No wonder, then, that Mutabilitie’s last stanzas admit a powerfully subversive reading. Most readers hear the narrator’s declaration that Mutabilitie’s argument “makes me loath this state of life so tickle, / And loue of things so vaine to cast away” (7.8.1) as reaching toward the transcendence that allegory seems to offer. But Berger has given these lines an alternate cast that resists the allegorical temper: “I am loath to cast away this state of life and this love of things.”63 The compounding in Mutabilitie’s final lines of Sabbath and Sabaoth—of peaceful rest and armed hosts—gives us reason to refuse what Susanne Wofford has called “figurative compulsion” in the poem, to evade allegorical conclusions for the “vain and tickle” present.64 Elizabeth Bellamy has pointed out that these lines’ prayer to “that great Sabbaoth God” disfigures Elizabeth’s own name (Eli-sabbath, God’s rest).65 That truncation, I would add, in turn enforces the “trunkation” of queens—Radigund’s beheading, Britomart’s abandonment—as the principle behind Mutabilitie’s downfall and hence behind eternal rest. But if apocalyptic allegorical conclusions require the grim armed forces that brought about Book 5’s historic ends, then the final downstroke of that “Sabbaoth God” to whom the narrator prays might show us that we have shaken off the powerful embrace of The Faerie Queene’s last seductive queen only to lie down with Talus, Artegall’s right-hand iron man.
3
Leading Ladies
Feminine Authority and Theatrical Effect in Shakespeare’s History Plays
TO MOVE FROM Spenser’s epic-romance poem to Shakespeare’s history plays, I wish to return to the moment in The Faerie Queene at which forward historical movement is first breached: Arthur’s reading of history in Book 2. Before The Faerie Queene digresses from epic structure, the poem momentarily makes a proposal contrary to both the seductively digressive poetics of Books 3 and 4 and the unattractively direct poetics of Book 5. This is a proposal that Shakespeare’s histories will reach for and elaborate: that a reader or audience member may be ravished just as much by a literary work when it details the orderly, masculine, teleological progress of history as when it suspends that orderly progress.
We remember that the volume of chronicle history that Arthur peruses in Alma’s castle turns out to be his own history, the chronicle of his kingly ancestors the Britons. We also remember that Arthur remains ignorant of his connection to this chronicle because its account of his lineage halts just after it mentions Arthur’s father, Uther Pendragon:
After him Vther, which Pendragon hight,
Succeding There abruptly it did end,
Without full point, or other Cesure right,
As if the rest some wicked hand did rend,
Or th’Authour selfe could not at least attend
To finish it: that so vntimely breach
The Prince him selfe halfe seemeth to offend,
Yet secret pleasure did offence empeach,
And wonder of antiquitie long stopt his speach.
(2.10.68)
Arthur is, understandably, frustrated at the “untimely breach” of his reading pleasure, a stoppage enforced unnaturally, “Without full point, or other Cesure right.” A closer look at these lines, however, reveals an Acrasian cast to Arthur’s reader response. Arthur’s delight, it turns out, derives as much from the interruption in his reading as from its previous progress, anticipating the poetic ravishment I have discussed in regard to Book 3, where poetic success and reading pleasure are to be found when linear heroic narrative is interrupted or suspended, not determinedly completed. First of all, the double equivocation of the breach half seeming to offend—not only merely seeming, but half seeming—makes the harm appear small indeed; and second, the “secret pleasure” that accrues to Arthur and “empeaches” the interruption’s offense in fact derives just as plausibly from the “untimely breach” that precedes the phrase, as from the “wonder of antiquitie” that follows it. The near homonymic substitution of “Authour” for “Arthur” in line 5, moreover, insinuates that the break in the text conforms to its princely reader’s desires to dwell upon his secret pleasure, “as if … th’Arthur self could not at least attend to finish it.” And because Arthur is reading a chronicle of England, the poetic reverberates within the political. In this first stanza, Arthur’s “wonder of antiquitie” comes during an interrupted account of dynastic succession—a breach that conforms in poetic terms to the interruption that powerful, seductive women classically provide for epic action, and in political terms, as I will discuss in this chapter, to the dynastic interruption that Spenser’s Virgin Queen clearly guaranteed for her country.
The very next stanza, however, enforces a diametrically opposed idea of what elicits reading pleasure, one that conforms to a masculine model both of textual power and of political authority:
At last quite rauisht with delight, to heare
The royall Ofspring of his natiue land,
Cryde out, Deare countrey, O how dearely deare
Ought thy remembraunce, and perpetuall band
Be to thy foster Childe, that from thy hand
Did commun breath and nouriture receaue?
How brutish is it not to vnderstand,
How much to her we owe, that all vs gaue,
That gaue vnto vs all, what euer good we haue.
(2.10.69)
Here Arthur as literary consumer is “quite rauisht with delight” very differently from the way other men in The Faerie Queene are ravished. Far from suspending his sense, the chronicle heightens it, so that he reacts with reasoned, rhetorically patterned patriotism to this mapping of monarchical lineage. Arthur’s outburst manages to crown the way in which the chronicle he has just read has gradually effaced its own gynecocratic texture. At the beginning of the canto, which opened with a paean to Elizabeth, we were led to expect a genealogy ending with this Tudor queen: “Thy name O soueraigne Queene, thy realme and race, / From this renowmed Prince [i.e., Arthur] deriued arre” (2.10.4). Instead, the chronicle breaks off just after it recounts Uther Pendragon’s conquest over his father’s usurper and accession to his male forebears’ throne. Admittedly, the chronicle before this point does tell of three female rulers of ancient Britain, but Arthur’s response to his reading deflects what is female about England from its rulers onto the land itself.1 His characterization of his “Deare countrey” as nourishing mother is highly conventional in both imagery and phrasing; both the didacticism and the repetitiveness of his speech (“Deare countrey, O how dearely deare”; “that all vs gaue, that gaue vnto vs all”) indicate that this particular portrait of femininity is hardly the source of the reader’s ravishment. Rather, Arthur’s experience of poetic delight in this stanza derives from learning of this maternal land’s “royall Ofspring,” who are, in the end, men-children only.2