1. "Of custom, and not easily changing an accepted law," in The Complete Essays of Montaigne , trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 79, 83.

2. I have taken the last phrase from The Essays of Montaigne , trans. John Florio, 3 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 1:112. The French text is Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), 115.

3. Plato, "Gorgias," trans. W. D. Woodhead, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato , ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series LXXI (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 266-267.

4. See Jean Daniélou, Sacramentum Futuri: Études sur les origines de la typologie biblique (Paris: Beauchesne, 1950), 115.

5. Readers trained in Chartrian poetics—the Platonic notion that life is an intellectual pilgrimage of the soul—were accustomed to seek hidden truth. See Donald Kelly, The Art of Medieval French Romance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 63. A prominent example of moral bewilderment based on this notion occurs in the vulgate Quest of the Holy Grail when Gawain encounters the evil customs of the Castle of Maidens. Here the narrative resolution takes the form of an explanation by a hermit that the seven brothers who maintain the foul custom represent the seven deadly sins, the castle represents hell, and the maidens are to be understood as "the souls of the just that were undeservedly imprisoned there before the passion of Jesus Christ" ( Grail 79). The problem of knowing how to behave ill an earthly as opposed to a spiritual context, the great theme of the Grail story, emerges from the clash between Gawain's martial values, which lead him to defeat the seven knights, and the surprising explanation of the hermit, based on an opposing, spiritual set of values, that by killing the seven brothers Gawain prevented them from doing penance for their wicked custom.

6. The Beaurepaire episode begins at line 1699. The later prose Lancelot also makes marriage a means to real estate. In that story, the custom of the castle of Estroite Marche ("la droiture del chastel et encontre les coustumes," L 8:277) derives from the will of the local people, who have told their lord that he has waited too long to marry off his daughter. They decree that no knight may spend the night at the castle unless he jousts the next day and swears always to be the enemy of anyone who attacks Estroite Marche. Hector therefore must fight Marcanors, who works for the King of the Hundred Knights and every day arrives at the castle's bridge to joust. As a representative of King Arthur's royal power, which reaches into and stabilizes the countryside, Hector satisfied the "borgois de ceste vile" ( L 8:279) by defeating Marcanors and arranging a marriage for the lord's daughter. Compare the cyclic version in Lancelot ("Que jamais chevalier n'entrast en cest castel qu'il ne jeust une nuit en ma maison et demorast l'endemain jusc'a miedi en l'aide de la vile," L 8:280) to the noncyclic version in Lancelot do Lac ("Et il me distrent que ja mais chevaliers n'antrast an cest chastel qui ne geüst une nuit an [ma] maison[et] qui ne d[em]orast l'andemain anjusque au midi an l'aide de la vile. Et lo jor qu'il s'an devroit aler, ainz qu'il aüst les armes, li covanroit jurer sor sainz que a tozjorz seroit nuisanz et annemis a toz ces qui guerroieroient lo Chastel de l'Estroite Voie—issi a non li chastiaus,'' L2 447).

A similar situation occurs in Yvain , where a woman maintains the Custom of the Boiling Spring to select a husband and lord for her estate. Because Yvain has won her he must decline the hand of the lord's daughter at the Castle of Most Ill Adventure.

7. Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 115-116. Donald Maddox points out that Chrétien's "preoccupation" with customs "precedes and anticipates the development of customals" such as the Summa de legibus Normanniae (1235-38) or the Coutumes de Beauvaisis of 1283 ( The Arthurian Romances of Chrétien de Troyes [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 139 and 165). In his study of Chrétien's romances, Maddox treats many scenes and issues (contracts, community, methods of adjudication, rituals) that the present study can only suggest. He concludes that "the Arthurian romance unveils a world ill regulated by its customs, chronically prone to crisis, and repeatedly destabilized in the absence of effective upholders of its institutions" ( The Arthurian Romances of Chrétien de Troyes , 119).

8. Roger Sherman Loomis traces the bastons cornus (horned staves) of the two champions to the Coutumier de Normandie (1194-1223), the Assises de Jérusalem , the Coutumier d'Amiens , and another thirteenth-century "Norman-French compilation which goes under the name of Britton," concluding that their equipment is based on "the judicial practices of Christendom from Acre to England" but that "it would have been contrary to custom for two champions to fight on one side." To this he adds, seriously, "nor would the intervention of the lion have been tolerated." See Arthurian Tradition and Chrétien de Troyes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 323-325.

9. Arthur is torn between his need to uphold the Custom of the White Stag, which he inherited from his father, and his realization that dissension will rend his court if he must choose the most beautiful woman to kiss as the custom requires.

Arthur's custom exemplifies the first of three kinds of customs that Erich Köhler identifies in Chrétien's romances, since it is both the basis of his rule and a constraint on it. From a political and sociological point of view, Arthur provides an outlet for the idle and dangerous energies of his knights. As a figure of central authority, the king has as much obligation to provide adventures as he does to give gifts to maintain the social order. The second type of custom in Chrétien's romances occurs where someone has misappropriated a custom for strictly personal benefit, creating a dissonance between the interests of the indi-

vidual and those of the community as represented by an Arthurian knight. This type describes the "custom" of defending a fountain that begins Erec and Enide , where the device allows a widow with property to be integrated with the main social group. A third type of custom usually takes place at what Maddox calls a "remote locus," where a villain has arbitrarily instituted a foul custom which the hero undoes in some great terminal adventure, as in the "Joy of the Court," where Erec reestablishes order and harmony by excelling at battle and thereby earning the right to abolish a custom which no one could modify because it is based on the absolute imperative of the single combat. See Köhler, "Le rô1e de la 'coutume' dans les romans de Chrétiens de Troyes," Romania 81 (1960): 386-397, and Maddox, The Arthurian Romances , 35ff.

10. Maddox, The Arthurian Romances , 8.

11. Arthur Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perception of the Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance England (Durham: Duke University Press, 1979), 229.

12. The award is regulated by the composition made between the prior "and the bailiffs and the commonality of the said city of old time" ( English Historical Documents: 1327-1485 , ed. A. R. Meyers [New York: Oxford University Press, 1969], 565).

13. According to Marc Bloch, customs could be a source both of continuity and of constraint because there could be bad customs : "In fact, the legal documents quite frequently use these words, but almost invariably they are applied to rules actually or supposedly of recent origin—'those detestable innovations,' 'those unheard-of exactions,' denounced by so many monastic texts. A custom, in other words, might seem especially to deserve condemnation when it was too new. Whether it was a question of Church reform or of a lawsuit between two neighbouring lords, the prestige of the past could scarcely be contested save by setting against it a past more venerable still" ( Feudal Society [1940; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961], 88).

14. "Sanz faille cele costume que li jaianz i establi i fu puis trop longuement tenue" ( T 456.30).

15. "A savez vos por quoi je ai ensi establie ceste costume? Por ce que je veil que vox avez des ores mesa seignor le meillor chevalier que aventure aportera ceste part, et que vos aiez a dame la plus bele que aventure vox i envoiera" ( T 456.51).

16. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 113.

17. J. G. A. Pocock makes this point in The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 159.

18. The English translation is that found in Sir Thomas More, Utopia , trans. and ed. Robert M. Adams (New York: Norton, 1975), 10. For the Latin text, see The Complete Works of St. Thomas More (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), IV: 58-59 ("haec nostris, inquiunt, placuere maioribus, quorum prudentiam utinam nos aequaremus").

19. Thomas Wilson, The Rule of Reason Conteinying the atone of Logique , ed. Richard Sprague (Northridge, Calif.: San Fernando Valley State College, 1972), 199.

20. "Hoc veritatis fundamentum, non consuetudinis abusum sequor" (Peter Ramus, Arguments in Rhetoric Against Quintilian [1549], trans. Carole Newlands [DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986], 99 and 179, including the Latin text).

21. Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 237.

22. See The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643) and the note on custom in Merritt Hughes, ed., John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York: Odyssey, 1957), 696-697.

23. Thomas Wilson reproaches Catholicism for promoting worship "not in spirite, but in Copes, in Candlesticks, in Belles, in Tapers, and in Censers, in Crosses, and many good morowes else," in The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), fol. 19, or the edition of G. H. Mair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), 33. Russell H. Wagner rules that because Wilson did not revise his text, citations should be to the 1553 edition, not to the 1560 reprint by Mair ("The Text and Editions of Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique," MLN 44 [1929]: 421 - 428). The difference is slight.

24. Cicero remarks, "Consuetudine autem ius esse putatur id quod voluntate omnium sine lege vetustas comprobarit" ("Custom law is thought to be that which lapse of time has approved by the common consent of all without the sanction of statute," De Inventione , The Loeb Classical Library [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960], 2.22.67).

25. Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique , fol. 19; Mair's edition, 33. I have slightly modernized the spelling.

26. J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law , 36, presumably citing Sir Edward Coke.

27. Alan Harding, A Social History of English Law (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1973), 217.

28. See William C. Dowling, Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to "The Political Unconscious " (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 129. I am greatedly indebted to Bill Dowling, in person and in prose, for helping me shape this introduction.

29. Bacon defines the idols in Novum Organum , the second book of his Great Instauration . See The Works of Francis Bacon , 3 vols. (Philadelphia: M. Murphy, 1876), 1:45-47 (essay) and 3:347-353 (idol of the theater).

30. Pascal, Pensées , 274.

31. For Samuel Daniel's Defense of Rime (1603), see Hyder E. Rollins and Herschel Baker, The Renaissance in England (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Company, 1954), 657. Daniel published his Defense to promote the Gothic "neochivalric mode that had dominated Elizabethan court pageantry from the late 1570s on" as the proper "custom" of England to contrast the imperial "Roman manner" of the new monarch, King James, whom he regarded as a royal intruder from Scotland. See Richard Helgerson, "Barbarous Tongues: The Ideology of Poetic Form in Renaissance England," in The Historical Renaissance , ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

32. Wesley Trimpi, Muses of One Mind (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 343 n.

33. Aristotle, Poetics , trans. Gerald E Else (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), 48 (1455 ^b 1-15).

34. Trimpi, Muses , 308.

35. Ibid., 343.

36. I have not been concerned in this study with the castle of knowledge or perseverance or the castle as an image of the soul or the besieged female body—each a well-known topic of Renaissance scholarship. I have sought, instead, a process of social adjustment that is often disconcerting, imprecise, and uncertain. The practical and social nature of the custom of the castle distinguishes it from (although it has its roots in) the theme of private hospitality and that court hospitality that surrounds a festival, studied by Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner in Narrative Invention in Twelfth-Century French Romance: The Convention of Hospitality (1160-1200) (Lexington: French Forum, 1980). For a different but related analysis, see Roberta Douglas Cornelius, The Figurative Castle: A Study in the Medieval Allegory, of the Edifice with Especial Reference to Religious Writings (Bryn Mawr, Penn.: n.p., 1930); G. R. Kernodle, From Art to Theater (Chicago: Uni-

versity of Chicago Press, 1944); Don E. Wayne, Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the Poetics of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); and Thomas M. Greene, Besieging the Castle of Ladies , Occasional Papers, no. 4 (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995). Prof. Greene's seminar on Ritual and Ceremony, held at the Newberry Library in 1988, encouraged me to pursue the topic of this book.

1. "Li tost le non de pucele" (448.13). I cite the prose Tristan from the edition of Renée Curtis, giving paragraph and line numbers. For this study her text is a reasonable approximation of what Malory had before him, although work in progress by Michael Salda promises new light on Malory's sources. When referring to the French source, I use the spelling Tristan and Iseult and Galehaut; for Malory, I use Tristram and Isode and Galahalt. Translations from the prose Tristan are my own, except where they appear in Curtis's Romance of Tristan , an abridgement of the prose Tristan . For details, see the Bibliographical Note.

2. I have taken the translation of this passage from The Romance of Tristan , trans. Renée Curtis, Oxford World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 88-89.

3. "Two enchanters, two ghosts, two ferlies are always half as impressive as one" (C. S. Lewis, "The English Prose Morte, " in Essays on Malory [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963], 7-28, 12).

4. On my use of Vinaver's second edition, see the review article by Michael Salda, Chaucer Yearbook 1 (1992): 264-271, which authorizes retention of the 1973 text despite new editions. I generally have modernized Malory's language in the interests of readability, basing my text on Le Morte D'Arthur , ed. Janet Cowen, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), which I have silently emended in many places. Some citations are from Vinaver's edition.

5. Emmanuèle Baumgartner, Le "Tristan en prose " (Geneva: Droz, 1975), 169.

6. J. R. Lander reveals that "taxation returns made in 1436 list 51 lay peers, 183 greater knights, 750 lesser knights, 1200 esquires, 1600 men with incomes of £10 to £19 a year from land and 3400 between £5 and £9 that is on the fringe between yeomen and gentlemen" ( Conflict and Stability in Fifteenth-Century England [London: Hutchinson University Library, 1969], 173).

7. English Historical Documents: 1327-1485 , 410.

8. Sir John Fortescue, A Learned Commendation of the Politique Laws of England , trans. Robert Mulcaster (1573), 26. I have modernized the spelling of the translation by Spenser's teacher. This edition includes the Latin text.

9. The following discussion is based on Fritz Kern's classic study, Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages (1914; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), 149-180.

10. Kern, Kingship , 179.

11. These borough customs—perpetual succession, legal power to hold lands—often "secured by the terms of a written document," were closely entangled with merchant law. See Mary Bateson, Borough Customs , Selden Society, vol. 18 (London: Bernard Guaritch, 1904), xiv. The rights of towns particularly characterized Irish affairs: the Dublin customal was copied by Waterford (Bate-son, Borough Customs , xxiv). The ruling class of the towns had often purchased its privileges, and were at odds with growing craft guilds. See English Historical Documents: 1327-1485 , 391. Thomas More edited the customal of the Cinque Ports (Bateson, Borough Customs , xxii).

12. F. W. Maitland comments, "We ought to carry our thoughts back to a time when England was full of private prisons—the prisons of lords who claimed jurisdiction by royal grant or by prescription. At the suit of the imprisoned subject the king would send his writ to the keeper of the gaol, bidding him have the body of that subject before the king's court, to undergo and receive what that court should award" ( The Constitutional History of England [Cambridge: At the University Press, 1948], 271).

13. Beverly Kennedy, Knighthood in the Morte Darthur , Arthurian Studies XI (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985), 159-160.

14. Elizabeth Pochoda, Arthurian Propaganda (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), especially chapter 2.

15. A useful introduction on these matters is Alan Harding's A Social History of English Law .

16. Edward IV's years of rule (1461-1470, 1471-1483) coincided with Malory's composition of the Morte Darthur : Malory presumably worked during the 1460s; William Caxton printed the manuscript in 1485.

17. Lander, Conflict and Stability in Fifteenth-Century England , 102.

18. Bloch, Feudal Society , 113.

19. Ibid.

20. See, for example, Malory's Originality , ed. R. M. Lumiansky (Baltimore:

The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964). Other critics and a bibliography can be found in Aspects of Malory , ed. Toshiyuki Takamiya and Derek Brewer, Arthurian Studies I (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1981) and Studies in Malory , ed. James W. Spisak (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985).

21. The motif can also be at Dolorous Guard, one of the most important sources of the Weeping Castle, which Lancelot disenchants to prove himself worthy of Guenevere. In the prose Lancelot , the confusion of tasks at Dolorous Guard corresponds to Lancelot's unsureness in the ways of love. The young hero learns his name and lineage after he disenchants the castle and overcomes one of the many customs that replay Chrétien's cart episode and the custom of Gorre, which traps Arthur's subjects who enter the foreign realm in Chrétien's Chevalier de la charrete . The point of Dolorous Guard seems to be that Lancelot's royal birth and prowess qualify him for the love of the queen that he has felt from the time she knighted him.

This type of love allegory based on enigmatic, almost elliptical analogy shadows the custom of the castle topos from Chrétien to Spenser. When the author of the first part of the prose Tristan , who identifies himself as Luce of the Castle of Gail (or Gat) near Salisbury, proposed to integrate Tristan into the world of the Round Table, he drew on the Arthurian convention of the custom of the castle to create a dense network of personal relations, themes, duplications, enigmas, analogies, and etiologies. The author of the prose Tristan learned to concentrate themes—love, friendship, cultural otherness—in a single, symbolic episode, using duplication and analogy to create a mise-en-abîme after the lovers first make love on board ship. Later, after his marriage to Iseult of the White Hands, Tristan encounters another land of confinement. He drifts, asleep, with the second Iseult and her brother Kahedin in a small boat to the Servage, a land of harsh ways controlled by Nabon le Noire. Later still, when Tristan exchanges his excessive devotion to Iseult for life among Arthur's adventurers, he and his companion Dynadans face a foul custom that requires that they joust to establish their right to hospitality. In stark contrast to his earlier confinements, the errant knight, now less encumbered by the curse of his passion for Iseult, resolves the issue simply by walking away from the castle, unconfined by its "custom" ( T2 2:124ff.; cf. MD 9.23: one of the epigraphs of this book). If there is an uncertain correspondence in details, nonetheless the stories reveal a general pattern wherein key Arthurian characters face evil customs whenever the lovers' fortune changes.

22. Larry Benson, Malory's " Morte Darthur " (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 70. Benson also analyzes Gareth's struggle against the Red Knight, which may be compared to Chrétien's "Joi de la cort" episode at the end of Erec et Enide ( Malory's " Morte Darthur ," 93, citing Vinaver, Works of Sir Thomas Malory , 1428). Benson finds a Bildungsroman pattern: "Malory introduces the proof-of-knighthood theme, which requires, after a preliminary bat-de (here the whole Red Knight adventure), success in a tournament, then a quest in which an evil custom is abolished (and usually prisoners are freed and some enemy of Arthur's is punished), and finally the jousting of the hero, unrecognized, with some of Arthur's knights" ( Malory's "Morte Darthur,'' 105). But we need to look at the episode from the perspective of the Red Knight, who keeps the custom thirty winters, not just Gareth, who undoes it.

23. John Ladd, "Custom," in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967).

24. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 193.

25. John Ladd, The Structure of a Moral Code: A Philosophical Analysis of Ethical Discourse Applied to the Ethics of the Navaho Indians (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 256.

26. Ibid., 257.

27. Ibid., 269.

28. Caxton substituted "destroy" for Malory's "distress," making it seem as if Tristram already knows that he must fight Sir Breunor to the death. Malory's original word suggests that Tristram is only reacting to his imprisonment. Either way, Tristram expects to find good customs at a caste.

29. Paul Zumthor invented the term mouvance to describe the practice that followed from the presumption that the text was subject to critical review and clarification, to new intentions and a new audience. "Scribal adaptation is a fact of medieval writing," and nowhere more so than in the vast compilation known as the prose Tristan , the most important—because the most direct—source of the convention for Malory and later writers. See Donald Kelly, The Art of Medieval French Romance , 146.

Scholars date the prose Tristan from 1225-1230, but its mouvance carries it along from at least another century. We read the work as unsure of its provenance as Malory and Spenser were when they encountered it. Perhaps it suffices that, like Malory, we know the story was written in French during the Middle

Ages and that it refers to other French stories, particularly the prose Lancelot .

The Lancelot is itself of uncertain origin, but it served as a source for scenarios involving customs and castles, including the "male costume" of Morgan's Val Sans Retour ( L 1:277), Lancelot's disenchantment of the "malvaises coustumes" of Dolorouse Garde ( L 7:312), Dolorouse Chartre (where Gawain is lured by a vavasor of Brandon des Isles, who controls Dolorouse Garde, L 7:353), and at least four castles which involve problems of women: two adventures of Gawain's cousin Galescalain, the duke of Clarence, first against the "doleroses costumes" at Pintaduel ( L 1:228) and second, his attempt to enter Escalon le Tenebros, where darkness has descended following the rape of a woman in a monastery ( L 1:232). At Estroite Marche, Hector fights Marganorre (the name Ariosto used) and the people legislate the custom of drafting strangers because the lord has no son to inherit his estate ( L 8:279). Perhaps the most important scene, because it anticipates the joust and beauty contest motifs of the Weeping Castle, involves Sir Hector's battle against Persidés, husband of Helen sans per, after he is brought to her aid by her sister. He is higher class than she and his family will not accept her. She claims she is more beautiful than he is strong, so he locks her in a tower and is not allowed to leave until Sir Persidés meets someone stronger or a more beautiful woman arrives ( L 8:397-406).

The prose Tristan fragments and mirrors these scenes, as Tristan's main goal is to imitate Lancelot, the world's greatest knight and lover. Tristan comes to reside at Lancelot's castle of Joyous Guard (the former Dolorous Guard), when he and Iseult match the fame of Lancelot and Guenevere (the point where Malory leaves his story).

30. A "descriptive ethics" relies on an analysis of an informant's thinking as one means for overcoming an ethnocentric view of someone else's social customs. It is similar to descriptive linguistics, which analyzes "how people actually talk, rather than setting up norms or prescriptions for the way they ought to talk." Its purpose is to determine what acts are objects of moral prescription, and what establishes their claim to that status. See John Ladd, The Structure of a Moral Code , 26.

31. Vinaver ( Works , 1450) notes that Malory adds the words "all the astatis and comyns of that lordshyp were there ready to behold the battle and judgement" ( MD 8.25). The public attends constantly in the French source, but only here are we suddenly aware of its presence in the English text. Malory therefore condenses his source and then summarizes at a dramatic moment, maximizing

the impact of his words. Baumgartner observes the role in Malory's source played by those of Cornwall ("cil de Cornoalle"), the common people in Mark's realm who are always ready to help Tristan against his uncle ( Le "Tristan en prose, " 321). At the Weeping Castle, by contrast, Tristram is at odds with the population.

32. Mark Lambert draws attention to the role of the collective voice in Malory's works ( Malory: Style and Vision in "Le Morte Darthur " [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975], 16-19).

33. Catherine La Farge, who has also studied Malory's speakers, notices that they are often at cross-purposes. They respond with more emotion than relevance, and rarely speak at length. They retreat from known facts and recast indicative statements in the subjunctive. She writes that Malory "adds confusion and ambiguities to the received narrative by making the reader depend upon the dialogue of his self-defensive and, all in all, rather unreliable speakers" ("Conversation in Malory's Morte Darthur," Medium Aevum 56 [1987]: 225-238, 230).

34. Y 6211-6377. Maddox finds in Yvain a manipulation of rights by "ruse" rather than heroic might, royal proclamation, or majority rule ( The Arthurian Romances of Chrétien de Troyes , 70-77). Elspeth Kennedy cites other examples in her edition of Lancelot do Lac , 2:347.

35. "car trop a li rois petit gent, 'et se je conquerroie,' fait il, 'sa terre en cest point, je n'i aroie pas honor, mais honte'" ( L 8:12).

36. Before he sails for Cornwall, Tristan promises to visit Galehaut in Sorelois or Logres, "but it was not long before he heard that Galehaut was dead" ("mes il ne demora pas granment qu'il oï qu'il estoit morz," T 481.27-28).

37. In the French story, the King of the Hundred Knights destroys the Castle of Tears, but Galehaut himself must go to the site, after he has recovered from his wounds, and exact oaths from the former inhabitants that they will remove the custom.

38. The Weeping Castle symbolizes Isode's situation, which is not a happy one. She must endure an arranged marriage to King Mark, made worse because she and Tristram fall in love, yet Tristram refuses to or cannot break the convention of marriage to release her from her bondage. (She must also endure Malory, who hardly hints that her marriage is a problem and suppresses all of her speaking parts.) Besides confronting the custom of the castle, where she risks losing her head if she loses a beauty contest, Isode also suffers from Tristram's inattention, particularly as Malory tells the story. Tristram's main concern is with hunting (one of the "customs of noble gentlemen," for which Tristram

wrote the book, MD 8.3), or with how he compares to Lancelot. In a striking addition to his source, Malory has Tristram regret, when the Weeping Castle episode ends, that he cannot immediately seek out Lancelot because he must first deliver Isode to Mark: "'Alas,' said Sir Tristram, 'and I had not this message in hand with this fair lady, truly I would never stint or I had found Sir Lancelot'" ( MD 8.28). Tristram not only complains about this delay, but about the money the woman costs him. In a sentence that Malory adds to his source, Tristram says that he expects Mark to treat him well because of the "fetching and costs of Queen Isode out of Ireland, and the danger than I was in first and last, and by the way coming home what danger I had to bring again Queen Isode from the Castle Pluere" ( MD 9.21).

Isode's sad situation continues after she leaves the Weeping Castle. In Cornwall, the Irish princess finds herself in a strange land, uncertain how to behave. There is a clash of cultures between the bridal party and the locals. Two Cornish women envy Dame Bragwaine, who accompanies Isode from Ireland, and they arrange for Bragwaine's abduction. Isode shows signs of homesickness when she finds her maid missing: "Wit ye well she was right heavy as ever was any queen. . . . The cause was for she came with her out of her country" ( MD 8.29).

Homesick, vulnerable in a male world, Isode must then endure Palomides, who pesters her for favors. She makes him a rash promise that if he will return Bragwaine to her, she will reward him. When he does, she discovers that she is expected to keep her bargain. King Mark proves unable to fend off Palomides, and Tristram is "in the forest a-hunting" in her hour of need ( MD 8.30). Palomides bears her away, but she manages to escape when he has to fight Sir Lambegus, Tristram's knight. She flees like Ariosto's Angelica, Tasso's Erminia, or Spenser's Florimell: "So the queen ran into the forest, and there she found a well, and therein she had thought to have drowned herself" ( MD 8.30).

Tristram's chivalry may contrast to Sir Breunor's crude social customs, but he has little refinement or cortoisie : He hardly meets the requirement that Gaston Paris listed among the elements of what he called Courtly Love, that the lover grovel as an inferior before his lady. (For a reassessment of the nineteenth-century origins of courtly love—that love be adulterous, secret, debasing to the male—see R. Howard Bloch, "'Mieux vaut jamais que tard': Romance, Philology, and Old French Letters," Representations 36 [1991]: 64-86.) The English knight is not a doting Lancelot, however, but a colder man. He resembles Ariosto's Tristan, who taunts Clodione and offers him a woman without asking her first ( OF 32.90), and Spenser's Tristram, who seems more interested in his armor

than in his lady's welfare: having despoiled a dead knight, he "long fed his greedie eyes with the faire sight / Of the bright mettall" ( FQ 6.2.39). The name of the Weeping Castle seems to reflect Tristram's faults in the story at large, creating an image of Isode's social situation in the outside world.

It is only fair to notice, however, that within the castle the custom which Tristram calls foul plays into Isode's own best interests. She easily wins the beauty contest against Breunor's wife. Moreover, the French text makes clear what Malory's scene offers only elliptically: once the couple establish themselves, they are perfectly happy. The Castle of Tears is described from the beginning as handsome and well appointed ("biax et bien seanz," T 452.3). Even King Mark could not object to their being together ("il n'i penseroit ja nul mal," T 474.5). Their cohabitation is justified because they are prisoners. Prison is therefore so pleasing to them, in the French story, that they want never to leave. Iseult can forget the world ("tot le monde oblier," T 474.7) and regard only Tristan. Tristan feels the same way, and they spend three happy months together ("I1 demeurent en la tor bien trois mois entiers,'' T 474.15-16). Their isolation and happiness excuse the custom of the castle, which confines them within its law.

Malory characteristically suppresses Isode's happiness. And the essence of the episode that Malory retains from his source despite many changes is that the custom of the castle represents total constraint. Its customs are so powerful that they implicate Tristram, who furthers their purpose even as he resists. By his eventual success in fleeing himself from the castle's customs, moreover, Tristram unwittingly destroys Isode's happiness.

39. Paul Zumthor comments, "Les monstres des romans 'bretons' symbolisent les forces anticourtoises" ( Essai de poétique médiévale [Paris: Seuil, 1972], 360, cited by Jacques Le Goff, introduction to Erich Köhler, L'aventure chevaleresque: Idéal et réalité dans le roman courtois [Paris: Gallimard, 1974], xiii: Zumthor is citing P. Lakits, La Châatelaine de Vergi et l'évolution de la nouvelle courtoise [Debrecen, 1966].

40. There seems to be no good evidence that the rapist thief Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, Warwickshire, wrote the Morte Darthur , according to William Matthews, The Ill-Framed Knight (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), who suggests Thomas Malory of Yorkshire instead. See Benson, Malory's "Morte Darthur; " ix, and R. M. Lumiansky, "Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur ; 1947-1987: Author, Title, Text," Speculum 62 (1987): 878-897.

41. Caxton's Own Prose , ed. F. N. Blake (London: Andre Deutsch, 1973), 47.

42. Ibid.

43. Northrop Frye, On Shakespeare (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 38.

44. E. K. Chambers, English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), 196.

45. For Caxton's text, see Blake, ed., Caxton's Own Prose , 126. I have modernized the English. On Lull and the prose Lancelot , see Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 11.

46. Chambers, English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages , 197.

1. Cicero, De Legibus , 1.14.40, in De Re Publica; De Legibus , Loeb Classical Library (1928; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952). The Latin text, where cited, is from this edition.

2. Ibid., 1.15.42.

3. "But in fact we can perceive the difference between good laws and bad by referring them to no other standard than Nature" (ibid., 1.16.44).

4. Ibid., 1.16.45.

5. Clifford Geertz, "Found in Translation: On the Social History of the Moral Imagination," in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 36-54, 48.

6. Ibid., 41.

7. Ibid., 44.

8. Ibid., 48.

9. Georges Duby cites a mid-eleventh-century text by a monk of St. Cybard of Angoulême, which relates how Hugh, lord of Lusignan, captured a castle and had the entire garrison thrown from the top of the keep, "thereby purging the entire area of his enemies." Ransoming them would have been more profitable. Hugh's violence indicated, contradictorily, his lack of power. See France in the Middle Ages , 987-1460, trans. Juliet Vale (1987; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 71.

10. The castle bridge where the giant releases a trap door is an image of fraud, one that Edmund Spenser, for example, will make part of the custom of Pollente's castle in the Book of Justice ( FQ 5.2.12). Falling victim to fraud suggests an ignorance of what others consider acceptable behavior.

11. The Italian text is that edited by Aldo Scaglione and reprinted in Matteo Maria Boiardo, Orlando Innamorato , trans. Charles Stanley Ross (Berkeley: Uni-

versity of California Press, 1989). Numbers in the text refer to book, canto, and stanza.

12. Angelica performs a function similar to that of a damsel who alleviates Gawain's torment when he is confined to King Caradoc's Dolorous Tower in the prose Lancelot ( L 1:203-213). In that story the damsel brings Gawain a box of ointment for his swelling (he had been flogged), a pole to fight off vermin, and (later) some poison bread that kills the vermin. The pillar that keeps Gawain off the filthy floor recalls Ranaldo's roost. Caradoc's cruel mother perhaps explains why Ranaldo refers to Marchino's wife as "mother," although the epithet may also derive from a similar horror story in The Golden Ass of Apuleius. In both the Lancelot and the Innamorato , the hero does not understand the extent to which a damsel assists him.

13. John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes (1598), s.v. "lima."

14. Jo Ann Cavallo, Boiardo's "Orlando Innamorato": An Ethics of Desire (Rutherford, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993), 57.

15. See "The Improvisation of Power," in Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 222-254.

16. Similarly, Ariosto's Rodomonte, like Marchino, unexpectedly uses terms of endearment on Isabel instead of raping her. Like Boiardo, Ariosto shifts attention from the past to present custom, highlighting a clash of cultures. Holed up in a hermitage in France, Rodomonte follows advice Ranaldo gives him in the Innamorato , that when in France he should follow French customs (in that case, by not killing horses, OI 2.14.48). Rodomonte finds barrels of wine and drinks them, "repudiating Saracen custom" ("e ripridendo il rito saracino," OF 29.22). But he gets so drunk that Isabel tricks him into killing her, preserving the chastity she vowed to her dead husband, Zerbino.

17. The duel between Orlando and Ranaldo begins when Ranaldo kills Trufaldino, a villain whom Orlando defended because he had been tricked into swearing an oath to save Angelica. Ranaldo's real claim is that Orlando had no business defending the evil king of Baghdad. In fact, Orlando only makes an issue of Ranaldo's vengeance because he jealously fears that Ranaldo loves Angelica. When Orlando, though in the wrong, claims to wield "the sword of justice," Ranaldo uses local law as a shield to protect himself from Orlando's claim ( OI 1.27.15).

18. Amorotto maintains the custom of the Castle Crudele on the island of Perfida after killing the son of Sir Gurone the Courteous ( Tristan and the Round Table , trans. Anne Shaver [Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and

Studies, 1983], 185-190). The Italian version of Tristan's story was titled La Tavola Ritonda by its nineteenth-century editor, Luigi Polidori. It seems fairly certain that Boiardo knew the Tavola in some form. Urgano the Hairy, a giant who maintains a castle in the Tavola , reappears early in the Innamorato as one of four giants who escort Angelica from her home in Cathay to Charlemagne's court in Paris ( Tristan and the Round Table , 174). Boiardo assigns Urgano's shaggy pelt to his companion Lampordo ( OI 1.1.75). Moreover Boiardo says that Tristano and Isotta die in each other's arms, a detail provided only by the Tavola Ritonda ( Tristan and the Round Table , 322). See OI 2.26.2 and Cavallo, Boiardo's "Orlando Innamorato ," 66.

19. The Metamorphoses of Ovid , trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Harcourt, 1993), lines 6.648-649 and 6.655 in the original. The Latin text is cited from Ovid, Metamorphoses , The Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).

20. The hatred of Marchino's wife echoes what Agamemnon, thinking of how he was murdered by his wife Clytemnestra, tells Odysseus in book 11 of the Odyssey , that there is no protection from a jealous woman. Marchino's wife makes a similar claim when she tells Ranaldo that "No creature is more terrifying, / Crueler and more incendiary, / Than is the wife in love when she / Is scorned and falls to jealousy" ("Lo animal che è più crudo e spaventevole, / Ed è più ardente che foco che sia, / É la moglie che un tempo fu amorevole, / Che, disprezata, cade in zelosia," OI 1.8.37). Agamemnon's concubine was the unmarried Cassandra, who could read the future though no one believed her. Marchino makes love to Stella who, after he murders her husband, is technically a widow. Boiardo alters Homer to catch the disruptive effect a beautiful widow has on the wife of another man.

21. "Ma qual vendetta lo potria far sazio / Ché pensando al suo oltraggo in veritade / Non v'era pena di tal crudeltade" ( OI 1.8.45). The original lacks punctuation, allowing the reading I give, whereas Scaglione's edition puts the phrase "considering her crime" with what follows, making the text read: "considering her crime, there is no punishment too cruel for her.'' This reading fits Marchino's desire to be the lewdest man who ever lived, but we need not rely on the lectio facilior . Marchino seems an even crueler man if he analyzes his victim's psychology, as he does, I have suggested, when he woos Stella by wiles, not force.

22. Virgil's Aeneid , trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam, 1981), 8.486. The Latin text is that of R. A. B. Mynors, P. Vergili Maronis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). Boiardo follows Virgil closely: "And to the corpse

[Marchino] had Stella bound / Hand to hand, and face tight to face" ("Fece la dama a quel corpo legate, / Viso con viso stretto, e mano a mano," OI 1.8.46).

23. Spurned by Ranaldo, Angelica flies home to the East and seeks help from the magician Malagise, Ranaldo's cousin, to help her seduce Ranaldo. She offers Malagise his release from the prison where she had confined him (following an earlier attempt outside of Paris to rape her), plus the restoration of his magic manual if he will act as a go-between for her.

Malagise flies to Spain, where Ranaldo is commanding the army of Charlemagne, and informs his cousin of Angelica's offer to release Malagise if only Ranaldo will sleep with Angelica. When Ranaldo still refuses, Malagise devises a plan to lure Ranaldo to a more enticing location by means of a pilotless ship that ferries Ranaldo beyond the Straits of Gibraltar to an island named after its principal building, Palazo Zoioso (the Pleasure Palace). Although a damsel tells Ranaldo that he is a prisoner of the island of the Pleasure Palace and cannot leave, Ranaldo has only to walk away and board ship to depart. This inconsistency makes the allegory of love clear enough: Ranaldo is a prisoner insofar as the damsel finds it inconceivable that he will reject Angelica's offer of love—"You can't refuse" ("Non pôi disdire," OI 1.8.12). So strong is the effect of Merlin's Fountain, however, that Ranaldo disdains the offer of love. Furious at Ranaldo's refusal, Malagise once again transports him, this time to Castle Cruel.

24. Geertz, Local Knowledge , 43.

25. Ibid., 46.

26. The silent file that Angelica leaves for Ranaldo suggests a similar inadequacy of narrative terms to represent Ranaldo's final reaction to Castle Cruel. It functions as a sign of Angelica's sharp anguish, but it also permits Ranaldo to escape and use his sword. Boiardo had no precedent for using the file that makes no sound to suggest the social or bureaucratic structure that enables justice to operate.

27. E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 18. Recent critics have complained that Tillyard, in his Elizabethan World Picture , projects a static, conservative society as a Renaissance ideal. Catherine Belsey, for example, accuses him of fostering a "lost Elizabethan Utopia" and promoting "in the principle of order the necessity of submission to the proper authorities, social and divine" ("Literature, History, Politics," in Modern Criticism and Theory , ed. David Lodge [New York: Longman, 1988], 400-410, 400). Cf. Patricia Parker ( Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender; Property [New York: Methuen, 1987], 115, 125) and Jonathan Dollimore, who attacks

Tillyard's representation of a static social system ("Introduction: Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism, and the New Historicism," in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism , ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985], 2-17, especially 5-7). These critics generally regard Tillyard as a representative of British colonial thought, someone who cites with admiration Ulysses' speech on degree, from Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida , a passage that has been reprinted for years in the Norton Anthology of English Literature , vol. 1, but was dropped from the sixth edition (New York: Norton, 1993). The example from Boiardo suggests that Tillyard's purpose was not so much to defend a new social order or promote a proper disposition as it was to read the romance images that inform Elizabethan literature. The Innamorato 's double perspective—as when Marchino first tries his role as a courtly persuader and then falls back on the extremes of violence—fits what Tillyard calls "a habit of mind most difficult for a modern to grasp, being at once fantastic and closely allied to action" ( Elizabethan World Picture , 45).

28. Tillyard, Elizabethan World Picture , 20. The "standards" Tillyard refers to are those of a Christian "theological scheme of sin and salvation" (18).

29. Cicero, De Legibus , 1.14.40.

30. Ibid., 2.4.10.

31. In the vulgate Lancelot Dolorous Guard presents a variable set of strange customs that Lancelot must overcome to win the love of Queen Guenevere. When he does and their affair seems assured, Lancelot changes the name of the castle to Joyous Guard. Inside of Dolorous Guard are found, among other things, the statue of a woman holding keys, a copper pillar which the big key opens, a coffer which the little key unlocks, thirty pipes, and a demonic organ from which devilish voices emerge to enchant the castle. These objects are a "bricolage mythologique," part of a figurative space that relies on the allegorical imagination of the audience (Daniel Poirion, "La Douloureuse Garde," in Approches du Lancelot en prose , ed. Jean Dufournet [Paris: Champion, 1984]: 25-48, 40). Its features change each time Lancelot encounters it, and his adventures there have several dénouements. Its customs are not explained. Rather, the customs "are alleged as the justification for many acts performed during the Conquest. They are arbitrary phenomena, announced from time to time when a need for justification of behavior arises. . . . They are the rules of the game, apparently created by the author as the game progressed" (J. Neale Carman, "The Conquests of the Grail Castle and Dolorous Guard,'' PMLA 85 [1970]: 433-443, 442).

32. Geertz, Local Knowledge , 41.

33. Aeneid 6.421; Inferno 6.27.

34. Rime 103.22 ( Enciclopedia Dantesca [Rome: Trecanni, 1971], 6:665; my translation). Dante found the image of internal suffering in the poems of Guiraut de Calanso ( Enciclopedia Dantesca , 3:651, s.v. "lima").

35. See James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of "The Faerie Queene " (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 368 n. 154.

36. "Pereunt quos appulit aequor" ("He slew the strangers whom the sea brought to shore") (Lucan, The Civil War ( Pharsalia ), trans. J. D. Duff, Loeb Classical Library [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969], 4.606 [218-219]).

37. David Quint, Epic and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 165.

38. See OI 1.17.24-29 and 2.3.57. Rubicone brings out Ranaldo's violent side just as Lucan's Caesar reveals his true, antirepublican character by crossing the Rubicon river.

39. Boiardo's poem shares the general Renaissance disdain for the lower classes, Antonio Franceschetti argues in "Eroi, soldati, e popoli nel mondo dell' Innamorato e del Furioso, " in Humanitas e poesia: Studi in onore di Gioacchino Paparelli (Salerno: Pietro Laveglia, 1988-1990), 117-142. Nonetheless, as Stephen Greenblatt shows in a well-known essay, the ways in which an artist depicts even the murdering of peasants tell us something about his deeper social values ("Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion," Representations 1 [1983]: 1-29). Boiardo, as an aristocrat, depended on the past for his identity, but Castle Cruel indicates a poet who worried deeply about the loss of natural law and the power of experience and the recent past to motivate human behavior.

40. Quint argues that Virgil associated the wanderings of romance with history's losers ( Epic and Emphre , 9). I would argue that Boiardo regarded errancy as a temporary truancy for the privileged.

41. See Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). It is Baron's civic humanism, traveling through the centuries, sometimes in the open, sometimes hidden, that J. G. A. Pocock in The Machiavellian Moment (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975) traces through the seventeenth century to show how it developed into an ideology of republicanism that supported the American revolution.

42. Ibid., 49.

43. Ibid., 71.

44. Translated by Edmund G. Gardner, Dukes and Poets of Ferrara (1904; New York: Haskell House, 1968), 70 n. 1.

45. The index to my translation of the Orlando Innamorato (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) traces how these characters appear first in stories and then in the story .

46. Cicero, De Legibus , 1.15.42.

47. Ibid., 1.15.42-43.

48. Cavallo, Boiardo's "Orlando Innamorato, " 113. For other recent assessments, see Peter Marinelli, Ariosto and Boiardo: The Origins of "Orlando Furioso " (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), and Antonio Franceschetti, ''II Boiardo e l'avvio del Furioso, " in Da Dante al Manzoni , ed. Bianca Maria Da Rif and Claudio Griffio (Florence: Olschki, 1991), 111-130, 123 (arguing that Ariosto's heroes reason and make decisions, in contrast to Boiardo's knights).

49. "fosse iustizia, o fosse crudeltade" ( OF 11.52). Like the custom of Castle Cruel, the custom of the Ebudans emerges from the pathos of a victimized victim. Proteus invades the island to punish a father who has punished his daughter for being raped by Proteus: "As the story makes clear, woman is punished for sins she did not commit and punished again for being the victim of sins she was unable to avoid" (Valeria Finucci, The Lady, Vanishes: Subjectivity and Representation in Castiglione and Ariosto [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992], 138).

1. William Shakespeare, As You Like It , 2.1.12.è

2. Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute , trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (1984; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 29.

3. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element of Culture (1950; Boston: Beacon Press, 1962). The terms in quotation marks are typical of the language of ethnomethodologists such as Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967).

4. See Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince , trans. Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa, World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), chapter 6.

5. "While seasons of praise or blame for that historical classic [Jacob Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy ] have come and gone in one of the more elaborate rituals of the tribe of historians, the notion of a transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance refuses to go away. I take it to be one of Burckhardt's central, though seldom fully appreciated, insights that what he called 'Renaissance individualism' emerged with new forms of political, social, and cultural organization, which simultaneously promoted and militated against the free expression of individuality" (Randolph Starn, Contrary Commonwealth: The Theme of Exile in Medieval and Renaissance Italy [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982], xviii).

6. Pio Rajna, Le Fonti dell' "Orlando Furioso " (Florence: Sansoni, 1900), 486-505. Rajna thought such scenes merely revealed the errant knight's prowess.

7. Peter Marinelli, Ariosto and Boiardo: The Origins of "Orlando Furioso " (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), and Albert Ascoli, Ariosto's Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Mario Santoro's work is typical of criticism that concentrates on the Arthurian elements of Rinaldo's defense of women (canto 5) and the story of the "nappo" (canto 37), although he also analyzes the story of Olympia, which was added to the third edition of the Furioso ( Ariosto e il Rinascimento ) (Naples: Liguori Editore, 1989), 134-166, 171-184, 275-294. Daniel Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization of ''Orlando Furioso " (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), writes about Ariosto's reception in the sixteenth century without mentioning Spenser or his fascination with Ariosto's customs and castles.

8. Peter DeSa Wiggins, Figures in Ariosto's Tapestry: Character and Design in the "Orlando Furioso " (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 202. Wiggins repeats his formulation elsewhere when he calls Spenser's imitation of the Tower of Tristan the "profoundest" of his imitations of Ariosto and suggests the need for a harder look at the scene ("Spenser's Anxiety," MLN 103 [1988]: 75-86, 84). Pamela Benson argues that because Bradamante "makes a carefully reasoned defense of her rights as a military woman," one can say that Ariosto explicitly connected the Rocca di Tristano episode to the tradition of defenses of women ( The Invention of Renaissance Women [University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992], 129). By contrast, Valeria Finucci writes that "Bradamante seems to suffer from penis envy since she dresses like a

man, behaves like a man, and claims that she is a man even when everybody is convinced otherwise, as in the Rocca di Tristano episode" ( The Lady Vanishes: Subjectivity and Representation in Castiglione and Ariosto [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992], 210). See also Deanna Shemeck, "Of Women, Knights, Arms, and Love: The Querelle des Femmes in Ariosto's Poem," Modern Language Notes 104 (1989): 68-97.

9. Marianne Shapiro, The Poetics of Ariosto (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 184.

10. Wiley Feinstein implies that the Tower of Tristan episode counters his thesis that "Ariosto undermines Bradamante's feminist potential" ("Bradamante in Love: Some Postfeminist Considerations in Ariosto," Forum Italicum 22 [1988]: 48-59, 48). I think he is right, that the episode is more "subtle" and "complex" than his brief comments show (51-52).

11. J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (1957; New York: Norton, 1967), 19.

12. Cited by Edmund G. Gardner, The King of Court Poets (1906; New York: Greenwood, 1968), 21-22, who goes on to quote from Ariosto's sixth satire, "My father drove me with goads and lances, not merely with spurs, to turn over texts and glosses, and kept me to that rubbish for five years" ( Satire 6.154-159).

13. On the sack of Rome as a cultural watershed, see Alberto Asor Rosa, "Il Sacco di Roma del 1527 e l'immaginario," Rivista di studi italiani 6 (1986): 18-34.

14. Line 76. See The Satires of Ludovico Ariosto: A Renaissance Autobiography , trans. Peter DeSa Wiggins (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), 35.

15. Lines 175- 183. See The Satires of Ludovico Ariosto , 67-69.

16. "Perché ha sempre intorno un sì grosso cerchio de genre che mal si pò penetrate, sì perché si conven combattere a x usci prima che se arrivi dove sia: la qual cosa a me è tanto odiosa, che non so quando lo vedessi; né anco tento de vederlo, ne lui né omo che sia in quel palazo: pur per vostro amor forzarò la natura mia" (Ariosto's letter of 7 April 1513, in Ludovico Ariosto, Satire e lettere , ed. Cesare Segre [Turin: Einaudi, 1976], 96; my translation).

17. Lines 4- 5. See The Satires of Ludovico Ariosto , 99. For Ariosto's aural sensitivity, see James V. Mirollo, "On the Significant Acoustics of Ariosto's Noisy Poem," MLN 103 (1988): 87-112.

18. Letter of 25 June 1523, in Satire e lettere , 139.

19. Michele Catalano, Vita di Ludovico Ariosto , 2 vols. (Geneva: Olschki,

1930), 1:542. We have the list in Ariosto's hand of his dozen "balestrieri" and their salaries (2:242).

20. In the second of two custom-of-the-castle scenes Ariosto added to the final edition of the Furioso , to which I can only refer briefly here, Marganorre responds to the manipulation of customs that two women use to kill his sons by decreeing that any woman discovered in the valley near his castle and town "is to be beaten across the shoulders with a willow-rod and then ejected; but first her dress is to be shortened to expose that which Nature and modesty conceals. And if any woman happens there escorted by an armed knight, she is to be slain" ( OF 37.83). Although Ariosto signals his debt to earlier romances when he refers to this decree as an "evil custom" ("ria costuma," OF 37.99), he usually refers to it as a "cruel law" ("la legge ria di Marganorre,'' OF 37.103; "la legge sua credule e rea," OF 37.104). Marganorre implements it like a statute and posts it in the town square. But Marganorre's evil ways do not survive the attention paid to them by Marfisa.

The prestige of legislative law over oral custom depends on the reputation of the king or law-making assembly that promulgates it. After Marfisa eliminates the foul custom of Marganorre's castle by force, Marfisa literally inscribes a new law. Her belief in the primacy of the legislative act associates her with the practices of civil law. She decrees that husbands must "make over to their wives the administration of the territory and all else" and that "what elsewhere appertains to the husband was here to fall to the wife" ( OF 37.115). To ensure the administration of women, she has her rules written on a column in the town. The con-flation of customs with the strict regulations of a tyrant is not uncommon in earlier romances, but the written form of the custom or law is an Italian Renaissance touch with no precedent in Arthurian romance:

The brave warrior-damsels noticed a column standing beside a church; on it the impious tyrant had inscribed his cruel, insane law. Now they attached the shield, breastplate and helmet of Marganor to it after the manner of a trophy, and had their own law there inscribed. ( OF 37.119)

Marfisa's inscription is all the more significant because Spenser eliminates it when he creates his own version of the Marganorre story in The Faerie Queene . English common law, based on custom, had defined itself since the time of Fortescue in opposition to civil law and its sources in Roman codes (see Sir John Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Anglie , 43 [chapter xx]). This opposition extends to Spenser's reversal of Ariosto's story. When Britomart, who represents chastity

and married love, defeats the Amazon Radigund, she does not impose but repeals the rule of women. Her action is paradoxical. How can she, as a woman, establish a law that says women cannot rule? Why would she want to? The answer is that she is not establishing a law, but restoring one.

Britomart's gesture is typical of English jurisprudence based on custom, where judges act not to make law but to uncover law that already exists. Britomart operates not by codes and decrees but by the "laws of chivalry." She establishes her reliance on chivalry at the moment when Radigund makes conditions for their combat.

But ere they reared hand, the Amazone
Began the streght condition to propound,
With which she used still to tye her fone;
To serve her so, as she the rest had bound.
Which when the other heard, she sternly frownd
For high disdaine of such indignity,
And would no lenger treat, but bad them sound.
For her no other terms should ever tie
Then what  prescribed were by  lawes of chevalrie .
        ( FQ 5.7.28; my emphasis)

The "laws of chivalry," which Britomart claims as her authority, are the good concepts of custom. These rituals of chivalry seem no different from the customs that dictate Yvain should fight two demi-goblins at once, the custom of Pesme Aventure. Yet there is a difference of degree. As Brian Stock has pointed out, one of the implications of literacy is that oral discourse often functions as if written texts were present ( The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983]). Chrétien's references to customs sometimes sound as if they assumed the existence of exact codes, and in Perceval they are, in fact, said to be written. For Chrétien customs are not diminished by writing, but they are for Spenser. When Britomart defeats Radigund, she overturns her law, and she does so by oral instruction, not by inscribing a pillar:

        there [Britomart] as Princess rained,
And changing all that forme of common weale,
The liberty of women did repeale,
Which they had long usurpt; and them restoring
To mens subiection, did true Iustice deal:

That all they as a Goddesse her adoring,
Her wisedome did admire, and hearkned to her loring
[instruction].
        ( FQ 5.7.42)

By insisting on the "law of chivalry," Britomart sets up an opposition between negotiated law and customary law that Spenser himself maintains by eliminating Ariosto's inscriptions. Spenser says that the "law of chivalry" is prescribed ( FQ 5.7.8, quoted above). That is, it precedes written law. This notion of precedence is the key to the strange concept of the "ancient constitution" that J. G. A. Pocock has shown played such a strong role in shaping English common law in the years when Spenser was writing: custom was both always old and always new.

21. Bigi finds that a new tension between ideals and sordid reality informs the historical series of French invasions portrayed on the walls of the Tower of Tristan ( OF 33.1-59), illustrations that Bradamante views in the second part of this addition to the 1532 version of the Furioso . See the introduction to his edition of Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso , 2 vols. (Milan: Rusconi, 1982), 36.

22. Catalano, Vita Di Ludovico Ariosto , 1:618.

23. Ibid., 1:611-612. Ariosto's private marriage was probably more typical than has been thought. Before the Council of Trent, free consent of the parties determined wedlock; see James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 552.

Catalano also suggests that Alessandra's secret marriage allowed her to retain custody of her children and maintain the patrimony left her by her husband Tito Strozzi, to which she was probably entitled as long as she remained a widow (Tito Strozzi died intestate) (Catalano, Vita Di Ludovico Ariosto , 1:614). It is not to be overlooked that remarriage allowed Alessandra to escape the constraints of widowhood: in a letter she complains of having "consumato dieci anni del fiore della mia etade, come ho fato, 'in viduità'" (1:616). Alessandra's behavior may be regarded as self-centered: she kept her children in shabby conditions in Florence, complained about the little wealth her husband left her (although she had her own houses and farms in Florence), and sent her insolvent debtors to prison (1:619). But Catalano also calls Alessandra a "donna sventurato": married young to a man twice her age, she was a widow with small children during her prime of life. It may have been that the world did not condone her illegitimate relation with the poet, or that she was allowed to reveal her subsequent marriage (1:623). She died in 1552 (1:622).

24. Northrop Frye divides the virtues into private and public ("Structure of Imagery," in Fables of Identity [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1963], 75-77), an idea that Nohrnberg develops: "Spenser's second installment goes on to treat the virtues of friendship, justice, and courtesy, which, unlike the first three, involve social loyalties rather than fidelity to a private ideal" ( The Analogy of "The Faerie Queene " [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976], 60). Holiness and temperance, the subjects of Spenser's first two legends, are individual virtues: The former begins in the wandering wood of error and the deceptive house of Archimago where Red Crosse dreams. The legend of Temperance is served by the House of Medina, which suits the lesson of the temperate mean that Aristotle teaches in the Ethics , and by the Castle of Alma, or the soul.

The order of Spenser's next four legends (chastity, friendship, justice, courtesy) reflects the Aristotelian and humanist belief that matrimony, a partnership based on diversity, is the foundation of the social order and justice. The legend of chastity starts with a version of the custom of the castle. Malecasta is said to have ordained a "law" requiring passing knights to battle for her, and she is "accustomed"—Spenser's only use of the word—to Persian luxury ( FQ 3-1.41). The motif then appears successively in the opening cantos of the following books: the Castle of Couples in the legend of friendship in Book IV, Munera's Castle in the legend of justice in Book V, and Crudor's Castle and Sir Turpine's Castle of the Ford in the legend of courtesy in Book VI.

25. Ariosto did not settle on this reprise to round out the action of the two poems, but added Ruggiero's involvement with King Leo of Hungary as a preliminary to his final duel with Rodomonte. Henri Hauvette long ago caught an echo of Boiardo's poem in this aborted plot, sensing that the "trophée" was a departure point for new rivalries ( L'Arioste et la poésie chevaleresque à Ferrare au dé-but du XVIe siécle [Paris: Champion, 1927], 280). Angelica's similar challenge—part of a plot by her father to disrupt Charlemagne's court—begins Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato and disperses the Christians, keeping Orlando from the defense of Paris. Knowing Ariosto planned yet further revisions, Hauvette found the Ullania addition out of keeping with the economy of the poem, and compared it to the Cinque Canti . The theme of those strange stanzas is also discord. A council of malignant fays haunts a forest near Prague, and Charlemagne must exorcize this image of hate, chaos, violence, and deceit. Ariosto rejected this dark expansion, and the Cinque Canti were not printed until after he died. Similarly, he seems to have rejected an open allegory of discord, leaving Ullania's mission attenuated in the poem as we have it.

26. Ruggiero saves Brunello from the gallows in Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato 2.21.36ff.

27. Pio Rajna, Le Fonti del' "Orlando Furioso, " 492; for the shepherd, see the epigraph of this book.

28. Barbara Reynolds, Orlando Furioso (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974).

29. The United States Supreme Court has held, in an infamous decision, that a state has the power to treat any appearance by a defendant as a submission to the state's jurisdiction over his person, York v. Texas , 137 U.S. 15, 11 S.Ct. 9 (1890). No state currently exercises its power to lay this cruel trap. Similar issues of institutional jurisdiction, especially the boundaries of canon law and civil law, must have worried the legal minds of Ferrara.

30. See Henry V 1.2.37. In poking fun at Clodione, Ariosto undermines the notion that customs have founders at all. Pocock observes that Machiavelli could write with what seems singular naiveté of the man "chi ordinó" so complex a creation of history as the monarchy of France: "Custom came to be a salutary corrective to the thought of this king; all its emphasis was on gradual process, imperceptible change, the origin and slow growth of institutions in usage, tacit consent, prescription and adaptation" ( The Ancient Constitution , 19). Custom, when written and codified, loses its essential character. To restore authority to custom, common lawyers began to posit remote and mythical legislators (36).

31. With him when he arrives at Clodione's castle is a woman whom he recently rescued from a giant. Waldman's translation says Tristan was still pulling along the giant. The Italian probably means that the giant had been pulling the woman along when Tristan rescued her ("che traea presa a forza un fier gigante," OF 32.84).

32. Gyron le Courtoys c. 1501 , ed. C. E. Pickford (London: Scolar Press, 1977).

33. Gyron le Courtoys , cclviii ^v . The technique whereby a main character leaves his main quest to settle some local political affairs occurs when Ranaldo finds Iroldo weeping in a grove, wondering how to rescue Prasildo from Falerina's Garden ( OI 1.16.60-1.17.22). At this point Rubicone appears (see above, chapter 3, note 38). Boiardo's example suggests that the custom of the castle is usually the tip of the iceberg for themes that circulate, often submerged, through interlaced romances. Guyon's version of this motif occurs when he meets Mammon, whose house has its own foul customs ( FQ 2.7.3). Gyron should be added to the list of sources for Guyon's name.

34. Gyron le Courtoys , cclix ^v .

35. "Cy est le perilleux passage dung chevalier seul encontre les vingt. Et bien saiche vrayement que chascun chevalier errant que avanture apportera par destuy chemin que iamais ceste coustume ne fauldra devant que passez y feront par force darmes quatre chevaliers" ( Gyron le Courtoys , cclx ^r ).

36. "Gyron qui le chevalier voit venir le commence a regarder" ( Gyron le Courtoys , cclxiii ^v ). There is a pun. They "regarde" each other because they have such "regarde" for each other (cclxvii ^v ).

37. "Gyron voit que la nuyt vient si approchent" ( Gyron le Courtoys , cclxv ^v ).

38. "Me diez en quel guise ceste perilleux advanture de ce chastel fust establie premierement" ( Gyron le Courtoys , cclxviii ^r ).

39. Rajna, Le Fonti del' "Orlando Furioso ," 498.

40. Gyron le Courtoys , cclxviii ^v -cclxxiv ^v

41. The Convivio of Dante Alighieri , trans. Philip H. Wicksteed (London: Dent, 1903), I: viii.

42. Ibid., I: x.

43. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1984; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), xvii.

44. André Chastel, The Sack of Rome , 1527, trans. Beth Archer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 26. The account that follows is indebted to Chastel's work.

45. Isabella lost a cargo of precious tapestries to pirates (Chastel, The Sack of Rome , 1527, 245).

46. Ibid., 37.

47. Francesco Guicciardini, The History of Italy , trans. Sidney Alexander (1969; New York: Collier, 1972), 49 (my emphasis). "[Charles] entrò in Asti il dì nono di settembre dell'anno mille quattocento novantaquattro, conducendo seco in Italia i semi di innumerabili calamità, di orribilissimi accidenti, e variazione di quasi tutte le cose: perché dalla passata sua non solo ebbono principio mutazioni di stati, sovversioni di regni, desolazioni di paesi, eccidi ci città, crudelissime uccisioni, ma eziandio nuovi abiti, nuovi costumi, nuovi e sanguinosi modi di guerreggiare, infermità insino a quel dì non conosciute; si disordinorono di maniera gli instrumenti della quiete e concordia italiana che, non si essendo mai poi potuta riordinare, hanno avuto facoltà altre nazioni straniere e eserciti barbari di conculcarla miserabilmente e devastarla" ( Opere , ed. Vittorio de Caprariis [Naples: Ricciardi, 1961], 435).

48. See Gardner, The King of Court Poets , 206.

49. Michael Murrin finds a conflict between those who find an Ariosto of concord (Marinelli, Wiggins) and those for whom his skepticism is paramount (Quint, Ascoli): "While these critics wish to recover Ariosto for history, none of them is doing a New Historical analysis of the court, the role of the poet in that court, or fables of power" ( Italica 66 [1989]: 466-469, 467).

50. Ascoli, Ariosto's Bitter Harmony , 31 n.55, 32.

51. Walter Binni, Due studi critici: Ariosto e Foscolo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1978), 11.

52. Cf. Nohrnberg, The Analogy of "The Faerie Queene, " 18.

53. Wiggins, The Satires of Ludovico Ariosto , xx.

54. For Atlante as Ariosto's persona, see David Quint, "The Figure of Atlante: Ariosto and Boiardo's Poem," MLN 94 (1979): 77-91. For Astolfo, see A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 140. See also Ascoli, Ariosto's Bitter Harmony , 37.

55. John Addington Symonds, The Renaissance in Italy: Italian Literature , 2 vols. (New York: Scribner's, 1904), 1:441-442.

56. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction , trans. Robert Hurley, 3 vols. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 1:92.

57. "Dispersion and (Re) Integration: Ariosto's I Suppositi and Archetypal Modes of Early Sixteenth-Century Italian Comedy," JMRS 16 (1986): 197-212.

58. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (1936; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 306.

59. At the nameless castle, where the social order is uncertain, Britomart avoids a strategic confrontation, in contrast to the brutal justice of Talus ( FQ 5.2.25), or to her own earlier adventure at Malecasta's castle, where the issues of right and wrong, chastity and the lack of it, are clear-cut ( FQ 3.1).

60. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1899), xix.

1. Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature , ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 146-147.

2. See the prefatory remarks to Book VI in A. C. Hamilton, ed., Spenser: The Faerie Queene , 621.

3. In contrast to the arbitrary, symbolic customs of Book VI—Crudor's craving for shaved beards and Arthur's strange charge that Turpine strips travelers of their upper garments—the customs of Pollente's bridge and castle in the legend of justice (Book V of The Faerie Queene ) seem eminently practical. The Pollente episode suggests the skills needed to confront the historical reality of local tolls and town customs in Ireland, highwaymen who rob passersby, and neighboring landlords ready to go to court to defend property lines. Bacon called the related topic of tenures a source of great turbulence: "I have chosen to Read upon the Law of Uses made 27. Hen . 8, a Law whereupon the Inheritances of thise Realme are tossed at this day like a Ship upon the Sea" ( Learned Reading upon the Statute of Uses [1642], A 3).

Spenser would not have known Bacon's lecture. But it seems fitting that Spenser compares Pollente's duel with Artegall to the contest between a dolphin (glossed as "guile" by Hamilton) and a seal. Seals usually live at sea. But seals are also the wax impressions that attest the execution of a legal document, such as a deed. Pollente's daughter is named Munera, "agreeing with her deeds." A pun on deeds as activities (such as bribing officials) and rifles to real estate had been possible since Henry VIII's Statute of Uses, which authorized conveying title to realty by a writing. The beneficial interest in property is called a "use" (the nominal owner might be someone else). Even Donny the dwarf knows that Pollente's way of fighting is not to joust (the romance sign of justice), but to jump off his bridge "through practice usuall " ( FQ 5.2.8). I believe that the Pollente episode is as close to a poetic representation of the Munster settlement as The Faerie Queen provides. The trapdoors in the bridge may represent the procedural pitfalls of a lawsuit, such as Spenser and his neighbor Lord Roche engaged in. Or the scene may figure Artegall's inability to ascertain the exact nature of local custom, a problem for someone seeking to prove title to land.

4. Despite the strategic placement of these scenes, few critics focus on custom itself, or extend to Turpine's Castle of the Ford their comments on the topos that the Variorum edition of Spenser's works treats most fully for Malecasta's castle, which it traces back to Boiardo's Palazo Zoioso (Edmund Spenser, Works: A Variorum Edition , ed. E. A. Greenlaw, F. M. Padelford, C. G. Osgood, et al., 10 vols. [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932-1949]), vol. 3, 208. Rosemond Tuve, for example, says that "castles with 'customs' which the errant knights must face" are merely incident to "the initial datum : these are tales of knights errant" ( Allegorical Imagery [Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1966), 379-380; cf. 384). Harry Berger lists romance motifs for Book VI, from nurseries and foundlings to cannibals, shepherds, and "withdrawal and return," but like others he ignores the custom of the castle topos (Harry Berger, Jr., "A Secret Discipline: The Faerie Queene Book VI," in Revisionary Play [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], 215-242, 216. Patricia Parker's wide-ranging essay on romance in The Spenser Encyclopedia , which reminds us that romances are characterized by recurring images such as magic castles where knights receive instruction, overlooks the custom of the castle as a scene of social confrontation ( The Spenser Encyclopedia , ed. A. C. Hamilton [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990], 609-618). Humphrey Tonkin's article " The Faerie Queene , Book VI" adds nothing to his earlier studies of courtesy, and misleadingly telescopes hundreds of years of Arthurian Romance by referring to Crudor's custom as "a variation on a Celtic legend" ( The Spenser Encyclopedia , 283-287). The Spenser Encyclopedia itself offers no article on either castles or customs.

Critics who do consider Crudor's and Turpine's castles usually ignore the theme of social custom. James Nohrnberg is something of an exception. His analogical technique rightly turns our attention to Malecasta, Malbecco, and the opening of Book IV, and he compares Turpine to the "difficult or intractable person" of Giovanni Della Casa's courtesy book, Galateo ( The Analogy of "The Faerie Queene, " 656). The critical focus usually falls, however, on the knight who broaches the castle or on the keeper of the custom. Dorothy Woodward Culp summarizes the first episodes of Book VI by saying that Calidor meets and helps various people in distress ("Courtesy and Fortune's Chance in Book 6 of The Faerie Queene," Modern Philology 68 [1971]: 254-259, 254). Theresa Krier merges Crudor's demand that Briana beard knights (thus humiliating her by demanding a price for his love) with the traditions of courtly love. She therefore adds an economic motive to the secrecy, adultery, and idealization of the female that normally characterize the medieval passion whose essential distinction, one supposed, was its ability to transcend cupidity ( Gazing on Secret Sights [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990], 231-232). David Miller ("Calidore," The Spenser Encyclopedia , 127-128) and Gordon Teskey ("Arthur in The Faerie Queene,'' The Spenser Encyclopedia , 69-71) nearly contrast the conduct of Crudor, which may be reformed, to Sir Turpine's irredeemable turpitude. Yet the infinite varieties of evil do not quite explain the problem of social confrontation. What a poem can treat as moral philosophy has darker consequences in the world.

5. See Hamilton, Spenser: The Faerie Queene , 737.

6. The allegory is "faint enough," writes Norhnberg, but the meaning seems to be that "perverted effort [Maleffort] in the service of evil custom is a fertile source of error" ( The Analogy of "The Faerie Queene, " 695).

7. Hamilton, Spenser: The Faerie Queene , note to FQ 6.1.25.

8. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589; Cambridge: At the University Press, 1936), 226.

9. Frank Whigham comments that "when Calidore and Crudor fight in The Faerie Queene . . . moral disparity recedes before martial resemblance." He reads the episode as an expression of a "tension between ideological distinctiveness and the fluid social reality" ( Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984], 78-79).

10. Compare the "affection" that suddenly alters Leontes in The Winter's Tale (1.2.137), making him suspect his queen of adultery. Although Briana calms down while Leontes heats up, both experience a sudden change in mood.

11. Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 441.

12. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious , 234-235.

13. Ibid., 173.

14. Felicity Heal identifies two contrasting aspects of English civility: "The first is the idea that refinement separates those who possess it from the rest, and justifies them in seeking one another's company. . . . Paradoxically, the second important aspect of the civility literature is its concern for the idea of accommodation. Social versatility, and the ability to adjust to the needs of others for the avoidance of unpleasantness, became major themes in English writing from the mid-Elizabethan period onwards" ( Hospitality in Early Modern England [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990], 103-104).

15. The first part of Malecasta's entry procedure inverts the normal custom that tests a knight by his prowess. By her rules, whoever wins, loses. A knight with no lady must serve her. A knight with a lady must abandon his lady. And a knight who refuses to give up his lady and successfully defends her beauty against Malecasta receives, by law, Malecasta as his reward, just what he does not want, since he already has a lady. Because her "soueraine beautie hath no living pere," say her six guardians in a logical non sequitur, she "hath ordained this law, which we approuve" ( FQ 3.1.26).

The unweaving of Malecasta's social web is caused not by anything Britomart does, but instead follows from the web's own logic. After Britomart defeats the

six perversions of civility who defend Malecasta—Gardante and the others were ironically "traynd in all civilitee" ( FQ 3.1.44)—she enters the castle for the night, as required by Malecasta's law. If Malecasta represents adultery or premarital sex, as most commentators say, nonetheless her law—which Spenser's interest in laws and customs characteristically emphasizes—functions to allow her to operate simply as what used to be called a "masher," someone sexually aggressive, either male or female, whose attentions make others uncomfortable.

16. Sir Edward Coke, for example, calls the shifting of land from tillage to pasture an "inconvenience" to the commonwealth due to depopulation and the beginning of "mischief" ( The First Part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England or A Commentary upon Littleton , 4th ed. [London, 1639], 85). Spenser uses "inconvenience" in this technical sense throughout The View of the Present State of Ireland .

17. Spenser calls The Faerie Queene a "continued Allegory, or dark conceit" in his letter to Raleigh (Hamilton, Spenser: The Faerie Queene , 737).

18. What is looked for at Calepine's hand is a heroic response, but Calepine balks. By contrast, Britomart, Paridell, and the Squire of Dames threaten to fire Malbecco's gates when he locks them out ( FQ 3.9.17). Boiardo's Orlando tells the traitor Trufaldino that unless he unlocks the gates of Albraca, he will scatter the citadel across the plains ( OI 1.15.46). Generally Spenser's knights have only human powers; none takes on armies singlehanded. But they do overpower mobs, and even Calepine later disperses the savages who capture Serena. Here, however, he shows only weakness.

19. The allegory suggests that she was bitten by the Blattant Beast because she became pregnant while making love outdoors to Calepine—or that slander would have it seem so.

20. Nor does the romance endorse specific practices of child care. In contrast, Renaissance courtesy manuals often center on family life. L. B. Alberti's Vita Civile , for example, advises mothers to nurse their children, or to find a suitable substitute. Spenser's images work insofar as they show universals, not accidents of history. Nonetheless, a detail that has nothing to do with courtesy keeps the romance grounded in reality: the baby cries all day. It is a grateful Calepine who finds Matilda, a childless woman who relieves his social embarrassment. By the time she does, however, he has lost his way. He will not meet Serena again until he finds her naked and silent among the savages, a rich image

that from this perspective suggests her inability (due to herself, social practices, or male conditioning) to impart her experience ( FQ 6.8.51).

21. Stephen Greenblatt, "To Fashion a Gentleman: Spenser and the Destruction of the Bower of Bliss," in Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 157-192. In a similar vein, Robert Stillman suggests that Spenser uses the green world of pastoral romance to conceal his political concerns ("Spenserian Autonomy and the Trial of New Historicism: Book Six of The Faerie Queene," English Literary Renaissance 22 [1992]: 299-314).

22. The Book of Justice, as well as Spenser's plans for reforming Ireland, make the mistake of specificity that Book VI generally manages to avoid. The Book of Courtesy starts off on this wrong foot by making civility a place, not an idea (the flower of virtue "spreds it selfe through all civilitie," 6.proem.4). Edmund Campion similarly equates civility with areas of Ireland that answer the writs of the crown ( Historie of Ireland [Dublin, 1633], fol. A).

23. Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Filocolo , Book IV, question i, in Decameron, Filocolo, Ameto, Fiammetta , ed. Enrico Bianchi, Carlo Salinari, and Natalino Sapegno (Milan: Ricciardi, 1952), 838.

24. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie , 170.

25. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology , trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 212.

26. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations , trans. F. E. Sutcliffe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 29.

27. Civility, the culmination of social graces, is broadly characterized. Colin later tells Calidor that the graces "teach us, how to each degree and kynde / we should our selves demeane, to low, to hie; / To friends, to foes" ( FQ 6.10.23). Colin Clout represents that part of Spenser capable of poetic rapture or ecstasy, the furious fit described in the October eclogue. His lofty, transcendent vision therefore does not translate the three graces into specific modes of conduct. We gather little more than that the three graces contrast the three detractions, Defetto, Decetto, and Despetto. They assume the classic position of Renaissance art—two facing forward, one backward—to show "That good should from us goe, then come in greater store" ( FQ 6. 10.24). Defetto and Decetto, like Turpine and the Blatant Beast (now spelling with one t ), prefer to attack from behind ( FQ 6.5.19).

28. Michael MacCarthy-Morrogh, The Munster Plantation: English Migration to Southern Ireland, 1583-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 111-114.

29. Ibid., 124.

30. See Bruce Avery, "Mapping the Irish Other: Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland," ELH 57 (1990): 263-280.

31. MacCarthy-Morrogh, The Munster Plantation , 135.

32. Custom is defined narrowly in the View , a dialogue that treats in turn the Irish abuses of laws, customs, and religion, then offers remedies to solve the problems it identifies. Spenser's fascination with specific social forms emerges most forcibly when Eudoxus exclaims how much he enjoys listening to Irenius's description of these customs, the "manye swete remembraunces of Antiquityes" ( Spenser's Prose Works , ed. Rudolf Gottfried [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1949], 81). Abusive customs include nomadic herding (97), wearing a mantle and glib (long bangs that cover the face, 99-102), uncivil battle cries (102), choice of weapons (106), ceremonies such as prayers and charms and vows (107), and the Irish "manner of marryinge of burying of dauncinge of singinge of feastinge of Cursinge" (109). The moral of the View is that Irish ways of dressing, speaking, and riding are unsuited to Englishmen. The Faerie Queene , however, locates suitability in the moral sphere, not in precise modes of dress, speech, or carriage.

33. For example, Arthur, if he were to become king in some future extension of The Faerie Queene to twenty-four books, would necessarily become what in Malory he already is, the husband of an unfaithful queen.

34. The lesson that courtesy includes tolerating practices of which one disapproves, as well as others' disapproval of what one believes is right, is repeated three times in the two central cantos positioned between the first half and the last third of the book—where we usually look for Spenser's allegorical core. First, Arthur baffles Turpine and holds him up for an example, but does not kill him. Second, Mirabella, like Turpine, maintains her own ways, despite the heavy sentence imposed on her by the court of Cupid. When offered a choice, she refuses to be released from Disdain and Scorn. The presence of these figures suggests their inevitability in social situations. The narrative voice castigates her woman's pride ( FQ 6.8.1), but the story accepts her resolution. Some aloofness is necessary for a woman, even if she is condemned for it. Finally, Serena ends where she began, naked and outdoors with Calepine, vulnerable, unable to communicate her experience in terms others will understand ( FQ 6.8.51). As an outcast, she can easily stand for the entrepreneurial poet, whose very vocation exposes him to censure.

1. "How many unjust things custom makes one do" (Publius Terentius Afer, Heauton Timorumenos ( The Self-Tormentor ), in Terence , trans. John Sargeaunt, Loeb Classical Library [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953], 202-203 [line 839]).

2. William Graham Sumner, Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals (Boston: Ginn and Company; The Athenaeum Press, 1913), 28-29, 67.

3. Ibid., 3.

4. Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 73. Coriolanus rails against the customs of Rome that he must follow if he wishes to have the people's voice as their leaden Leah Marcus argues that Coriolanus displays the increasing power of the laws and customs of London ( Puzzling Shakespeare [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], 211). Marcus reads the banishment of Coriolanus as the symbolic ouster of royal and aristocratic privilege from London: "If there is one precipitating cause behind his rejection as consul, it is his inability to act within what the aristocrats scoffingly refer to as the citizens' 'rotten Privilege and Custom'" (204). Coriolanus (who uses the word custom more than any character in Shakespeare) rejects "customs" because they represent the voice of the people (205).

5. Stanley Carell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 188.

6. Hilary Gatti, The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge: Giordano Bruno in England (London: Routledge, 1989), ix.

7. Julia Annas, An Introduction to Plato's "Republic " (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 22.

8. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 9-17. Insofar as it has come to be an anthropological commonplace, Dollimore's key insight survives his telling: in Radical Tragedy , Dollimore traces two conceptions of ideology, which he calls cognitive and materialist. The cognitive conception recognizes that rulers consolidate power by conspiring to produce systems of belief that will mystify the ruled. Men like Machiavelli, Calvin, Montaigne, and Marlowe tell us such deception exists. But a materialist ideology is more important than the cognitive, because the materialist concep-

tion conditions and grounds consciousness itself. A material ideology "exists in, and as, the social practices which constitutes people's lives." For Dollimore, the materialist conception represents an important shift in Marxist thinking. While the term "materialism" recalls Marx's historical materialism (the cognitive doctrine that ideology is the way those who control a society's means of production defend their privilege), the new form of materialism contains the cognitive conception of ideology within it. It invokes an interrelationship of ideology and power. In this way, materialism and cognition together are more complex than a strictly limited cognitive conception of ideology.

These cultural conceptions were also "inextricably related" during the Elizabethan/Jacobean period, as the writings of Francis Bacon show—to Dollimore's astonishment, since it took current Marxist thought so long to recognize their overlapping nature. For example, Bacon's doctrine of idols reveals a cognitive view of ideology, leading Bacon to equate tradition with credulity. But Bacon simultaneously held a materialist conception of ideology, as when he observes that customs move men as forcibly as wheels move engines.

At this point Dollimore supplies the interpretive logic necessary to combine Bacon's awareness of the limits of cognition with Bacon's less obvious insight into historical materialism. To move men as wheels move engines is to have power over society. Traditions move men, customs move men; any social practice moves men. Therefore traditions, customs, and social practices are sources of power. Dollimore praises the sophistication of Bacon's thought for its understanding that this power to move men is the power to maintain social order. Bacon knows that the power of custom depends on the force of belief. This knowledge comes to him when he recognizes the element of raw credulity on which traditions, customs, and social practices depend. Because Bacon understands the importance of credulity and the force of belief, he therefore understands what Dollimore calls the epistemology of truth. Those who maintain a social order also control its epistemological truth. The corollary to this grasp of the very, foundation of social behavior follows, that such truth is relative to local custom.

Dollimore claims, however, that not only is epistemological truth—what we credulously believe—relative to social custom, but that ethical truth is similarly relative. He derives this ethical dimension not from his discussion of Bacon, but from other thinkers he reviews, such as Calvin and Montaigne, who recognized that institutions such as religion or the law are agencies of control. Ethics, then,

is a product of institutions in Dollimore's thinking, just as knowledge is a function of what we can know when not deceived by idols of the tribe, the marketplace, or the theater.

For several reasons Dollimore's tour of Marxist thinking takes longer than it might to reach the conclusion that ethics vary with time and place. For one thing, Dollimore fails to mention Bacon's idols of the den: each person's perceptions are distorted by their own "proper and peculiar nature," by their own smaller worlds of experience, which are subject to fortune. Second, Dollimore distorts his analysis by insistently resorting to a myth of progress. The period, he says, had a " developing awareness of ideology." Tradition, for Bacon, "becomes" the basis for a materialist conception of ideology. Once "epistemological and ethical truth was recognized to be relative to custom and social practice, then ideological considerations were inevitably foregrounded'' (my emphasis). Moreover, because Dollimore focuses on the early seventeenth century, he conflates his earlier witnesses like Erasmus and More with mid-century humanists like Elyot and Ascham and Wilson.

9. Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 22.

10. Giovanni Della Casa's Galateo reproves the drinking of healths ( brindisi ) ( Galateo: Ovvero de' Costumi [Milan: Rizzoli, 1977], 132). Cf. Plato's Laws : "A native will always meet the stranger's astonishment at an unfamiliar practice with the words, There is no call for surprise; this is our established custom in the matter, though yours may perhaps be different. . . . So we must take the whole subject of convivial drinking into fuller consideration; it is a practice of grave importance, and calls for the judgment of no mean legislator" ( Laws 1.637d, trans. A. E. Taylor, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato , ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series LXXI [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978]). To decide how a drinking party ought to be conducted requires a theory of education, since the point of companionship over a bottle is to imitate the good conduct of the best men—someone should be in control (I.640b)—not to follow debased taste ("education is, in fact, the drawing and leading of children to the rule which has been pronounced right by the voice of the law, and . . . by the concordant experience of the best and oldest men," II.659).

11. For more on the stage-business of wearing a hat in Hamlet, Love's Labor's Lost 5.1, and As You Like It 3.3, see Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage: 1574-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 1-2.

12. Della Casa's Galateo claims more time is wasted determining the fine points of ceremony than in conducting business. Courtiers in Rome know how to do these things, but elsewhere

le cirimonie sono di grande sconcio alle faccende e di molto tedio. "Copritevi," dice il giudice impacciato, al quale manca il tempo: e colui, fatte prima alquante riverenze, con grande stropiccio di piedi, rispondendo adagio, dice: "Signor mio io sto bene così." Ma pur dice il giudice, "Copritevi"; e quegli, torcendosi due e tre volte per ciascun lato e piegandosi fino in terra, con molta gravità risponde: "Priego Vostra Signoria che me lasci fare il debito mio'': e dura questa battaglia tanto e tanto tempo si consuma che il giudice in poco più arebbe potuto sbrigarsi di ogni sua faccenda quella mattina. ( Galateo , 90)

13. "The Pope never takes off his cap for anyone whatever" ( The Complete Works of Montaigne: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters , trans. Donald Frame [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957], 925, 938). I am in debt for this reference to Edwina Vittorini, "Montaigne, Ferrara and Tasso," in The Renaissance in Ferrara and Its European Horizons , ed. June Salmons and Walter Moretti (Swansea: University of Wales Press, 1984), 145-167; see also Oeuvres Complètes de Michel de Montaigne , vol. 7, Journal de Voyage en Italie (Paris: Louis Conard, 1928), 202.

14. "A Sermon Preached Before the King's Majesty at Whitehall on the Fifth of April, A.D. MDCXVIII, Being Easter Day," in Lancelot Andrewes, XCVI Sermons (London, 1641), 518.

15. Sumner, Folkways , 57.

16. Boccaccio, Il Filocolo , Book IV, question i.

17. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie , 196.

18. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution , 14-15.

19. As Annabel Patterson has shown, current practices could be tarred as usurpations of more ancient customs. Anti-enclosure tracts, for example, appealed "to the past as the source of 'ancient rights,' some of which were actually imagined as embedded in charters; but it was still to be found as a strategy from 1610 to the 1640s, when parliamentarians were developing their case against the king on the grounds of 'ancient liberties' that Stuart absolutism was said to have abrogated" ( Shakespeare and the Popular Voice [Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989], 41). Patterson concludes that "the idea of the 'common' had much wider ideological force, and stood for customary practices and 'rights' that were clearly perceived as such at the time of, and because of, their rescinding" (44).

20. The Atre of Rhetorique (1553), fol. 19; Mair's edition, 33.

21. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative , vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 5 and 231, cites Saint Augustine, The Confessions , book 11, chap. 14:17, noting that an investigation of time is really an investigation of the self.

22. Although Wilson never escapes his own convictions, he was a good storyteller. He and other sixteenth-century writers went beyond the limits of logic or rhetoric by drawing on a long narrative tradition to explore the complexities of ethical and moral issues. Patricia Parker comments that "[Wilson's] Rule of Reason and texts like it link the control of reason, logic, logos itself, to the disciplining of the 'errour' and potentially subversive 'doubtfulness' of words, and both to the maintainance of order in language and society" ( Literary Fat Ladies , 102).

23. "This is it, Adam, that grieves me, and the spirit of my father, which I think is within me, begins to mutiny against this servitude" ( As You Like It 1.1.21-24).

24. Charles says, "There's no news at the court, sir, but the old news: that is, the old Duke is banished by his younger brother the new Duke" ( As You Like It 1.1.97-100). Celia's comment occurs at 1.3.71.

25. Rosalind controls the timing of her discovery as a woman, which she has no reason to delay once within the forest except to achieve what Michel de Certeau called the tactical advantage of the less powerful to manipulate time or, in Ricoeur's terms, to tell her story. Like the dances that symbolize social harmony in Shakespeare's comedies, Rosalind uses the rhythmic chants by Silvius, Phebe, and Orlando to settle the social order of the play to her own advantage ( As You Like It 5.2.79-124). When Rosalind delivers the epilogue of the play, her role as the play's narrator culminates her control of time and displays her eloquent civility.

26. For printed English romances reasonably available to Shakespeare, see Ronald S. Crane, The Vogue of Medieval Chivalric Romance During the English Renaissance (Menasha, Wis.: George Banta Publishing Company, 1919).

27. See Richard II 5.4.119. The theme of French "custom" as the feminized, colonized Other is implicit in Juliet Fleming's " The French Garden: An Introduction to Women's French," ELH 56 (1989): 19-51 ("To learn French was then to show interest in a nation and a tongue readily associated with impropriety").

28. R. M. Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 338 n. 110.

29. The resistance to customs that Hamlet faces also gives depth to Shakespeare's Winter's Tale . The play is about what happens when the old ways no longer work. The action begins with Leontes' spectacular onset of jealousy, when he suddenly reinterprets Hermione's hospitable gestures to Polixenes as signs of adultery. His friend Polixenes suspects something is wrong when Leontes fails to respond to his "customary compliment" ( Winter's Tale 1.2.371). The dilemma of Camillo and Antigonus then shows how changing social circumstances call modes of behavior into question, creating a situation where there are no correct rules. For example, Antigonus agrees to Leontes' demand that he carry Perdita to a distant place, but he dies for his loyalty, pursued by a bear. Camillo, in contrast, temporizes before Leontes' threats. He gropes for a new code of social behavior, but ultimately remains trapped in a system of courtly allegiance. He switches masters, not values, and flees to Bohemia.

Meanwhile, after breaking down Leontes emotionally, Paulina extracts his promise never to marry without her permission. When she makes Hermione's statue descend from her pedestal of sixteen years, she creates the illusion of overcoming time and death. Hermione's statue ages because the art of Julio Romano "would beguile Nature of her custom" ( Winter's Tale 5.2.99). Like the custom that became the basis of the common law, Hermione is always ancient, yet always up to date, tam antiqua tam nova . The ambiguous quality of custom, which solved the problem of how to accommodate change without loss of authority for legal theorists, also restores the dead queen to life.

30. Fredson Bowers, "Shakespeare's Dramatic Vagueness," in Hamlet as Minister and Scourge (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 80-89, 80.

31. Maynard Mack remarks, "In the last act of the play (or so it seems to me, for I know there can be differences on this point), Hamlet accepts his world and we discover a different man" ("The Readiness is All: Hamlet, " in Everybody's Shakespeare [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993], 107-127, 124).

32. G. K. Hunter, "The Heroism of Hamlet," in Dramatic Identities and Cultural Tradition: Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1978), 230-250, 247.

33. Harry Levin, Shakespeare and the Revolution of the Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 48.

1. David Bevington, discussing the play New Customs (ca. 1563), notes that Protestantism "must be seen not as revolutionary but as 'primitive constitution,' the restored church of Christ's first apostles. 'New Custom' is actually a pejorative term, foisted on the elect by those who would claim antiquity for themselves. . . . [T]he play castigates the reactionary habit of doing 'as thy fathers have doone before thee'" ( Tudor Drama and Politics [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968], 130-131).

2. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution , 36.

3. Spenser believed English customs derived from the Norman yoke, thereby excusing the imposition of English customs on Ireland; see Diane Parkin-Speer, "Allegorical Legal Trials in Spenser's The Faerie Queene," Sixteenth Century Journal 23 (1992): 494-505. Coke argued furiously that the Norman invasion was not a conquest, but a restoration of William's "pretended" legal title against Harold, just as he argues that the Grand Customary of Normandy derived from earlier English law, and so was not its source (Edward Coke, Argumentum Anti-Normanicum [1682], v, cxviii). Later Coke cites Fortescue's De Politica administratione & Legibus Civilibus libus florentissimi Regni Angliae Commentarius to the effect that "the self same Customs that it is now governed withal" have obtained since the Romans ruled, ''which if they had not been right good, some of these Kings, moved either with Justice, or with Reason or Affection, would have changed them, or else altogether abolish [ sic ] them" ( Le Size Part des Reports [London, 1697], fol. A2 ^v ).

4. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution , 32, citing Fortescue, De laudibus legum Angliae , chap. 17.

5. "James favored Roman law against the pretensions of the common law tradition that supported Parliament, and Roman law underlay the civil law, church law—and Scottish law. In his Star Chamber speech of 1616, he was at pains to distinguish civil and canon law from the common law, and to insist that it keep its place and not encroach on the royal prerogative" (Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983], 47, citing Leah Marcus, "Masquing Occasions and Masque Structure," Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 24 [1981]: 7-16, and David Harris Willson, King James VI and I [New York: Oxford University Press, 1956], 257ff.).

6. See André Chastel, The Sack of Rome , 1527.

7. See Anne Lancashire, "The Emblematic Castle," in Minor Up to Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of G. R. Hibbard , ed. J. C. Gray (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 223-241. She cites John B. Barcourt, "I Pray You, Remember the Porter," Shakespeare Quarterly 12 (1961): 393-402; Paul A. Jorgensen, Our Naked Frailties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Glynne Wickham, "Hell-Castle and Its Door-Keeper," Shakespeare Survey 19 (1966): 68-74; John Doebler, Shakespeare's Speaking Pictures (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974), 132-137. See also Edgar Schell, Strangers and Pilgrims: From "The Castle of Perseverance" to ''King Lear " (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), and the index to large numbers of castles, both realistic and emblematic, found in medieval and Renaissance drama and pageantry in Ian Lancashire, Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain: A Chronological Topography to 1558 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983).

8. Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics , 35.

9. In addition to having the social significance traced here, the castle was, of course, often an image of the soul. According to James Nohrnberg, "The interiority of the Castle might be taken as a kind of paradigm for all enclosed spaces in the poem that stand for something inviolate in experience. It is a castle belonging to a virgin (Hebrew almah ), but it is also a virgin castle, like the 'castellum' of Martha and Mary, which, because Christ entered there, is a part of the homily for the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin. (Such a castle appears in the Digby play of Mary Magdalene , and is attacked by the seven deadly sins)" ( The Analogy of "The Faerie Queene, " 328).

10. T. S. Eliot, "Dante," in Selected Essays (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, n.d.), 203.

11. My student Paula von Loewenfeldt points out to me that Akira Kurosawa's 1957 version of Macbeth , where castles figure prominently as sites of civility and intrigue, is rifled not Throne of Blood but Kumonosu-jo (Castle of the Spider's Web).

12. Harry Berger, Jr., "The Early Scenes of Macbeth : Preface to a New Interpretation," ELH 47 (1980): 1-31, 29.

13. Berger argues that Scotland was no harmonious state under Duncan and that "the killing of the king may be a recurrent feature of the political process by which the kingdom periodically rids itself of the poison accumulating within it as a result of normal institutional functions ("The Early Scenes," 25). G. M. Trevelyan finds a similar pattern in history: when Mary Stuart mar-

ried Bothwell, Darnley's murderer, "her subjects supposed her precognizant of the deed. True, assassination was still a custom of the country. Knox had not disapproved the slaughter of Cardinal Beaton, and Darnley had conducted the tragedy of Rizzio. But people had a prejudice against the killing of husbands by their wives" ( A Shortened History of England [1942; New York: Longmans, 1951], 226).

14. Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland , 6 vols. (1808; New York: AMS, 1965), 5:269. Shakespeare realized he was using a conflation of sources molded to the Protestant Tudor position, according to David Nor-brook, " Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography," in Stephen Zwicker and Kevin Sharpe, eds., Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventh-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 78-116.

15. See, for example, Erich Köhler, "Le rôle de la 'coutume' dans les romans de Chrétiens de Troyes," Romania 81 (1960): 386-397.

16. David Quint, Epic and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 260.

17. For Brutus, see Julius Caesar , 3.2.45 ("I have the same dagger for myself, when it shall please my country to need my death"); compare Othello 1.3.294 ("My life upon her faith!").

18. Huntington Cairns notes, "In the Case of Tanistry , decided in 1608, the common law tests of custom were applied to the Irish Brehon law of succession. Although the existence of the custom could not be denied, the judges with the aid of the tests were able to pronounce illegal the native tenures of land" ( Legal Philosophy from Plato to Hegel [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1949], 221-222). The Case of Tanistry was reported by Sir John Davies.

19. Holinshed's Chronicles , 5:269.

20. Ibid., 5:271.

21. William Empson saw the temporal ambiguity of this passage, "where gentle might just as well be, and suggests, 'ungentle,' because the weal is conceived as 'ungentle' before it was purged and gentle afterwards" ( Seven Types of Ambiguity [1930; London: Chatto and Windus, 1963], 203).

22. Holinshed's Chronicles , 5:271.

23. Ibid., 5:274.

24. Shakespeare had a fondness for ambiguous prophecies, easily created in Latin, where the infinitive takes the object case: "Aio te, Aecida, Romanos vincere posse," quips York, when Margery Jordan's spirits announce that Suffolk

will die by "water" (a sailor named Walter kills him) and Somerset should "shun castles" ( 2 Henry VI 1.4).

25. The play is a moral spectacle, R. S. Crane wrote, because Macbeth acts in full knowledge of the moral character of what he does. It is the story of "a man, not naturally depraved, who has fallen under the compulsive power of an imagined better state for himself which he can attain only by acting contrary to his normal habits and feelings" ( The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1953], 171-172).

26. Anthony Munday, trans., Palmerin d'Oliva: The Mirrour of Nobilitie (London, 1615), chap. 47. I have modernized the spelling.

27. Lewes Lavater, Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght (1572), ed. J. Dover Wilson and May Yardley (Oxford: At the University Press, 1929), 91. I have modernized the text.

1. Georges Duby, France in the Middle Ages (1987; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 56.

2. The rise of Arthurian romance coincided with the Norman hegemony in Great Britain. Geoffrey of Monmouth, who essentially invented King Arthur so that the Normans could claim to be restoring old ways that the intervening Angles and Saxons had usurped, wrote of fortresses in his Historia Regum Britanniae (ca. 1135). Wace, however, substituted castles when he translated Geoffrey's Latin into French verse a generation later, as well as highlighting some evil customs ( Roman de Brut , in Wace and Layamon, Arthurian Chronicles [New York: Dutton, 1976], 3, 7, 10, 15, etc.)

3. N. J. G. Pounds, The Medieval Castle in England and Wales: A Social and Political History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 96-101.

4. Pounds, The Medieval Castle , 256. See also Michael W. Thompson, The Decline of the Castle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

5. Pounds, The Medieval Castle , 249.

6. J. R. Lander, Conflict and Stability in Fifteenth-Century England (London: Hutchinson, 1969), 164.

7. Pounds, The Medieval Castle , 297.

8. Michael W. Thompson notes, "For three centuries the castle had been a grim but serviceable structure with unpleasant associations. In the late four-

teenth century it seemed to reveal how nice it could look" ( The Rise of the Castle [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 178).

9. David Aers, Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing, 1360-1430 (New York: Routledge, 1988), 155.

10. Ibid., 161.

11. Compare Sir Thomas Elyot's The Castel of Helth (1539), cited in A. C. Hamilton, ed., Spenser: The Faerie Queene , 124.

12. Hamilton, ed., Spenser: The Faerie Queene , 742.

13. Eneas: A Twelfth-Century French Romance , trans. John A. Yunck (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 198.

14. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 391.

15. Coleridge is cited in the notes to FQ 4.5 in Spenser, Works: A Variorum Edition , vol. 5, 198.

16. Phillip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poesy , ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1965), 101, 158 n. 8. See also the Oxford English Dictionary , s.v. "castle," 12.

17. Richard II 3.1 (Bristol), 3.2 (Barkloughly), 3.3 (Flint), 3.2.210 ("pine away"), 3.3.148 ("gorgeous palace"). Sidney gives a "gorgeous palace'' as an example of something that must be modeled or pictured, not just declared, to make known its "inward conceit" for a "judicial comprehending" ( Defense 107). Cf. The Tempest 4.1.152. The word palace derived from Palatinum, one of the hills of Rome, and in sixteenth-century English usage almost exclusively denoted a royal palace in a town, as Joseph Rykwert notes ("The Palace and the City," Times Literary Supplement , 13 September 1991, 17).

18. Northrop Frye observes that "when Northumberland reports Bolingbroke's wish for Richard to come down and parley with him in the 'base court' (the basse cour or lower courtyard of Flint Castle)," the symbolism of the whole operation flashes at once through Richard's mind: "Base court, where kings grow base" ( Richard II 3.3.180) ( On Shakespeare [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986], 65).

19. See 2 Henry IV IV, Epilogue, 30-32.

20. John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe , 8 vols. (New York: AMS, 1965), 3:709, 712.

21. As David Riggs notes, 1 Henry VI is "an extended comparatio between English chivalry, as it is represented by Talbot, Bedford, and Salisbury, and the

mock-heroic pretensions of Joan la Pucelle and the French peers. . . . Although Talbot does fight to maintain his personal honor, that honor is systematically contrasted to the wholesale disregard for feudal convention that characterizes the French 'revolt'" ( Shakespeare's Heroical Histories: Henry VI and Its Literary Tradition [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971], 83).

22. Ibid., 102.

23. The Duke of Somerset, "who long before was warned to eschew all Castles," dies under the alehouse sign of the castle in Edward Hall's Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke (1548); see Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare , 3:124.

24. I have been unable to trace the reference. But Lewis may have had in mind Thomas More's observation that travelers easily discover man-eaters and monsters, "but it is not so easy to find good citizens and wise governments" ( Utopia , trans. and ed. Adams, 8), or the medieval Aeneas, who expresses his disappointment at the backwardness of Italy: "I do not know if there is any grain or castle or city; I have seen nothing wilder. If we find no provisions here, we have no reason to stay" ( Eneas: A Twelfth-Century French Romance , 62).

25. The "Diario" of Christopher Columbus's First Voyage to America, 1492-1493: Abstracted by Fray Bartolomé de las Casas , ed. Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley, Jr. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 58-63.

26. A word for "temple" picked up by the Spanish in the Antilles.

27. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico , trans. A. P. Maudslay (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1956), 190-191.

28. Murrin, The Allegorical Epic , 138-139.

29. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 132.

30. In a book deeply indebted to Stephen Greenblatt's idea of improvisation in Renaissance Self-Fashioning , Tzvetan Todorov has pointed out that for one who is truly unsympathetic to a foreign culture, it makes no difference whether one recoils from its horrors or openly embraces its values because one sees them as similar to one's own. Either reaction is ethnocentric; see Tzvetan Todorov's The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper and Row, 1984).

31. Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico , 191.

32. Ibid., 205.

33. See Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).

34. Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness , xvi, in Elizabethan Plays , ed. Arthur C. Nethercot (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 840.

35. The shift is part of the transition from medieval to modern England. Lawrence Stone ascribes a crisis of the hereditary elite to the period of 1580-1620. Armed retainers are replaced by coach and footmen, private castles by private houses; North and West are nationalized and their violence subdued; abstract liberty and public interest give way to particular liberties and ancient customs; radical Protestantism elevates individual conscience over the claims of obedience to family, church, nation; noblemen turn to books, and for the first time in history, the "intelligentsia" became a branch of the propertied classes ( The Crisis of the Aristocracy [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965], 15).

1. Cited by John Danby, Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear (London: Faber and Faber, 1949), 30.

2. R. A. Foakes, Hamlet versus King Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare's Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 181.

1. Iago first seizes on Cassio as fit for his purpose because the Florentine's "manners" (Othello 2.1.98) make him familiar with women; the situation prefigures Leontes' suspicion of his wife's conversation with Polixenes in The Winter's Tale . That the social custom of drinking undoes Cassio echoes Plato's Laws (I.639), where convivial drinking is regarded as an important social custom.

2. Lynda E. Boose, "Othello's Handkerchief: 'The Recognizance and Pledge of Love,'" English Literary Renaissance 5 (1975): 360-374, 361.

3. Carol Neely Thomas, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays (1985; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 129.

4. For the weaving of fictions, see Catherine Bates, "Weaving and Writing in Othello," Shakespeare Survey 46 (1994): 51-60, 51, citing Renaissance Self-Fashioning , 236-237.

5. Marguerite Waller, "Academic Tootsie: The Denial of Difference and the Difference It Makes," Diacritics 17 (1987): 2-20, 18.