spenser's art of war_chivalric allegory, military technology, a

Spenser's Art of War: Chivalric Allegory, Military Technology, and the Elizabethan Mock-Heroic SensibilityAuthor(s): Michael WestSource: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Winter, 1988), pp. 654-704Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2861885 .Accessed: 20/10/2011 09:20

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Spenser's Art of War: Chivalric Allegory, Military Technology, and the Elizabethan

Mock-Heroic Sensibility

by MICHAEL WEST

n the medieval romances single combat was the knightly norm. The Italian chivalric epics sought to adapt this convention to the

ideals of the Renaissance courtier. In II Cortegiano, Frederico Fregoso explains "that where the Courtyer is at skirmishe, or assault, or bat- taile upon the land, or in such other places of enterprise, he ought to worke the matter wisely in seperating himself from the multitude, and undertake his notable and bould feates which he hath to doe, with as little company as he can. '9 But such displays of panache had little place in the massed infantry tactics that dominated the actual battlefields of the sixteenth century. It was disciplined self-restraint that made the Swiss and Spanish pike phalanxes so formidable, rel-

egating cavalry to secondary importance. The Italian courtier-

knights had been rudely humbled, after all, when Charles XII in- vaded Italy in 1494 and deployed his excellent artillery.

Moreover, the ascendancy of siege warfare made chivalry in-

creasingly irrelevant to sixteenth-century tactics. Militarily speaking, the period from 1450 to 534 was "to some extent an aberration, where the conditions of war offered an unusually fertile soil for some

expressions of the cult of chivalry. After 1534 the battle went into rapid decline and with it chivalry entered a phase of decay from which it never recovered. "2 Between 1534 and 163 I "the major battle almost disappeared from Western Europe." The developing technology of angle-bastion fortification restored the advantage to the defensive, and war became a series of sieges, "with battle, when it occurred at all, as subsidiary to the major business of investing or

'Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, tr. Sir Thomas Hoby, ed. Walter Raleigh (London, 1900) 113. All early texts are cited with normalized typography and expanded contractions. Earlier versions of this paper were presented during 1986 at the conference of the Renaissance Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; at the meeting of the West Virginia Shakespeare and Renaissance Association in Morgantown, West Vir- ginia; and at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. I am grateful to my au- diences for helpful suggestions.

2Malcolm Vale, War and Chivalry: Warfare and Aristocratic Culture in England, France, and Burgundy at the End of the Middle Ages (Athens, Ga., 1981) I74.

[654]

SPENSER'S ART OF WAR

relieving fortresses."3 Such patterns of warfare reflected not only technological advances in fortification and fire-power, but "the ex- tension north of the Alps of military entrepreneurship on the Italian model and with it the natural desire to conserve expensive plant. Cautious professional competence took the place of the quest for

glory in the planning and conduct of campaigns; the caution of men who intended to see their investment in armed forces pay off in

wealth, political influence, and land." But the pay-off never quite materialized. Paradoxically, such limited and unglamorous warfare also seemed unprecedentedly nasty and pointless: "All this . . . ex-

plains why, for over a hundred years, warfare in Europe was so pro- longed and indecisive; smouldering away like wet wood . .. never

acting as a catalyst establishing a new pattern of political order." Like many episodes in the Faerie Queene, Spenser's capsule history

of "the land which warlike Britons now possesse" reflects the Renaissance's considerable moral ambivalence about the activity of warfare.4 Similar ambivalence characterizes Spenser's attempt to reconcile traditional heroic virtue with the demands of military lead-

ership. In avowing that "the generall end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle dis-

cipline," Spenser assumed that humanism would mold not simply ideal men but ideal leaders, who could serve the state equally well in

peace or war. But in reviewing his epic predecessors, he noted that the ideal man was not always an ideal leader: "I have followed all the

antique Poets historicall, first Homere, who in the persons of Ag- amemnon and Vlysses hath ensampled a good governour and a vertuous man, the one in his Ilias, the other in his Odysseis: then Virgil, whose like intention was to doe in the person of Aeneas: after him Ariosto comprised them both in his Orlando: and lately Tasso dis- severed them againe, and formed both parts in two persons."5 Ini-

tially he planned to emulate Virgil and Ariosto by fusing the ideal hero and governor in Arthur, devoting twelve books to perfecting him in "the twelve private morall vertues, as Aristotle hath devised

. which ifI finde to be well accepted, I may be perhaps encoraged,

3Michael Howard, War in European History (Oxford, 1976) 26-27, 34-37. 4FQ, II.x.25; I cite Spenser from the Variorum Works, ed. Edwin A. Greenlaw et al.

(Baltimore, 1932-1949). On Spenserian ambivalence about warfare see esp. Michael West, "Spenser and the Renaissance Ideal of Christian Heroism," PMLA, 88 (1973): IOI3-32; and "Warfare," in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Tor- onto, forthcoming)

5"A Letter of the Authors," in Works 1:167.

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RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

to frame the other part of politicke vertues in his person, after that hee came to be king." As Spenser saw that he could never realize this

grandiose scheme, he accelerated the shift to a public ethic. After three books devoted to the private moral virtues of holiness, tem-

perance, and chastity, the titular virtues of the next three books-

friendship, justice, and courtesy-all characterize the hero in a social context and locate him in an increasingly politicized Faerie lond.

Although the titular virtues of his epic form a rather inadequate moral arsenal for a commander-in-chief, the Vewe of the present state

oflrelande demonstrates that Spenser was never so naive as to fancy that his employer Lord Grey could pacify Ireland by relying on them alone. Whether Spenser actually saw combat has been debated in-

conclusively; but improving the performance of the English army is

certainly a central concern of his. Fostered by bards whom he abom- inates, the warlike disposition of Irish outlaws precludes civilizing them simply by legal reforms; they must be crushed militarily, he insists. Like Lord Grey, he advocates troop increases for war a out- rance and is skeptical of Burghley's policy of temporizing with Irish rebels like Tyrone. Among the specific army reforms that he calls for are promoting officers from within the ranks on Irish experience and merit, establishing an independent paymaster to guard against false muster rolls, and curbing a colonel's power to court-martial without

convoking a jury of fellow-soldiers. Warmly defending Lord Grey against the charge of undue cruelty occasioned by his massacre of

Spanish prisoners at Smerwick (albeit on rather technical legal grounds, arguing that their surrender had been unconditional and without promise of quarter), Spenser strikes some as a disciple of Machiavelli, whom he cites.6 Both authors, for example, appreciate the strategic utility of fanmine, the devastating effects of which

Spenser graphically describes. His conviction that success in war "useth Comonlie to be accordinge to the Justnes of the Cause"

(Vewe 3582-83) probably owes more to Jean Bodin than to Machi- avelli, but the author of the Vewe certainly strikes one as a tough- minded observer of military affairs. Though Spenser's hawkish policy has been often criticized as discordanc with the Christian humanism of the Faerie Queene, it was this hardnosed strategy car-

6With Edwin A. Greenlaw, "The Influence of Machiavelli on Spenser," Modern Phi-

lology, (I908): 187-202, cp. H. S. V. Jones, "Spenser's Defense of Lord Grey," Univ. of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, No. 3 (1919): 1-75, which stresses Bodin's influence. See also Sheila T. Cavanagh, "Such Was Irena's Countenance: Ireland in

Spenser's Prose and Poetry," Texas Studies in Language and Literature, (i986):24-50.

656


ried out by generals like Mountjoy, Strafford, and Cromwell that

finally pacified Ireland-at least for the next three centuries. Yet there are indications that Spenser was an armchair tactician. 7

The most salient sign occurs when Eudoxus queries Irenius about the Irishman's horsemanship, "his Shanke pillion without stirrops/ his mannier ofmnountinge his fashion ofridinge his Chardginge of his

speare aloafte above hande." Though admitting that Irish tack dif- fers radically from English, Irenius defends the Irish practice: "Neither is the same yet Counted an Uncomelye manner of Ridinge for I have hearde some great warriours saie that. . . they neuer sawe a more Cornlye horseman then the Irisheman, nor that Commethe one more bravelye in his Chardge neither is his manner of mount-

inge unsernelye though he lacke Stirrops but more readye then with stirrops." Eudoxus concludes fairly enough that "it semethe then that ye finde no fault with this mnanner of Ridinge" (1Vewe 2193- 2203).

Justifying his sobriquet of"peaceful one," here Spenser's normal

spokesman (like his interlocutor) naively ignores the military function of the stirrup, which enables a knight to couch his lance under- arm and brace to absorb an enemy's impact. As the leading military historian of the Irish campaigns observes, "the shock of thrusting a lance against an opponent's armour when both horses were moving at a fair pace would certainly unhorse a man without stirrups." Be- cause the Irish "rode without stirrups, they were not fitted for shock action and dared not face English horse except at the most favorable odds; for the English not only had stirrups but also commonly rode much heavier horses."8 Their plate armor made them superior to

light Irish cavalry even when mailed, and to the unarmored Irish

7According to Alexander B. Judson's Life, when the privy council nominated

Spenser to be sheriff of Cork in 1598, it described him as "a man . not unskilful or without experience in the service of the wars" (Variorum Works, 8:200). But in the Vewe his spokesman Irenius disclaims personal knowledge of garrison tactics, saying, "I am noe marshall mao" (3718-19), and his apparent military inexperience is emphasized by Roland M. Smith, "The Irish Background of Spenser's View, "Journal of English and Ger- manic Philology, 42 (1943): 499-5 5.

8Cyril Falls, Elizabeth's Irish Wars (London, I950) 69. Philippe Contamine, Warin the Middle Ages, tr. MichaelJones (London, 1984) 179-184, reviews controversy over the

stirrup. For further evidence of Spenser's naivete see Allan H. Gilbert, "Spenserian Armor,

" PILA, 67 (1942): 98 -87. Derricke's woodcut is reproduced from the unique

illustrated copy in the Edinburgh University Library by their kind permission. I am grateful to the University of Edinburgh's Institute for Advanced Studies in the Human- ities for electing me an Honorary Fellow during 1987 to pursue research on this topic and to my colleagues there for helpful suggestions.

657


jFo2 if b)balur ontebe mou'e,crtat~.3ltl~Otito taktq p 5 Mars ~ Ifo tle 1nal ti, of tTalptroutoaseb tateo, fiticb Doe our fouerigm neinc lti, lfl btaelp beaipf ftla br. Co plutce the tbatei of taclYbowne,tlaft slp p ar~ t .t aawtj.

p? nott)e rmctl! imprtag6,no) g?baee,t f t»eoftloe oo pCe tlegm ltonfob6eltt ,b riour offba tblte, Ao0 pet tecroohe c rbbctt roo f Pe;Lst bctl ibfoe, nti tlO rfameto aUct bta ,l bO,ittrtfuc bporluauemat. Can mae im to teuole tfettng, ti^ ono)pbt pb oe *e it i mioprntfiwt,nt moftt to be Wie

(Ilt tattame 3etenotSp3cWtB,-BapntetWleoifnr.a. . t.. ...e. attf tB

FIG. I -English and Irish cavalry collide. Reproduced by permission of the Edin-

burgh University Library.

footman, the kerne, they were almost invulnerable. When on one occasion a body of seventy kerne stood up against a charge by six English horse, the event was reported as highly unusual. Even without full chivalric armor English cavalry routinely routed enemies who outnumbered them better than ten-to-one. In a woodcut for John Derricke's Image of Irelande (I58I) the distinctive Irish shank pillion is clearly rendered while the defeated Irish horsemen perforce brandish their spears aloft. In the background the unarmored kerne flee from the English troops' firepower while the Irish piper lies dead (see Fig. i). The cut depicts the English forces as overwhelming; however, "a few troopers charging at the heels of a daring-but it must also be noted, a well-armored commander. . . often achieved amazing results" (Falls 345). Such feats undoubtedly made an impression on Spenser; but he apparently appreciated neither their dependence on superior military technology employed against a rel- atively primitive foe, nor the degree to which that technology itself was outdated on the Continent. The guerilla warfare of the Irish marches made possible military anachronism that would have

658


proved grotesquely out of place in the increasingly mathematical siege warfare of the Lowlands. Spenser's nostalgia for the niounted knight obliquely reflects the essential backwardness of Elizabethan armies, among the last in Europe to abandon the lance.

Though single combat is the norm in the Faerie Queene, it is in- structive to consider passages where Spenser depicts a knight con- fronting massed enemies, or two knights endeavoring to concert their efforts, or a leader commanding forces of his own. To rescue his Pastorella Sir Calidore slays an entire band of brigands. How? Dis- guising himself as a shepherd, but having "underneath, him armed privily" (VI.xi.36), Calidore introduces himself to some of the thieves and craftily contrives to have them lead him back to their den. When they all fall asleep, "Sir Calidore him arm'd, as he thought best, /Having of late by diligent inquest,/Provided him a sword of meanest sort:/With which he streight went to the Captaines nest" in a separate cave (VI.xi.42). Note the scrupulosity with which

Spenser insists that the only sword that disguise permitted him to

carry was a very poor one. Since he is already supposedly armored, this further arming must mean that he picked up some ax-like

weapon in the den. By its aid, apparently, "Calidore with huge re- sistlesse might,/The dores assayled, and the locks vpbrast," a feat less readily imaginable with sword alone. Presumably unarmored, the Captain, "Into the entrance ran: where the bold knight/Encoun- tring him with small resistance slew" (VI.xi.43). Calidore is over-

joyed to find his Pastorella safe. But

now by this, with noyse of late uprore, The hue and cry was raysed all about; And all the Brigants flocking in great store, Unto the cave gan preasse, nought having dout Of that was doen, and entred in a rout. But Calidore in th' entry close did stand, And entertayning them with courage stout, Still slew the formost, that came first to hand, So long till all the entry was with bodies mand. (VI.xi.46)

Then when "no more could nigh to him approach,/He breath'd his sword, and rested him till day" (VI.xi.47).

Spenser strives mightily to keep this feat plausible in military terms. Unlike Calidore the brigands have no armor. Their leader is

659


dead, a night attack discourages coordinated effort in any event, and Calidore has a strong defensive position that forces them to assault him individually. Indeed, it may seem strange that he abandons it with the dawn: "Through the dead carcases he made his way,/ Mongst which he found a sword of better say,/With which he forth went into th' open light:/Where all the rest for him did ready stay" (VI.xi.47). But this tactic too is justifiable. A good offense is now Calidore's best defence. As a lone warrior opposing a band he cannot withstand a concerted siege for long; there is no way out but for- ward, and his position weakens with every hour. Were his only thought for himself, he should probably have advanced after his ini- tial success under cover of darkness; but that tactic might not have

permitted him to extricate Pastorella. Yielding his defensive edge to risk combat in the open, Calidore understandably grasps at every slender advantage by exchanging the mediocre sword necessitated

by his disguise for a better one of the brigands-a shrewdly realistic touch. 9

By the end of combat, however, realism is severely strained. With no advantage but his armor and superior swordsmanship Calidore routs an enormous body of brigands who attack him ferociously to-

gether: "So many theeves about him swarming are,/All which do him assayle on every side,/And sore oppresse, ne any him doth

spare:/But he doth with his raging brond divide/Their thickest

troups, and round about him scattreth wide" (VI. xi.48). How could a determined force large enough to be numbered in troops fail to subdue a knight fighting alone on foot, however valiant, if they attack en masse "with all their might" (VI. xi.47)? Spenser here sounds

oddly like Falstaff describing the multiplying rogues in buckram who supposedly waylaid him. Dozens of thieves could swamp a

knight and pinion his arms before "he had strowd with bodies all the

way" (VI.xi.49). Such prowess is barely conceivable for a lone

knight with a well-trained mount like the cavalrymen whom

9To James Nohrnberg's The Analogy of the Faerie Queene (Princeton, I976) I owe much. But his treatment of this passage suggests how even so elegant an allegorist can slight Spenser's epic dimension: "Different ranks merit different courtesies, and Cali- dore conforms to decorum even when he arms himself to attack the brigands. He pro- vides himself with 'a sword of meanest sort,' and only when victory is in sight does he employ 'a sword of better say' " (708). Should a reader really think that Calidore ex- changes weapons out of decorous courtesy? I doubt that this idea occurred to Spenser; but if he did toy with it, or if he wrote in such a fashion elsewhere as to encourage us to do so, then this passage like much else in the poem must be recognized as ludicrous.

66o


Spenser knew in Ireland. But Calidore is fighting on foot, and

Spenser seems unaware of the limitations that this imposes. Massed human bodies have only fitful military reality for him. What results is epic surrealism. The thieves "fled from his wrath, and did them- selues convay/Into their caves, their heads from death to hide"

(VI. xi. 49). But when Calidore ransacks their caves two stanzas later, they have apparently vanished. Their disappearance yields no particular allegorical meaning, and it is all the more disconcerting in view of the many specific touches with which Spenser has drama- tized Calidore's tactical predicament in facing massed foes. Likewise the armor upon which the entire feat depends is only hazily imag- ined. Calidore's invulnerability to such a band would seem to re-

quire extensive chivalric plate, to say nothing of a helmet. Yet a suit sufficient to protect him as this fight assumes could scarcely have been masked from the thieves for several hours beforehand. When he sat down in their cave, there would surely have been an audible clank or two from beneath his "shepheards weeds" (VI.xi. 36), even if only mail were involved. Moreover, it would have exhausted him. British commanders in Ireland were not so naive about what

wearing armor actually involves. Although their upper plate nor-

mally made mounted English cavalry more heavily armored than their Irish counterparts, even these horsemen discarded full chivalric

leg-armor because it was too fatiguing and restricted the mobility necessary for cross-country operations against marauding guerilla tribesmen who were not easy to bring to bay.

However, Spenser's description of how Maleger and his troops besiege the castle of Temperance does distill some essential princi- ples of guerilla warfare from his Irish experiences. When Prince Arthur and Sir Guyon first reach the castle, "a thousand villeins round about them swarmed/Out of the rockes and caves adjoyning nye,/Vile caytive wretches, ragged, rude, deformnd,/All threatning death, all in straunge manner arnd." At first they force the two mounted knights to give ground, "but when againe/They gave fresh charge, their forces gan to faile,/Unable their encounter to sustain." The heavier equipment of Arthur and Guyon lets them tri-

umph over amazing odds; the hyperbole here exaggerates an under-

lying military reality. The only hope of these irregulars lies in the tactic of "their cruell Capitaine," who sought to surround Arthur and Guyon "and overrun to tread them to the ground." But the footmen's very lack of military training keeps them from executing

66I


such commands effectively, so "the knights with their bright- burning blades/Broke their rude troupes, and orders did confound" (Iix. 3-I 5). These ragged, undisciplined hordes with their rustic

weaponry resemble the semi-nomadic kerne, who could turn over-

night from herders to raiders, then just as easily melt back into the

populace. Thus Guyon and Arthur, though masters of the field, find themselves "hewing and slashing at their idle shades;/For though they bodies seeme, yet substance from them fades." Maleger proves invulnerable to conventional tactics. Whenever Arthur slays him, he rises from the ground with renewed fury. Finally Arthur tackles him bare-handed, lifts and strangles him, then throws his body in a lake, so that he is no longer able to draw strength from his mother Earth. This adaptation of the Antaeus myth to historical allegory vividly renders the futility of waging counter-insurgent warfare from a

plane of technological superiority and the strategic importance ofin-

terdicting the rural guerilla's sustenance from the countryside, which the English did brutally but successfully in Ireland with a policy of agrarian devastation.

Yet other military aspects of this episode are more bizarre. Pelted with poisoned arrows by the retreating Maleger, Arthur makes the sensible tactical decision "to follow him no more, / ... Untill he quite had spent his perlous store,/And then assayle him fresh, ere he could shift for more" (II.xi. 27). But Maleger is aided by two hags, Impo- tence and Impatience. Impotence retrieves his spent arrows. When Arthur seeks to bind her, he is suddenly attacked from behind by Impatience, who "him backward overthrew." Maleger immedi-

ately piles on also. The three would clearly have killed Arthur "had not his gentle Squire beheld his pain,/And commen to his reskew, ere his bitter bane." Acting rather like a chivalric referee, Tirmias

pries off the two hags and holds them at bay, so that Arthur can pro- ceed to deal with Maleger properly in single combat. In a stanza

moralizing this event Spenser draws the ultimate lesson "that had not grace thee blest, thou sholdest not survive" (II. xi. 3o). Curiously absent, however, is any sense of the need for military teamwork when facing multiple enemies. Maleger's forces are often a disorganized rabble, yet he and his hags fight more effectively together here than do Arthur and Timias, who simply materializes like a deus ex machina. Likewise, when Arthur and Guyon charged among Ma-

leger's troops, they scarcely acted in concert, nor did either try to cover the other's rear. Their companions Timias and the Palmer

662


were not even described as present. The notion of armed allies fighting together has only intermittent appeal for Spenser. Even when Timias helps the wounded Arthur from the battlefield, faint "through losse of blood" shed in quelling Maleger, this tableau remains unconvincing, for as the two return to Alma's castle the entire horde besieging it - who now could make short work ofthem - has

conveniently and characteristically vanished into thin air. In the mil-

itary dream-world of the Faerie Queene one can dispel bands of ter- rorists by neutralizing their leader. In the Middle East, alas, that may not work.

Indeed, the siege is conceived with grotesque inconsistency. Spenser is unsure whether a besieged castle may safely open its gates. When Arthur and Guyon first appear at the castle, the enemy are nowhere in sight; yet the castle wards, though wholeheartedly friendly, decline to risk opening the gates to admit them, lest the en-

emy appear and gain entry. Emerging from neighboring rocks and caves, Maleger's hordes suddenly rush the little party, confirming the wisdom of the castle's defensive tactics. Guyon and Arthur must

disperse this horde "quite away" before being received into the castle (II.ix. 16). Yet after Guyon has departed on his quest, the siege is renewed even more hotly with "huge artillery,/With which they dayly made most dreadfull battery." For allegorical reasons Ma-

leger's wild hordes are now very carefully organized in twelve

troops."Seven of the same against the Castle gate,/In strong en- trenchments he did closely place,/Which with incessant force and endlesse hate,/They battered day and night, and entraunce did awate" (II. xi. 6-7). With "wicked engins" the other five troops support the Deadly Sins by assailing the castle's five sensory bulwarks.

Though the defense is spirited, the lady Alma understandably feels that "neuer was she in so euill cace." Yet when Arthur at this junc- ture offers "against that Carle to fight," they happily allow "those

gates to be unbar'd" for his sally despite the fact that the enemy forces are now dug in directly before the gates and eager to exploit any opening, since "evermore their wicked Capitaine/Provoked them the breaches to assay" (II.xi.9-I7). Any good tactician would

sally from "the back-gate" carefully described in II.x.32; but since

Spenser's physiological allegory has equated that with the anus, chivalric dignity apparently forbids Arthur to use the postern.

Oddly enough, upon his appearance Maleger's forces make no effort to rush the gate but concentrate upon Arthur. But strangest of

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all is their contradictory nature. As when Arthur arrived at the castle, he rides roughshod over them, "and with his sword disperst the raskall flockes,/Which fled a sunder, and him fell before. ... / The fierce Spumador trode them downe like dockes." This feat invites us to imagine Maleger's forces as a "rascal" mob like the undisciplined Irish kerne capable of being routed by an individual mounted horseman "in glitterand armes . . . dight" (II.xi. 17-I9). But during the

siege Maleger's guerrilla troops have been transformed into a modern Renaissance army conducting siege warfare on the continental model, whose plans for entrenched investment reflect a military en-

gineer's careful "dessignment." Their "wicked engins," "bat- teries," and "artillery" might conceivably be ballistic catapults or rams rather than guns. But when we are told that "euermore their hideous Ordinance/Vpon the Bulwarkes cruelly did play," Spens- er's emphasis upon the rapid rate of fire involved suggests that he has cannon in mind. Whether or not this ordnance uses gunpowder, it could never be employed by the wild semi-nomads of a captain whose henchwomen are Impotence and Impatience. Nothing of the sort was employed by the Irish kerne, who serve only sporadically as the models for Maleger's primitive horde. Though by 1596 Ty- rone had trained a corps of native musketeers, his dependence on internal lines of communication over bog and mountain discouraged Irish use of cannon, whereas the English could transport them by sea. Essentially "the Irish never possessed any. This was a heavy handicap. It meant that no castle held by the English need ever fall unless it were betrayed, surprised, or starved out, whereas practi- cally no castle could be maintained by the Irish, provided the English could reach the scene with cannon of adequate weight" (Falls 343- 44).

This phantasmal army combining primitive guerilla tactics with formal siege warfare may seem a trivial anomaly to a modern audience, for whom both are equally exotic forms of combat. Our temp- tation is to explain it away as a superficial narrative incoherence that is unimportant given the underlying unity of the allegory. But to do so is to ignore certain peculiar features of Spenserian narrative, grounded partly in epic conventions. By stretching our imagina- tions we can imagine a Western movie that might be allegorical. But if the hero of that movie appeared in a plumed helmet and chaps, by no stretch of the imagination could we regard the sight as other than ludicrous, whatever underlying meaning might be involved. Spens-

664


er's highly pictorial style often conjures up such grotesque images, and one result is uneasy laughter.

Uneasy laughter must characterize our response to much of the Book most specifically devoted to military affairs. At its core lies the relation between its titular hero Artegall and his iron servant Talus. "Powre is the right hand ofJustice truely hight," Spenser explains at one point (V.iv. i) and the entire book develops that theme in social terms. Morally oriented critics have written much about Talus as the embodiment of executive power. But if one must assign a single al-

legorical meaning to this fascinating figure, perhaps more than anything else he represents the army that a general must use to project ajust foreign policy and the police force that a governor must use to ensure that just laws are obeyed. Artegall himself is usually Spens- er's idealized version of his employer Lord Grey, who, as Lord Dep- uty between 1 580-1 584, was both chief executive of the civil gov- ernment and supreme commander of the Queen's armed forces in Ireland. Talus usually plays a military role: standing sentry duty at

night (V.iv.45), mounting an amphibious assault (V.xii.43), captur- ing and razing a rebel castle (V.ii.21-28), collecting military intel-

ligence (V.ii.25), and functioning throughout as Artegall's "gard and gouernment" (V.iv.3). That "his yron flaile . . . thondred"

(V.v. 9) suggests that "his strange weapon, never wont in warre"

(V.iv.44), represents the impact of firearms on a chivalric milieu un- accustomed to them.Io Rejecting the proffered services of a human

squire, Artegall marches through a degenerate world dealing out martial justice in ambiguous solitude: "Ne wight with him but

onely Talus went,/They two enough t'encounter an whole Regi- ment" (V.i. 3o). He knows the full loneliness of command, for Talus

'"See John P. Daly, S. J., "Talus in Spenser's Faerie Queene," Notes & Queries, n.s. 7 (I966): 49. The moral interpretations compiled in the Variorum edition are usefully supplemented by John Erskine Hankins, Source and Meaning in Spenser's Allegory (Ox- ford, 1971) I71-73. The best discussion of Talus is offered by Nohrnberg 409-25, who

develops the iron man's threefold significance as a legal, technological, and military symbol. But he rather slights Talus' military dimension, as is evidenced by his outright misunderstanding of wont in this passage: "Somewhat confusingly Spenser says that Ta- lus does not use his flail in war." Instead of seeing Talus as a military subordinate with some capacity for independent action, he claims that "Talus is basically a slaie." But after

arguing that the iron man suggests the Hegelian-Marxist analysis of master-slave relations, he must admit that "Talus' obedience, I hardly need say, is never explicitly char- acterized in terms of the class relation just described. We must reason back to such a relation from indirect evidence" (409-410).

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is an inhuman companion. Significantly, Talus is most human when

separated from Artegall. Bringing the bad news of his master's cap- tivity to Britomart, "the yron man, albe he wanted sense/And sor- rowes feeling, yet ... did inly chill and quake" (V. vi. 9). But though his speeches to Britomart show robotic emotion, his communica- tions with his commander are purely businesslike. Indeed, nowhere in the poem do the two converse directly. In describing their cam-

paigning Spenser limits himself to impersonal indirect discourse even more studiously than does Caesar in the De hello gallico.

This is quite appropriate, inasmuch as Talus is Astraea's groom. Upon returning to heaven that demnigoddess of justice had "willed him with Artegall to wend, /And doe what ever thing he did intend"

(V. i. 12) As the verbs iv7ill and intend suggest, Talus scarcely seems to need explicit conmmands to know his duties. Sometimes, indeed, the iron man seems to act under Artegall's general instruction, as when we are told that "he Talus sent/To wrecke on them their follies har-

dyment" (V.iv.24). On this occasion, however, Talus not only follows and catches Guyle but pulverizes him when that trickster re-

escapes from the startled Artegall, an action not contemplated in his

original rules of engagement (cp.V.ii.52). Once or twice Talus is given quite specific orders. When Arthur and Artegall combine forces in an undercover operation against the Souldan, Artegall de- taches the iron man to accompany the Prince, "and by hiss stirrup Talus did attend,/Playing his pages part, as he had beene/Before di- rected by his Lord; to the end/He should his flale to finall execution bend" (V. viii. 29, and cp. V.xii.26). But Arthur's orders are usually so general that Talus seems responsible for devising a plan of action: thus when repelled from Pollente's castle, the knight "bad his ser- uant Talus to invent/Which way he enter might, without endanger- ment" (V.ii.2o). Since Artegall can delegate all tactical detail, his

decision-making is oddly effortless. When an injured squire reveals his assailant's location to Artegall, "no sooner said, but streight he after sent/His yron page" (V.i.2o). The decisiveness of a good com- manader is here treated like the physical snap reflex of a good warrior.

Much of the time Talus acts without explicit prompting. While

Artegall "fairely gan asswage" the communist Giant with his argument, Talus, exasperated with his continuing sophistries, swells to

gigantic proportions in his own right. "Approching nigh unto him cheeke by cheeke," with all the mute violence of a Renaissance Ranibo "he shouldered him from off the higher ground, /And down

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the rock him throwing, in the sea him dround" (V.ii.49). Alter-

nately flailing and parleying with Radigund's Amazons, he seems

fully capable of independent decision-making. When his commander is enslaved, he informs Britomart on his own recognizance. Accompanying her to rescue Artegall, he always acts indepen- dently, lying outside her door "like to a Spaniel" to protect her from Dolon's men (V.v.26). Finding opponents awaiting them on Pol- lente's bridge, Talus takes the initiative and "desir'd, that he might have prepared/The way to her" (V. vi. 3 8). His tactical counsel seems both chivalrous and prudent. Britomart angrily disregards it as a

piece of chauvinistic condescension and vindicates her prowess by skewering both opposing knights. Her temper shows her heroic

spirit, but Talus seems the better officer in this scene, albeit a non- commissioned one.

One might suppose that in these instances Talus' independence of action is illusory. Perhaps Artegall issues orders that are not de-

scribed; perhaps Talus telepathically intuits his master's unvoiced commands, a platoon leader in constant walkie-talkie contact with his captain, so to speak. But such hypotheses fail to explain the many instances where Talus' operational autonomy clearly runs counter to his leader's desires. In particular, Talus represents military ruthlessness. Spenser's employer Lord Grey had been accused of just such ruthlessness, of course. For that reason the Queen relieved him as Lord Deputy and brought him back to England to face charges, an event described allegorically in the last canto. Spenser is so concerned to defend Artegall from charges of undue cruelty that he re-

peatedly embodies such tendencies separately in Talus, then portrays Artegall as motivated by pity to countermand the merciless violence of his overly zealous subordinate. The final stanza typically describes the reaction of the pair to a slanderous hag: "But Talus hear-

ing her so leudly raile,/And speake so ill of him, that well deserved,/ Would her have chastiz'd with his yron flaile,/Ifher Sir Artegall had not preserved,/And him forbidden, who his heast observed"

(V.xii.43). This culminates a string of incidents suggesting that Talus is only

tenuously under his commander's control. When Britomart sees that in his vengefulness he will slay Radigund's Amazons to the last

woman, "her heart did quake" as her own anger turns to pity and horror (V.vii.36). He spontaneously massacres Grantorto's troops with such sternness that "Artegall him seeing so to rage,/Willd him

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to stay, and signe of truce did make" (V.xii. 8). When the popular Giant is overthrown, the humble victims of his demagogy "rose in armes, and all in battell order stood. /Which lawless multitude him comming too/In warlike wise, when Artegall did view,/He much was troubled, ne wist what to do." His reluctance to fight with them shows aristocratic disdain and fear of shame as well as pity. He sends Talus "truce for to desire" (V.ii.5I-52). The mob's persistent hos- tility provokes Talus to clear the field with his iron flail, so Artegall is extricated from his moral predicament by Talus' tactical initiative. Had Talus sought to clear this action with headquarters, one won- ders if Artegall would have replied as Sextus Pompeius did in

Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra: "Ah, this thou shouldst have done,/And not have spoke on't! In me 'tis villainy,/In thee, 't had been good service."II

Book V is Spenser's most ambitious attempt to portray military leadership. The results are curious. Unlike most soldiers, Talus never needs to be inspired to greater efforts; his unflagging energy and morale mean instead that Artegall's chief task is to call him off.

Artegall's generalship seems essentially effortless. He knows the loneliness of command, but not its burdens. Tactical problems are

delegated to Talus, who solves them with computer-like efficiency. We seldom see Artegall obliged to figure anything out. No heroic

poem reduces to an officer's handbook, Renaissance critical theory notwithstanding. But Homer's Agamemnon, Virgil's Aeneas, Camoens' da Gama, and Tasso's Goffredo do inform their epics with an understanding of military leadership that the Legend ofJus- tice lacks. Lawrence of Arabia drew on the Odyssey for tactical in-

spiration, but one scarcely imagines any commander campaigning with the Faerie Queene in his duffle. In Artegall Spenser portrays a leader who is in fact usually led by his subordinate. In a revealing and

disturbing phrase Talus is described as "the true guide of his way and vertuous gouernment" (V.viii.3). No one accused Lord Grey of

"William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. M. R. Ridley for the Arden

Shakespeare (London, 1954) II.vii.73-75. Richly suggestive though his analysis is, in

refusing to grant this automaton any effective autonomy Nohrnberg oversimplifies him and nullifies one of Spenser's main points. Thus after noting that, like the Palmer, Talus

precedes his knight, suggesting that legal and martial precedent direct Artegall's operations, Nohrnberg must reverse himself and deny the narrative's clear implication by ar-

guing that Talus is no "true guide" but simply a bodyguard, for "he takes direction rather than giving it" (409).

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luxuriating in his civil office while supinely accepting the military decisions of his staff.

This perspective helps explain one extraordinary episode. After

detaching Talus to serve as Arthur's page, Artegall disguises himself to enter the Souldan's court. Arthur challenges the Souldan and slays him in single combat:

Then Artegall himselfe discouering plaine, Did issue forth gainst all that warlike rout Of knights and armed men ... All which he did assault with courage stout, All were they nigh an hundred knights of name, And like wyld Goates them chaced all about, Flying from place to place with cowheard shame, So that with finall force them all he ouercame. (V.viii. 50o)

No more preposterous combat is described in the entire poem. On foot Artegall single-handedly overcomes nearly a hundred promi- nent knights together with a corps of armed men presumably even

larger. Annotating this passage, A.C. Hamilton seeks to explain it

by glossing hundred as "an absolute number, as III iv 21. I etc." and

comparing V.iii. I I.5.2 But the word nigh makes it difficult to take hundred absolutely. In the passages compared a "hundred" knights are defeated sequentially, not in one fell swoop, nor are additional armed men involved. More relevant is Cambello's predicament at the Turneyment of Maidenhead, where "An hundred knights had him enclosed round. " Though "he with their multitude was nought dismayd," his resistance was ultimately "all in vaine: for what might one do more?/They have him taken captive, though it grieve him sore" (IV.iv. 3 -32). In Book V it does not seem to be Artegall who discovers himself but mild-mannered Clark Kent, bursting from mufti mightier than a locomotive and ready to leap tall buildings at a single bound. In the careful plotting of their joint attack Spenser tries to emphasize Artegall's and Arthur's capacity for shrewd generalship. But a hero who can defeat an entire army by himself really has no need of camouflage. Nor has he any need of Talus, who

throughout the entire episode stands quietly by in his non-functional role as Arthur's page, though the main end ofArtegall's grand strat-

egy had been to bring the iron flail to bear. Indeed, what seems to

''A. C. Hamilton, ed. The Faerie Qucene (London, 1977) ad loc. Nohrnberg explains this feat by tentative resort to historical allegory (406-7), but even more convincing parallels would not diminish the explosive oddity of Artegall's epic aristeia.

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happen here is that Artegall himself becomes Talus, for the feat is

exactly like those routinely performed by the iron man. Just as the Don and Sancho gradually exchange roles in Don Quixote, so here too the relations between master and man are momentarily re- versed, with ominous implications for Spenser's theory ofjustice.

Because of its historical allegory Book V repeatedly describes armies drawn up for combat, but their behavior is consistently bizarre. When Geryoneo hears of his Seneschall's defeat, he is deeply disturbed, "yet sith he heard but one, that did appeare,/He did him selfe encourage, and take better cheare." Hastily arming himself, "forth he far'd with all his many bad," explicitly trusting in his nu-

merically superior odds. Arriving at his captured citadel, "he

sternely marcht before the Castle gate" (V. xi. 2-3). But after this pa- rade of strength his army promptly vanishes. Geryoneo simply chal-

lenges Arthur to single combat, loses in short order, and no more is said of his "many bad" that he relied on to help repel the lone in- vader. Likewise when Artegall together with Talus and Sir Sergis embarks to rescue Irena, they find "great hostes of men in order martiall,/Which them forbad to land." "Wading through the waves," Talus braves rust to establish a beachhead, then routs them

utterly. Marshalling another army, Grantorto tries to halt Artegall's party "ere they left the shore." But Artegall debarks rapidly and

penetrates inland to a town. When Grantorto's troops arrive, Talus rages so wildly among them that Artegall calls a truce to explain that "not for such slaughter's sake/He thether came." He asks the herald instead to bear a chivalric challenge to Grantorto to spare his people mass misery. This is promptly accepted, for "glad he was the

slaughter so to stay." Such unwonted humanity avails the tyrant nothing. Artegall briskly decapitates him, "which when the people round about him saw,/They shouted all for joy of his successe . . . /And running all with greediejoyfulnesse/To faire Irena, at her feet did fall. "As hostilities dissolve into festivity the tyrant's army seems to have been composed to a man of innocent draftees, thus Artegall's benevolent concern for their fate. Yet the strong power that coerced them into service could only be a loyal military cadre, so after the

general festivities Artegall must harshly punish "all such persons, as did late maintayne/That Tyrants part" (V. xii. 4-26). The ambiguity of Elizabeth's policies toward Irish rebels makes for contradictory descriptions of army tactics.

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Nor is Spenser more consistent in describing Artegall's own

party. In equipping him with the old Sir Sergis as a companion he tries to portray a staff officer, a figure like Homer's Nestor who can

exemplify aged skill in the management of warfare. Sergis' chief contribution to the war effort occurs when Artegall encamps before Grantorto's city on the eve of their single combat. Artegall strin-

gently forbids the local populace to entertain him; for British commanders in Ireland could not rely on inadequate local provender, and those who provided it exposed themselves to rebel reprisals. "But yet old Sergis did so well him paine,/That from close friends, that dar'd not to appeare,/He all things did purvay, which for them needfull weare" (V.xii. o). Supplying an army in the field is an em-

inently realistic part of strategy. To Spenser's credit, he tries to cel- ebrate this unglamorous but very practical side of warfare in Sergis. Unfortunately the result is faintly absurd, for unlike an army Talus does not need to eat. Sergis' noble logistic effort dwindles, on in-

spection, to rustling up sandwiches for Artegall and himself.

Like strategy, military technology tempts Spenser into grotes- querie that he seems almost to court. In describing Arthur's con-

quest of the Souldan, Spenser ingeniously develops several specific allegorical parallels with the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The two contend "on the green," where the Souldan fights from "a charret

hye,/With yron wheeles and hookes arrn'd dreadfully" (V.viii.28). He is "mounted in his seat so high" that the Prince cannot get at him

(V.viii.33). This strange vehicle towers over Arthur even on horse- back because Spenser has one eye on the high-pooped Spanish galleons that towered over the smaller English ships on the main. When Arthur finally draws the veil from his dazzling shield and stampedes the Souldan's fire-breathing horses, divine grace shines forth as when the storm scattered the Armada. Arthur never strikes a blow. The Souldan's maddened steeds make him fall victim to his own elaborate war machinery: "At last they have all overthrowne to

ground/Quite topside turvey, and the pagan hound/Amongst the

yron hookes and graples keene,/Torne all to rags, and rent with

many a wound" (V.viii.42). The capsized chariot suggests the foun-

dering of Philip's huge galleons, which carried grappling gear for the boarding tactics upon which they vainly relied. Moreover, it in-

67I


verts Philip's iconographic impresa, which portrayed Apollo driving the chariot of the sun with the motto lam illustrabit omnia.I3

But what is a chariot doing with "graples" in land warfare? In the classical sources beloved of the Renaissance, chariot warriors do not lash themselves alongside their foes. The Souldan's remarkable vehicle seems less a conventional chariot than a wheeled arsenal:

"Againe the Pagan threw another dart,/Of which he had with him abundant store,/On every side of his embatteld cart,/And of all other weapons lesse or more,/Which warlike uses had deviz'd of yore" (V. viii. 34). In describing this formidable battlewagon Spenser seems to have one eye on the Spanish Armada and the other eye on Renaissance technological fantasies. In the fifteenth-century Hussite wars Ziska's troops evolved a technique for fighting from the wagons in which they traveled, which were circled when the enemy appeared. Peculiarly suited to the grasslands of Bohemia, this essen-

tially defensive tactic relied on provoking the enemy to assault the armored wagon train, repelling him with firearms, clubs, and iron-

tipped flails, then sallying with cavalry to rout his disorganized forces. Fighting in this manner, the Hussites won some impressive victories. In his Historia bohemica Enea Silvio Piccolomini embroidered on fact by assuming that the Hussites actually attacked in their mobile forts, encircling and annihilating their dumbfounded foe in an anticipation of modern tank tactics. Thus a legend of marvelous

battlewagons capable of offensive prodigies was handed on to the Renaissance with the authority of a Pope. 4

Spenser was no doubt influenced by the form the legend took in Olaus Magnus, whose Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus was a fa- vorite book of his friend Gabriel Harvey. "The chief Souldiers of Sweden and Gothland used Chariots with Hooks and Gramp-Irons

. . so, that having searched by what way the Enemy would enter, they bound their empty Chariots ... to firm Beams, in the shelving

13Faerie Queene, V.viii.28. Annotating this passage, A. C. Hamilton rehearses the

parallels first pointed out by Upton and adds others. However, he errs in attributing to William Camden a claim that "the Spanish ships were 'headed with yron, and hooked on the sides.' " Camden's phrase actually describes iron-tipped pilings carried by the fleet for mooring, not the ships themselves. For Philip's impresa seeJane Aptekar, Icons of Justice: Iconography and Thematic Imagery in Book V of The Faerie Queene (New York, 1969) 80-83.

'4See Hans Delbriick, History ofthe Art of War within the Framework of Political History, tr. WalterJ. Renfroe, Jr. (3 vols.; Westport, Conn., 1975-82) 3:494-97; Ferdinand Lot, L'Art militaire et les armees au moyen dge (Paris, 1946) 2:I84-214, 437.

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sides of the Mountains," the Archbishop explained (see Fig. 2).

"Filling them with snares . . they would let loose these Chariots, which with swift running, would either break their ranks, by rend-

ing them, or would disperse their bodies." They also drove "Brazen horses that would spit fire . .. carried about with versatile Chariots into the thickest body of the Enemies," so that "there seemed more

hopes of Victory in the Engine than in the Souldier; for the huge weight of it overwhelmed what ever it went against" (see Fig. 3). Having mastered Panzer tactics, "they ever used those Chariots, as movable forts. "5

Rendering these perfervid fancies taxed the illustrator. In his cut the grapples that originally chained Czech wagons in a circle survive

only as obscure fittings for attaching separate juggernauts to posts; moreover, he does little to portray their use as forts. Other Renais- sance artists dreamed up scythed wagons and mobile forts by the dozen. Valturio's De re militari offered two versions (see Fig. 4). Drawn by panting oxen, the former's lack of horsepower and fire-

power marks it as an economy model less suited for Blitzkrieg. 16 A certain Gallic elegance characterizes a two-story movable fort sans

scythes that accompanied French editions of Vegetius (see Fig. 5).17

'5Olaus Magnus, Compendious History of the Goths, Suvedes, and Vandals, tr. Joshua Sylvester (London, 1658) I I8. Figs 2, 3, and 4 are reproduced from the Historia (Roma, I555) sigs. AA5 v., AA6 v., and L3v. The original Latin reads: "Curribus falcatis, & hamatis ... olim usi sunt ... Gothorum pugnatures" (IX.iii). For Spenser's likely use of this book see West, "Spenser, Everard Digby, and the Renaissance Art of Swim- ming," Renaissance Quarterly, 26 (1973): 1-22.

'6Figs. 4 and 7, which originally appeared in the second edition of Roberto Valturio's De re militari (Verona, 1483) are here reproduced by kind permission from the University of Edinburgh's copy of Les douze livres de Robert Valturin touchant la discipline militaire, tr. Loys Meigret (Paris, I5 5 5) sigs. Bb I v. and Dd2 v. The binding of this French translation bears the arms ofJames Hepburn, the great Earl of Bothwell. It evidently belonged to him in his capacity as Lord High Admiral of Scotland and Lieutenant of the Borders. A formidable tactician who personally wounded Spenser's employer Lord Grey (then serving as a young officer) during a sally at the siege of Leith, Bothwell, unlike the artist, was presumably experienced enough to realize that weapons could scarcely be aimed with assurance from a horse-drawn cart trundling rapidly across uneven ground like that depicted; indeed, its lurching would probably make the crew as much of a hazard to each other as to the enemy. On the woodcuts for Valturio see Max Sander, Le livre a figuies italien depuis 1467jusqu'a 1530 (Milan, 1943) 4:xlv-xlvii.

'7Figs. 5, 6, 9, II, 13, and 15 are here reproduced from Bothwell's copy of Flaue Veg- ece Rene . . dufait de guerre: etfleur de chevalerie, quatre livres, . . tr. N. Wolkyr (Paris, 1536) sigs. g4 v, q4, ns, s4, and d2 v. bound together in the Latin edition of the Roman

military writers published at Paris in 1532. See French 16th Century Books, comp. by Ruth Mortimer as Pt. I of the Harvard College Library Departmenlt of Printing and Graphic Arts

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DE B L LIS CAM PESTRI B.

V.4

Dc curribus falcatis.

FIG. 2-War-chariots with hooks. Reproduced by permission of the Edinburgh University Library.

D E-. B"E L"I S CAM PEST RIB.

V De zreis equis igniuomis.

FIG. 3-Fire-breathing brazen war-horses. Reproduced by permission of the Ed- inburgh University Library.

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FIG. 4- Battlewagons with hooked scythes. From Les douze livres de Robert Valturin touchant la discipline militaire (i555); reproduced by permission of the Edinburgh University Library.

No draft animals are visible, so it either relies on internal manpower or is designed to be pushed from the rear. With a following breeze perhaps it could scud into battle like other popular wind-propelled

CatalogueofBooksand Manuscripts (Cambridge, Mass., I964) 2:599-60, 654-56, for further discussion of these illustrations, pr6bably copied by MercureJollat from later Ger- man copies of woodcuts by Hans Knapp and others published at Erfurt in 151 . These in turn derive from a complicated tradition of manuscript illustration to which the best introduction is offered by Bertrand Gille, Engineers of the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass., 1966).

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FIG. 5-A towering Renaissance battlewagon. Reproduced from Flave Vegece Rene . . . dufait deguerre: etfleurde chevalerie, quatre livres (I536) by permission of the Ed- inburgh University Library.

vehicles of the period (see Fig. 6). Some designers melded boat and chariot by giving their battle-wagons pointed prows.I8

The tall "embattled cart" of Spenser's Souldan seems to be a cus- tom-designed, one-man model synthesizing elements from Figs.

'8For this design see Bertrand Gille, "ltudes sur les manuscrits d'ingenieurs du XVe siecle," Techniques et civilisations, 5 (1956): 77-86, Fig. 5.

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FIG. 6-One of many unworkable designs for a wind-propelled cart. Reproduced from Flave Vegece Rene ... dufait deguerre (I 536) by permission of the Edinburgh University Library.

2-5. 9 But no illustrations that I have seen equip chariots with keen

projections that have any real grappling function. Conceivably, therefore, the Souldan is minced by his own copious internal arsenal. Perhaps it included fanciful jointed grappling gear like that por-

'9For amusing reproductions ofone-man chariot designs by the Italian engineer Tac- cola see Giuseppe Canestrini, Arte militare meccanica medievale (Milan, 1946), Figs. LXIII and LXIV. In the first Taccola sought to create the effect of flame-breathing horses by recommending that Greek fire be placed at the tip ofthe chariot's long projecting tongue. Then, realizing that any blaze there would terrify the unfortunate beasts even more than the enemy, in the second sketch he tried to salvage his plan by incorporating a screen. But for various reasons this design, too, was obviously an unworkable pipe-dream.

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FIG. 7-Fanciful jointed grappling gear recommended for siege work; note giant hand. Reproduced from Les douze livres de Robert Valturin ( 555) by permission of the Edinburgh University Library.

trayed in Fig. 7.20 Keener and more practical are the implements de-

picted in Fig. 8, where among sharp grapples used for attaching scal- ing ladders to walls we see some that may actually have served as anti-personnel weapons in the Lowlands wars if Famianus Strada can be believed.21 Describing the relief of the siege of Leyden in 1575, he tells how the Dutch forced the Spanish commander Valdez

200n the utter impracticability of "the complex grappling devices recommended by Valturio for siege work," seeJ. R. Hale, Renaissance War Studies (London, I983) 369.

2"Figs. 8, IO, and 12 are reproduced by kind permission from the Huntington Li- brary's copy of Vegetius, De re militari (Erfurt, 15I I), Figs. CXXIII, LXXXI, and CXXX, which actually lacks any text. Evidently the cuts by Hans Knapp and others enjoyed an independent circulation; for many reasons they merit a moder edition. I am grateful for the support of a Huntington-NEH Fellowship while I investigated this among other topics.

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.: iCXIt

, L I

FIG. 8-Assorted military grapples. Reproduced from Vegetius, De re militari (I5 I I), by permission of the Huntington Library and Art Gallery.

to flee, "chasing him with Grapples in their hands, that is long poles headed with iron hooks, or hooks at the end of long ropes, where- with they angled for the Spaniards, grievously wounding them, and drawing up many of them prisoners. "22 Functionally the Souldan's grapples remain obscure, like the hooks adorning a pyramid of cannon in another Renaissance fantasia of Armageddon (see Fig. 9). But in describing how he is hoist by his own armory Spenser had in his mind's eye more than an allegorical impresa. To upset Philip's Apollo-cart he drew on what he took to be descriptions of actual weapons. Many involved grotesque fantasy.

Spenser's knights are not always lonely questers for whom war means single combat. In undertaking to assimilate the facts of mass

"De bello belgico: The history of the Low-Countrey warres, tr. Sir Robert Stapylton (London, I65o) VIII. 8, sig. Aaa4 v. See Norhrnberg 393-407 for a labored effort to relate the Souldan's chariot with "graples" to the "monstrous Scorpion ... / With ugly cra- ples" (V.viii.4o) as elements in an elaborate scheme of zodiacal symbolism.

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FIG. 9-Cannon alternate decorously with hooks on an implausible pyramid. Re- produced from Flave Vegece Rene . . . dufait deguerre (1536) by permission of the Edinburgh University Library.

warfare in his poem he embarked on a task that medieval chivalric conventions had seldom anticipated. He aspired to epic stature and to some extent attained it, but only at the cost of radical inconsistencies. Like that of sixteenth-century Europe, his sensibility was torn between two different concepts of war. Personal prowess found less and less scope in campaigns dominated by massed infantry, gunpowder, and siege tactics, though anachronistic Irish cavalry skirmishing encouraged him to gloss over this contradiction. While gunpowder kindled the robustly popular imagination of the Eliza- bethan dramatists to elevate the gun over the sword as the chief emblem of heroic virility, continental aristocracy evolved the point of

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honor and the ritual of the duel partly to compensate for the felt loss of an organic role in battle as personal cornbatants.23

At the same time the fine arts made imaginative efforts to soften and glamorize the military technology that was eroding chivalry. Iconographically, Mars loses his brutality and is heroicized, devel-

oping into a lover, a dandy, and even a figure of fun, while pistol-

packing putti cavort on one Cinquecento powder-flask. Leonardo da Vinci sketched prettily ornamented cannon for Lodovico il Moro of Milan. Like many others the Italian artillerist Biringuccio explained that he always added urns, heads of men or animals "to make the gun beautiful."24 After learning to cast reliable iron cannon at one third the cost of brass, English gun-founders were more restrained, since iron could not be finely worked. Nonetheless, on Henry VIII's flag- ship the Harry-Grace-a-Dieu "bronze guns were covered with dec- orations and inscriptions, and were genuine works of art.'"25 Like Charles V, Henry christened a pet battery The Twelve Apostles. English armor also remained imbued with a workmanlike spirit somewhat at odds with "the maelstrom of magnificent incoherence which marks the designs for armor by Cellini, Campi, Giulio Ro- mano, and the Louvre School."26 The exuberant martial aestheticism of the continent was carried even further by "some contem-

porary Italians who for the sake of beauty were engraving not only the guns but even the gunshots, knowing perfectly well that this was detrimental to the efficiency of their artillery. "27

A similar spirit pervades the would-be military engineers, "who were one of the less sane manifestations of the late Renaissance. "28 Their visions of wind-propelled tanks and ox-powered Blitzkrieg sought to elevate the professional soldier above the ruck of battle. Three soldiers propelling a ribaudequin in Hans Knapp's woodcut do not even look at the enemy whom it rolls over. Cheerfully chatting

23Vale i66. For the impact of gunpowder on the European imagination see esp. Hale's richly detailed "Gunpowder and the Renaissance: An Essay in the History of Ideas" 389-421, from which I draw heavily.

24Cited by Hale 407; see further his "War and Public Opinion in Renaissance Italy" 359-87.

2SMaurice B. Daumas, A History of Technology and Invention, tr. Eileen B. Hennessy (New York, 1969) 2:483.

26Charles Ffoulkes, The Gun-founders of England (Cambridge, Eng., 1937) 28. 27Carlo M. Cipolla, Guns, Sails, and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early

Phases of European Expansion, 1400-1700 (New York, I965) 43. 28Christopher Duffy, Siege Warfare: The Fortress in the Early Modern World, 1494-

1660 (London, 1979) 76.

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FIG. Io-Mowing down the enemy with a snazzy ribaudequin. Reproduced from Vegetius, De re militari ( 5 I I), by permission of the Huntington Library and Art Gallery.

among themselves, they might be suburbanites maneuvering a lawnmower-or artists absorbed in the technical problems of incis-

ing wood-blocks (see Fig. io). Even the victims seem curiously blas6 about their fate. Only the dog is human enough to show ex- citement. The geometrical symmetry of these designs for war machines, which is often carried to absurd extremes, has roots in Re- naissance magic and occultism, for it was the alchemical tradition that gave birth to gunpowder. The would-be adept is lured with the

promise that knowing the art of war will turn war into art (see Fig. I I). Like Shakespeare's Fluellen, the French captain who prepares to fire a missile at the besieged town has evidently read his Vegetius. Perhaps he has also gone to dancing school.29 Showing no strain, he

pivots gracefully on one leg to wind his espringal up, ignoring the fact that the artist has failed to wrap the cord around the drum properly. His fancied technical virtuosity obviates the need for armor.

290n geometry and dancing as part of military training see Hale's "The Argument of Some Military Title Pages in the Renaissance" and "The Military Education of the Officer Class in Early Modem Europe," Studies, esp. 228, 243n. On the occult background see Gille, Engineers 59-60.

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FIG. I I-Nonchalantly preparing to fire an impossibly tangled espringal. Repro- duced from Flave Vegece Rene ... dufait deguerre (I536) by permission of the Ed-

inburgh University Library.

On his face the archaic smile of Greek statuary has degenerated into a knowing Renaissance smirk. Apparently the impulse to rationalize war, however grotesquely, goes hand in hand with its increasing ir- rationality-a thought with disturbing modern implications. In- deed, though Spenser's chivalry was outdated, Book V still offers an oddly prescient vision of moder technological warfare. Talus, after all, is not only an army but a quasi-computerized military robot.

Yet Talus is not a sinister figure, however troublesome we may find him morally. Like the drawings of Renaissance war machines he is notably grotesque. His feats of exuberant violence have all the wild vitality ofa cartoon. Like the Homeric gods, his invulnerability

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within the heroic world makes him a faintly comic anomaly. Bela-

boring evil-doers right and left, he transcends his mythic origins, suggesting the Tin Woodman run amok in Oz, yet still in search of a heart. Artegall quests forjustice with a companion who would not be out of place in the pages of Pulci, Folengo, or Rabelais.30 More-

over, Talus' overwhelming power renders all Artegall's individual efforts gratuitous and slightly absurd. Rather than risk his life

fighting with Pollente himself, should he not simply have sent in the

marines, as indeed he does when assaulting Irena's island?

Absurdity of various kinds characterizes Spenser's allegorical style. As Michael Murrin reminds us, allegorical theorists from

Julian the Apostate and Origen to Campani and Chapman positively rejoiced in narrative incongruities, for these forced the reader to go beyond the literal level and focus on the spiritual truth that alone

gives meaning to allegory. Thus what we may regard as narrative inconsistencies Spenser might defend as narrative virtues. We can

only read allegory properly by continually interrogating the poet's mind. No author is obliged to write realistically, and it is one of

Spenser's great glories as a romancer that the world he creates is so

strikingly sui generis. But the distortions of time and space that free his visionary meaning can also obscure it. How characters accom-

plish their feats of derring-do is sometimes irrelevant, but not when

Spenser draws our attention to mechanical details gratuitously as he so often does. Murrin concedes that on occasions like the Redcrosse

Knight's combat with the Dragon "Spenser's distortions do become obvious and confusing to his audience when he places his images in an extended narrative. "3' The incongruities ofMaleger's army force us to think about the illusory nature of fleshly temptations, but the inconsistencies in Calidore's combat with the brigands yield no

comparable insight. So much of that episode is tightly plotted in mil-

itary terms that it raises unfulfilled expectations, and the ending

30For parallels to this mixture of genres see esp. Carmelo Previtera, La poesia giocosa e l'umorismo (2nd. ed. rev., 2 vols.) for the Storia deigeneri letterari italiani (Milan, 1953) I: 294-2: 68; Alison I. T. Higgins, Secular Heroic Epic Poetry of the Caroline Period (Bern, 1953).

3r The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes toward a Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance (Chicago, 1969) 142. Elegant efforts to define and justify Spenser's narrative inconsistencies, like Paul Alpers, "Narration in The Faerie Queene," ELH, 44 (1977): 19-39, have not entirely persuaded those who, like Madelon Gohlke, "Embattled Al-

legory: Book II of The Faerie Queene," English Literary Renaissance, 8 (1978): 123 -40, feel that strain in the allegory often reflects underlying intellectual tension.

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seems sadly anticlimactic. Whether Artegall's army is rustproof is an obtuse question, to be sure, but whether he seems genuinely in command of it is not.

To seek the answer to that question by interrogating the poet's vision rather than his plot may be to embark on a quest as inconclu- sive as Artegall's. There is nothing in Spenser really comparable to Dante's Celestial Rose, with its precise scholastic underpinnings; rather his syncretic ambition made him heir to all the intellectual contradictions of the Renaissance. Its inconsistencies are also his. If he were pressed about whether the ideal hero could be an ideal commander, about how the private moral virtues relate to the public, about whether war is beautiful, discursively he could perhaps have done no more than cite contradictory authorities. Before we credit him with a truly powerful integrative vision, we must ask whether and where that vision irradiates his allegory in Book V. In the Tem- ple of Isis? The relative claims ofjustice, equity, and mercy are ex- plored at length, as they are also in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, another work that shifts fluidly between allegorical levels; but Spenser appears to lack the stable, integrated vision of those values that informs the entire structure of the play. Injustifying his allegory many Spenserians demonstrate their own learning rather than his, while others vie to prove their ingenuity by venerating its very instability.32 Whereas Ariosto's and Tasso's epics were soon trans-

3-E.g., recent studies like Jonathan Goldberg, Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Struc- tures of Discotrse (Baltimore, 198 ), and Kenneth Gross, Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Icon- oclasm, and Magic (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), which accept the poem's lack of an integrated vision and seek to valorize it. But as Gross wisely admits, "exaltation of the Renaissance artist's ironic, self-limiting enterprise may involve as much of a reduction as the idea of a totally self-absorbed visionary poet" (200). When Goldberg urges an approach where "the reader plays before the vast aod powerful indifference of the text, learning the plea- sures of being made subject to it" (29), some may suspect that they are being asked to prostrate themselves not before the text but before hermeneutic cant. Few except professional Spenserians seem likely to share his masochistic delight in "a freeplay within the text's own narcissism, which also leaves the text playing with itself and the reader defeated" (i 16n). If the Faerie Queene resembles Finnegans Wake, Spenserians are fast coming to rival Joyceans in their penchant for learned foolishness. In The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed. Boris Ford (New York, 1982), W. W. Robson honestly faces up to some of the poet's traits that make it "difficult to feel that his work is really alive today." Noting the plight of the reader "caught between some experts using freedom of association ever more and more widely, and others demanding a heavier and heavier burden of esoteric knowledge," he soberly concludes, "Studies multiply, often repetitive; one scholar may differ from another, but no interpretation gets eliminated; more and more are added. And as this is a world without a common reader, there is no common-sense check on these interpretations, no public opinion that may be attended to. It is not a healthy state of affairs for a supposedly classic author" (2:11 9-36). Three

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lated into English, and Dante's and Shakespeare's complete works have been translated into dozens of languages, no nation has ever felt the need for a complete translation of the Faerie Queene. There are precious few translations of individual books. That is perhaps no ac- cident of literary history. Spenser's integrative vision is sometimes incommunicable except through the subtlety of allegory. But sometimes his allegory is not subtle, and elsewhere he has no mastering vision to communicate.

* * * * *

Many narrative incoherencies in the Facrie Quc'rne do not dissolve in some higher allegorical synthesis but remain markedly incongru- ous. What Murrin calls the Absurdity Principle does indeed function in the poem, though not always quite as he suggests. Running through the epic is a vein of ludicrousness. Indeed, Renaissance chivalric epics tend to be distinguishable from those of classical an- tiquity by a spirit we might call heroi-comic. Despite Spenser's gravity - or indeed partly because of it - such tendencies are observ- able throughout the poem, and perhaps nowhere more obviously than in the passages purportedly dealing with warfare. Sooner or later, insisting on an impossibly lofty heroism will beget a reaction. What clearly happened in the Restoration also occurred in the Eliz- abethan era. Though in interpreting Muiopotmos we have been urged to discard seventeenth-century genre expectations "unknown to Elizabethans who had no subtle understanding of the mock-heroic," it is worth considering that puzzling little poem in the light of Spenserian ambivalence about warfare.33

Problems begin with the invocation, which applies so uncertainly to the poem that many scholars have tried to explain it as an allusion to a historical feud. But they cannot agree on the personages involved:

remedies might help: I) a moratorium on scholarly adulation of the poet, which masks his declining reputation from no one but academics and does little to address its causes 2) less critical pomposity and a livelier sense of humor when reading Spenser 3) an approach to his intellectual background like that of Robert Grudin in Mighty Opposites: Shakespeare and Renaissance Contrariety (Berkeley, 1979), which might make Spenser's polarized thinking seem both less smugly secure and less self-canceling-in short, more genuinely dialectical. See further Grudin s.v. "Humanism," Encyclopedia Britannica

(Chicago, 1986). 33Don Cameron Allen, "On Spenser's Muiopotmos," Studies in Philology, 53

(I956):I41-58. Allen's identification of the butterfly with the soul, now widely accepted, is further developed by Judith Anderson," 'Nat worth a boterflye': Muiopotmos and The Nun's Priest's Tale, "Journal of Medieval and Renaissalnce Studies I (I97I):89-Io6.

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I Sing of deadly dolorous debate, Stir'd up through wrathfull Nemesis despight, Betwixt two mightie ones of great estate, Drawne into armes, and proofe of mortall fight, Through prowd ambition, and hartswelling hate, Whilest neither could the others greater might And sdeignfull scorne endure; that from small jarre Their wraths at length broke into open warre. (I-8)

If not two Elizabethan noblemen, who are the "mightie ones" whose armed discord is here announced? The lines scarcely apply to Clarion, for the butterfly is never even aware of the hateful spider until he blunders into his net. He is motivated more by pleasure than

"prowd ambition," let alone "hartswelling hate," or "sdeignfull scorne." Lines 7-8 seem to envisage a protracted quarrel and strug- gle quite unlike Aragnoll's rapid overthrow of the unwary Clarion. Therefore, William Wells argued that the "two mightie ones" were Pallas and Arachne, whose Ovidian quarrel over skill in weaving the

poem freely adapts at some length. Bested in the contest by the non- Ovidian butterfly woven into the goddess' tapestry, Arachne's

metamorphosis accounts for her son's enmity to all butterflies.34 Wells' conjecture is tempting, but discrepancies remain. Are the

first stanza's martial epithets a mock-heroic exaggeration of the do- mestic weaving scene where Arachne "challenges" Pallas? This is hard to maintain, for in adapting the myth from the Mletamorphoses Spenser eliminates from it every element of conflict between the two female figures that Ovid had boisterously emphasized. Ovid's Min- erva visits earth determined that her rival shall recant her vaunts. Matched or even surpassed as a weaver by Arachne, she angrily tears

up her rival's tapestry and belabors the girl with her shuttle. Then when the sorely pummeled Arachne starts to hang herself in shame, the goddess half-pityingly changes her into a spider, suspended from her own web. Spenser's goddess, by contrast, hearing of Arachne's fame, "Came downe to prove the truth, and due reward/ For her prais-worthie workmanship to yeild." Challenged to com-

34See William Wells, " 'To Make a Middle Construction': The Significance of the Opening Stanzas of Muiopotmnos," Studies in Philology, 42(I945):544-54. Also tempting is the conjecture of Isabel E. Rathborne, "Another Interpretation of Muiopotmos, PMLA 49 (1934): 1050-68, that Spenser set out to depict a war between the two "mightie ones" Aragnoll and Muscaroll, with their respective insect armies; but as Wells notes, formally the poem seems a polished mock tragedy rather than a fragment of a larger mock epic.

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pete, she graciously accedes and clearly outclasses her rival. Arachne

silently concedes the victory, but "poisonous rancor" at her defeat and "griefof follie late repented" transform her into a spider. Spens- er's benign goddess does nothing to cause her metamorphosis ex-

cept weave divinely. Indeed, there is really no "deadly dolorous debate" between them, for there is no sign that this generous Min- erva could not tolerate her mortal rival's skill. When Arachne com-

pletes her tapestry of Europa, it is "Such as Dame Pallas, such as En- vie pale . . /Could not accuse," and indeed the goddess never does

(267-348). The conflict seems to be entirely in Arachne's mind rather than in the narrative, from which Spenser resolutely excludes

every Ovidian detail that might suggest that "their wraths at length broke into open warre." Even the attempted suicide is suppressed. Moreover, if we apply the first stanza to Pallas and Arachne, it is

oddly followed by the question, "Is there then/Such rancour in the harts ofmightie men?" Spenser deliberately masculinizes a Virgilian line characterizing a goddess' rancour. On Well's interpretation the

poem supplies the "tragicall effect" of a quasi-conflict "the roote whereof' remains quite obscure (9-16).

The scholarly search for two historical "mightie ones" was probably triggered by characteristic Spenserian narrative inconsistency. However we apply the opening stanza, it promises us an epic conflict that never materializes, not even in mock-heroic terms. Probably Spenser does not invoke Calliope because Clarion himself represents his epic muse. Abandoning pastoral for epic in the invocation to the Faerie Queene, he decides "for trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds" (FQ, I Pro.i). In The Teares of the Mvses he portrays the plight of the patroness of epic poetry in an unheroic age. "The nurse ofvertue I am hight,/And golden Trompet ofeternitie," Calliope laments, but "now I will my golden Clarion rend,/And will henceforth immortalize no more" (457-464). Such disillusion- ment with epic, though not constant, is a recurring theme in

Spenser.3s

35This notion was first proposed by Anne Kimball Tuell, 'Note on Spenser's Clar- ion," Modern Language Notes, 36(192I): 182-83. In "Invidia and the Allegory of Spens- er's 'Muiopotmos,' " English Studies in Canada, 2 (I976):I44-5 5, Ronald B. Bond mod- ified it by identifying Clarion not with Spenser's epic muse but with fame. His Spenser is more medieval than mine, but his focus on the role of aemulatio in the poem, which

may denote either envy or heroic emulation, reinforces my conception of the poem's ambivalence about heroic values.

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Muiopotmos can be read as a smiling, half-rueful fantasia about the

tragic predicament of a Renaissance epic poet with Puritan inclina- tions and a taste for romance. Clarion desires "each part t'inquire" of his ancestral domain. Able "to tempt the troublous wind," he has the power "to mount aloft vnto the Christall skie'/To vew the

workmanship ofheavens hight" (44-45). But though he might challenge Homer and Virgil, Italianate beauty is his preferred element. His delicately described accoutrements are warlike only insofar "as him their terrour more adornes" (88). The myth of Astery links him with a ladylike world of floral displays whose courtly elegance re- tains its charm despite courtly backbiting and intrigue. Fluttering boldly "through all the countrey wide he did possesse," he finds that

nothing in the realm of nature "mote please his fancie," for "no common things may please a wauering wit." Instead he is drawn "to the gay gardins" of"lavish Nature in her best attire," where "Arte with her contending, doth aspire/T'excell the naturall, with made

delights." Strongly reminiscent of Acrasia's bower, this artificial

paradise, which comes complete with "dull Poppie," suggests the

heavily ornamented aesthetic atmosphere of Renaissance chivalric romance. In this make-believe world it seems possible for Clarion to taste "whatso else of vertue good or ill/Grewe in this Gardin, fetcht from farre away." But the garden of such art is as deceptive as Clarion's sense of freedom within its plots. It cannot insulate him from the need for grace from the powers that brood over the cos- mos. Although Clarion will encounter no army in Muiopotmos, in our real world "the armies of their creatures all and some/Do serve to them, and with importune might/Warre against us the vassals of their will" ( 50-231).

What finally checks the free exercise of Clarion's poetic fancy is not simply theological but military reality. Aragnoll is "the foe of fair things" (244). Against such an ugly enemy the fragile fictions of Clarion's chivalric armour are not proof. Though his horned helmet is initially compared to "a warlike Brigandine" with "engines which in them sad death do hide" (84-86), a poetically embroidered

burganet will not enable Clarion to contend gloriously in single combat with a crafty adversary who is actually a skilled military en-

gineer. Inheriting a perverse artistic talent from his unfortunate mother, the spider overthrows the knightly butterfly by contriving weaponry so superior that the result seems not so much warfare as

butchery. Like the figures in Renaissance military engravings, the

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FIG. 12- Geometric constructions resembling cobwebs in a Renaissance handbook of military engineering. Reproduced from Vegetius, De re nmilitari (i 51 ), by permission of the Huntington Library and Art Gallery.

spider is an amateur of geometry and wants "all his gins that him entangle might, /Drest in good order, as he could devise." Diagrams from Hans Knapp's series point up the parallel between cobwebs and a military engineer's geometrical constructions (see Fig. 12). The ingenuity ofAragnoll's "networke" surpasses "that same subtil gin,/The which the Lemnian God framde craftilie,/Mars sleeping with his wife to compasse in,/That all the Gods with common mockerie/Might laugh at them, and scorne their shamefull sin" (368-388). But the result oftechnology is the same in each case: Mars is rendered contemptible or ridiculous. When one woodcut shows an armed diver marching along blithely underwater (though the laws of pressure prevent sucking air more than eighteen inches be- low the surface) and even nabbing a complaisant fish en route (though the artist-engineer has not provided his helmet with eye- holes), we begin to converge oddly on such a vision. Its heroi-comic overtones are reinforced when on the surface a small Triton takes

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I

FIG. 13- Underwater sneak attack or fishing expedition? Reproduced from Flave Vegece Rene ... dufait de guerre (i 536) by permission of the Edinburgh University Library.

aim with bow and arrow at a haughty waterfowl, recalling the mythological pygmies in their ludicrous parody of warfare with cranes (see Fig. 13).

A common motto for Renaissance military treatises was Marte et arte. But Spenser's Ovidian mythmaking suggests that in Muiopot- mos he was not entirely happy with the equation. The root of Clar- ion's decline is to be found, if anywhere, in Arachne's contention with Pallas. Whereas Ovid's Arachne wove a tapestry deriding the gods by portraying a dozen mythological abductions, Spenser makes her select one subject: the Rape of Europa. The three stanzas describing it are one of his handsomest pieces of mythological word-

C I --- I

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:-·.·~ ;1* ~; · ·-

i V~~~~~~~'


painting, showing a remarkable ability to participate in all the elements of the scene imaginatively: the enamoured bull, the fright- ened girl, the crisping waves, the fluttering loves. He is clear that it was "a goodly worke, full fit for Kingly bowres" (300). But though he renders the scene with considerable dignity and enormous verve, he was also probably conscious of the meanings assigned to it by Re- naissance mythographers. Summarizing several earlier sources, George Sandys cites speculation about a warlike raid on Asia Minor

by Cretans who carried away the daughter of the Phoenician king Agenor; "and because the figure of a Bull was carved on the prow of the ship (or as others report in that Taurus of Gnossos was their

Captaine) it was fained that Jupiter stole her away in that likenesse: the Sydonians stamping the same on their Coine, either in flattery to their king, or to comfort him.. . . Of her name our part of the world was called Europa."36 This euhemeristic interpretation grounds Western culture in armed aggression like the Trojan War.

In its allegory Minerva's tapestry stands in sharp contrast to Arachne's. The goddess of wisdom portrays her victory over Posei- don when the two deities contested for title to Athens before their fellow gods. Poseidon "strikes the rockes with his three-forked

mace;/Whenceforth issues a warlike steed in sight,/The signe by which he chalengeth the place." But Pallas counters triumphantly:

Then sets she forth, how with her weapon dredd She smote the ground, the which streight foorth did yield A fruitfull Olyve tree, with berries spredd, That all the Gods admir'd; then all the storie She compast with a wreathe of Olyves hoarie.

Emongst those leaves she made a Butterflie, With excellent device and wondrous slight, Fluttring among the Olives wantonly That seemed to live, so like it was in sight. ... (3 4-332)

3'George Sandys, tr., Ovid's Metanorplhosis Englished, ed. Karl K. Hulley and Stanley T. Vandersall (Lincoln, Neb., 1970) 125. For an interpretation of MAuiopotnos stressing the role of the tapestry in somewhat similar terms and treating the butterfly as a generic Elizabethan courtier satirized for political impotence, see Robert A. Brinkley, "Spenser's Muiopotmos and the Politics of Metamorphosis," ELH, 48 ( 98 I):668-76. In

"Spenser's Muiopotmos," Explicator, 40:4(982):9-II, Thomas Ramey Watson finds in the tapestry yet another allegory of the Fall, but proves only that Christian exegesis itself can fall into monotonous reductionism. More persuasive is Terrance Brophy Kearns, "Rhetorical Devices and the Mock-Heroic in Spenser's 'Muiopotmos,' " Publications of The Arkansas Philological Association, 9:2(I983):58-66.

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Poseidon claims Athens because his demonstrable martial expertise, symbolized by a warhorse, makes him especially dear to its turbu- lent, sea-faring populace. But the goddess of wisdom vindicates her

prior claim by forcibly reminding thejury, in Sandys' words, "that a Citty is not to be so much renowned for riches and empire, pur- chased by naval victories; as by civill arts and a peaceable govern- ment" grounded in agriculture (p.286). Pallas vanquishes Arachne as she vanquished Poseidon-by making the gospel of peace seem wiser than the glorification of warfare. Her doctrine roots European civilization firmly in the intellectual achievements of Athens rather than in a Hellenic Viking raid on Asia Minor. And she vanquishes Arachne peaceably by sublimating strife in artistic creation. Arachne's metamorphosis is occasioned only by her inability to do the same.

Bordered by an olive wreath, this richly suggestive tapestry is consummated by the butterfly "fluttering among the Olives wan-

tonly. " Olive wreathes were both emblems of victory and emblems of peace "in that Peace is the end for which war is made" (Sandys 268). The muse of epic poetry may require both, but its prior do- micile, its native habitat, here seems to be peace. This image is not

only the nexus of the plot but the nodal symbol of the poem. At the core of Spenser's little mock-heroic is thus a paradoxical vision where epic poetry somehow sustains itself gaily without war, and

military victory becomes artistic triumph. The fragility of this in-

tegrative vision is evident. It is established by an armed goddess and

may be no more than a "wondrous slight." It flickers in Spenser like the "unstaid desire" of Clarion, who, after all, will go on to die mis- erably and not very heroically-indeed, rather comically. But what Achilles' shield is to the Iliad this tapestry is to Muiopotmos, allowing us to glimpse for a moment the governing vision of Spenser's poem. Surprisingly like Dryden's, at bottom that vision is anti-heroic. 37

This may seem implausible until we reflect that portions of the Faerie Queene betray a similarly anti-heroic spirit. Throughout the "Legend of Holiness," for example, Spenser subjects the Redcrosse

Knight's conventional epic heroism to such a searching Christian

37On Dryden's anti-heroic vision see West, "Dryden and the Disintegration of Re- naissance Heroic Ideals," Costerus, 7 (I973):I93-222; also West's other works on Dry- den therein cited.

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critique that the birth of a Puritan saint may seem the death of a hero.

Consequently, the climactic dragon-fight is studded with "mock- heroic comparisons," and "thejoco-serious undertone . .. gets the better of the narrative here, once the dragon is dead" (Nohrnberg 196). Elsewhere in the Faerie Queene a more powerfully synthetic vision prevails, but not steadily, not always successfully, and sometimes quite absurdly. With its implicit aestheticism, the Renaissance

conception of the Art of War did much to foster such epic grotesque- ness. Spenser shared this failing with other Elizabethans. As C.S. Lewis shrewdly observed apropos of Gervaise Markham's nautical

epic The Tragedy of Sir Richard Grenville (1595), "the Golden style not only fails but becomes ludicrous, even odious, when it attempts to present heroic action occurring in the real world ... a defect visible in the battle poetry of Drayton, Spenser, and even Shakespeare."38 Certainly Spenser's effort to aestheticize war in a rhetoric of sugared sweetness makes some of his stanzas flow like The Daerie Queene.

The Renaissance was in many respects a renascentia rhetorica, not

only in literature but in other forms of cultural expression. Whereas humanistic rhetoric sought to moralize experience and reform so-

ciety, Heinrich Plett suggests, courtly rhetoric aimed at aestheticiz-

ing life in the interest of celebrating order and enhancing political stability. Ornament dominates courtly rhetoric because it both

drapes and highlights the brute fact of power, just as the contrapun- tal art of the madrigal gets its most expressive effects by elaborating the starkest Petrarchan cliches. The masque is the courtly genre par excellence. Typically it contains an anti-masque, and other Elizabe- than art-forms also spawn their own antitheses. At the core of

courtly rhetoric are irony, allegory, and impersonation, three re- lated forms of polysemy. By defining allegory as "when we speake one thing and thinke another" Elizabethan rhetoricians like George

3XEnglish Literature in the Sixteenthl Century (Oxford, 1954) 523. On the implications of this tendency for Elizabethan genres see West, "Drayton's 'To the Virginian Voyage': From Heroic Pastoral to Mock-Heroic," Renaissance Quarterly, 24 (I97I):501-5o6. For treatment of Renaissance burlesque poetry as symptomatic of "der Krise der epischen Dichtung," see Erich Loos, Alessandro Tassonis "La Secchia Rapita" und das Problem des heroisch-komischen Epos, Schriften und Vortrage des Petrarca-Instituts KOlns, 20 (Co- logne, 1967) 28; also Karlernst Schmidt, Vorstudien zu einer Geschichte des komisclhcr Epos (Halle, I953); and Previtera, Poesia giocosa. On "il pacifico temperamento dell'autore" characteristic of heroi-comic poets see Domenico Oritisi, "La satira nei poemi eroico- mici del Seicento," Cenobio, 8 (I959): 136-59; also Fernand Fleuret and Louis Perceau, eds., Les Satires francfaises du XVIIe siccle (Paris, 1923) I:vi.

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Puttenham equated it with irony. Indeed, Puttenham calls allegory "the Courtier or figure of faire semblant" and sees it as essential to the courtier because "in any matter of importance his wordes and his

meaning very seldom rneete."3' Yet from Castiglione onwards courtly writers also sought to distinguish the desire to stylize the self

aesthetically from hypocrisy. Despite Neo-Platonism's assurances, whether faire semblant was actually false semblant was a key issue for Elizabethan culture in the 1590s. It was certainly a key issue for

Spenser, who was both an aspiring court poet and a satirist at odds with the court.

"An Aligory is eyther pure, or commixte" wrote the rhetorician

Henry Peacham in 1577. "A commixt Aligorye, is when one word, or more than one in the Aligory, have their proper sygnifycation. "40 His illustration shows a minister nervously concerned lest allegorical interpretation leach the literal truth from Scriptural terms like

"unquenchable fire." But his very effort to expound the literal meaning of such fire as "everlasting paynes" itself invokes an ab- straction. When Peacham weeded The Garden of Eloquence under Ramnist influence in 1593, he was still wrestling with the notion of mixed allegory, "whereof this may be an example: Why doest thou covet the frute and not consider the height of the tree whereon it

groweth? Thou doest not forethinke of the difficultie in climbing, nor danger in reaching, whereby . . . thou fallest with the bough which thou doest embrace." Covet, consider, andforethinke "retaine their proper sense . .. which words do make it a mixt Allegorie," he concluded. "This Allegorie describeth, although somewhat ob-

scurely, yet verie aptly, the danger, vanities, and common reward of ambition." He could not grasp that his own exegesis required him to include danger among the literal terms. His dutiful praise for al-

legory is tempered with considerable mistrust, evidently grounded in his difficulty coping with it. How would a man troubled by the

obscurity of this little parable have responded to the wildly mixed

allegory of The Faerie Queene? While he elsewhere praises Spenser's Shepheardes Calender ( 579), there is little evidence that he had read

3-Cited by Heinrich F. Plett, "Aesthetic Constituents in the Courtly Culture of Re- naissance England," New Literary History, 14 (I983): 597-621. My argument in this

paragraph draws heavily on this excellent article.

40Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1577; rpt. Menston, 1971) sig. Dii. See Plett, "Konzepte des Allegorischen in der englischen Renaissance," in Formen and Funk- tionen der Allegoric, ed. Walter Haug (Stuttgart, 1979) 3 IO-35.

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the Faerie Queen-except perhaps for this warning: "In speaking by Allegories strange similitudes and unknowne translations ought to be

avoyded, lest the Allegorie which should be pleasant, become pee- vish and altogether unprofitable: also unlikenesse of the comparisons do make the Allegorie absurd."41

Such problems stem partly from allegory's effort to realize the timeless in the timebound medium of narration. Human lives too are timebound. Certainly any effort to live out the contradictions in The Faerie Queene risked absurdity. Like Spenser, his good friend Gabriel Harvey strove to straddle the gaps between his bourgeois origins, his humanism, and the court. But his awkward self-

stylization, his difficulty in finding a rhetorical script that would me- diate the polarities of his life, left him virtually incarnating the absurd. We remember him today (if at all) as the "Gorboduc Huddle- Duddle' of Nashe's satirical pamphlets. Just as Spenser's Malbecco

"quight/Forgot he was a man, and Gelosy is hight" (FQ, III.x.60), so Harvey's career makes us feel that we are watching an intellectual transform himself into a comic allegorical figure-call him Frus- trato.

The mercer Robert Laneham allegorized his life with more sprez- zatura, if we may judge from A Letter: Whearin, part of the entertainment untoo the Queenz Majesty, at Killingiwoorth Castl . . . in this Soomerz Progress 1575, is signified. Elizabeth's progresses provoked extravagant pageantry. Leicester's reception of her at Killingworth was no exception. She was welcomed by elaborately costumed people of all ranks impersonating allegorical figures from the Lady of the Lake to Pomona. At the castle gate a surly porter enacted a scene out of romance by declining to admit her, then relenting. For nine- teen days fireworks resounded, processions were mounted, damsels recited poems, marriages were celebrated, and the men staged mock combats where after "good bangz a both sides: the fight so ceasing, but the battail not so ended, folloed the footmen."42

But this remarkable epistle does more than describe how the

Queen and her grandees collaborated to choreograph extravagant fantasies, so that Elizabethan culture often seems a kind of dress re- hearsal for the Faerie Queene, complete with dissolving battles. If

41 The Garden of Eloquence, ed. William G. Crane (I 593; rpt. Gainesville, I954) 26-27. 42Letter: Describing a Part of the Entertainment unto Queen Elizabeth at the Castle of Ke-

nilworth in 1575, ed. F.J. Furnivall (London, I907) 37. My discussion of Laneham develops a pregnant footnote in Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-FashioningJfromn More to Shakespeare (Chicago, I980) 284n.

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Bottom had written Peter Quince a letter from Titania's bower, it

might have resembled this one. Laneham's enthusiastic participa- tion in the collective fantasy mingles oddly with a sense of detach- menet. He has all of Bottom's aplomb but can gleek just as sharply. Though he jovially signs himself "El Prencipe negro," his assumed

identity as the Black Prince seems to be part of a running joke with

"my good freend, Master Humfrey Martin Mercer," to whom he is writing. Indeed, he composes his eighty-page letter from "sum notez and observationz" taken diligently throughout the festivities, "for I can not bee idl at ony hand in the world" (I). The work ethic of these two tradesmen gives them a wry perspective on Killing- worth's gilded butterflies. Laneham was there as a dependent of

Leicester, whom "it pleazed . to have given me apparail eeven from hiz bak, to get me allowauns in the stabl, too advauns me untoo this worshipfull office so neer the most honorabl Councell, to help me in my lecens ofBeanz . Whearby I go noow in my sylks, that else might rulfl in my cut canves: I ryde now a hors bak, that els many timez might mannage it a foot: am knoen to their honors & taken foorth with the best, that els might be bidden to stand bak nmy self

. .and none oftheez for my dezert eyther at fyrst or syns" (80-8 I).

Enjoying his good fortune but frankly acknowledging its whimsi-

cality, Laneham was shrewd enough to see that Leicester's situation was much the same.

His praise for his patron is appropriately whimsical. Scholars may debate what Spenser meant by celebrating magnificence in Arthur, but Laneham extolls "his Lordships great honor and magnificens" chiefly for letting him scarf up free food, ogle the entertainment, and flirt with the ladies: "I can gracify the matters as well as the prowdest of them; and waz yet never staynd, I thank God" (6I). From Ceres' role in a pageant he passes to the crisis when the beer gave out, es- timating consumption with a tradesman's eye. He is given to dis-

concerting shifts in register: "Nath then rather, master Martin (to cum out of our poeticalities & too talk yn more serioous tearms . . .

(65). Laneham was not unlettered. He had gone to St. Paul's school and read his Terence there; moreover, a knack for continental lan-

guages acquired in trading had brought him to Leicester's attention. But patches of ornamental rhetoric mask shrewd common sense. The sight of an Italian tumbler leaves him temporarily at a loss for words until "anon I bethought me of men that can reason and talk with too toongs, and with too parsons at onez, sing like burds, curteiz of behaviour, of body strong and injoynts so nymbl withall,

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that their bonez seem as lythie and plyaunt as syneuz. . .. Nay Mas- ter Martin I tell you no jest: for both Diodorus Siculus .. .and also from him, Conrad Gesnerus . . . reporteth the same."43 He pro- fesses that they live in a happy island four months voyage beyond Ethiopia, but he may have felt that similarly pliant beings with two

tongues could be found a good deal closer to home. Though he had learned to speak their language, it is not clear that the Black Prince

uncritically relished their company. El Prencipe negro strolls

through Leicester's enchanted castle with much of Sancho Panza's

skepticism. But courtly culture could generate its own comic criticism from

within. Sir John Harington was the Queen's godson, but he sur- veyed the court with the ironic eye of an Ariosto. Spenserians have

happily used the annotations to his translations of the Orlando Furioso to argue for the persistence of allegorical interpretation late into the Elizabethan era. But as one recent study emphasizes, they ignore "the strong indications in Harington's book of the opposite tendency: a dawning awareness of the limitations of the allegorical method as a way of interpreting, and justifying poetry. "44 Though for the most part he follows the sober Italian explicator Fornari, he is radically ambivalent about such exegesis. The entire project had been imposed on him by the Queen as penance for translating Ari- osto's obscene twenty-eighth Canto and circulating it at court. Not

surprisingly, in his annotations to the Canto "we are clearly very close to open parody of the fourfold expository method" (374). Thus his ingenious scatological whimsy The Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596). If the allegorists were right, his proposal for a new close- stool must shadow forth (among other ideas) the notion that the throne could be improved by sanitary engineering. But though Har-

ington knew that all was not fragrant at court, he was too much its

43Laneham 25. Cp. his odd description of Killingworth's clock, which Leicester stopped for the Queen's visit. Equating the number one with the dignity of sovereignty and the inumber three with plurality "or els confusion," Laneham speculates elaborately about the numerological significance of stopping the clock at two. He finally reads his own riddle by deciding that it must stand for amity or "a freendly conjunction of two ones," but does so in a manner that sounds suspiciously as if he were tempted to see in this choice of time another emblem of courtly duplicity (53-55).

44T. G. A. Nelson, "SirJohn Harington and the Renaissance Debate over Allegory," Stldics in Phlilolo(y, 82 (I985): 359-79.

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creature to forsake it. His ironies allowed him to keep strolling through courtly allegory's palace of mirrors as through a funhouse.

When Philibert de Vienne's work was translated by George North in 1575 as The Philosopher of Court, its translator and many English readers missed its irony. In a letter of 1579 Gabriel Harvey describes how his Cambridge contemporaries, eager for preferment at Court but increasingly uncertain that their humanistic education would do them much good there, desperately strove to make themselves men of the world. "You can not stepp into a schollars studye but (ten to on) you shal litely finde open ether Bodin de Republica

. . or sum other like Frenche or Italian Politique Discourses," he noted. Then as now, Cambridge was full of parochial academics, the

offspring of an aspiring bourgeoisie. Instead of publish or perish, their motto was pubic service or parish. "And nowe of late forsoothe to help countenance owte the matter they have gotten Philiberts Phi-

losopher of the Courte . . . Castiglioes fine Cortegiano . . . Guatzoes new Discourses . . . Plutarch in Frenche, Frontines

Strategemes, Polyenes Strategemes. . .. "45Just as these literary in- tellectuals read Philibert's satiric attack on the court as a how-to guide to preferment, so they read French and Italian translations of the classical military writers and naively gawked at the illustrations.

For all his affectation of superiority, Harvey shared their goals. Most of the books he lists he definitely read. His marginalia show how much he thought he profited from writers like Machiavelli. That he read The Philosopher of Court cannot be proven, but it would be strange if he ignored it. Whether he would have fathomed its

irony is unclear. But this faculty-club Machiavel could not fathom the military writers-or rather he dove too deeply into them. An-

notating his copy of William Bourne's A Regimentfor the Sea (1 592), he regretted its focus on the merchant marine. "One chapter of Nau- machie, or Sea-fight, were necessarie in a Martial world," he de- cided. And after listing "thre notable Stratagems, in ye last chapter ofFrontin," hejotted down a fourth topic to be covered: "Perforatio Navium, per Urinatores."46 The French woodcuts of military divers had evidently made a lasting impression on him. Olaus Mag-

45Letter-Book ofGabriel Harivey, ed. EdwardJohn Long Scott (Westminister, 1884) 78- 79.

4('Macginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Stratford-Upon-Avoni, I93) 214. On the achievements of early divers, both legendary and factual, see Reg Valentine, Divers and Diving (Poole, Dorset, 1981) ch. i.

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De Magis marinis

FIG. 14-Pirate, necromancer, and pioneer surfer, Oddo used to wander at sea without a ship. Reproduced by permission of the Edinburgh University Library.

nus had reinforced it with tales about "a kind of Pyrats that use Leather ships, and by an arbitrary Navigation not so much above as beneath, they lye in wait, boring holes in the ships of Merchants about the Pump" (20). The Archbishop went on to explain that Scandinavian divers had to be expert in underwater combat to ward off the monstrous fish that regularly beset them. Such feats came naturally to folk adept at water sports. Another chapter describes the sinister Oddo, a Danish pirate who preyed on merchants by raising tempests to swamp their vessels. Oddo "was so well learned in Mag- ick, that he would wander at Sea without a ship" (XXX.xvii). Struggling to imagine this, the Italian artist compromised and depicted Oddo deftly cruising the Baltic dryshod on a board (see Fig. 14). The depredations of this malevolent wizard were finally halted when the Swedish king dispatched Eric the Eloquent to Jomsborg. Eric's eloquence took the very practical form of ordering divers to bore holes in Oddo's ships by night. "The following morn they be- gan to list and Eric attacked and killed all the distracted pirates" (Val- lentine 12). Neither hocus-pocus nor the knack of hanging ten availedOddo in the long run against the scourge of submarine warfare.

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Guyon's passage through the fantastic perils in the GulfofGreed-

ine'ss suggests that Spenser may have shared Harvey's fascination with surfing sorcerers and underwater demolition. But he also shared the minister Peacham's commitment to the rhetoric of Chris- tian humanism, the mercer Laneham's bourgeois skepticism about

courtly values, the butterfly Harington's ambivalence about alle-

gory. A society where an ironic encomium like Philibert de Vienne's could be read straightforwardly was also a world where an allegorical encomium like the Faerie Queene could be read ironically. Insofar as the Faerie Queene sings the mock battles of Elizabethan pageantry, it partakes of mock epic. While Spenser labored "to pourtraict in Arthure . .. the image of a braue knight," iconoclastic Protestant- ism made him wary of graven images.47 He deeply mistrusted his own art. Indeed, Spenser's plight resembles that of the artificer in one woodcut, who, operating an elaborate military machine, finds it threatening to recoil upon him (see Fig. 15). The poet was no sor- cerer's apprentice; but, like Prospero, the mature artist had to abjure his art.

"Now, mark me how I will undo myself, " cries Shakespeare's Ri- chard II (IV.i.203). As his courtly culture disintegrates, he resorts to bitter mock-ritual ceremoniously to unravel the ceremony draping the Realpolitik of his deposition. Likewise the Faerie Queene dissolves in the gentler self-parody of the Mutabilitie Cantos. As Nohrnberg emphasizes, the epic's coda is comic and satiric. The gods engage in all-too-human political squabbling. Mutability's lawsuit resembles the harebrained scheme that typically precipitates Aristophanic comedy. She is the ironic imposter or alazon who assaults the old

society, an Erasmian paradoxical encomiast whose argument ulti-

mately devours itself (for if she already governs the world as she claims, what more does she expect from Nature and the gods?). The Cantos finally demand us to accept the separation of God from Na-

ture, but this perspective necessarily eludes all the characters, who thus remain comic naifs. Whatever forces them to confront their essential ridiculousness they violently resist. Thus the sixth Canto ends by elaborating a myth of Faunus, whose supreme sin is laugh-

47"Letter of the Authors," Variorumn Woirks 1:i67. See Huston Diehl, "Graven Im-

ages: Protestant Emblem Books in England," Renaissance Quarterly, 39 (1987): 49-66 for evidence of how analogous iconoclasm helped shape a distinctive rationale for Elizabe- than emblem literature.

701


FIG. 15 - Second thoughts of a Renaissance artillerist. Reproduced from Flave Veg- ece Rene . .. dufait deguerre (1536) by permission of the Edinburgh University Li-

brary.

ing out loud. Spenser criticizes not so much the faun's desire to see Diana stripped naked of her allegorical garments, nor even his de- lighted amusement at the sight, but his foolish reluctance to conceal that pleasure with quiet irony.

Whether the episode would have formed the visionary core of a seventh book celebrating Constancy is unclear, for it significantly lacks any central heroic figure. Like other beings in Spenser's romance world, his knights possess demonic energies. Given free play in the world of epic, these make them supermen. Nohrnberg locates the poem's uniqueness in "the interdependence of romance, poly-

702


daemonism, and allegory," but we must square his triad by adding a fourth term: epic. Even in the epic world supermen are risky; in the real world they become intolerable. Thus Spenser's mythicized ex-

pulsion of Pan as Faunus comically commemorates the passing of his Faerie lond of dangerously daemonized heroes. As Nohrnberg finely observes, they "are supplanted by a lesser, postheroic race whose unheroic stature thereby defines its predecessors as heroic. Such a successor race can only aspire to be heroic allegorically. ... It is out of the same paradox the concept of the antiheroic takes its

beginning" (768-73). The Elizabethans cherished heroic aspirations that we do not, so

we are tempted to see them as more than allegorical heroes. Indeed, some actually made themselves heroic. But the cost of such self-

fashioning was high. Ultimately Europe declined to pay it. The

plain style triumphed, together with l'honnete honmme. It is a com-

monplace that by the later seventeenth century heroism survives in

English literature only in the ironic forms in which Milton and Dry- den cultivate it. As Milton demolished martial heroism in Paradise Lost, Dryden brought the allusive mock-heroic style to perfection. But an anti-heroic spirit already lurked in the cultural tensions of the Elizabethan era. In the Faerie Queene "there is burlesque," as William Nelson emphasized, for sometimes "Spenser. . . recognizes the ab-

surdity of chivalric narrative and . . . exposes it to his own amusement and that of his readers. That many passages . . . are hyper- bolic, bathetic, and illogical few would deny. The question remains, however, whether they are so because of the poet's naivete or because of his sophistication. It is not a question that can be answered

definitively."48 I think we must concede more unconscious self-

parody in the poem than Nelson was eager to admit, but deliberate

burlesque like Ariosto's there undoubtedly is too. Calling irony "the Drie mock," Puttenham groups it with other witty figures like "the

Merry scoffe," "the civill jest," "the Broad floute," and "the Privy nippe." Like "the Fleering frump .. one of the Courtly graces," "all these be souldiers to the figure allegoria and fight under the banner

48"Spenser ludens," in A Theatrefor Spenserians, ed. Judith M. Kennedy andJames A. Reither (Toronto, 1973) 83-100. On Spenser's comic vision see also C. A. Patrides, "Spenser: The Contours of Allegorical Theology," Centennial Review, 26 (1982): 17-32.

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of dissimulation. "49 Nelson's final caveat is therefore a wise one. The elements of seventeenth-century mock-heroic style are held in solution by Elizabethan poetic conventions. Spenser's example shows how often they threatened to precipitate out and crystallize. UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH

49TheArte of English Poesie ( 589; rpt. Menston, I968) 157-59. In addition to Gohlke 139, seeJudith Dundas, "Allegory as a Form ofWit," Studies in the Renaissance, I I (1964): 223-33.

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spenser's art of war_chivalric allegory, military technology, a

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