Of course “fact” in Spenser has, since Hamilton’s complaint, enjoyed something of a critical renaissance. Insofar as Cantos 8 through 12 of Book 5 engage recent events, and especially in their interplay with the repressive and violent colonialist policies advocated in Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland, they have recently attracted historicist commentary.3 At the same time, the episode of Book 5 featured just before the poem’s turn to fact has increasingly drawn the attention of feminist critics—not because fiction is repressed, but because feminine authority is repressed. In this episode Britomart, the female knight who has been the intermittent focus of The Faerie Queene since the beginning of Book 3, rescues her fiance Artegall by decapitating his captor, the Amazon queen Radigund. Britomart then rules Radigund’s city]state for a time only to turn sovereignty over to Artegall.4 But little work has been done in either the new-historicist or the feminist mode to bridge the gap between the central and final sections of Book 5, to describe the killing of the Amazon queen and the turn to historical allegory as parts or versions of the same process or impulse.5 The discontinuous structure of Book 5—its sudden, unexplained, and unsatisfying shift in mode from fiction to fact—is replicated by a criticism that takes up Book 5 only in piecemeal fashion.
In my view, neither the traditionalist desire to paper over Book 5’s structural shift nor the current tendency to treat Book 5 merely episodically does justice to a Book whose concern is, from the beginning, transformations of kind. In fact, this portion of The Faerie Queene uniquely meditates upon what kinds of form are appropriate to latter-day poetry. The Proem to Book 5 not only dolefully announces that “the world … being once amisse growes daily wourse and wourse” (5.Pr.1), but also thinks of that decay in terms of materials once, but no longer, put to use:
And men themselues, the which at first were framed
Of earthly mould, and form’d of flesh and bone,
Are now transformed into hardest stone:
Such as behind their backs (so backward bred)
Were throwne by Pyrrha and Deucalione:
And if then those may any worse be red,
They into that ere long will be degendered.
(5.Pr.2)
Breeding backward is the problem, but it is also the solution. If humans have degenerated rather than evolved in kind, then a heroic poem must look backward for models and materials of literary types: “I doe not forme them to the common line / Of present dayes, which are corrupted sore” (5.Pr.3). But Spenser’s chronology deserves some examination here. In the second installment of The Faerie Queene—Books 4–6, first published in 1596—the “present day” of the poem, the moment in which “form” has become so corrupt, has already been identified as the present in which the poem is invented, and in which the poem is therefore complicit. In the Proem to Book 4, a disapproving figure named only as the “rugged for-head” but usually identified as Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary, Lord Burghley, rebukes the poetic mode of the 1590 installment of the poem, Books 1–3. “My looser rimes (I wote) [he] doth sharply wite, / For praising loue, as I haue done of late” (4.Pr.1, my emphasis). In light of the rugged forehead’s attack, Book 5’s notoriously “tight” structure—especially, and especially in its last five cantos, its dispensing with the lush or knotty language, the odd twists of plot and identity beloved of Spenserians—seems a response to the “looseness” that The Faerie Queene has continued to perpetuate throughout its immediate precursor Books 3 and 4. Book 5 begins with the degeneration of form through history, but that history turns out to be the history not only of humankind, but of the poem’s production.
In this chapter I wish to analyze the structure of The Faerie Queene in light of the unpopular form to which Book 5 turns. By using the word “de-gendered” rather than “degenerated” to describe the sorry pass to which form has and will come, Book 5’s Proem again casts the problem of form into the terms that were previously provoked by the languorous verse of the witch Acrasia’s bower in Book 2: the problem of feminine authority.6 At the same time, the stony men of Book 5’s Proem look forward to Artegall’s subjection to Radigund, hinting that the knights of Book 5, like Acrasia’s thralls, might demonstrate Freud’s Medusa effect, where men are no longer men because they are “degendered” stones, castrated by the phallic woman.7 By the 1611 folio of Spenser’s complete works, “degendered” in this stanza becomes the more purely francophonic “degenered,” a substitution that encourages us to make a more explicit connection between the end of feminine rule showcased in Book 5 and the shift in literary form that immediately follows. To reverse the effect of men becoming “degendered,” enthralled by the witch, the Medusa, or the Amazon, The Faerie Queene must confront the perception that the poem itself has become “degenered,” debased in literary kind from its purportedly original epic intent. Book 5’s repeal of feminine authority becomes both the motivation and the prerequisite for its turn toward the bleak new genre of historical allegory. If, as Fredric Jameson has contended, innovations in literary genre come about to address potentially discomfiting changes in politics and socioeconomics, then we should not be surprised that, in this most self-conscious of poems, a shift in genre is baldly signalled by a shift in the gender of political regime.8 Britomart’s returning the Amazons “to mens subiection” in the middle of Book 5 is an accomplishment labelled as “changing all that forme of common weak” (5.7.42); immediately thereafter, The Faerie Queene itself “changes all that form.”
The genre in question for Jameson is romance, which he argues expresses a nostalgia for “an organic social order in the process of penetration and subversion, reorganization and rationalization, by nascent capitalism.”9 But as Harry Berger reminds us, with The Faerie Queene matters of form are more complicated. If Spenser’s poem expresses nostalgia for an earlier order, it does so with a canny awareness of the uses to which nostalgia can be put.10 As it turns out, romance in the poem is not itself a nostalgic mode, but rather an experimental mode that induces nostalgia—the poem’s own display of nostalgia for a genre it occupied before, and other than, romance. In The Faerie Queene, the “penetration and subversion” of order are laid explicitly at the feet not of Jameson’s nascent capitalism, but rather of authoritative women.11 And implicitly, as Patricia Parker has demonstrated, order’s penetration and subversion are laid at the feet of the genre of romance, which in Books 3 through 5 of the poem is intimately associated with those authoritative female figures and their characteristic modes of thought and action. Parker identifies romance and its failure to close off narrative as the foremost source of tension in The Faerie Queene;12 more recently, in a reading of Book 2 of the poem, she has identified that failure of closure with the enchantress Acrasia’s (and by extension any powerful woman’s) ability to “suspend male instruments,” holding men in thrall. Guyon’s destruction of Acrasia’s Bower of Bliss at the end of Book 2, then, has the effect of restoring narrative progress: “In Spenser, the ‘suspended instruments’ of Acrasia’s male captives are recovered as the Bower itself is overcome, and as Guyon and his Mosaic guide move forward to the narrative ‘point’ or end of a Book of the Governor in which both a threatening female ruler and her suspect lyricism are finally mastered and surpassed.”13 The genre of romance, the beauty of lush poetry, the power of a queen: all three elements that make the Bower so dangerously seductive are cancelled in Guyon’s immoderate rampage toward conclusions.14 But, as many critics have noticed and as I shall reiterate below, all three of these elements reemerge in Book 3, hold sway in Book 4, and linger stubbornly into the central cantos of Book 5. It is therefore Book 5’s turn toward history, not romance, that carries the force of nostalgia: nostalgia