In Book 4, we learn that Spenser’s deferral of Amoret and Scudamour’s union replicates Busirane’s earlier disruption of their wedding:
For that same vile Enchauntour Busyran,
The very selfe same day that she was wedded,
Amidst the bridale feast, whilest euery man
Surcharg’d with wine, were heedlesse and ill hedded,
All bent to mirth before the bride was bedded …
Conueyed quite away to liuing wight vnknowen. (4.1.3.1–9)
Rhyme calls the reader’s attention to the expected progression from marriage vows to consummation and to Amoret’s suspension between the two. She is kidnapped in the liminal space between being “wedded” and “bedded”—still a virgin and not yet a wife. By relating this interrupted marital history after he prolongs Amoret and Scudamour’s separation in the revision of Book 3, Spenser suggests that his own poetic project is not far removed from Busirane’s rape and torture of Amoret.32 The opening of Book 4 thus acknowledges both the violence of poetic representation and its fundamental limits: while he can fragment chastity into different characters, Spenser cannot fully reconcile its complexities and ambiguities.
What does Amoret’s chastity signify, if she is both virgin and wife? The 1596 Faerie Queene leaves this question open, as virgins proliferate and the poem’s few weddings do little to contain chastity’s accretion of meanings. Book 4 features the metaphorical marriage of the Thames and Medway rivers, an extended poetic conceit that does not clarify the poem’s treatment of either chastity or marriage. Rachel E. Hile argues that “Spenser’s choice of a reluctant, proud bride and his focus on the wedding procession to the exclusion of the wedding itself suggest the possibility that he intends the Thames-Medway wedding to represent a concordant union, not an ideal of marriage based on the virtue of friendship.”33 But this focus on the wedding procession is not unusual for Spenser: the twelve stanzas dedicated to anticipation, preparation, and procession in Epithalamion—compared to the single stanza depicting the ceremony itself—reveal a similar hesitation surrounding the marriage service. Rather than indicating what type of union Spenser hopes to depict, the weddings in The Faerie Queene help reveal the narrative ruptures occasioned by conflicting ideologies of chastity and marriage in late Elizabethan England. While marriage was no longer a sacrament in the English church, chastity within marriage had at least conceptually surpassed the virtues of perpetual virginity. And yet Spenser struggles to represent a smooth transition from unmarried virginity to chaste wedlock. The wedding of Florimell and Marinell in Book 5 is especially notable in this respect, as the narrator acknowledges that he will not represent the wedding itself.
To tell the glorie of the feast that day,
The goodly seruice, the deuicefull sights,
The bridegromes state, the brides most rich aray,
The pride of Ladies, and the worth of knights,
The royall banquets, and the rare delights
Were worke fit for an Herauld, not for me. (5.3.3.1–6)
The bride, groom, guests, food, and, most important, the “goodly seruice” are here dismissed as material for a herald rather than a poet. Spenser suggests that such subjects would be digressive distractions from the true task at hand: the advancement of virtue. “But for so much as to my lot here lights, / That with this present treatise doth agree, / True vertue to aduance, shall here recounted bee” (5.3.3.7–9). Even if “this present treatise” refers specifically to Book 5’s focus on justice, readers may be surprised to learn that when “true vertue” is at stake the poem must turn its attention away from the spousal union.34
Marriage is nearly as impossible to represent as chastity, but for different reasons: rather than accruing meanings throughout the poem, it remains almost exclusively promissory. For many of Spenser’s paired characters—Una and Redcrosse, Amoret and Scudamour, Britomart and Artegall, Arthur and Gloriana—a consummated marital relationship is at the poem’s narrative horizon, always just out of reach and only visible in the prophetic mode. For Britomart, whose first sight of Artegall is of a “manly face” in a magic mirror, marriage is originally a spectral vision with an unknown object (3.2.24.4). The details of their union are communicated only through Merlin’s prophecy, part of Spenser’s chronicle history of Britain. The poem’s characters look forward as the poet looks back, but Britomart’s marriage is nearly invisible in both prospective and retrospective visions. She learns that “the man whom heauens haue ordaynd to bee / The spouse of Britomart, is Arthegall,” but this identification of marital status does not produce a representation of marital practice (3.3.26.1–2). Instead, Merlin’s syntax grows knotty as his narrative approaches Britomart and Artegall’s life together. After explaining that Artegall is in Faeryland but not of it, he reveals that “from thence, him firmely bound with faithfull band, / To this his natiue soyle thou backe shalte bring, / Strongly to aide his countrey, to withstand / The powre of forrein Paynims, which inuade thy land” (3.3.27.6–9). The delay of the “thou” identifying Britomart makes the “faithfull band” that binds Artegall ambiguous: is it a marriage band or is he bound to his native soil?35 Subsequent clauses (“strongly to aide,” “to withstand”) suggest that Britomart brings him home so that he may demonstrate his martial might rather than enjoy their marital union. The next stanza emphasizes military prowess on the part of both Britomart and Artegall: “long time ye both in armes shall beare great sway” (3.3.28.5). They are united on the battlefield, “till thy wombes burden thee from them do call, / And his last fate him from thee take away” (3.3.28.6–7). Pregnancy arises from the battlefield rather than the bedroom in a parallel construction that aligns Artegall’s death with his child’s birth. Spenser thus elides Britomart and Artegall’s marriage in favor of their political and martial alliance, the outcome of which is dynastic rather than domestic.
As Jonathan Goldberg has argued, “there seems never to have been a domestic partnership…. This story seems less to support the seamless relationship between sexuality, marriage, and socio-political efficacy than to continue the problematization of these linkages.”36 Goldberg offers this reading in the interest of demonstrating that “marriage is not the only legitimate form of sexuality in The Faerie Queene, although it is a critical commonplace to say so.”37 I would add that this critical commonplace arises out of the poem’s many representations of female chastity, which consistently point toward a marital future that rarely materializes. Marriage is a representational blank and an empty future in The Faerie Queene: an end that is not, to borrow Merlin’s