Showing Like a Queen. Katherine Eggert

of these cantos’ poetic reformation, their expurgation of what Dunseath has called the poetic “suggestibility” we expect from Spenserian poetry.⁴³ I would argue that these cantos do not mean to be suggestive. Instead of dense wordplay and multiple allusiveness, their verse offers only a limited field of interpretation, a tunnel vision meant to afford narrative progress. Whereas The Faerie Queene’s poetry typically engages its reader by withholding conclusions—or as Fletcher, quoting Hazlitt, puts it, by holding the ear “captive in the chains of suspense”⁴⁴—these cantos eagerly draw toward singular conclusions both poetic and narrative. When Canto 11 repeats the word “shield” thirteen times, for example (as Hamilton notes with irritation),⁴⁵ not only do we get the message that a knight must never discard his shield, but we also get no other message. And when Canto 8 sketches Arthur’s triumphal march upon defeating the Souldan in only seven parsimonious lines, the reader is also reminded not to wallow in celebratory glee. Arthur, Artegall, and the reader all move on to the next adventure “hauing stayd not long” (5.8.51, my emphasis). Book 5’s last reiteration of Artegall’s recall to his “first aduenture” clearly navigates where he and the poem are going: “on his first aduenture [he] forward forth did ride” (5.10.17, my emphasis).

      What minimal figurative language and swift narrative conclusions do for these cantos in small, historical allegory does writ large; the firm attachment of these cantos to easily recognizable political and military events serves to cordon off all but the most straitened avenues of interpretation. We might be allowed a bit of wriggle room in the form of some referents that are not merely unitary: as David Norbrook points out, for example, we must hear in the rescue of Irena a reference not only to Ireland, but also to the French philosopher of absolutism Jean Bodin, who “used the term ϵιρηυη (eirene) to describe the highest kind of justice.”⁴⁶ Kenneth Borris strenuously argues, too, that these cantos not only depict such said-and-done events as the defeat of the Armada and the sentencing of Mary, Queen of Scots, but also voice a Protestant rewriting of history into the approach of the apocalypse. For Borris, Spenser “transforms the particulars of history into vehicles for the ostensibly prophetic revelation of cultural destiny.”⁴⁷ But Norbrook goes on to remind us that for Spenser as for others with more radical religious leanings, Protestant apocalyptics (like Bodin’s political theory) were also a matter of historical event and analysis. If Book 5’s Battle of Beige (Canto 10) is seeded with allusions to radical Protestant apocalyptic commentary, it is because Spenser’s revered Leicester sympathized with those Protestant factions, seeing his expedition in Belgium as a religious war as well as a containment of Spanish imperial ambitions. Spenser’s portrayal of the battle for Beige as a resounding success runs counter to fact not because its eye is on the final victory at world’s end, but (arguably) because Spenser was propagandizing in favor of continued military effort in the Low Countries, in hopes that Essex would be allowed to take up where Leicester had left off.⁴⁸ Protestant messianics, far from being suprahistorical, circle back round into realpolitik, into strategic militarism and jurisprudence.

      The relentlessly optimistic depiction of Beige’s fate, however, like the redemption of Irena in Canto 12, finally uncovers the pitfall of these cantos’ dependence on diachronic historical allegory. For of course these two episodes do not depict accomplished historical victories at all, but rather revise past English engagements, some of them not at all successful, into future triumph. When Arthur recovers a city that looks suspiciously like Antwerp (5.10.25–38), we are asked to acquiesce in an event that in 1596 has not yet taken place, and in fact never took place. In the same way, Irena’s rescue comes about as elegantly as a challenge to single combat—truly a kind of wishful thinking, on the order of Hal’s flyting of Hotspur on the eve of Shrewsbury. Even in the poem (not to mention in late sixteenth-century Ireland) matters are not really so easy, for like Hal’s England, Irena’s realm sees considerable bloodshed before Artegall undertakes his “single fight” with Grantorto (5.12.8). Artegall’s prosthetic Talus manages to massacre most of the barbaric hordes before Artegall calls him back, claiming a bit belatedly “that not for such slaughters sake / He thether came” (5.12.8).⁴⁹ These intrusive details, these shadowy reminders that current uncompleted missions are not as neatly sewn up as famous past victories, expose the danger of engaging upon a historical allegory that extends from past to future. Standing in the road between past and future is the ineluctable present, where history’s certain endings give way to the muddled and inconclusive status of recent current events, events that curtail any story of doome. But yet, still, the end is not.

      In the end, Book 5’s historical episodes make the case that even when barren and driven poetry replaces seductive lyric, masculine heroism is still subject to an undirected feminine authority. The liberations of Beige and of Irena, both fantasies that expose their own frustration, are framed (and hence, in The Faerie Queene’s juxtapositional logic, arguably caused) by two dilatory queens and their tactics of diversion. In the first case, Queen Mercilla’s waffling pity for Duessa in Canto 9 is seemingly closed off by Artegall, whose judgment is accompanied by his usual epithet of first intent (“But Artegall with constant firme intent, / For zeale of Iustice was against her bent” [5.9.49]). Mercilla’s wavering in a certain sense nevertheless still carries the day, since the pronouncement of Duessa’s final sentence is delayed until the beginning of the next canto, and even then her actual punishment is elided. Surprisingly enough in this book of beheadings, the poem remains silent on whether Duessa’s means of demise doubles that of Mary, Queen of Scots, her allegorical referent. Most readers assume that Duessa is beheaded, but in fact the poem tells us only that Mercilla, having delayed judgment “Till strong constraint did her thereto enforce,” then “yeeld[ed] the last honour to [Duessa’s] wretched corse” (5.10.4).⁵⁰ In this light, Artegall’s oddly gentle decapitation a few cantos later of Grantorto (“Whom when he saw prostrated on the plaine, / He lightly reft his head, to ease him of his paine” [5.12.23]) is better read not as a somewhat extraneous detail, but as a displaced dropping of Duessa’s unenacted death-stroke, as if Artegall must carry out somehow, anyhow, what Mercilla has postponed. If he finishes off Grantorto with unwonted mercy, it is because he is momentarily usurping Mercilla’s role. The point is minor enough, except that this queenly stay of execution recurs when Artegall tries to conclude his final task. His mission is the same as Britomart’s in Amazonia, “How to reforme that ragged common-weale” (5.12.26). “But ere he could reforme it thoroughly” he is recalled to Gloriana’s Faerie Court, “that of necessity / His course of Iustice he was forst to stay” (5.12.27). Blocked in the course of first intent, Artegall turns aside toward his queen’s command with a final reiteration of straightforwardness that is by now entirely ironic: “he for nought would swerue / From his right course, but still the way did hold / To Faery Court, where what him fell shall else be told” (5.12.43). This promise of narrative closure is never kept. No doome, no end for Artegall. Instead, he returns to the demanding, static embrace of Acrasia, or Venus, or Britomart, or Radigund, or Gloriana.

      Gloriana’s whim further serves to highlight the difficulty of constructing historical allegory as heroic accomplishment. Although depending on current events to endow narrative closure would be futile enough in any era, late sixteenth-century events in England seemed to many observers, especially those sympathetic to militant Protestantism, particularly recalcitrant to fostering masculine endeavor and its fruition. By the mid-1590S Spenser’s queen had been perceived for several years as hindering a Protestant crusade on the continent; in her canny ambivalence, Elizabeth was never willing to commit the funds or the manpower for a full-scale effort against Spain. R. B. Wernham details “a secret agreement” in the Triple Alliance between England, France, and the United Provinces that “limited the English military contribution [to the Netherlands] to 2,000 men…. In fact, after 1594 England practically withdrew from the continental war, except for [these] forces in the Netherlands.”⁵¹ Although Burghley was partially if not primarily responsible for this policy, the Queen herself was blamed for womanish inconstancy and lack of will. J. E. Neale reports a story that circulated about the queen’s endless changes of mind: “[T]he story of the carter who, on being informed for the third time that the Queen had altered her plans and did not intend to move on that day, slapped his thigh and said, ‘Now I see that the Queen is a woman as well as my wife.’”⁵² Elizabeth throughout her reign had used to her advantage