The Hermaphrodite Canceled and Amoret Reconstrained

As the 1596 Faerie Queene moves from Book III to Book IV it revises both the stanzas originally concluding Book III and the themes affirmed by the 1590 conclusion.^[3] Not only has the triumphant reunion of Amoret and Scudamore, with which the 1590 Faerie Queene concluded, been rewritten, so that, in the 1596 version, Scudamore has left to get help by the time Britomart emerges with Amoret from the Castle of Busirane, but Britomart's liberation of Amoret seems oddly nullified as well.^[4] Amoret remains subject to all of the attitudes represented by Busirane and his pageant of Petrarchan allegories of male domination. She sees herself as Busirane sought to present her: as an object, the legitimate spoil of her apparently male rescuer. Moreover, Britomart, Amoret's erstwhile champion, now seems to be taking over from Busirane in abusing Amoret with her own imitation of male sexual aggression:

Thereto her feare was made so much the greater
    Through fine abusion of that Briton mayd:
    Who for to hide her fained sex the better,
    And maske her wounded mind, both did and sayd
    Full many things so doubtfull to be wayd,
    That well she wist not what by them to gesse,
    For other whiles to her she purpos made
    Of loue, and otherwhiles of lustfulnesse,
That much she feard his mind would grow to some excesse.
                                                                                              (4.1.7)

Busirane's Masque of Cupid attempted to blur the boundaries between male ideology and female psychology in order to violate Amoret. The comedy of mistaken identity and gender masking that opens Book IV puts sexual ideology in a new perspective as The Faerie Queene moves from an exploration of private virtues in the first three books to an exploration of public virtues in the second. The comic scene evoked at the opening of Book IV shows us what it is like for those attitudes figured allegorically in Busirane's castle—for example that sexuality is a battle and woman is the spoil—to be unexamined cultural assumptions. We view a dramatic rather than an explicitly allegorical representation of social constructs. If in Book III, Amoret was imprisoned among Petrarchan allegories, she now finds herself in a socially untenable situation. As the narrator observes:

    When her from deadly thraldome he redeemed,
    For which no seruice she too much esteemed,
    Yet dread of shame, and doubt of fowle dishonor
    Made her not yeeld so much as due she deemed.
                                                                   (4.1.8.4–7)

It is ironic that Amoret's passive resistance here maintains Britomart's bluff since in Book III Amoret suffered Busirane's enmity, "All for she Scudamore will not denay" (3.11.11.5). The chastely loving wife provokes the hostility of Busirane, whose Petrarchan art requires a lady who just says no. In Book IV, we see Amoret assuming as a social constraint what in Book III she resisted as an allegorical agon . The fundamentally inner-directed conflict over how Amoret's chastity is to be read has been transformed into a question of how she fits into a social matrix.^[5]

Even before the opening episode, the introductory stanzas reveal how much Busirane is a part of the social milieu of Book IV:

For that same vile Enchauntour  Busyran ,
    The very selfe same day that she was wedded,
    Amidst the bridale feast, whilest euery man
    Surcharg'd with wine, were heedlesse and ill hedded,
    All bent to mirth before the bride was bedded,
    Brought in that maske of loue which late was showen:
    And there the Ladie ill of friends bestedded,
    By way of sport, as oft in maskes is knowen,
Conueyed quite away to liuing wight vnknowen.
                                                                   (4.1.3)

Unless one is either very tolerant or very jaded, it registers, I think, as a shock that what was presented in Book III as a horror show provided part of the entertainment at the wedding of Scudamore and Amoret. In Book III, Britomart's second look at the pageant reveals the emptiness of Busirane's Petrarchan fictions. The second "second look," directed by Book IV at the Masque of Cupid, reveals their power and a reality of socially authorized rape more horrifying than the lurid fantasies Britomart overcomes in Book III. James Nohrnberg observes that epithalamia focusing on male sexual violence were a common feature of Elizabethan weddings (Analogy 475). That, I think, is Spenser's point. As Oscar Levant once observed of Hollywood, "When you strip away the phony tinsel, what you have left is the real tinsel." The move from a private experience of the Masque of Cupid to its function as a part of a public celebration gives us a critical perspective on Elizabethan social conventions.

The opening of Book IV calls attention to the contextualizing of the Masque of Cupid. In Book III, Busirane is said to have "pend" Amoret: imprisoned her with language. In Book IV, we see Amoret embedded in social conventions, as are we as readers. Book IV reflects critically on the force of conventions to which a society subscribes as it develops a critique of reading conceived as a solitary, context-free activity. Accordingly, Book IV directs a second look at the quest structure of Book III, which posits the homology between individual heroine and individual questing reader.