Welcome back, everyone, to another edition of the Classic English Podcast, where rhyme gets its reason.  Today, we return to our discussion of Edmund Spenser, Elizabethan poet, bureaucrat, and swotty tryhard.

Last time around, we looked at Spenser’s more important lyric poetry, especially the pastoral Shepherd’s Calendar, the sonnet cycle Amoretti, and that cycle’s sort of concluding poem, Epithalamion.  You might remember that in the Shepherd’s Calendar, the shepherd Piers advised his friend to give up pastoral poetry and try his lanolin-soft hand at epic: “sing of bloody Mars, of wars, of jousts.”  Well, here is Spenser following his own advice.  This time, we’re going questing in The Faerie Queene, his great allegorical epic, in which the speaker declares, “I of wars and bloody Mars do sing.”

But before we saddle up with the knights, ladies, and monsters of that Spenser’s magnet octopus, let me once again tell you that my email is classicenglishliterature@gmail.com – feel free to drop me a line; I’d love to hear from you.  The podcast also maintains a presence on the hippest social media platforms, so follow me on those.  A five star review on your podcast app would make me weep with gratitude, and a small financial donation would make me positively wail in appreciation.  Thank you for supporting our little chats.

I’d also like to thank listener Magnus for the very thoughtful and kind email.  I’m really glad to hear from you, Magnus, and I love your ideas.  And another thank you to listener Roland for your very generous contribution to the show.  You have my deepest gratitude.  Thank you for listening and helping!

Yes, the Faerie Queene is an imposing work: over 36,000 lines in over 4000 stanzas.  One website estimates it would take an average reader some 21 hours to tackle.  So I imagine you’ve all read it through a couple of times in preparation for today’s discussion.  Please do not undeceive  me.

Any summary of the epic will tell you that the Faerie Queene is a work of allegorical romance concerning King Arthur in praise of Queen Elizabeth 1.  And, insofar as a 12 word synopsis can comprehend a poem of 312,000 words, this is true.  Obviously, there’s no way of dealing with such a vast text in an episodic survey of English literature, so I’ll be focusing primarily on the first of the poem’s six books – the most famous and the one most likely to be referenced at those fashionable vin et fromage parties you all attend with enviable regularity.  

Generally, each of the six books concerns the adventures of a particular knight, who embodies a particular virtue.  The knight faces challenges appropriate to revealing and strengthening that virtue.  So Sir Guyon of Book 2 represents temperance and is tempted by bliss and riches.  Sir Artegall of Book 5 is justice and battles against tyranny.

As you can see, the epic operates on a highly allegorical level, just like previous medieval texts such as The Owl and the Nightingale, Piers Plowman, and Everyman.  But as we saw with his lyrical poetry, Spenser is something of an ambivalent traditionalist, not content with simply amplifying established genres – he uses the literary inheritance to extend and modernize English poetry.  For example, while nominally a work of Arthurian legend, we don’t see the well-rehearsed tales from Geoffrey of Monmouth or Sir Thomas Malory.  Indeed, Arthur is quite scant of his royal presence, appearing only occasionally to really wow the crowd.  Perhaps I should note that we are in a historical period in which Arthur and his knights have receded a bit in the cultural imagination.  Spenser’s is really the only major work concerning Arthur (and, as I say, quite tangentially at that) between Malory’s Morte and the 19th century medieval revival with poets like Tennyson.  Spenser does make a point of stressing Arthur’s Welsh roots – de rigeur during the Tudor period, a family who hailed from the land of song and castles.  But his real purpose is not to reassert Arthur as the primary British cultural hero so much as to, as he says in a letter to Sir Walter Ralegh: “The generall end therefore of all the booke, is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline.” 

Sidney’s “Defence of Poesie” ringing any bells here, kids?  Should be clanging like Judy Garland’s trolley!  Yes, we are still early in the English Protestant hegemony and there is a great deal of hand-wringing about the value of poetry.  Some rather Platonic Protestants fear that poetry is deceitful, its images and symbols hiding the plain truth.  This is rather ill-disguised anti-Catholicism, suspicious of a religion that deals with ritual, myth, and symbolism.  Protestant reformer and biblical translator William Tyndale coined the pun “popetry” – something of a portmanteau of the words puppetry and popery to denote the duplicity of Rome and its exploitation of multivalent meaning.

Spenser, like Sidney, asserts that poetry can in fact effectively teach virtue, that its primary purpose is the moral perfection of humankind.  And so he takes the English Catholic allegorical tradition, enunciated by the likes of William Caxton and Sir Thomas More, and redeploys it in a Protestant and humanistic endeavor.

The other big thing we should note is Spenser’s continual melding of the medieval and modern sensibilities of poetic language, form, and versification.  You’ll note a good deal of Anglo-Saxon style alliteration in the poem, for example.  In the last episode, I noted that he consciously employed an artificially archaic form of English to establish a genuine home-grown tradition fit to rival the classical languages and their Romance offshoots. 

Actually, I think I perhaps overstated his preference for an older English – I fear I implied that he spurned non-English diction, and that is certainly not true.  There have been, from time to time, movements to purge the language of its non-Germanic influences, but Spenser wasn’t part of them.  He wasn’t looking for a purely Anglo-Saxon English.  Rather, he preferred the language as Chaucer and other Middle English writers used it, so Latinate words, for example, were copacetic in that milieu. 

And so in the Faerie Queene, too, but Spenser raises the ante a bit.  The stanza form he chooses has come to be known as the Spenserian stanza – it is nine lines long: the first eight are iambic pentameter, the ninth iambic hexameter, called an alexandrine.  The eight lines present a formal unity – of thought, effect, or action – while the ninth caps the thought or expands it.  The rhyme scheme –  ababbcbcc – essentially presents us with two alternately and interlocking rhyming quatrains with an extra line, and an extra foot, doubling as a couplet.  Note that there are then two a rhymes, three c rhymes, and 4 b rhymes.  This puts an extraordinary amount of pressure on the poet to inventively manipulate diction.  English, unlike say the Romance languages, is comparatively rhyme-poor – we have a fairly limited pool of rhyming words when stacked against other languages.  Spenser’s use of an archaic, pseudo-Chaucerian English – reintroducing Middle English noun declensions and verb conjugations – does a good deal to expand the language’s resources.  Necessary, if you’ve planned out 36,000 lines.  So not only does he accomplish a wondrous poetic feat (pun very much intended), he simultaneously asserts the vast elastic possibilities of English, promoting it as a vehicle for cultural ascendency and moral edification.

Book 1 – The Legend of the Redcrosse Knight – is as good a place to start an exploration of the poem as any.  It’s a quest story – hero must slay monster to rescue a kingdom – written in 12 sections called “cantos.”  Comes from the Latin “cantus” which means singing, so a canto is a song.  Same root gives us chant and enchant, by the way. Our hero is Redcrosse, so called because “on his breast a bloody cross he bore” and he represents the virtue of holiness. He's a young knight, new to his calling, though his armor has been worn by many before him.  The beautiful maiden Una accompanies him – she has begged this quest of him to slay a dragon that imprisons her parents and their kingdom.  Tagging along as well we have a prudent dwarf – a loyal dogsbody, who mainly frets and runs away.  He does offer a helpful recap of events at one point, though.

The companions lose their way in a storm and come upon a cave wherein the monster Error dwells.  Redcrosse defeats the beast and, continuing their travels, they come upon the hermitage where lives the evil sorcerer Archimago.  As the travellers sleep, the wizard conjures a dream from the god Morpheus – a sex dream about Una that disgusts the blue-nosed Redcrosse.  The wizard also summons a lookalike for Una – a woman named Duessa.  Subscribing to the adolescent male adage that “it’s disgusting when you do it, but it’s awesome when this hot chick does it to me,” Redcrosse succumbs to Duessa’s carnal temptations and desists from his quest, thus separating the knight from his maiden.

During this separation, Redcrosse fights “Sarazin”, that is pagan or Muslim, knights.  He and Duessa arrive at the House of Pride whose mistress Lucifera arranges for a tourney between Redcrosse and the knight Sansfoy, the prize being Duessa and Sansfoy’s shield.  You can guess who wins, since I told you this was a long story. 

Meanwhile, Una, in search of her knight, barely escapes rape by Sansloy, another scoundrel pagan.  She is rescued by – fanfare – Prince Arthur himself!  The king-in-waiting also manages to put a giant named Orgoglio out of her misery and reveals Duessa as a hideous witch!

Redcrosse, however, freed from the giant, meets the monster Despair, who nearly convinces our hero to kill himself.  He doesn’t, of course – long story, yeah?  But he’s in terrible shape.  Una, Arthur, and the dwarf discover the ravaged youth and bring him to the House of Holiness to treat his wounds.  Dame Caelia and her daughters Fidelia, Speranza, and Charissa nurse him to health and a hermit named Contemplation reveals Redcrosse’s true lineage and true name: “thou Saint George shalt call-ed be / Saint George of merry England, the sign of victory!”

Well, clever listeners will suss out the ending of our tale with that little revelation.  If Redcrosse is Saint George, then that great big dragon is dead, and the kingdom is freed.  Una and George will marry and England will go on to build the world’s largest empire, defeat fascism, and win the 1966 World Cup.  And you’d have sussed rightly, clever listener, well done.

Now, if we just left it at that, we’d have a pretty boilerplate fantasy romance.  What we have instead is pretty boilerplate allegory.  No, I exaggerate for snarky effect.  But allegory does get to be a somewhat stale genre, don’t you think?  This actually means that and they personify this other thing.  Wa, wa, wa.  But before I can talk about some other interesting things Spenser has going on, we do have to get the whole extended metaphor thing sorted.

So.  Redcrosse is Christian Holiness and Una is Truth.  The monster Error is . . . error: false belief, false teaching.  Archimago translates as “archimage” –  the great illusion – a deceiver who beguiles the senses.  Duessa is the opposite of Una, right?  Una means “one” – there’s only one truth – and Duessa kind of means two, or doubleness.  More deception stuff.  She has a great line in Canto 5: “I that do seem not I.”  Brilliant – anticipates Iago’s “I am not what I am” from Shakespeare’s Othello.  The House of Pride, like the Biblical Tower of Babel, is a metaphor for human hubris, but it too is an illusion:

A stately Palace built of squared brick, 

Which cunningly was without mortar laid, 

Whose walls were high, but nothing strong, nor thick, 

And golden foil all over them displayed, 

That purest sky with brightness they dismayed . . .

It was a goodly heap for to behold, 

And spake the praises of the workmans wit; 

But full great pittie, that so faire a mould 

 Did on so weak foundation ever sit:

 For on a sandy hill, that still did flit,

 And fall away, it mounted was full hie, 

That every breath of heaven shaked it: 

And all the hinder parts, that few could spie, 

Were ruinous and old, but painted cunningly.

Looks beautiful, but it’s a facade, it rests on weak foundations.  Lucifera, the lady of the house, obviously recalls Lucifer, the chief angel whose hubris impelled him to rebel against God.  Lucifera’s train is led by six counsellors named Idleness, Gluttony, Lechery, Avarice, Envy, and Wrath – the six deadly sins in service to Pride (the greatest deadly sin, according to Christian moral theology).  

The House of Pride is paralleled by the House of Holiness at the book’s end.  Dame Caelia (whose name means heavenly) – her daughters are the three Christian virtues: Faith (Fidelia), Hope (Speranza), and Charity (Charissa).  Attending them are seven “bead-men” (men of prayer), whose duties – such as alms-giving, comforting the sick and imprisoned, caring for widows and orphans – contrast the sins of the previous palace.  They are works of mercy.  

There is the river in Canto 7, in which Redcrosse and Duessa share a cheeky skinny-dip, but when the foolish knight drinks of the water, “ eftsoones his manly forces gan to faile / And mightie strong was turned to feeble frail.”  The lad’s strength is restored by a well in Canto 11 which “could recure, and aged long decay, renew as one that were born that very day.”  So we’ve a parallel between the enervating river and the energizing fountain.  And he’s repeatedly competing for shields.

And Despair is despair – the giving up of hope, the unforgivable sin.  Sansfoy is French for “faithless,” his brother Sansloy is “lawless.”  I didn’t mention the third stooge – Sansjoy – but, you know, “joyless.”  And of course, the Dragon is Satan, the great deceiver – the serpent that tempted Adam and Eve and corrupted humankind (oh, by the by, they are Una’s parents).  And Saint George is England!  Defeater of Evil and defender of all things good and true, a true knight to the queen of Faerie: Gloriana.  Yes, Good Queen Bess herself: “Goddess heavenly bright / Mirror of grace and majesty divine, / Great lady of the greatest isle, whose light / Like Phoebus’ lamp throughout the world doth shine.”

Uh . . . need a little lip balm there, Ed?  Lips look a bit chapped.

But some eloquent posterior-kissing goes a long way and it did earn him a life’s pension of 50 pounds a year from the queen – a not inconsiderable sum.  Rumor has it that, actually, she forgot to put the paperwork through and when reminded, told her treasurer to give the rhymester 100 pounds, but the parsimonious bureaucrat cut the figure in half.  Maybe.

Anyway, the main political point of this allegorizing is the validation of Tudor Protestantism over against the evils of Roman Catholicism. All of the villains of the piece are identified with the Romish Church (well, except for the Sans Brothers, who are explicitly Muslim – another false religion as far as Spenser and his contemporaries were concerned).  The monster Error, “half like a serpent horribly displayed / But th’other half did woman’s shape retain,” when slain by Redcrosse, 

spewed out of her filthy maw

A flood of poison horrible and black,

Full of great lumps of flesh and gobbets raw,

Which stunk so vildly, that it forced him slack

His grasping hold, and from her turn him back:

Her vomit full of books and papers was,

With loathly frogs and toads, which eyes did lacke,

And creeping sought way in the weedy grass:

Her filthy parbreake all the place defiled has.

The books and papers represent the false teachings of corrupt Catholicism – the written word.  Error’s loathsome offspring are “black as ink” to emphasize the point.  In fact, the slain dragon’s “black gory blood” in Canto 11 also seems likened to ink.

When we first meet Archimago, he tells of “Saints and Popes, and evermore / He strowd an Ave Maria after and before.”  His name, of course, refers to Catholicism’s use of icons, rituals, and symbols to dazzle the innocent believer.  The old woman of Canto 3 “day and night did pray / Upon her beads devoutly penitent / 900 Paternosters every day / And thrice 900 Aves she was wont to pray.”  The thief that robs churches for her – Kirkrapine (name means church-robber) – almost seems justified in a Robin-Hoody kind of way:

He was to weet a stout and sturdy thief,

Wont to rob Churches of their ornaments,

And poore mens boxes of their due relief,

Which given was to them for good intents;

The holy Saints of their rich vestiments

He did disrobe, when all men careless slept,

And spoiled the Priests of their habiliments,

Whiles none the holy things in safety kept;

Then he by cunning sleights in at the window crept.

This “the Church is the real thief” conceit gets echoed by the description of Covetesse in the House of Pride, who

hated all good works and virtuous deeds,

And him no lesse, that any like did vse,

And who with gracious bread the hungry feeds,

His almes for want of faith he doth accuse;

So euery good to bad he doth abuse.

Duessa wears, at one point, a

 gold and purple pall to wear,

And triple crown set on her head full hye,

And her endowed with royal majesty:

Then for to make her dreaded more of men,

And peoples hearts with awful terrour tye.

In these descriptions, Spenser chastises the Catholic Church for its worldliness, its hypocrisy, its political ambitions.  Too much, he feels, has Rome ascribed its glory to its own works, its own strength.  He makes his Protestant point explicit in the first stanza of Canto 10:

What man is he, that boasts of fleshly might,

  And vain assurance of mortality,

  Which all so soon, as it doth come to fight,

  Against spirituall foes, yields by and by,

  Or from the field most cowardly doth fly?

  Ne let the man ascribe it to his skill,

  That thorough grace hath gained victory.

  If any strength we haue, it is to ill,

But all the good is Gods, both power and eke will.

That last line, actually, is a pretty good summation of the theological point of the poem, isn’t it?  Human effort always only comes to ill – we are powerless without grace.  God only alone is good.

Which leads me to a point I’ve been thinking about concerning the protagonist, Redcrosse.  On the surface, he seems a quite typical questing hero.  Young, brash, eager, little cocky.  He will be humbled by his trials and, finally, by discovering his humility he discovers true strength.  Yes, sounds like a Sunday sermon or any number of heroes from our popular culture: Luke Skywalker, Taran Wanderer, Arthur Pendragon, probably a bunch from Marvel Comics, but I wouldn’t know personally.  Anyway, these are all versions of a heroic archetype popularized by mythologist Joseph Campbell, who based his interpretations on the work of psychologist Carl Jung.  The hero starts as an obscure individual born under unusual circumstances in some backwater, gets called to some outlandish adventure, meets a mentor who guides him, overcomes challenges, and fulfills the quest, returning to his people a more mature person.

So, in this framing, heroism is a process of fashioning.  One is not born a hero, one must struggle to become one.  And again, on the surface, Redcrosse seems to tick all these boxes.  What interests me, however, is the quirky dimension that allegory adds to this formula.  Redcrose doesn’t become something or someone new at the end of the book.  He doesn’t emerge, as from a chrysalis, utterly transformed.  He doesn’t become holiness; he always was holiness.  His story is not one of metamorphosis (such as Canto 2’s episode involving Fradubio who is changed into a tree).  Rather, it is one of manifestation, or realization literally understood.  Redcrosse’s essence is static, unchanging.  Through his quest for Una and Gloriana, he becomes who he always was.  I think it makes more sense to understand a line like “So new this new-borne knight to battell new did rise,” when Redcrosse rises again to slay the dragon, as synonymous with a line a little bit later: “his late renewed might.”  Granted, the repetitions do seem to drive the point of novelty home, but renewal seems more consistent with Redcrosse’s allegorical reification of holiness.  It always already was.

All this seems, to me, consonant with the Neoplatonic currents swirling around the poem.  Let me back up for a second.  Neoplatonism is a philosophical school emerging from late antiquity, around the 3rd century CE that sought to reconcile various philosophical and religious beliefs, including Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and a smattering of Egyptian and Eastern mysticism.  Its core concept describes a hierarchical universe with multiple levels of reality. The ultimate reality, according to Neoplatonism, is a transcendent and ineffable principle called "the One" or "the Good," the source of all existence.  From the One emanates a series of intermediate principles, such as the Intellect, which gives rise to the World Soul, sustaining the physical world, itself a reflection of higher spiritual realities.  So Neoplatonism emphasizes mystical union with the divine, advocating a process of spiritual ascent, where individuals seek to transcend their lower, material existence and attain a direct experience of the divine through contemplation, meditation, and philosophical inquiry. 

So the Faerie Queene has very strong neoplatonic elements: its hierarchical structure based on a series of analogues (the whole allegory thing).  Una is the “One”, right?  Truth with a capital T.  Redcrosse must transcend his lower existence to reach the divine.  But transcend doesn’t mean to get rid of – he must move beyond the physical and intellectual images that cloak his already pre-existing higher reality.  I suppose in our pop-psychology, we could call this self-actualization, but Spenser isn’t copping to some mere navel-gazing – he is illuminating what he believes is the human soul’s purpose in a divinely ordered chain of being.  He, in a quite orthodox way, acknowledges humanity’s fallen nature – remember Adam and Eve – and has Redcrosse confess to them his failings.  But this is potential renewal – transfiguration, if you want to be so bold – not transmutation.

At the end of what people in tweed jackets with leather elbow patches call the Mutability Cantos, we get confirmation of this thesis.  The Mutability cantos probably represent an unfinished Book 7 of the Faerie Queene and these fragments tell the tale of the Titaness Mutability (which means change or changeableness, you might recall – think mutant or mutation) – Mutability challenges Jove and all the gods, basically, for supremacy of the world.  She argues that all things are subject to change: the four elements, the four seasons, the months, days, and hours, even the planets, the gods themselves.  However, Mother Nature finds against her with this ruling:

They are not changed from their first estate,

But by their change their beings do dilate,

And turning to themselves at length again

Do work their own perfection so by fate;

Then over them change doth not rule and reign

But they rule over change, and do their states maintain.

OK, I’ll stop punching the bruise.

Perhaps it's best to end at the beginning.  The Faerie Queene is an epic, and Spenser makes sure he hits all the epic marks: it's a long narrative poem with serious intent; it has elevated diction; he is very liberal with his Homeric similes (those long comparisons characteristic of the Greek epics –Spenser likes to flex here) and he, of course, begins with the invocation of the Muse, here probably Clio, muse of history.  But he does it all weird.  He makes himself the object of the invocation.  He begins with “Lo, I the Man whose Muse whilome did mask” and humbly recognizes that “Me, all too mean, the sacred Muse areeds.”  He also calls upon Queen Bess to “raise my thoughts too humble and too vile.”  It’s his development as a man and as a poet he calls for, not necessarily the poem itself.  Right?  Homer wants to sing of Achilles' wrath, Virgil of arms and the man.  But Spenser wants what he calls his argument vouchsafed.  The proem immediately puts the individual self at the center of the poem’s project.  

OK, I punched a bit more.  Sorry.  Thanks for your time and attention, and I’ll talk to you soon.