VII
A half century after Ariosto wrote, Edmund Spenser confirmed the manipulations inherent in Bradamante's behavior. Spenser isolated the situation of one who confronts a questionable custom but does not make an issue of its morality. Spenser's reading of the Furioso further confirms that Ariosto's fictional progenitor of the Este family offers a crucial insight into that crisis of individualism that since Burckhardt has shaped our notion of the Italian Renaissance.
As Book IV of The Faerie Queene opens, Britomart (a country cousin, C. S. Lewis said, of Ariosto's Bradamante)[58] has not yet disclosed her identity to Amoret, whom she has rescued from Busirane's tortures: Amoret fears she owes her body to her deliverer. The pair ride until they reach "a Castell," where "the custome of that place was such" that anyone who has not "love nor lemman there in store, / Should either winne him one, or lye without the dore" (FQ 4.1.9).[59]
Britomart easily solves this castle custom, which seems designed to admit only heterosexual couples. Armed with her ebony spear (Spenser's version of Bradamante's golden lance), she gains acceptance for herself and Amoret by defeating a "jolly knight" who seeks Amoret as his entrance partner. Then Britomart upsets the apple cart. She has already overcome social custom by concealing her sex; now she overcomes it
again by revealing herself. After asking the seneschal of the castle to ratify her victory as a man, she gains entrance for the nameless jolly knight by claiming that because she is a woman, she may be allowed entry with a man.
In contrast to more conventional caste scenes, Britomart both accepts and devalues custom by her own terms and solution. She practices (in the sense of undermining ) by participating. Despite, even because of, the custom's claims on her, she operates freely. And her confidence goes beyond her ebony spear. She decides to do things the hard way—to have the "jolly knight" admitted too—thereby imposing a new possibility of failure before the custom's challenge. Instead of destroying the caste or its custom, she overgoes the rules. Her wit, as conveyed by her words, allows her to set the fashion for the castle, if not alter the custom.
Her mechanism for this feat demonstrates how the weak overmaster dominant social forces. Rather than obtaining a strategic victory, as Tristan does at the Weeping Caste, Britomart obtains victory by what Michel de Certeau calls tactical means. In de Certeau's terms, "a tactic depends on time—it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized 'on the wing.'"[60] That is, Britomart imposes a solution dependent not on force alone. Although Britomart owes her victory in the joust to the irresistible enchantment of her ebony spear, her triumph over the castellan is a temporal trick. Having declared herself a woman, she could not again fight for Amoret. The ruse is not reversible.