Introduction

Literary critics of the 1990s face the problem, eminently predictable for more than a decade, of what to call what comes after postmodernism. Deconstructive criticism of the 1970s has taken us beyond formalism and shown us new ways of paying close attention to texts, particularly to processes of literary signification hitherto taken for granted. Criticism of the 1980s loosely labeled New Historicist has reminded us of the ways in which literary texts are both products and producers of the wider culture of which they are a part. Nevertheless, all of this theoretically conscious attention paid to literary texts has left a very uncertain sense of why a particular work of literature should matter, whether it is worth studying in any capacity other than as a symptom, significant insofar as it illustrates or confirms a given theory of language or history.

Recently, I heard a former president of the Modern Language Association allude to reading Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene as the paradigm of pointless, boring activity. My response to this, once the impulse to throw something subsided, was embarrassment for my chosen profession as I tried to imagine an analogous scene in which, for example, the president of the American Medical Association referred to treating a particular disease with equal contempt because the disease had a funny-sounding name. What is at stake, here, is not blind reverence for short, dead, canonical poets (or the AMA), but some rudimentary sense of engagement with and respect for what one does. With this book, I hope to bear witness to the proposition that reading The Faerie Queene is a worthwhile activity. I shall be drawing on theoretical work of the last twenty years—feminist, deconstructionist, and New Historicist—as well as on earlier Spenser scholarship, insofar as that work provides forms of engaged attention to the literary text. My working assumptions are, first, that the intellectual activity involved in thinking about a poem as complex as The Faerie Queene is pleasurable and worthwhile for itself but, also,

that the poem has something to say to us, even if, indeed, especially if the highly problematic nature of that "saying" is an important part of the message. The Faerie Queene has accommodated various critical approaches and inspired diverse critical responses. The one requisite, as far as I am concerned, is to recognize The Faerie Queene as the product of a powerful and idiosyncratic intelligence. Miss that and miss everything.

Whether The Faerie Queene is a poem for all time we cannot, even as we approach the second millennium, yet know. For good or ill, however, there is still considerable cultural continuity between England in the late sixteenth century and the English-speaking world in the late twentieth. Arguably, these two eras share a peculiar sense of crisis and transition. Then, as now, new philosophy calls all in doubt. And one of the fundamental projects of The Faerie Queene is to address that doubt and to explore the role of ideas and ideals in an uncertain world. In this, The Faerie Queene anticipates postmodernist concerns with destabilizing language but denies to the distrust of language the status of absolute truth. Spenser was writing in an age that understood faith but saw the beginnings of a great movement of scientific inquiry. Unlike us, who live in the decadence of an Arnoldian age of criticism, Spenser was not apt to mistake faith for theory. Truth is one and given to faith alone, but the mind can construct theories to cope with a world in flux. Spenser directs attention to the nature of linguistic signification not because it is trendy, but because it is important.

Books III and IV of The Faerie Queene address the problem of making sense of the sensual world by subjecting conventional discourses of love to critique. Spenser directs a powerful critical intelligence at the sexual ideology of his time while registering the strength of the social forces and philosophical predilections that support that ideology. The poem pursues understanding over social change, and its critique of sexual ideology is ultimately absorbed (if not co-opted) by concerns about epistemology and politics in a society that was historically patriarchal. Nevertheless, ideas have consequences, even if those consequences do not necessarily occur immediately (or bear much resemblance to anyone's intentions). The Spenserian critique of conventional sexual ideology becomes part of a cultural discourse that, several centuries later, produced feminism.^[1]

The Faerie Queene is a very long poem. Critics attempting to produce books on The Faerie Queene have adjusted their approach to ac-

commodate a poem of over thirty thousand lines.^[2] One consequence of these efforts is a distinguished tradition of studies of individual books of The Faerie Queene or studies of a limited group of books. Other critics have chosen to focus on a particular theme or motif as it appears in The Faerie Queene or to discuss the nature of Spenserian allegory in general terms. Martha Craig's groundbreaking article "The Secret Wit of Spenser's Language" has taught us the necessity of looking closely at the language of The Faerie Queene , daunting as that task may be. The rehabilitation of allegory under the influence of postmodernism has also directed attention to The Faerie Queene as a complex verbal text.^[3]

Nonetheless, most current works of Spenser criticism tend not to sustain close attention to Spenser's text for the duration of an extended argument about large units of The Faerie Queene . In contrast, this study bases larger claims about Book III and IV on a detailed and intense reading of major portions of those books, while placing interpretations of individual passages and episodes in the context of an implicit argument about how individual books function in the poem as a whole. I shall be arguing that the individual books of The Faerie Queene are in fundamental ways essays , as signaled by their subtitles, that is to say, attempts at examining a given subject.^[4] Thus, while the books of The Faerie Queene contribute severally to a coherent poetic vision, or to a poetic vision as coherent as might be achieved in the sublunary world, each individual book proceeds from a different set of intellectual assumptions in an effort to explore a different intellectual problem. Although Spenser critics have traditionally considered the shift in theme from one book to the next, the extent to which there is a programmatic shift not only in theme, but in allegorical procedure from one book to the next has largely been ignored.^[5] Many years ago, A. S. P. Woodhouse pointed out that Books I and II of The Faerie Queene presuppose different intellectual contexts—Book I places itself within the order of grace and Book II the order of nature—but little attention has been paid to this shift of framework as a consistent intellectual strategy and an organizing principle of The Faerie Queene . Each book has something of the character of a thought experiment as it focuses on a given issue and on its own processes in framing that issue. Each successive book takes up problems left in abeyance by the theoretical focus of previous books as Spenser's allegory shifts to address a new set of issues. Book I develops and explores a typological allegory in which the word of the text is

grounded in but not coterminous with the Word of God as part of its exposition of Holiness. Books III and IV address under the rubrics of Love and Friendship respectively the worldly concerns transcended by Holiness and explore how versions of conventional erotic discourse function to shape and express those concerns.

What, then, are the intellectual projects essayed in Books III and IV? They are the construction of a progressive utopian ideal and the unsentimental demonstration of what can happen to a beautiful ideal when it is subjected to a not-so-attractive social reality. Book III develops an ideal of love, of understanding, and of the relationship between individual and world figured by the Hermaphrodite image with which the original version concludes. When The Faerie Queene is continued through Book IV and beyond, the Hermaphrodite stanzas are canceled and the ideal represented by that figure is shown to be untenable in the face of conventions and institutions of Spenser's own place and time.

The ideal developed in Book III and shown under attack in Book IV represents a way of addressing the world of the senses. Books III and IV treat issues of understanding initially considered in Book I, but from a different perspective. Book I treats the question of truth from the perspective of Christian eschatology. It presents the mortal world as a sign pointing toward a higher, spiritual reality and presents faith in Christian revelation as the ideal of understanding. Book III shifts perspective from transcending to making sense of the fallen world. It does not deny the truth of revelation but rather addresses that practical concern for the here and now that, at the conclusion of Book I, moves the protective mothers of Eden to pull their children away from the dragon slain apocalyptically by Saint George. Book III develops a model of reading that allows for the uncertainty of knowledge in the fallen world, not as an expression of universal doubt, but as the logical concomitant of the understanding of faith as the evidence of things unseen, as the belief in the truth of revelation. Book I and Books III and IV participate in a coherent vision; however each is a self-contained essay that addresses its own set of concerns.

Having affirmed the truth given to faith alone in Book I, Spenser goes on to register in Books III and IV the provisional nature of temporal understanding. In those central books, dedicated to love and friendship, Spenser examines the role of desire in both moving us to function in an uncertain world and tempting us to foreclose that un-

certainty by various strategies that seek to frame knowledge in such a way as to posit total mastery of it. In these two books, Spenser focuses a critical eye, both on the conventions and presuppositions of his own culture and on the aims and limitations of his own practice by examining how the erotic discourses current in Elizabethan literature both facilitate and deform perceptions of and engagement with the world.

In Book III, Spenser develops an allegory that is the shared enterprise of writer and reader who join in the quest to make meaning in order to accommodate epistemological uncertainty in the fallen world, as he seeks to construct a reader fit to cope with this uncertainty. The languages of love become ways of talking about the relationship of self and other, and Spenser's transformation of traditional erotic discourses, represented by the concluding figure of the Hermaphrodite, becomes a way of positing creativity and the growth of knowledge as the ideal model of engagement with the outside world. The heroine Britomart's uncertain quest for Artegall, whose image she has seen in an enchanted mirror, is analogous to the reader's struggle to understand the complexities of Book III. When Britomart fashions herself into the Knight of Chastity as she risks pursuing what might be the delusive shadow of a man, the adventures of Spenser's figure provide a model for the reader, who learns the power of language to construct reality as well as to delude.

In Book IV, Spenser shifts his focus from the construction of an ideal reader to the consequences of addressing a preexisting interpretive community as he shows how the ideal of creative sexual harmony figured by the Hermaphrodite cannot be sustained in a culture of sexual hierarchy. Spenser cancels the Hermaphrodite stanzas as a signal that the erotic ideal embodied in the Hermaphrodite cannot be readily sustained in a culture antagonistic to that ideal. Whereas in Book III, Spenser examines the development of new ideas in a revision of the epistemology of recollection articulated in Plato's Meno and Phaedo , in Book IV he explores the generation of the text (and of social institutions) and the pressure of what has already been written on the generation of ideas. For this reason, Spenser casts Book IV as the continuation of Chaucer's "Squire's Tale": Spenser inserts his own text self-consciously into one by the earlier poet. He emphasizes issues of narratology as he shows the progress of his own narrative to be a paradoxical attempt to get back to lost precursor texts and to

reunite the lovers whose union was given in the canceled conclusion of the first installment of The Faerie Queene . At the same time, Spenser shows the process of narrative deferral—that is, the narrative's apparent movement away from itself and its own origin—to be culturally grounded rather than, as modern theorists such as Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida would have it, the inescapable condition of language. Book IV explores how the retrospective stance, the longing for and emphasis on origins figured mythologically by the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, is implicated in the sexual politics of the male point of view, which reduces the female other to an object and occasion for male competition and camaraderie (an issue discussed in various ways by Rena Girard, Luce Irigaray, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick). Moreover, Spenser explores how narrative complications can proceed from and conceal the fundamentally ideological commitment to the notion of sameness, which gives privilege to the masculine over the otherness of the female. Specifically I shall argue that Book IV, nominally the book of friendship, provides a critique of the notion of friendship as the mark of sameness by revealing the sexual politics involved in such a notion.

The first three chapters of this study are devoted to Book III; the last five chapters treat Book IV. Chapter 1 considers the adaptation of quest-romance narrative to construct an epistemological model of limited, temporal knowledge. Book III shows the transformation of Britomart from a love-sick girl into the Knight of Chastity as she pursues a lover she has never met as a paradigm of coping with the uncertainty of the fallen world. The heroine's forward-looking quest presents knowledge as an evolutionary process in which the truth is always more fully but never completely known. This chapter considers Spenser's use of the erotic as an intellectual model that allows him to explore poetic and epistemological issues. In Book III, the sexual relation becomes a model for more general relationships between an individual and what is Out There. Spenser revises and transforms conventional discourses of love, particularly those that figure love as a hunt, in order to explore the problem of achieving some sort of critical perspective on and understanding of a given system when one is part of that system: the universal problem of addressing the fallen world from within the fallen world rather than sub specie aeternitatis. The shift in the basis of Spenser's allegory from the typological evocation of revealed truth (figured by the betrothal of the Redcrosse

Knight to Una) to the pursuit of temporal understanding (figured by Britomart's quest) marks the distinction between faith and theory. Redcrosse is initially parted from Una when he believes the vision of Una's adultery created by Archimago's artifice. He trusts the evidence of his senses over his faith in his lady. The standards of truth and falsehood under which Redcrosse operates are clearly defined in this episode. Truth is the evidence of things unseen, known to faith alone, and falsehood is the illusion received through the senses. Redcrosse and the reader learn to understand the fallen world as a series of signs that point typologically to spiritual truth. The errancy of the Redcrosse Knight's adventures, which proceeds from his initial error in doubting Una, achieves closure insofar as it assumes the pattern of sin and redemption. Britomart's uncertain vision of Artegall, which impels her on her quest, contrasts explicitly with Redcrosse's false vision of Una. Her belief that the image she has seen in Merlin's mirror represents a real knight is provisional. She pursues Artegall without being certain she is not chasing after an illusion, the creation of her own imagination. She has an emotional stake in the object of her quest, but no guarantees of its existence. The truth of her vision is theoretical in terms that would be codified by seventeenth century science as something subject to confirmation. The pattern of her quest, as she pursues her object without prior assurance about what she pursues, is a theoretical model of understanding that contrasts with but does not contradict the spiritual quest after final things enacted by the Redcrosse Knight.

The second chapter focuses specifically on the theme of risk as the concomitant to the epistemology of uncertainty. Chapter 1 shows how Britomart's quest after a man she has seen only in a supernatural vision addresses the problem of epistemological certainty by positing uncertainty as the condition of mortal knowledge. Britomart risks pursuing what is merely an erotic fantasy as she risks physical dangers on her journey. Her wounding, first by Gardante and then by Busirane, represents graphically her spiritual and emotional vulnerability as well as her psychic engagement with the objects of her pursuit. Chapter 2 takes up the theme of risk and the motif of wounding as these are focused in variations of the myth of Adonis. Britomart's quest appears as a creative alternative to the literary convention of love as a chase. The Gardens of Adonis and Timias' wounding by the boar-spear-carrying forester direct attention to the

discursive character of erotic metaphor. On the one hand, these episodes insist on the corporeal aspect of erotic desire. On the other, they emphasize the function of discursive structures in enabling or deforming desire. These episodes take Spenser's exploration of risk to a higher level of abstraction by showing how the choice of linguistic terms itself participates in the calculus of risk and benefit.

Chapter 3 examines the Hermaphrodite as a complex image of an ideal romantic love that supplies an alternative to erotic desire represented by the conventional motif of the hunt. The Hermaphrodite figures androgynous reversals of gender roles as a substitute for the fruitless reversals of pursuer and pursued that characterize the erotic chase.^[6] The figure of the Hermaphrodite concludes Book III in 1590 and marks Britomart's victory over Busirane, a provisional but not final conclusion to her adventures as the Knight of Chastity. The Ovidian myth of the Hermaphrodite functions as an important subtext of Book III as it examines issues of closure and certainty central to Britomart's quest and to the open-ended prospective orientation represented in that quest. The myth treats the complex interplay of Eros, the body, and linguistic expression crucial to Spenser's construction of an alternative discourse of love.

Chapter 4 treats the cancellation of the Hermaphrodite stanzas in 1596 as the focus of Spenser's shift from the construction of an ideal of creative love and understanding to a critical exploration of the cultural forces that frustrate that ideal. Those forces are specifically identified as the desire for absolute security and an ideology of sexual hierarchy designed to provide guarantees of security and control. As The Faerie Queene moves from Book III to Book IV the myth of the Hermaphrodite is replaced by the story of Orpheus and Eurydice as a subtext. The change in subtext reflects a shift in theoretical orientation from a forward-looking emphasis on making sense of things, to the assertion of totalizing control represented by the retrospective gaze in the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.^[7] Similarly, the emphasis in Book III on an open-ended process of finding becomes in Book IV an obsessive concern with a closed circuit of winning and losing, as Scudamore's Orpheus-like quest for Amoret emphasizes winning the lady over finding her. Chapter 4 shows how strategies that seek to assert control over the sexual relation are strategies that ultimately foreclose the satisfaction of desire. In moving its focus from an ideal to how that ideal is thwarted, Book IV

shifts attention from the act of reading to the question of textuality. Chapter 4 considers this shift from the Book III construction of ideals as an education in reading to the Book IV examination of institutional force as it is codified textually.

Chapters 5 and 6 concern the joust as a paradigmatic institution. In Book IV recurrent examples of organized combat, the joust between Cambel and Triamond, Satyrane's tournament, the single combat between Britomart and Artegall, the combats by which Scudamore wins Amoret, and many lesser clashes between knights over a lady, become the vehicle for Spenser's exploration of the nature of institutional power. These jousts give concrete form to the binary of winning and losing that in Book IV replaces the open-ended, prospective structure of Book III. Chapter 5 considers the combat between the eponymous heroes Cambel and Triamond as it reflects critically on the apparent authority of social and linguistic constructs. The combat is initially presented as an etiological fable about the development of institutional order: the joust is instituted by Cambel as a means of directing the passions of his sisters's suitors into manageable outlets. As the episode proceeds, however, we see a reversal. While the story of the joust first appears to offer an explanatory gesture, a meditation on the nature of institutional order cast as a narrative of origins, what finally emerges is an exploration of the nature of narrative cast as a combat between its conflicting components. The combat of Cambel and Triamond reflects ironically on the project of seeking guarantees from social and textual structures by showing how all structure is provisional.

Chapter 6 considers the erotic symbolism of the joust as it focuses on Satyrane's tournament and the subsequent single combat between Britomart and Artegall. This chapter examines the sexual politics of the joust as a structure of order. While competition between males is ostensibly for the purpose of winning a lady, the joust depends on the lady's remaining aloof and untouched so that the two knights can continue a relationship, the fundamental purpose of which is their own mutual self-assurance and self-definition. In Book IV, the sexual politics of the joust reflect critically on broader issues of representation. As the joust is construed in Book IV, the lady's chastity is appropriated as part of a structure designed to ensure the knights' self-definition. The apparent sexual relationship between knight and lady is something of a red herring, a nominal relationship

the fundamental purpose of which is to occasion the mutual definition of two knights. The joust engages a relationship of male and female only by process of specious extension from a relationship between men. Moreover, the joust is emblematic of broader strategies of extending structures beyond what they can encompass with certainty in an attempt to assert specious control of what is not totally amenable to control. The joust depends on the binary of winning and losing to ensure coherence. The tautology that one party wins if the other loses makes the joust a signifying structure that is necessarily true: the winning knight is the winner by definition. The fruitless proliferation of tournaments and jousts in Book IV tacitly criticizes the mind-set that expects certainty in all things because one can get it in some things.^[8] In focusing on the erotic aspect of the joust, Chapter 6 treats Spenser's critique of reductive attitudes toward sexuality. In Book IV, Spenser shows the reduction of the complex virtue of chastity to a fetishlike prize for the triumphant male as part of a larger cultural obsession with security.

The single combat between Britomart and Artegall examines the joust structure from a different perspective. Their private battle presents the relationship between the erotic and the discursive in more sympathetic terms. The episode shows the complex interplay between human emotion and the intellectual structures through which emotions are expressed and understood. At the same time, the episode examines critically the Sidnean version of mimesis, which posits a straightforward, morally charged relationship between textual representations and human behavior. The combat of Britomart and Artegall shows discursive processes to be much more complex than the formation of role models.

Chapter 7 focuses more narrowly on Spenser's critique of Sidnean mimesis as that critique is reflected in the Lust episode. The grotesque representation of sexuality in the allegorical figure of Lust strains the Sidnean "role model" model of moral fiction so as to reveal its limitations. At the same time, the episode includes an allegorical representation of Elizabeth in the figure of Belphoebe. Belphoebe's defeat of Lust provides a model for the transaction of reader and text when the reader has genuine authority.

Although Book IV largely functions as a critique of strategies of literary closure that seek to fix meaning, its conclusion, with the marriage of Thames and Medway, undermines the self-critical stance of

Book IV by showing how limited an ideal of closure and totalizing control seems when compared to a poetic vision of universal fluidity and limitless plenitude. The final chapter of this book considers the conclusion of Book IV, both the set-piece marriage of Thames and Medway and the narrative framework for the river marriage in the reunion of Florimell and Marinell. The river marriage provides a model in which the text and its referents are both partial unfoldings of a fluid whole that escapes being fully circumscribed and fully known. And the story of Florimell and Marinell—by showing the practical advantage of eschewing closure—reflects with gentle irony on the repudiation of closure as a principle in the marriage of Thames and Medway. Florimell and Marinell are brought together through a series of improvisations and spur-of-the-moment shifts in theoretical commitment that recalls Britomart's improvisatory self-fashioning in Book III. This reassertion, at the conclusion of Book IV, of the value of improvisatory change appears, not as challenge from within to dominant ideology and discourse, but as a minority report, a vision of a better alternative.

The marriage of Thames and Medway is triumphantly Spenserian in its celebration of going with the flow. Books III and IV manifest an intellectual flexibility and exuberance and a joy in the protean as well as an uncompromising sense of how many ways the mortal world falls short of its most beautiful ideals.