restricted by Book 5’s adherence to a nonfictional point of reference: “Throughout Book 5 the reader is aware of fact pressing down upon the fiction.”¹ As it turns out, “fact” for Hamilton, as for most readers, exerts its greatest pressure not on the whole of Book 5, but rather on the last five cantos, where the poem turns for the first time into a series of barely allegorized events in English history of the 1580s and 1590s: the defeat of the Souldan (read England’s defeat of Spain’s Philip II and his Armada); the trial of Duessa (Mary, Queen of Scots); Arthur’s liberation of Beige (England’s liberation of Belgium from Spain); Burbon’s fight for Flourdelis (Henri of Navarre’s fight for the French crown); and Artegall’s rescue of Irena and subsequent slander by the Blatant Beast (the adventures of Spenser’s patron in Ireland, Lord Grey). One of the most difficult tasks for critics attempting a traditional explication of Book 5’s allegory has been to prove Hamilton wrong, and to demonstrate that even if fact seems to subsume fiction in these episodes, the reverse is actually the case, and history remains in the service of mythmaking and idealization.² The trouble comes in contradicting centuries of readers’ first and even second impressions to argue that what looks like mere fact is not mere fact, that history does not press down on fiction, but liberates it.

Of course “fact” in Spenser has, since Hamilton’s complaint, enjoyed something of a critical renaissance. Insofar as Cantos 8 through 12 of Book 5 engage recent events, and especially in their interplay with the repressive and violent colonialist policies advocated in Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland, they have recently attracted historicist commentary.³ At the same time, the episode of Book 5 featured just before the poem’s turn to fact has increasingly drawn the attention of feminist critics—not because fiction is repressed, but because feminine authority is repressed. In this episode Britomart, the female knight who has been the intermittent focus of The Faerie Queene since the beginning of Book 3, rescues her fiance Artegall by decapitating his captor, the Amazon queen Radigund. Britomart then rules Radigund’s city]state for a time only to turn sovereignty over to Artegall.⁴ But little work has been done in either the new-historicist or the feminist mode to bridge the gap between the central and final sections of Book 5, to describe the killing of the Amazon queen and the turn to historical allegory as parts or versions of the same process or impulse.⁵ The discontinuous structure of Book 5—its sudden, unexplained, and unsatisfying shift in mode from fiction to fact—is replicated by a criticism that takes up Book 5 only in piecemeal fashion.

In my view, neither the traditionalist desire to paper over Book 5’s structural shift nor the current tendency to treat Book 5 merely episodically does justice to a Book whose concern is, from the beginning, transformations of kind. In fact, this portion of The Faerie Queene uniquely meditates upon what kinds of form are appropriate to latter-day poetry. The Proem to Book 5 not only dolefully announces that “the world … being once amisse growes daily wourse and wourse” (5.Pr.1), but also thinks of that decay in terms of materials once, but no longer, put to use:

And men themselues, the which at first were framed

Of earthly mould, and form’d of flesh and bone,

Are now transformed into hardest stone:

Such as behind their backs (so backward bred)

Were throwne by Pyrrha and Deucalione:

And if then those may any worse be red,

They into that ere long will be degendered.

(5.Pr.2)

Breeding backward is the problem, but it is also the solution. If humans have degenerated rather than evolved in kind, then a heroic poem must look backward for models and materials of literary types: “I doe not forme them to the common line / Of present dayes, which are corrupted sore” (5.Pr.3). But Spenser’s chronology deserves some examination here. In the second installment of The Faerie Queene—Books 4–6, first published in 1596—the “present day” of the poem, the moment in which “form” has become so corrupt, has already been identified as the present in which the poem is invented, and in which the poem is therefore complicit. In the Proem to Book 4, a disapproving figure named only as the “rugged for-head” but usually identified as Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary, Lord Burghley, rebukes the poetic mode of the 1590 installment of the poem, Books 1–3. “My looser rimes (I wote) [he] doth sharply wite, / For praising loue, as I haue done of late” (4.Pr.1, my emphasis). In light of the rugged forehead’s attack, Book 5’s notoriously “tight” structure—especially, and especially in its last five cantos, its dispensing with the lush or knotty language, the odd twists of plot and identity beloved of Spenserians—seems a response to the “looseness” that The Faerie Queene has continued to perpetuate throughout its immediate precursor Books 3 and 4. Book 5 begins with the degeneration of form through history, but that history turns out to be the history not only of humankind, but of the poem’s production.

In this chapter I wish to analyze the structure of The Faerie Queene in light of the unpopular form to which Book 5 turns. By using the word “de-gendered” rather than “degenerated” to describe the sorry pass to which form has and will come, Book 5’s Proem again casts the problem of form into the terms that were previously provoked by the languorous verse of the witch Acrasia’s bower in Book 2: the problem of feminine authority.⁶ At the same time, the stony men of Book 5’s Proem look forward to Artegall’s subjection to Radigund, hinting that the knights of Book 5, like Acrasia’s thralls, might demonstrate Freud’s Medusa effect, where men are no longer men because they are “degendered” stones, castrated by the phallic woman.⁷ By the 1611 folio of Spenser’s complete works, “degendered” in this stanza becomes the more purely francophonic “degenered,” a substitution that encourages us to make a more explicit connection between the end of feminine rule showcased in Book 5 and the shift in literary form that immediately follows. To reverse the effect of men becoming “degendered,” enthralled by the witch, the Medusa, or the Amazon, The Faerie Queene must confront the perception that the poem itself has become “degenered,” debased in literary kind from its purportedly original epic intent. Book 5’s repeal of feminine authority becomes both the motivation and the prerequisite for its turn toward the bleak new genre of historical allegory. If, as Fredric Jameson has contended, innovations in literary genre come about to address potentially discomfiting changes in politics and socioeconomics, then we should not be surprised that, in this most self-conscious of poems, a shift in genre is baldly signalled by a shift in the gender of political regime.⁸ Britomart’s returning the Amazons “to mens subiection” in the middle of Book 5 is an accomplishment labelled as “changing all that forme of common weak” (5.7.42); immediately thereafter, The Faerie Queene itself “changes all that form.”

The genre in question for Jameson is romance, which he argues expresses a nostalgia for “an organic social order in the process of penetration and subversion, reorganization and rationalization, by nascent capitalism.”⁹ But as Harry Berger reminds us, with The Faerie Queene matters of form are more complicated. If Spenser’s poem expresses nostalgia for an earlier order, it does so with a canny awareness of the uses to which nostalgia can be put.¹⁰ As it turns out, romance in the poem is not itself a nostalgic mode, but rather an experimental mode that induces nostalgia—the poem’s own display of nostalgia for a genre it occupied before, and other than, romance. In The Faerie Queene, the “penetration and subversion” of order are laid explicitly at the feet not of Jameson’s nascent capitalism, but rather of authoritative women.¹¹ And implicitly, as Patricia Parker has demonstrated, order’s penetration and subversion are laid at the feet of the genre of romance, which in Books 3 through 5 of the poem is intimately associated with those authoritative female figures and their characteristic modes of thought and action. Parker identifies romance and its failure to close off narrative as the foremost source of tension in The Faerie Queene;¹² more recently, in a reading of Book 2 of the poem, she has identified that failure of closure with the enchantress Acrasia’s (and by extension any powerful woman’s) ability to “suspend male instruments,” holding men in thrall. Guyon’s destruction of Acrasia’s Bower of Bliss at the end of Book 2, then, has the effect of restoring narrative progress: “In Spenser, the ‘suspended instruments’ of Acrasia’s male captives are recovered as the Bower itself is overcome, and as Guyon and his Mosaic guide move forward to the narrative ‘point’ or end of a Book of the Governor in which both a threatening female ruler and her suspect lyricism are finally mastered and surpassed.”¹³ The genre of romance, the beauty of lush poetry, the power of a queen: all three elements that make the Bower so dangerously seductive are cancelled in Guyon’s immoderate rampage toward conclusions.¹⁴ But, as many critics have noticed and as I shall reiterate below, all three of these elements reemerge in Book 3, hold sway in Book 4, and linger stubbornly into the central cantos of Book 5. It is therefore Book 5’s turn toward history, not romance, that carries the force of nostalgia: nostalgia for Guyon’s antiromantic narrative thrust, which managed in its “rigour pittilesse” to conquer the effeminacy induced by both a desiring queen and an arrested, uncloseable poetics (2.12.83).

What I mean to illuminate in this chapter is one reason for the range and malleability of The Faerie Queene’s literary strategies. No one can say what genre, if any, Spenser originally intended his long poem most to resemble; the “Letter to Ralegh” appended to the 1590 edition of Books 1–3 of the poem employs only the terms “allegory” and “history” by way of explanation of the work. And it is certainly the case that Spenser is engaged in synthesizing, in encyclopedic fashion, any number of literary forms inherited from the classical, Christian, continental, and native English traditions. But the Letter’s invocations of Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, and Tasso place The Faerie Queene in the midst of Renaissance debates over the epic versus the romance—as does the use of the term “allegory” itself, as John Watkins points out by quoting Sir Richard Blackmore, a seventeenth-century reader of the poem who uses “allegory” in place of the term “romance” to describe The Faerie Queene’s erratic narrative motions: “But Ariosto and Spencer … are hurried on with a boundless, impetuous Fancy over Hill and Dale, till they are both lost in a Wood of Allegories,—Allegories so wild, unnatural, and extravagant, as greatly displease the Reader.”¹⁵ Despite Richard Helgerson’s undoubtedly true contention that The Faerie Queene—both on the face of it and in its rejecting Tasso’s ultimate preference of public virtue over private love pursuits—entirely adheres to the genre of “Gothic” romance, within Spenser’s poem we may discern a certain guilt about poetic overreliance on this unmasculine form.¹⁶ David Quint demonstrates that the opposition of epic to romance is one that, beginning with Virgil, is one generated internally from the perspective of epic itself: “To the victors [in the Aeneid] belongs epic, with its linear teleology; to the losers belongs romance, with its random or circular wandering.”¹⁷ Hence each western epic subsequent to Virgil carries on a debate concerning which perspective—the winners’ or the losers’ perspective, epic or romance—the poem is going to embrace most fully.

For “winners” and “losers” we might easily substitute, at least in the normative terms of Renaissance ideology, “masculine” and “feminine.”¹⁸ Watkins’s analysis of the 1590 Faerie Queene suggests that the topos of the abandoned woman is key to understanding how Spenser, from moment to moment and canto to canto in the poem, is either stigmatizing or recuperating Ariostan romance, signified by its associations with femininity. Concluding as he does with Book 3 of the poem, Watkins is able to establish that Spenser by that point in the poem “transcends the debate over the compatibility of romance and epic conventions by defining epic as a genre foregrounding confrontations between antithetical influences.”¹⁹ My concern, however, is with what happens as The Faerie Queene, appearing in further installments in 1596 and 1609, is forced to reconsider this syncretism, as the poem fully faces up to what it would mean for epic poetry not to abandon femininity, but rather, like the ideal chivalric romance hero, to champion it.

Female Will and Feminine Poetics in the Legends of Chastity and of Friendship

My first task, then, is to track the history of the alliances between poetry and femininity proposed in Books 3 and 4, alliances that eventually necessitate Book 5’s generic shifts. Because Book 5’s attachment to history arises just as soon as its attachment to Britomart ends, it is worth remembering that Britomart’s entry into The Faerie Queene came hard upon the heels of a gap in history. Near the end of Book 2, Arthur in the castle of Alma finds himself reading a chronicle of Britain, a chronicle that ends just after the entry of Uther Pendragon, Arthur’s father (2.10.68). Of course Arthur’s name cannot be added to the chronicle because, in the time scheme of The Faerie Queene, he has not yet embarked upon the sequence of events that will lead him to the throne. Nevertheless, as Elizabeth Bellamy has pointed out, the chronicle’s abrupt ending reveals that Arthur himself exists in an arrested moment, in a state of history that is not yet.²⁰ Britomart’s adventures, which commence as Book 2 ends and which inaugurate the poem’s fullest experiment with the genre of Ariostan romance, therefore come to occupy two contradictory pauses in narrative as Book 2 draws to its close. Guyon’s successful netting of Acrasia, which closes off Book 2, seems, as I asserted above, also to foreclose upon the feminine poetics that Acrasia promulgated. But Arthur’s hesitation on the brink of his future has the opposite effect: it suspends the teleology of certain ends that the telling of history might afford, and hence encourages a digression into the romantic mode.

Furthermore, Book 3 of the poem begins by taking the radical step of associating poetic power with feminine power—no matter how emasculating that power might be, no matter how it may dismay, rather than fashion, a gentleman. This extraordinary proposition is first voiced in Book 3’s Proem. At first, this Proem worries that the feminine nature of its queenly subject, Elizabeth, might dissolve artistic achievement. After the narrative voice issues a caveat that “liuing art may not least part [of Elizabeth’s chastity] expresse,” it goes on to phrase these protestations of artistic failure in terms of sexual impotence. Even Zeuxis or Praxiteles would fall short of bringing this portrait to climax: “His daedale hand would faile, and greatly faint, / And her perfections with his error taint” (3.Pr.2). At this point the narrative voice attempts to recuperate potency for a masculine poetic enterprise by enacting certain revisions in this gendered scenario. Initially, the painter’s hand “tainting” the perfections of his chaste model suggests a leading tangent that is developed further in succeeding lines:

Ne Poets wit, that passeth Painter farre

In picturing the parts of beautie daint,

So hard a workmanship aduenture darre,

For fear through want of words her excellence to marre.

(3.Pr.2)

If “marring” the queen, like “tainting” her, amounts to ruining her, then these disclaimers actually advance an author’s ability to overpower the queen through rapine misrepresentation. This language becomes even stronger a few cantos later in Book 3, when the narrative voice proclaims his desire to “Endite [the queen] … as dewtie doth excite; / But ah my rimes too rude and rugged arre, / … And striuing, fit to make, I feare do marre” (3.2.3). Even not portraying the queen adequately promises a certain masculine authorial power. “Excited” by “dewtie” (suggestively spelled to imply a kind of sexual moistness), the harsh consonants of the narrator’s “rude and rugged rimes” culminate in the reiterated “marring” of his high object. In short, aesthetic failure is posed as phallic success.

Obviously, though, it is more to poetry’s advantage to seduce its royal reader’s sensibilities than to offend them. And shortly Book 3’s Proem moves to rescind this rather improbable notion of triumphant poetic failure, when it describes the “ravishing” power of Walter Ralegh’s poetic expression of unrequited desire for his queen’s favors, “The Ocean to Cynthia”:

But if in liuing colours, and right hew,

Your selfe you couet to see pictured,

Who can it doe more liuely, or more trew,

Then that sweet verse, with Nectar sprinckeled,

In which a gracious seruant pictured

His Cynthia, his heauens fairest light?

That with his melting sweetnesse rauished,

And with the wonder of her beames bright,

My senses lulled are in slomber of delight.

(3.Pr.4)

The dangling “that” clause of this stanza’s line 7—“That which his melting sweetness rauished”—initially makes it possible that Cynthia of line 6, and not the reader of line 9, is the one ravished by the poem. Yet Ralegh’s verse ravishes by means of its “melting sweetnesse,” a phrase that makes poetry a liquid and hence potentially feminized medium. The ravished receptor of that sweetness turns out to be not Cynthia at all, but instead the presumably male possessor of the “senses” in line 9 that “lulled are in slomber of delight.” Feminized by a poetry that itself is feminine, Ralegh’s reader rests passively in delightful “slomber.”

Book 3 here seems willingly to model itself after those moments in Books 1 and 2 that are most dangerous to the masculine integrity of both the knights within the poem and the male reader of the poem: those moments at which poetry becomes its most lush and enchanting exactly when it depicts an authoritative, seductive female and her hapless victim. If Spenser’s poem is ravishing in this way—if it charms, but does not rightly move—then it will have failed in the poetic purpose Spenser outlined in the “Letter to Ralegh”: to “fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline” (p. 737). But Books 1 and 2 periodically veer toward precisely this association between bewitching poetry and emasculating female power during their various scenes of seduction—Acrasia unmanning Verdant in her bower (2.12.76–80), Duessa pleasuring and enfeebling Redcrosse at the fountain (1.7.3–7), false Una seducing Redcrosse in his dream (1.1.47–48). Book 3’s substantial investment of both moral virtue and poetic narrative in its female knight, Britomart, hence raises the stakes of assigning gender to poetic success. At first glance, Britomart seems to endanger masculine poetics as much as do the enchantresses of Books 1 and 2. She derails the progress of male knights, including heroes like Guyon, both by literally disarming them and by astounding and mesmerizing those who look on her visage—a castratingly Medusan sight that “discomfits” onlookers in Malecasta’s castle (3.1.43) and “fixes” eyes in Malbecco’s (3.9.24). Chaste as she is, Britomart is nevertheless as skilled as Acrasia in suspending knightly instruments.

With Britomart, however, Spenser’s narrative at first displays some easiness with the associations between feminine and poetic authority, partly because Britomart’s ultimate fate is indeed a progressive one, to accomplish Spenser’s aim of revivifying masculine epic in the modern world. As Merlin tells her when she seeks his advice regarding her future course of action, her role in future history is to produce “a famous Progenie … / out of the auncient Troian blood, / Which shall reuiue the sleeping memorie / Of those same antique Peres” (3.3.22). Moreover, Britomart’s quest in Book 3 is prompted, not by a desire to dominate or incapacitate men, but rather by a vision in a magic glass—her father’s glass, no less—of her intended spouse, a vision that takes the form of a mental pregnancy: “To her reuealed in a mirrhour plaine, / Whereof did grow her first engraffed paine / … That but the fruit more sweetnesse did containe, / Her wretched dayes in dolour she mote wast” (3.2.17). With this visionary lying-in Britomart is allied with Spenser himself, who in the “Letter to Ralegh” writes of having “laboured” to “conceiue” the person of Arthur and the shape of his adventures throughout The Faerie Queene. Since “Renowmed kings, and sacred Emperours” are to be Britomart’s “fruitfull Ofspring” (3.3.23), her fate is also Spenser’s project: to produce a succession of heroes, which when complete will end in Elizabeth—The Faerie Queene. This epic product remains with her after her husband Artegall is gone:

With thee yet shall he leaue for memory

Of his late puissance, his Image dead,

That liuing him in all actiuity

To thee shall represent.

(3.3.29)

In this account of her future, it is unclear whether Britomart’s reproduction of epic takes the form of her children, or of her more authorially pertinent capacity for remembrance. In either case, her role is to “represent” and hence to revive the “Image” of the dead hero.

This version of authorial conception and birth, however, is altered by the abrupt end of Merlin’s narrative, which halts as Arthur’s history does, with no end in sight. Merlin’s tracing of Britomart’s descendants ends at last in Elizabeth, whose appearance in this recitation enacts another arrestive moment, both for the pedigree and for the wizard who delivers it. “But yet the end is not,” says Merlin, and “[t]here … stayd, / As ouercomen of the spirites powre, / Or other ghastly spectacle dismayd” (3.3.50). Merlin is as nonplussed as the knights whom Britomart defeats, and his abrupt cutoff marks the suspension of future male enterprise, which “yet … is not.” Elizabeth, punningly denoted here (as Jon Quitslund has remarked) in the form of her virgin knot, is barren, producing naught and ending the Tudor line.²¹ But this end also marks the beginning of Britomart’s adventures, which immediately take the form of narrative digression, not lineal progression. She and her nurse/squire Glauce proceed with anything but straightforward authorial intent, as they “diuerse plots did frame, to maske in strange disguise” (3.3.51, my emphasis).²² From this moment, then, Spenser’s metaphor of authorial pregnancy expands so that the feminine gives form to poetic narrative. As Britomart rides along she forges her own idea of her lover, one that departs from Merlin’s prophecies: “A thousand thoughts she fashioned in her mind, / And in her feigning fancie did pourtray / Him such, as fittest she for loue could find” (3.4.5). Britomart’s “image” of her goal becomes one that she authorially invents not as a singular heroic purpose, but as a set of multiple and interchangeably pleasurable possibilities. And from this moment, Book 3’s narration itself begins its digressive turns, as if it too wished to fashion “a thousand thoughts.” Unlike the severed genealogies of both Arthur’s ancestors and Britomart’s descendants, the romance adventures of Book 3 invest their energies not in the hope for a singular conclusion, but rather in potentially endless revisions of chase, discovery, reverie, and flight. By taking full advantage of Merlin’s “but yet the end is not,” Book 3 fully exploits as poetic form the feminized qualities attributed to Ralegh’s verse. On the level not only of lyric but also of narrative structure, poetry in Book 3 becomes liquid, shifting, and diffuse, and these are the qualities meant to afford readerly delight.²³

Such poetry is best displayed in Book 3’s Garden of Adonis, where the curt uncertainty of Merlin’s closing sentence, “but yet the end is not,” is transformed into a positive principle of “endlesse progenie” (3.6.30), so that even the arrestive power at the center of the Garden confers endlessness in the form of reanimation. The rumor that the slain Adonis still lives in Venus’s Garden acquires truth over the course of a few stanzas, as the narrator shifts from the suppositional—“There yet, some say, in secret he does ly”; to the probable—“And sooth it seemes they say: for he may not / For euer die”; to the certain—“There now he liueth in eternall blis” (3.6.46–48). And Adonis’s central resting place, upon the mons veneris, appropriates the epic place of beginning, in medias res, for the feminine place of beginnings, plural and indeterminate. Poetic activity itself is granted origins coinciding with this venereal center, whence spring Ovidian tales of those who have been converted into flowers, “To whom sweet Poets verse hath giuen endlesse date” (3.6.4’).

Whether such a feminized poetic form is allowed much free play in The Faerie Queene is quite another question, however, one that has recently engaged several Spenser critics in their evaluations of fulfillment and loss in Books 3 and 4. Maureen Quilligan and Lauren Silberman both read Book 3’s Garden of Adonis, despite its elements of chaos, decay, and lamentation, as a privileged site of feminine production—of earthly forms, of chaste love and marital fecundity, and of a female reader’s access to understanding.²⁴ For them, Book 3’s center celebrates a satisfying feminine poetic power. Jonathan Goldberg, in contrast, contends that the poetic pleasure offered by Books 3 and 4 is not the pleasure of fulfillment, but rather a writerly delight in castration and loss, in an excess of always-unfinished, unproductive production. Nevertheless, Goldberg shares with Quilligan and Silberman a focus on the delight afforded by feminized (or at least effeminized) constructions made available in this portion of the poem. As Goldberg describes it, Book 3’s revised 1’96 ending—which departs from the 1’90 ending in omitting the reunion of husband and wife, Amoret and Scudamour, and thus emphasizes Britomart’s unconcluded quest for her own mate—acts as a template for the continued deferrals of Book 4. For Goldberg, the pleasure of the writerly text of the entire Faerie Queene, but particularly of Book 4, arises from its failure to engage in unitary poetic or narrative endings. It is instead “an ‘endlesse worke’ of substitution, sequences of names in place of other names, structures of difference, deferred identities. It plays upon a void; it occupies the place of loss—where Britomart’s wound is extended to Amoret, where Amoret is ‘perfect hole.’”²⁵

My own view is quite different. Beginning with its exit from the Garden of Adonis (and perhaps even within the Garden itself, as Berger has pointed out),²⁶ The Faerie Queene starts to expose its own feminized poetics as eminently unsatisfying, whether those poetics produce a full harvest of invention or whether they disjunctively cut those inventions off. And once again, that dissatisfaction is bound up with the fortunes of the poem’s authoritative women. From the midpoint of Book 3 in the Garden of Adonis this feminine center will not hold; rather, the narrative embarks upon a sea of digressions that, like the sea at whose edge the habitually pursued Florimell makes yet another near escape (3.7.27), offers no assurance of fruitful outcome. Canto 7 of Book 3 is particularly dizzying in its multitudinous meanderings. Within fifty-eight stanzas the narrative turns from Florimell encountering the malevolent hag and her besotted son; to Florimell fleeing the monster the hag sends; to Florimell escaping into the fisherman’s boat; to Satyrane finding Florimell’s dropped girdle and subduing the monster; to the Giantess Argante fleeing a knight while bearing on her lap the “dolefull Squire” of Dames; to Argante defeating Satyrane and being further pursued by the knight; to the Squire of Dames, who’s been tossed aside by Argante, telling Satyrane of his unlucky quest for a virtuous woman. If Canto 7 has an anchor at all, it is the decidedly unvirtuous Argante, who as a parodic counterpart to Venus and her sexual sway over Adonis in her garden motivates not creative plenitude, but confused narration and disrupted natural hierarchy. This episode features a plethora of indefinite masculine pronouns remarkable even for Spenserian verse, as if Satyrane and the unnamed knight and the Squire are all, by virtue of their sex, equally to be picked up, dropped down, and knocked senseless by the lustful Giantess. (We do not learn until the episode is over that the unnamed knight is in fact a woman, the “faire virgin” Palladine [3.7.52].) Argante’s thralldom is the evident wage of personally and poetically going astray.²⁷

The second half of Book 3 continues to evince uneasiness about the Garden of Adonis’s feminized conjunctions of productivity and desire, traits that reemerge (like Argante’s domination) not as affirmation but as parody. For artistic creation we are given Proteus’s shapeshifting and the hag’s creation of the false Florimell; for feminine desire, Hellenore humped by satyrs; for male passivity, the childish Scudamour, who spends his time “beat[ing] and bounse[ing] his head and brest full sore” while Britomart engages in rescuing his bride (3.11.27). At the same time, as Berger points out, “[t]he repeated pattern of male behavior in these cantos is the shift from weaker to more aggressive forms of violence, and from victimization to tyranny: the shift, for example, from the hapless witch’s son to the hyena-like monster that feeds on women’s flesh; from the Squire of Dames and Argante’s other victims to Ollyphant; from the fisherman to Proteus, Malbecco to Paridell, and Scudamour to Busirane.”²⁸ However, the increased level of masculine tyranny does not correspond to an increase in poetic power. The poetic model proposed by Book 3’s most obvious poet, Busirane, proves to be remarkably ineffective, an only slightly more sophisticated version of the rapine “rude and rugged” rhymes earlier invoked by the narrator. Neither Amoret nor Britomart herself is much moved by what Maureen Quilligan calls Busirane’s “sadistic sonneteering,”²⁹ indicating that trying to convert the feminine lyricism of Acrasia’s Bower and elsewhere in the poem into some new breed of masculine lyricism will not prove a successful experiment. Even though Busirane aggressively composes his charms out of Amoret’s very blood, “Yet thousand charmes could not her stedfast heart remoue” (3.12.31).

And yet, the conclusion of Book 3 does not resolve itself in favor of a feminine mode of narrative progress, either. Despite the poem’s continued associations between femininity and inconclusiveness, we must remember that most of the primary female characters of Books 3 and 4 are in fact driving toward a particular conclusion: marriage. But as Books 3 and 4 progress, both the desirability and the conclusiveness of marriage become deeply compromised, and weddings are generally either delayed or evaded. The narrative hence finds itself in a double bind. In order fully to exploit the female knighthood that, beginning with Britomart, the poem has delineated, marriage must be acknowledged as a legitimate ending to a heroic story. But in the view of the male characters who are the necessary partners in this enterprise, marriage seems largely to replicate the dangers to heroism embodied in Acrasia’s bower, where knightly instruments are not sharpened, but suspended. Hence, aside from some marginal or deflected weddings (the curiously quadrangular union of Cambell to Cambina, and Triamond to Canacee; the morally suspect Poeana’s wedding to the Squire of Low Degree; and the unnarrated vows of purely allegorical rivers), Book 4’s narrative effort is spent eluding rather than concluding wedlock.³⁰ This avoidance is jumpstarted, as Goldberg points out, by the 1596 revision of the ending to Book 3, which assigns not only Britomart but also Amoret to the category of frustrated brides. The abortion of Amoret’s “conceiued” hope (3.12.44) to find her husband rewrites her as a duplicate of the unhappy Britomart, who in the 1590 ending to Book 3 witnessed Scudamour’s embrace of Amoret only to be reminded of her own incompletion: “In vaine she wisht, that fate n’ould let her yet possesse” (3.12.46a).

Considering that Britomart’s quest was prompted by her conception of an envisioned Artegall, the 1590 ending’s disjuncture of the “fate” of narrative from Britomart’s wishful thinking signals the imminent demise of the feminine poetics that Britomart initially embodied.³¹ This demise comes to pass in the 1596 Faerie Queene, in Books 4 and 5. Although the 1596 ending to Book 3 leaves both Amoret and Britomart to “wend at will” while the narrator takes his breather, the female wanderings of Book 4 have little to do with women exercising will. Rather, women’s thought and desires in Book 4 seem largely to be displaced by happenstance and mistake. Britomart carelessly misplaces Amoret and untowardly jousts for the false Florimell; the virgin huntress Belphoebe, a double for Queen Elizabeth, “misdeems” Timias’s attentions to Amoret.³² And more significantly, the long-awaited encounter of Britomart with her intended, Artegall, in Book 4’s “middest”—the analogue point to Book 3’s superproductive, female-ruled Garden—seems pointedly to cancel Britomart’s desired fulfillment. Instead, their encounter in the central Canto 6 evades a permanent union of heroine and hero, evidently because of its emasculating potential. Artegall initially fights Britomart with the rapine intent typical of a Spenserian knight in battle, but once he unhelms her he is unmanned: “trembling horrour did his sense assayle, / And made ech member quake, and manly hart to quayle” (4.6.22). Even though Britomart is in the end similarly subdued, narration remains in the grip of feminine digressiveness and masculine failure. We learn immediately after these lovers’ mutual recognition that Amoret, once again failing to join her husband Scudamour’s company, has “wandred … or gone astray” (4.6.36). As if to countervail this unpredictable feminine derailment of narrative conclusions, or as if to countervail a woman’s effect upon himself, Artegall immediately sues to leave upon his initial quest, “To follow that, which he did long propound” (4.6.42).

Artegall’s ability to “propound,” from proponere (“to put forward”), establishes him as the opponent of postponement and delay, even though it is he who is postponing their marriage. But in the prevailing opinion of The Faerie Queene’s second half, marriage itself postpones rather than embodies masculine endings. For Artegall, what is a “concerned” hope for Amoret or Britomart would amount to a return to Acrasia’s bower. From the bridegroom’s point of view, marital union constitutes a kind of suspended animation. A male hero’s safe response to marriage in Book 4 is either to flee it (as in Canto 6’s comic argument, where “Both Scudamour and Arthegall / Doe fight with Britomart, / He sees her face; doth fall in loue, / and soone from her depart”) or to contemplate it only from several heavily mediated removes, as is signified in the Temple of Venus, which hides its hermaphroditic goddess from view precisely because—as with man and wife become one flesh—she unites both sexes in one being:

The cause why she was couered with a vele,

Was hard to know, for that her Priests the same

From peoples knowledge labour’d to concele.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

But for, they say, she hath both kinds in one,

Both male and female, both vnder one name.

(4.10.41)

What must be covered up (and oddly so, in the Book that contains The Faerie Queene’s most famous union, the rivers’ wedding) is the very definition of marriage: “Both male and female, both vnder one name.” Wedlock and its results are threatening enough that Venus is thrice removed from direct experience: not only by her veil, but also by the pains her priests take to mystify the truth of her form, and finally by the narrative’s revealing her only indirectly, through Scudamour’s tale of finding Amoret at Venus’s feet.³³ Meanwhile, as I noted above, Amoret herself has mysteriously disappeared from the scene, as if the allegory of marriage can be recounted only when actual marriage has once again become impossible.

It is this revulsion from the feminine endings imagined by female authority, in my view, that accounts for the inconclusive structure of Book 4—its turns and returns, engagements and disengagements. Having devolved so much of its action upon anticipated wedlock, Book 4’s ultimate evasions of marriage leave the poem confronting its own heroic void. Notoriously lacking a unitary hero, a Guyon to break the Bower of Bliss’s thrall, Book 4 is seeded with ever-increasing narrative guilt for not properly ending things. The kinds of conclusions that Book 4 does feature are necessarily strained because they are not naturally arrived at, but arbitrarily imposed by the narrative voice. Canto 10, for example, reaches for completion by flatfootedly ending both Scudamour’s tale and the canto that contains it with the word end (“So ended he this tale, where I this Canto end” [4.10.58]). Elsewhere, Book 4 begins to ask forgiveness for the cliffhanger technique that The Faerie Queene has employed with confidence since Book 1. Canto 11 opens by apologizing for Florimell’s having been left “languishing in payne” since Canto 8 of Book 3 (4.11.1). Book 4 itself ends on a hasty promissory note, a one-line uncompleted completion like the one Artegall effects by leaving Britomart: the marriage of Marinell and Florimell, “Which,” says the narrative voice, “to another place I leaue to be perfected” (4.12.35).

Repealing Queenship in the Legend of Justice

That “other place”—that place of perfection—is Book 5, which in fact begins by once again shunting aside Florimell’s and Marinell’s wedding in favor of Artegall’s mission to rescue Irena. Hence Book 5’s narrative asserts openly what Book 4’s indirections implied: that marriage is not perfection at all, but rather at best a mere footnote to the glories of the heroic quest. Artegall attends the promised nuptials only as a brief stopover on his way to “his first aduenture” (5.3.40). The “firstness,” the originality, of that quest, as well as Artegall’s often-repeated intent to continue upon that first quest despite minor skirmishes and potential diversions along the way, is a new emphasis for a knight of The Faerie Queene, and one that leads us to examine what is (literally) being prioritized in Book 5. What is the first intent to which both Artegall and the narrative must insistently refer? Ostensibly, Artegall’s task is to restore originary justice. But in the reiterated word that describes Artegall’s judiciary pronouncements, doome, we hear how that “first aduenture” is dependent for its achievement of this restoration on a sense of ending, of final, irrevocable closure.³⁴ And as we will see, the opening pretexts of Book 5 firmly disenfranchise feminine authority from this return to finality.

Of all the proems in The Faerie Queene, the Proem to Book 5 features the most cursory and oblique reference to Spenser’s queen. After declaring that God’s justice, delegated to earthly rulers, allows princes “To sit in his owne seate, his cause to end” (5.Pr.10), the Proem addresses Elizabeth in only one stanza, as the “Dread Souerayne Goddesse” who initially seems to have the apocalyptic power of bringing about that doomsday:

Dread Souerayne Goddesse, that doest highest sit

In seate of iudgement, in th’Almighties stead,

And with magnificke might and wondrous wit

Doest to thy people righteous doome aread, …

(5.Pr.11)

It is difficult, given Spenser’s cunning hubris throughout The Faerie Queene, not to read aread punningly: Elizabeth areads “righteous doome” not by discerning or pronouncing it herself, but by her act of a-reading Spenser’s poem, which dispenses its own inspired judgments. The main action of Book 5 similarly weaves into its narrative structure a determination to achieve ending by substituting male for female authority. Just as the Proem addresses Elizabeth in the person of a goddess who has not appeared, and cannot appear, in the poem—Astraea, whose naming here is prefaced on her absence from the world—so too does Canto I go on to delineate Astraea’s departure as the precondition for heroic action. It is not until she is reft from earthly sight that her foster child Artegall can begin his career. Her removal from the poem therefore at last delivers narrative into the safe keeping of the masculine. As a substitute for herself Astraea leaves Artegall the iron man Talus, “And willed him with Artegall to wend, / And doe what euer thing he did intend” (5.1.12). This absolute fulfillment of “what euer thing” a man intends seems a dream of narrative progress, considering the feminine postponements and beguilements of Books 3 and 4. Talus is never delayed or diverted on his way to a goal. Once he sets out after Sir Sanglier, for instance, he requires only three stanzas to find and bind his prey (5.1.20–22)—a remarkable contrast to the pursuits in Books 3 and 4, some of which are never concluded at all. Talus acts as an external manifestation of doome, with its connotations of finality as well as of certain judgment. In Cantos 1–4 Artegall’s doome extends even to narrative itself, as with the end of each canto an episode in his travels is firmly and finally concluded.

That conclusiveness, however, itself comes to an end as Book 5 approaches its center, a center we have learned in Books 3 and 4 to associate with realized or potential feminine arrestiveness, with marriage and feminine (re)production. Cantos 5–7 of Book 5 in fact stage in miniature the extensive, interwoven problematics of marriage and of a feminine poetics mounted at length through Books 3 and 4. The Amazon queen Radigund’s capture of Artegall externalizes what might be Artegall’s nightmare of marriage to Britomart: not only do Radigund and Britomart resemble each other in looks and actions, as many critics have noticed, but Artegall crucially consents to his bondage, “to [Radigund] yeelded of his owne accord” (5.5.17).³⁵ Moreover, Radigund catalyzes at the precise moment of Artegall’s quasi-marital oath a regression to Book 3’s literary model, in which a feminine poem equally effeminizes its reader. We witness this regression in a complex moment of reader-response that goes beyond the earlier instances of feminine ravishment it resembles, as Artegall unhelms Radigund and sees her features for the first time:

But when as he discouered had her face,

He saw his senses straunge astonishment,

A miracle of natures goodly grace,

In her faire visage.

(5.5.12)

When he looks at her, what he sees is himself—and more than himself, his arrested self: “He saw his senses straunge astonishment.” It is that reading of his own plight, himself as Verdant in Acrasia’s bower, that causes him further to be emasculated, and finally further to emasculate himself by disarming: “At sight thereof his cruell minded hart / Empierced was with pittifull regard, / That his sharpe sword he threw from him apart” (5.5.13). At this point the doome—the finality—that he has wielded up to now returns upon himself, enforcing not masculine completion but effeminized thrall:

So was he ouercome, not ouercome,

But to her yeelded of his owne accord;

Yet was he iustly damned by the doome

Of his owne mouth, that spake so warelesse word,

To be her thrall, and seruice her afford.

(5.5.17)

The effeminization of the knightly reader is accompanied by a similar regression to the effeminized narrative of Books 3 and 4. Unlike Cantos 1–4 of Book 5, Canto 5 ends with no ending. This time Artegall remains in bondage, and his release is postponed till another place, “Which in an other Canto will be best contayned” (5.5.57). Worse yet, Canto 6 in fact fails to free Artegall, and he remains with knightly instruments suspended while Britomart makes her way to him. Thus, like Books 3 and 4, Book 5 has feminine authority at its heart. Significantly, Britomart in Book 5’s “middest” canto, Canto 6, herself rearms.

The dilemma of the arrested text begins to be resolved as Book 5 works its way out of this feminine center, a process encapsulated in Britomart’s stay in the Temple of Isis in Canto 7. The Isis Church episode has proved especially troubling for critics trying to assert a unity of purpose in Book 5. As Clare Kinney has put it, the episode is one of those “exemplary union[s] of Justice and Mercy” that “seems oddly irrelevant to the actual narrative progress of Arthegall and his automaton-slave Talus from one victory of force majeure to another.”³⁶ T. K. Dunseath, in contrast, has identified Isis Church as a necessary passageway to Britomart’s restoration of Artegall’s progress: “Once Britomart submits herself to Divine Providence in the Church of Isis, she discovers the true nature of her mission and is able to free her lover from woman’s slavery.”³⁷ Chafing though Dunseath’s condemnation of “woman’s slavery” may now be, it is a condemnation shared by the poem at this point, and Isis Church becomes the site of the reiteration and recuperation of Artegall’s stasis. This episode at first recalls and extends the state of overwhelming feminine power in which Artegall still lies languishing: Isis, as goddess of the moon, reminds us not only of Radigund, whose face was revealed “Like as the Moone in foggie winters night” (5.5.12), but also of Britomart herself, whose own visage has borne the same comparison and whose chastity allies her with the moon-goddess. Moreover, the dream that comes to Britomart as she sleeps at Isis’s feet consistently confuses her with Isis, using only “she” and “her,” not a proper name, to describe the marvelous queen that subdues the crocodile. But unlike the close of Book 3, where Britomart’s state of feminine dismay and incompletion bled over into the state of the narrative, this moment of feminine governance and of feminine conception is safely framed. At first Britomart’s dream seems to rediscover her former authorial mode: whereas in Book 3 she set out fashioning “a thousand thoughts” of her lover, here as she awakens “long while she musing lay, / With thousand thoughts feeding her fantasie” (5.7.17). The dream’s aftermath of interpretation, however, reduces those thousand thoughts to orthodoxy. First of all, the ambiguous or oscillating gender identities inherent in the temple sort themselves out. Not only do the priests, initially of uncertain gender, now become in the person of their spokesman an unambiguous “he” (5.7.19), but the crocodile of Britomart’s dreaming—which had been given both feminine and masculine pronouns, as well as variously hermaphroditic powers of tumescence, pregnancy, engulfment, and impregnation—is now unquestionably male, a figure of both Osiris and Artegall himself. And even though in the dream Isis/Britomart exerts phallic authority over that crocodile, “turning all his pride to humblesse meeke” (5.7.16), Isis’s priest re-reads this episode for her as pointing not toward Britomart’s subjection of men, but toward her eventual marriage and male offspring (5.7.23), reincorporating feminine power into masculine heroics as Merlin did by tracing the careers of Britomart’s male descendants. Signally unlike Merlin’s vision, the priest’s explication runs without interruption, “vnto the end” (5.7.24). From this point Britomart will step, not into a maze of digressive, self-made visions, but toward a certain closure of masculine heroics that she must internalize and enforce. As critics have often noticed, in Britomart’s subsequent defeat of Radigund the two women warriors are scarcely distinguishable: the fray is described as a challenge between a tigress and a lioness (5.7.30). Britomart’s task is, evidently, to subdue herself.

We can see in Britomart’s subsequent reconstitution of Radigund’s city-state the full consequences of Spenser’s reading of Plutarch’s “Of Isis and Osiris,” a text to which the Isis Church episode alludes, although Book 5 does not explicitly refer to Isis’s piecing together of her dismembered husband. Unable to find Osiris’s penis, Plutarch’s Isis replaces it with a consecrated replica; and so too does Britomart reerect her husband’s phallic power.³⁸ She not only rearms him and restores the Amazons “to mens subiection” (5.7.42), she also establishes Artegall’s thralldom as but a holiday aberration: “Ah my deare Lord, what sight is this (quoth she) / What May-game hath misfortune made of you?” (5.7.40). All of a sudden, and quite improbably, Artegall metamorphoses from an embarrassed, foolish Hercules to an epic Odysseus returning to his patient, waiting wife: “Not so great wonder and astonishment / Did the most chast Penelope possesse, / To see her Lord, that was reported drent” (5.7.39). With Artegall’s promotion to head of state, Book 5’s curious catalogue of ways to abuse the human head—its elaborately grisly panoply of hangings, beheadings, scalpings, and even bad haircuts—begins to make sense. All these illegitimate mishandlings of the head are cancelled in one stroke, Britomart’s decapitation of Radigund.³⁹ From this moment, too, the narrative itself seems to know where it’s heading. Artegall ventures forth once again with purpose upon his hitherto delayed quest: “He purposd to proceed, what so be fall, / Vppon his first aduenture, which him forth did call” (5.7.43, my emphasis). And he leaves Britomart behind.

We have heard Artegall’s rededication to his “first adventure” before the end of Canto 7. Significantly, this resolution had been repeated thrice in quick succession in the brief interval between his attendance at Florimell’s and Marinell’s marriage, and his encounter with Radigund’s crew.⁴⁰ If first intent prevails only in the respite between weddings and Amazons, how could it hold up if Artegall stayed to marry his own Amazon-like fiancee? Artegall’s second separation from Britomart in fact becomes an extended meditation upon the high stakes of avoiding feminine digression, both for Artegall and for the forward movement of narrative. After his announced departure at the end of Canto 7, Canto 8 surprisingly begins not by portraying Artegall on his way, but by worrying again at the issue of female dominance:

Nought vnder heauen so strongly doth allure

The sence of man, and all his minde possesse,

As beauties louely baite, that doth procure

Great warriours oft their rigour to represse,

And mighty hands forget their manlinesse.

(5.8.1)

A comment on Artegall’s recent imprisonment, it would seem—but as it turns out, the “louely baite” in question is not Radigund, but Artegall’s intended wife. Despite her recent role in suppressing female sway, Britomart still represents the “allure” that Artegall must resist, if he is to escape the fate (says the narrator) of Samson, Hercules, and Mark Antony. Feminine rule of body and mind must be cut off, beheaded, as a way of propelling Artegall back “vppon his first intent” (5.8.3)—his intent and the narrative’s, the rescue of Irena that is the ostensible mission of Book 5.

As both Busirane’s torturous rhymes and Artegall’s earlier dismissal of Britomart in Book 4 taught us, however, rejecting one version of feminine rule is not enough to restore with certainty either masculine heroics or a masculine model of poetic effect. More drastic measures are called for. In keeping with its obsessive decapitations of illegitimate authorities, Book 5 proposes a thoroughgoing revision of literary construction that ought for good and all to sever the poem from feminine influence. Feminine rule and feminized poetics are repealed in favor of the most straightforward mode that The Faerie Queene will ever assume, historical allegory. That is to say, the poem at this point assumes a new literary mode as a way of galvanizing the sense of an ending, the doome that Artegall’s adventures first promised before his digression into serving a queen.

I earlier suggested that Book 5’s revision of form reaches back nostalgically for the completed heroic endeavors of Books 1 and 2. If Books 1 and 2 can legitimately (if broadly) be described as the epic segments of The Faerie Queene, then the nostalgia that Book 5 expresses is for epic over romance. But Book 5 in its last five cantos also audaciously construes itself as more uniformly heroic than even those earlier books of epic (not to mention the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid), since it thoroughly discounts feminine otium as holding any allure whatsoever, either for the poem or for its hero. None of the women of these cantos poses any sensual danger for Artegall or for the late-arriving Arthur. Adicia’s malfeasance is described as sexual only ex post facto, once she’s been banished “farre from resort of men” (5.9.2).⁴¹ The female monster of the Inquisition’s dual appearance of foul and fair briefly recalls Duessa’s (“For of a Mayd she had the outward face, / To hide the horrour, which did lurke behinde, / The better to beguile, whom she so fond did finde” [5.11.23]), but her implied weapon of seduction is never put to use. Even Duessa’s sexual transgressions are described with extreme economy, with neither the seductive nor the repulsive flourishes of Book 1. The prosecuting attorney at her trial, Zele, simply mentions “many a knight, / By her beguyled, and confounded quight” (5.9.40). As well, these cantos decline to seduce their reader. Their refusal of sensual appeal extends to their poetry, which Angus Fletcher may be alone in praising as “aesthetically lean and muscle-bound.”⁴² Fletcher’s personification of verse as a male warrior physique draws together precisely, if unintentionally, the aim of these cantos’ poetic reformation, their expurgation of what Dunseath has called the poetic “suggestibility” we expect from Spenserian poetry.⁴³ I would argue that these cantos do not mean to be suggestive. Instead of dense wordplay and multiple allusiveness, their verse offers only a limited field of interpretation, a tunnel vision meant to afford narrative progress. Whereas The Faerie Queene’s poetry typically engages its reader by withholding conclusions—or as Fletcher, quoting Hazlitt, puts it, by holding the ear “captive in the chains of suspense”⁴⁴—these cantos eagerly draw toward singular conclusions both poetic and narrative. When Canto 11 repeats the word “shield” thirteen times, for example (as Hamilton notes with irritation),⁴⁵ not only do we get the message that a knight must never discard his shield, but we also get no other message. And when Canto 8 sketches Arthur’s triumphal march upon defeating the Souldan in only seven parsimonious lines, the reader is also reminded not to wallow in celebratory glee. Arthur, Artegall, and the reader all move on to the next adventure “hauing stayd not long” (5.8.51, my emphasis). Book 5’s last reiteration of Artegall’s recall to his “first aduenture” clearly navigates where he and the poem are going: “on his first aduenture [he] forward forth did ride” (5.10.17, my emphasis).

What minimal figurative language and swift narrative conclusions do for these cantos in small, historical allegory does writ large; the firm attachment of these cantos to easily recognizable political and military events serves to cordon off all but the most straitened avenues of interpretation. We might be allowed a bit of wriggle room in the form of some referents that are not merely unitary: as David Norbrook points out, for example, we must hear in the rescue of Irena a reference not only to Ireland, but also to the French philosopher of absolutism Jean Bodin, who “used the term ϵιρηυη (eirene) to describe the highest kind of justice.”⁴⁶ Kenneth Borris strenuously argues, too, that these cantos not only depict such said-and-done events as the defeat of the Armada and the sentencing of Mary, Queen of Scots, but also voice a Protestant rewriting of history into the approach of the apocalypse. For Borris, Spenser “transforms the particulars of history into vehicles for the ostensibly prophetic revelation of cultural destiny.”⁴⁷ But Norbrook goes on to remind us that for Spenser as for others with more radical religious leanings, Protestant apocalyptics (like Bodin’s political theory) were also a matter of historical event and analysis. If Book 5’s Battle of Beige (Canto 10) is seeded with allusions to radical Protestant apocalyptic commentary, it is because Spenser’s revered Leicester sympathized with those Protestant factions, seeing his expedition in Belgium as a religious war as well as a containment of Spanish imperial ambitions. Spenser’s portrayal of the battle for Beige as a resounding success runs counter to fact not because its eye is on the final victory at world’s end, but (arguably) because Spenser was propagandizing in favor of continued military effort in the Low Countries, in hopes that Essex would be allowed to take up where Leicester had left off.⁴⁸ Protestant messianics, far from being suprahistorical, circle back round into realpolitik, into strategic militarism and jurisprudence.

The relentlessly optimistic depiction of Beige’s fate, however, like the redemption of Irena in Canto 12, finally uncovers the pitfall of these cantos’ dependence on diachronic historical allegory. For of course these two episodes do not depict accomplished historical victories at all, but rather revise past English engagements, some of them not at all successful, into future triumph. When Arthur recovers a city that looks suspiciously like Antwerp (5.10.25–38), we are asked to acquiesce in an event that in 1596 has not yet taken place, and in fact never took place. In the same way, Irena’s rescue comes about as elegantly as a challenge to single combat—truly a kind of wishful thinking, on the order of Hal’s flyting of Hotspur on the eve of Shrewsbury. Even in the poem (not to mention in late sixteenth-century Ireland) matters are not really so easy, for like Hal’s England, Irena’s realm sees considerable bloodshed before Artegall undertakes his “single fight” with Grantorto (5.12.8). Artegall’s prosthetic Talus manages to massacre most of the barbaric hordes before Artegall calls him back, claiming a bit belatedly “that not for such slaughters sake / He thether came” (5.12.8).⁴⁹ These intrusive details, these shadowy reminders that current uncompleted missions are not as neatly sewn up as famous past victories, expose the danger of engaging upon a historical allegory that extends from past to future. Standing in the road between past and future is the ineluctable present, where history’s certain endings give way to the muddled and inconclusive status of recent current events, events that curtail any story of doome. But yet, still, the end is not.

In the end, Book 5’s historical episodes make the case that even when barren and driven poetry replaces seductive lyric, masculine heroism is still subject to an undirected feminine authority. The liberations of Beige and of Irena, both fantasies that expose their own frustration, are framed (and hence, in The Faerie Queene’s juxtapositional logic, arguably caused) by two dilatory queens and their tactics of diversion. In the first case, Queen Mercilla’s waffling pity for Duessa in Canto 9 is seemingly closed off by Artegall, whose judgment is accompanied by his usual epithet of first intent (“But Artegall with constant firme intent, / For zeale of Iustice was against her bent” [5.9.49]). Mercilla’s wavering in a certain sense nevertheless still carries the day, since the pronouncement of Duessa’s final sentence is delayed until the beginning of the next canto, and even then her actual punishment is elided. Surprisingly enough in this book of beheadings, the poem remains silent on whether Duessa’s means of demise doubles that of Mary, Queen of Scots, her allegorical referent. Most readers assume that Duessa is beheaded, but in fact the poem tells us only that Mercilla, having delayed judgment “Till strong constraint did her thereto enforce,” then “yeeld[ed] the last honour to [Duessa’s] wretched corse” (5.10.4).⁵⁰ In this light, Artegall’s oddly gentle decapitation a few cantos later of Grantorto (“Whom when he saw prostrated on the plaine, / He lightly reft his head, to ease him of his paine” [5.12.23]) is better read not as a somewhat extraneous detail, but as a displaced dropping of Duessa’s unenacted death-stroke, as if Artegall must carry out somehow, anyhow, what Mercilla has postponed. If he finishes off Grantorto with unwonted mercy, it is because he is momentarily usurping Mercilla’s role. The point is minor enough, except that this queenly stay of execution recurs when Artegall tries to conclude his final task. His mission is the same as Britomart’s in Amazonia, “How to reforme that ragged common-weale” (5.12.26). “But ere he could reforme it thoroughly” he is recalled to Gloriana’s Faerie Court, “that of necessity / His course of Iustice he was forst to stay” (5.12.27). Blocked in the course of first intent, Artegall turns aside toward his queen’s command with a final reiteration of straightforwardness that is by now entirely ironic: “he for nought would swerue / From his right course, but still the way did hold / To Faery Court, where what him fell shall else be told” (5.12.43). This promise of narrative closure is never kept. No doome, no end for Artegall. Instead, he returns to the demanding, static embrace of Acrasia, or Venus, or Britomart, or Radigund, or Gloriana.

Gloriana’s whim further serves to highlight the difficulty of constructing historical allegory as heroic accomplishment. Although depending on current events to endow narrative closure would be futile enough in any era, late sixteenth-century events in England seemed to many observers, especially those sympathetic to militant Protestantism, particularly recalcitrant to fostering masculine endeavor and its fruition. By the mid-1590S Spenser’s queen had been perceived for several years as hindering a Protestant crusade on the continent; in her canny ambivalence, Elizabeth was never willing to commit the funds or the manpower for a full-scale effort against Spain. R. B. Wernham details “a secret agreement” in the Triple Alliance between England, France, and the United Provinces that “limited the English military contribution [to the Netherlands] to 2,000 men…. In fact, after 1594 England practically withdrew from the continental war, except for [these] forces in the Netherlands.”⁵¹ Although Burghley was partially if not primarily responsible for this policy, the Queen herself was blamed for womanish inconstancy and lack of will. J. E. Neale reports a story that circulated about the queen’s endless changes of mind: “[T]he story of the carter who, on being informed for the third time that the Queen had altered her plans and did not intend to move on that day, slapped his thigh and said, ‘Now I see that the Queen is a woman as well as my wife.’”⁵² Elizabeth throughout her reign had used to her advantage the figuration of herself as her country’s bride, but in the 1590s certain factions within England found themselves wishing that, like Artegall upon his reunion with Britomart, they might simply ride away from the inaction their wife enforces.⁵³ Such was the wish expressed by the Lincolnshire rector Henry Hooke, whose short manuscript treatise of 1601 or 1602 entitled “Of the succession to the Crowne of England” digresses from praising Elizabeth into desiring her replacement by a king whose “first intent” would overgo his predecessor’s feminine stasis on the question of religious reform: “so the brightnes of [Queen Elizabeth’s] daye … shineth still: and more & more may it shine unto the perfect daye: that what corruptions in justice, what blemishes in religion, the infirmitie, and inconveniency of woemanhead, would not permitt to discover and discerne, the vigor, and conveniency of man sytting as king in the throne of aucthoritie; maye diligently search out, and speedylie reforme.”⁵⁴ Hooke’s remarks couple a desire for the repeal of female authority with a hope for an entirely new mode of monarchical endeavor, one that brings heretofore unenacted intents to fruition. As Christopher Highley has detailed, English officials in Ireland (such as Spenser himself) shared with particular intensity Hooke’s desire for a ruler whose policies were more direct and aggressive.⁵⁵

But as Artegall’s recall to Gloriana’s court demonstrates, such a hope for reform in 1596 remains suspended, both in terms of English politics, where the anticipation of a king’s succession only added to the internecine wrangling of Elizabeth’s court, and in terms of The Faerie Queene’s ambitions as an activist poem. Book 5’s revision of literary form might take the poem out of the realm of romance, but it cannot repeal the rule of queens, either of Elizabeth or of Gloriana. In this way Book 5 debunks the misogynist fallacy of The Faerie Queene’s earlier scenes of seduction and of wedlock. Artegall’s recall reveals that heroic expeditions are delayed not in the private female world—not in either the illicit bower or the sanctioned bridal chamber—but rather in the public world of political aspiration. And if the poem’s opposition between romance (to which that feminized private world corresponds) and masculine heroism is shown to be a false opposition, then the nostalgia for an epic form that predated romance no longer holds any attraction.

Instead, The Faerie Queene passes over the uncompleted ending of Book 5 by engaging upon yet another generic experiment. Book 6’s reformation into pastoral stands in contrast to Book 5 not only as a conspicuously anti-epic form, but also as a conspicuously and innovatively masculine anti-epic form.⁵⁶ Although Book 6 seems to accept with pleasure poetry’s suspension of experience—as does the narrative voice, which in the Proem admits itself “nigh rauisht with rare thoughts delight” in Faery land’s delightful ways (6.Pr.1)—it does so in a way untainted by the interruptive demands of feminine authority. Queen Elizabeth’s appearance in this Book is a pointed nonappearance: Colin Clout eliminates Gloriana from his configuration of the graces’ dance on the revelatory Mount Acidale, replacing her instead with “certes but a countrey lasse” (6.10.25). In contrast to The Shepheardes Calender’s April eclogue, where Colin confidendy fashioned his queen as an appropriate object for poetry, here Spenser’s poetic alter ego apologetically but firmly defines poetry as that which takes shape when female rule is out of the way.⁵⁷ Even more than splintering Elizabeth into “mirrhours more than one,” displacing her entirely from consideration leaves room for poetic accomplishment.

Not that Book 6 is therefore marked by triumphant poetic closure. The “untimely breach” of Arthur’s rent chronicle not only recurs as Calidore’s comically blundering “luckelesse breach” in Colin’s perfect vision (6.10.29), but also might be taken as the model for Book 6’s narrative, which is hardly famous for its seamless conclusions. The end of Book 6 is similarly not one of perfection, either promised or fulfilled. Like Artegall’s recall to Gloriana’s court, the Blatant Beast’s present-tense rampage at the end of Book 6 wrenches poetry from the domain of the past(oral) to the unnatural shocks of the present day, so that conclusion once again is disrupted by uncertainty—in this case, uncertainty imposed by readers more willing to slander poetry than to be melted into sweetness by it. “Ne spareth [the Beast] the gentle Poets rime, / But rends without regard of person or of time” (6.12.40). Though drastically different experiments in poetic form, Books 5 and 6 thus share a mode of inconclusion. Both books play out fantasies of freeing politics and poetry from feminine rule; both envision a newly masculine poetics. And both, in the end, acknowledge those fantasies as fantasies, enacting the futility of imagining that a male-gendered mode, either of monarchy or of poetry, will bring about the wished-for consummation.

I come to this conclusion (or to The Faerie Queene’s nonconclusion), however, with my ear cocked to Berger’s warning that what we hear in Spenser’s magnum opus as argument—as assertion, refutation, judgment, revelation, demonstration, or any other of those rhetorical certainties which we so often attribute to Spenser’s poetry—cannot be taken as “Spenser’s” or even “the poem’s” settled opinion, but rather must be viewed skeptically as one of the discourses that, like dummies at a ventriloquists’ contest, voice the competing desires that prompt their speaking. In his challenge to Paul Alpers’s thesis that Spenser’s stanzas are “modes of address by the poet to the reader,” Berger argues that “Alpers misdescribes the transaction as an empirical one between the author and actual readers, whereas I take it to be a virtual or fictive transaction, one that the poem actively represents and subtly criticizes, and therefore one that constitutes a rhetorical scene of reading from which actual readers can dissociate themselves.” Hence we can undertake “an ideological reading of The Faerie Queene as a critique of the cultural discourses it represents.”⁵⁸ Berger’s subtle argument describes The Faerie Queene as radical in ways that all its Elizabethan source materials and cultural commonplaces, rampant as they are in Spenser’s poetic field, could never countenance. I would like to make use of his insights to examine the radical critique ultimately disclosed by the generic experiment of Book 5: not a critique of attempting closure via masculinized poetic form, but rather a critique of desiring closure in poetry at all. In particular, the failures of Book 5’s final cantos unsettle the impulse toward closure that is, or at least can be, the impulse toward allegory. Allegory proposes that we can metonymically replace what is troublesome and undefinable by something that looks hermetically sealed: not sexuality, but Immoral Lust or Wedded Love; not savage massacres in Ireland, but a gratefully free Irena; not Elizabeth, but Gloriana. The problem of obtaining allegorical closure, however, is akin to the difficulties critics have had in plotting out Book 5’s structural, mythical, or moral unity. To create a transcendent order, one must repress the messy and conflicting nature of the facts or events that are transcended. Spenser in this clunkiest portion of The Faerie Queene anticipates how ballasted allegoresis of his poem can become, by showing how ballasted his own poetry can be when it succumbs to a fully allegorizing impulse. For that reason I think we should see Book 5’s historical allegory not so much as a failed experiment, but as an experiment whose failure is allowed to stand for all failures to impose univocal meanings upon complicated poems. Like the nostalgia for an unsullied genre before romance, Book 5 shows us, so too is the desire for unsullied truth based on false premises. Just as the “problem” of female authority precedes and enwraps and even motivates The Faerie Queene—and hence is not to be “solved” by backward glances to some golden age—so too are Spenserian irresolutions not to be wished away.⁵⁹

Book 5’s demonstrated failure forewarns of the dangers of excess complacency toward what critics usually take to be the real final statement of The Faerie Queene, the Mutability Cantos. Most critics describe Mutabilitie as the consummate enactment of allegorical closure. Hamilton’s edition of the poem approvingly quotes a number of these judgments, including William Blissett’s that the cantos are “a detached retrospective commentary on the poem as a whole, forming as they do a satisfactory conclusion to a foreshortened draft, a stopping place at which, after a seriatim reading, can be made a pleasing analysis of all” (p. 711).⁶⁰ But as Gordon Teskey has pointed out, Blissett’s essay also addresses the ways in which Mutabilitie, not so detached from its historical moment as it seems, in fact troubles itself again with the problematics of late Elizabethan female rule. As Teskey paraphrases Blissett, Mutabilitie undertakes “the shocking representation (especially shocking in the late 1590s) of Mutabilitie threatening Cynthia’s chair”; and Teskey adds the comment that “[c]riticism has yet to come to grips with Mutabilitie’s being not only unpublished in Spenser’s lifetime but unpublishable in Elizabeth’s.”⁶¹ Teskey goes on to suggest that Mutabilitie does not transcend political struggle, but rather exposes that struggle by means of yet another Spenserian gap. In this case, the gap is not the torn page of Arthur’s chronicle, but rather Mutabilitie’s omission of a Tudor-style myth of genealogical precedence, which we expect to be brought to bear against the titaness Mutabilitie’s blood-claim to Jove’s throne (7.7.16). Omitting that myth causes us to remember, rather than forget, the fact that Jove’s rule, like Henry VII’s inauguration of the House of Tudor, was brought about only by faction and bloodshed; and to remember, rather than forget, that the placid cycles of seasonal recurrence paraded in Mutabilitie were brought about only by Jove’s thunderbolt.⁶² Allegory’s violent begetting, so easily passed over in Mutabilitie’s lovely pageant of times, is laid much more bare in Book 5’s stark poetic reformation into historical allegory, which can be put into motion only by the “dreadfull sight” of Radigund’s headless corpse.

No wonder, then, that Mutabilitie’s last stanzas admit a powerfully subversive reading. Most readers hear the narrator’s declaration that Mutabilitie’s argument “makes me loath this state of life so tickle, / And loue of things so vaine to cast away” (7.8.1) as reaching toward the transcendence that allegory seems to offer. But Berger has given these lines an alternate cast that resists the allegorical temper: “I am loath to cast away this state of life and this love of things.”⁶³ The compounding in Mutabilitie’s final lines of Sabbath and Sabaoth—of peaceful rest and armed hosts—gives us reason to refuse what Susanne Wofford has called “figurative compulsion” in the poem, to evade allegorical conclusions for the “vain and tickle” present.⁶⁴ Elizabeth Bellamy has pointed out that these lines’ prayer to “that great Sabbaoth God” disfigures Elizabeth’s own name (Eli-sabbath, God’s rest).⁶⁵ That truncation, I would add, in turn enforces the “trunkation” of queens—Radigund’s beheading, Britomart’s abandonment—as the principle behind Mutabilitie’s downfall and hence behind eternal rest. But if apocalyptic allegorical conclusions require the grim armed forces that brought about Book 5’s historic ends, then the final downstroke of that “Sabbaoth God” to whom the narrator prays might show us that we have shaken off the powerful embrace of The Faerie Queene’s last seductive queen only to lie down with Talus, Artegall’s right-hand iron man.