III

Tobacco enters The Faerie Queene bearing this question of mediation, posed once again in terms of Raleigh's desire for Elizabeth. The dedicatory letter to Raleigh and the proem to The Faerie Queene's third book identify Belphoebe in two ways. First, she is said to represent one aspect, or "person," of Elizabeth: "a most vertuous and beautiful Lady" as distinguished from "a most royal Queen or Empress" (V 2:168); or Elizabeth's "rare chastitee" as distinguished from "her rule" (FQ 3.proem.5). Second, Spenser claims to have fashioned her after Raleigh's "own excellent conceit of Cynthia" (V 1:168). By removing the impediment of Elizabeth's high station and presenting an Elizabeth after Raleigh's own conceit, Spenser's Belphoebe moves Elizabeth closer to Raleigh's desires in much the way Hakluyt's Virginian bride does. Tobacco

strengthens the analogy to Hakluyt. With it, Belphoebe heals Timias's spear wound41 but inflicts a love wound she cannot bring herself to cure: "But that sweet Cordiall, which can restore / A love-sick hart, she did to him envy" (FQ 3.5.50). This more desirable cordial happens to be "that dainty Rose" (51), "her fresh flowring Maidenhead" (54). Though Spenser's pathos here hardly figures in Hakluyt's passage (nor, for that matter, in Spenser's source),42 the general allegorical point is basically the same: Raleigh is dying for Elizabeth's Rose, yet she grants him another flower, "divine Tobacco," as at once a demurral and a compensation; while the pastoral landscape that supports two classical herbs and an American one, and that presents the choice between them as almost indifferent, seems to show Spenser ignoring practical distances and distinctions (as far as he might safely do so) in favor of a less formidable gap, between not classes but states of mind— Timias's "mean estate" (44) and Belphoebe's "high desert " (45; my emphasis).43

This daring treatment of Raleigh's love for Elizabeth represents a step forward, or at least a new installment, in a debate about Elizabeth that Spenser had entered with the publication of The Shepheardes Calender a decade earlier. As my previous chapters argue, The Shepheardes Calender manifests Spenser's resistance to an increasingly popular view of Elizabeth that celebrated the Virgin Queen for keeping the English island separate and pure, an "Elizium." Faced with the problem of denouncing insularism as a political ideal while retaining Elizabeth as one, Spenser transforms Eliza's Elizium into an ideal that his alter ego, Colin, once celebrated but has now, for purely private and natural reasons, forsworn: what alienates Colin from pastoral complacency is, ostensibly, only his unrequited love for the shepherd-hating Rosalind. Yet the "November" eclogue, in which Colin returns as singer, underscores the political ramifications of his new melancholy by combining Eliza as pastoral genius and Rosalind as unattainable beloved in the figure of the dead Dido; Colin forsakes complacency about pastoral England to such a degree that he now longs only for the renovated "Elisian fieldes" ("November," 179) Dido seeks in heaven. If we take the epic reference in "Dido" seriously, however (and this is not the first such reference in the Calender ), her death would also seem to mean, mysteriously enough, a gain for

empire; the Calender leaves us wondering how Colin, the self-exiled Englishman, will find a compromise "England" between pastoral and the contemptus mundi that pastoral desire ultimately generates.

Compared to this esoteric argument about sexual frustration and Elizabeth, the Faerie Queene episode is quite striking in its directness, thanks to an even more striking development at Court: the rise to power and favor of "Colin's" exact contemporary and fellow adventurer in Ireland, Raleigh, has made it easier for Spenser to represent the unobtainable beloved as Elizabeth herself. Less obvious is the way the Timias and Belphoebe episode rewrites another feature of Colin's plight. In "December" Colin laments the fact that his pastoral lore cannot alleviate his love-woe:

But ah unwise and witlesse  Colin cloute ,
That kydst the hidden kinds of many a wede:
Yet kydst not ene to cure thy sore hart roote,
Whose ranckling wound as yet does rifelye bleede.
                                                                                (91-94)

This irony about herbal cures reflects the increasing transformation of Colin's frustrated desire into contemptus mundi ; the "wede" becomes a synecdoche both for mere worldliness and for the pastoral "flowers" or poetry proportioned to that worldliness.44 But when George Peele in his Araygnement of Paris appears to imitate Spenser, here in reference to Peele's own Colin—"And whether wends yon thriveless swain, like to the stricken deer. / Seeks he Dicta-mum for his wound within our forest here" (565-66)45 —he pointedly separates Colin's frutration from the issue of Elizabeth's virginity. According to Peele, Colin despairs and finally dies because he is too worldly himself, too absorbed in his beloved to recognize the better, otherworldly worldliness embodied in the virgin Eliza, "in terris unam . . . Divam" (1230). Responding to such an interpretation of Colin's alienation, it seems, Spenser in the Timias and Belphoebe episode makes Eliza herself the purveyor of inadequate herb cures and therefore of the argument to despair.46

Spenser agrees with Peele, then, that the pastoral lover is too worldly, but he adds that the pastoral beloved is equally so: absorbing themselves in the disposition of Elizabeth's actual maidenhead and therefore reducing Elizabeth to the private person Bel-

phoebe, Raleigh and Elizabeth, argues Spenser, debase the potentiality of a queen who, rightly understood, is as little a mere body as possible, a "Mirrour of grace and Majestie divine" (FQ 1.proem.4). Belphoebe treats her rose as if it were literal: she hides it in foul weather but in fair weather allows it to be "dispred" (3.5.51). The narrator, however, makes maidenheads sound figurative: he says they reside "in gentle Ladies brest" (52), and advises his female readers that such flowers should even "crowne" their "heades" (53). As for Timias, his response to Belphoebe does not, after all, differ much from the earlier reaction of the literalizing Braggadocchio, who

                                                fild with delight
Of her sweet words, that all his sence dismaid,
And with her wondrous beautie ravisht quight,
Gan burne in filthy lust, and leaping light,
Thought in his bastard armes her to embrace.
                                                                        (2.3.42)

Though nobler than "the baser wit, whose idle thoughts alway / Are wont to cleave unto the lowly clay," the languishing Timias nevertheless fails to aspire as the "brave sprite" should "to all high desert and honour" (3.5.1). If, then, Timias's degenerate precursor Braggadocchio helps reveal his own despair to be only a more genteel version of lust, Timias's master Arthur adumbrates the higher response to Elizabeth: he loves the queen as not the private Belphoebe but the public Gloriana. What's more, Arthur experiences less of Gloriana's physicality than either Braggadocchio or Timias does of Belphoebe's, for he meets the Fairy Queen only in a dream (1.9.12-15). Yet this dream is more than a fantasy. Determinedly ambiguous—material enough to have "pressed" the grass beside Arthur, though immaterial enough to vanish Arthur's dream woman tantalizes him with just the right blend of corporeal and incorporeal inducements, of hope and despair, to keep him earthbound and yet always on the go.

Ultimately, however, not even Arthur's love proves fully separable from Braggadocchio's, for if Arthur seems less desperate than his squire, that is because he has no physically present beloved about whose body he can despair. In other words, like the reader of The Faerie Queene whose complacence Spenser expects to

shake by "vaunt[ing]" of a fairyland Spenser "no where show[s]" (2.proem. 1), Arthur escapes becoming absorbed in the queen's material person only because he "no where can her find" (2.9.7): it is the immateriality, the otherworldliness, the utopicality of both Fairyland and fairy queen that are supposed to keep both Arthur and the reader questing. By book 3, however, Arthur's inability to catch the fleeing Florimell has so aggravated his frustration about not reaching Gloriana that he begins to ride "with heavie looke and lumpish pace, that plaine / In him bewraid great grudge and maltalent" (3.4.61). The mere promise of some future consummation is no longer enough for him, and so it is that the next canto provides a more materialist version of Elizabeth—Belphoebe—in order to show us how catching her has its own problems.47

Raleigh himself articulates the pathos surrounding Elizabeth's admirers in these episodes when, in a portion of his Ocean to Scinthia (c. 1592) reminiscent of Wyatt's Tagus poem, he laments how his love for Elizabeth at once inspires and subverts his imperialist ambition:

The honor of her love, Love still devising,
Wounding my mind with contrary conceit
Transferred itself sometimes to her aspiring,
Sometime the trumpet of her thoughts' retreat;
To seek new worlds, for gold, for praise, for glory,
To try desire, to try love severed far,
When I was gone she sent out her memory
More strong than were ten thousand ships of war,
To call me back, to leave great honors' thought,
To leave my friends, my fortune, my attempt,
To leave the purpose I so long had sought
And hold both cares and comforts in contempt. (57-68)48

But the Timias and Belphoebe canto does more than reproduce Raleigh's "contrary" desire: it also offers a cure, suggested when Belphoebe first appeared in the poem. Upon Belphoebe's entrance in book 2, the narrator himself anticipates Braggadocchio's lustful absorption in her by devoting the longest blazon in the poem to her body (2.3.21-31); yet at the same time he stresses the saving insubstantiality of poetical leering when he adds, "So faire, and thousand thousand time more faire / She seemd, when she presented was to sight" (26). A climactic feature of every proem to

The Faerie Queene , this issue of Spenser's inadequacy at representing Elizabeth appears in narrative form later in book 2 when Arthur stops to admire the picture of the Fairy Queen on the shield of the knight of Temperance, Sir Guyon, and Guyon assures him that

                                if in that picture dead
        Such life ye read, and vertue in vain shew,
        What mote ye weene, if the trew lively-head
        Of that most glorious visage ye did vew?
        But if the beautie of her mind ye knew,
        That is her bountie, and imperiall powre,
        Thousand times fairer then her mortall hew,
        O how great wonder would your thoughts devoure,
And infinite desire into your spirite poure!
                                                                                        (2.9.3)

An art figured as insufficient, "dead," to its referent turns out to mimic, and therefore properly underscore, the ontological insufficiency of Elizabeth's body to her mind.

Thus, when Spenser in the proem to book 3 ostensibly laments his ability only to "shadow" (3) Elizabeth, and imagines the queen possibly "covet[ing]" to see herself "pictured" instead in the "lively colours, and right hew" (4) of Raleigh's own poetry, he already begins the critique of "Cynthian" Belphoebe that will appear later in the same book. In fact, Spenser's depiction of Raleigh's "lively" art as lulling Spenser's senses "in slomber of delight" also recalls the critique of such art that had been developed in the preceding canto, where the artful Bower of Bliss proved so sufficient to nature as to be more prodigal in its worldliness than nature itself.49 It is the pastoral art of "respondence" familiar from "Aprill" and the Error episode, in which "birdes, voyces, instruments, windes, waters, all agree" (2.12.70); and, when concerned with representing a woman in particular, it leads not to her enhancement but to her diminution, her reduction to and ultimately from her body, as when the magus Busirane forms the "characters of his art" with the "living bloud" (3.12.31) of Belphoebe's sister Amoret.

If Spenser argues, then, that his conspicuously inadequate or trifling representations of the queen are more faithful and consequently less damaging to Elizabeth's true beauty than Raleigh's

iconic verse, he does not go so far as to insist that his own poetry is wholly insubstantial; rather, he depicts it as sharing the ambiguous status that Arthur accords his dream of Gloriana. When the muse Polyhymnia in The Teares of the Muses (1591), for instance, celebrates that "true Pandora of all heavenly graces, / Divine Elisa " (578-79), she also prays that "divinest wits" will "etemize" Elizabeth with "their heavenlie writs " (581-82; my emphasis). Polyhymnia stresses, in other words, not just the spiritual import of a truly Elizabethan poetry but its materiality, the actual writings or documents that Elizabeth's poets will produce; and these writings even surpass the bodies of Elizabeth and Gloriana as bodies in their ability to make lastingly present, to "eternize," what a normal body cannot. Yet how can one distinguish such acceptable poetic materiality from the worldly substantiality Spenser repudiates? Since the "writs" Polyhymnia describes are not Edenic, as in the Bower of Bliss (FQ 2.12.52), but "heavenlie," Spenser apparently believes that it is the oxymoronic "character" of this poetry, the allegorical disparity between its signs and its referents, that both saves it from mere worldliness and qualifies it to represent the equally oxymoronic divinity of the queen.50

In the Timias and Belphoebe episode, the "divine" similitude for a queenly "Mayd full of divinities" (3.5.34) is conceived so materially as to be called a flower, or in Spenser's more oxymoronic formulation, a "soveraigne weede" (33). But this poetical herb also has specific political implications. If Raleigh's romantic attachment to the queen enables a more directly critical treatment of her "insular" virginity in this episode than Spenser could muster in The Shepheardes Calender , another aspect of Raleigh's ambition—as unavailable to Spenser at the writing of The Shepheardes Calender as the royal love affair with Raleigh—has allowed Spenser to extend his critique. For the worldly herb that allegorically figures the limitations of worldliness can now be the flower of a pastoral transcending the English island and yet still English and earthly—Virginian tobacco. Shortsighted about their relationship, Timias and Belphoebe fail to recognize that the episode's conspicuously inadequate correlative to Belphoebe's maidenhead can mean more than its present materiality, can signify Virginia as both an other-worldly reflection of "the heavenly Mayd" (3.5.43) and an actual substantiation of her "imperiall powre." What "divine tobacco," a

posy of poesy, allegorizes, in short, is the possibility of Elizabethan expansion beyond the apparent material limitations of both Elizabeth and England the mystery of a royal Virgin bearing "fruit."