The Faerie Queene RESEARCH in MEDIEVAL and EARLY MODERN CULTURE

Spenser’s Narrative Figuration of Women in The Faerie Queene RESEARCH IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE Medieval Institute Publications is a program of The Medieval Institute, College of Arts and Sciences WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY Spenser’s Narrative Figuration of Women in The Faerie Queene Judith H. Anderson Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture MEDIEVAL INSTITUTE PUBLICATIONS Western Michigan University Kalamazoo Copyright © 2017 by the Board of Trustees of Western Michigan University Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Anderson, Judith H., author. Title: Spenser's narrative figuration of women in the Faerie Queene / Judith H. Anderson. Description: Kalamazoo : Medieval Institute Publications, 2018. | Series: Research in medieval and early modern culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017046483 | ISBN 9781580443173 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Spenser, Edmund, 1552?–1599. Faerie queene. | Women in literature. Classification: LCC PR2358 .A924 2018 | DDC 821/.3--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017046483 ISBN: 9781580443173 eISBN: 9781580443180 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or trans- mitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. Chapter 1 Parody and Perfection: Spenser’s Una his chapter beGins with background that enables and Tintroduces my focus on Una’s figuration, while deferring her thematic dominance for a time. It moves from the general to the more specific, from a discussion of parody as a historical form to parody in the 1590 Faerie Queene, especially with respect to Una, Duessa, and Florimell, all three of whom resonantly “blubber” in the charged context of near-rape. Building on their parodic relation, the chapter then examines the problematizing of Una in stark terms of good or evil in recent criticism, which I interweave with my own readings of her experiences throughout Book I. It concludes with a substantial treatment of parody in Eden, where Una’s story achieves a divinely comic ending. *** My opening question is whether we have fully appreciated the extent and degree to which The Faerie Queene, like contemporary masterpieces by Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Cervantes, makes a defining use of parody, albeit not an exclusive or overwhelming use. Without denying the serious moral and religious force of the poem, might we do so? Would a great- er, more specific recognition of the presence and function of parody in Spenser’s epic, as apart from irony, satire, or simple contrast, shift our sense of it? In asking such questions, I am deliberately seeking a shift in perspective that will make Una both more accessible and less simple as a figure. Each book of the epic uses comic parody early enough for it to be a formative influence and thereby signals a fundamental commitment to play in both the ludic and open senses of the word. This is also a commitment to process and exploration, which a reading of each book should reflect as well: just for example, in Book I, Archimago’s parodic imperson- ation of Redcrosse initiates and intermittently propels a comic subplot; 14 Chapter 1 in Book II, the figure of Braggadocchio reflects back parodically on both Guyon and his Palmer; the parodic Malecasta in Book III, together with Florimell, frames its first canto, and Florimell quickly accords with the thematic “mirrours more then one,” her figure later to be parodied specifi- cally by her double, the False Florimell.1 Additional examples abound in the 1596 installment: in the opening cantos of Book IV, the outrageous parody of friendship by the false foursome; the parody that relentlessly dogs the execution of Artegall’s justice in the early cantos of Book V; the parody in Calidore’s quest throughout Book VI, evident in the ironic jux- taposition of pastoral and violence from the earliest cantos to Melibee’s idyll. In the first of the Mutabilitie Cantos, Mutability’s rebellion, itself already parodic, is then further parodied by Faunus. Such familiar examples are only a start, but, coming early in each book, they are, like other first impressions, important and lasting. Of course, as each narrative progresses, it is subject to modification and, in the instances of each book, to significant, even radical modification. The paired protagonists of Book I, Redcrosse and Una—perhaps Una most of all—afford an especially tell- ing test of the parodic potential of Spenser’s epic romance, and they will appear recurrently in subsequent discussion. Whatever early preview of The Faerie Queene Spenser’s friend Gabriel Harvey saw, parody aligns suggestively with his familiar response to it as “Hobgoblin runne away with the Garland from Apollo.” Harvey’s critical jest contrasts with the enthusiastic praise of Spenser’s lost com- edies that it follows.2 In context, Harvey further compares what he has seen of The Faerie Queene unfavorably with Ariosto’s model romance and instead recommends that Spenser return to the generic model of ancient and contemporary writers of dramatic comedy, including Aristophanes. Perhaps the academic Harvey was more of a generic purist than Spenser or, perhaps, less of a one. Anciently, Aristophanes also affords a familiar model—perhaps the model—of parody. Parody might well be the major term from ancient Greece that describes “comic quotation, imitation, or transformation,” although parody is also a practice that readily overlaps, merges with, or even blends into satire and irony, two other ancient terms.3 Additional terms of rel- evance, such as burlesque, travesty, pastiche, double-coding, and meta-fiction are all more recent. Although these terms have variously been identified with parody, by themselves they are generally narrower or even other with respect to it. Both great parodies—the usual historical examples being by Aristophanes, Rabelais, Cervantes, and Sterne—and the ancient roots of P ARODY AND PERFECTION 15 parody are more complex and inclusive; they are capable of criticism, sympathy, or both at once—that is, of balance, ambivalence, or simple ambi- guity. They include both parodic content and parodic expression, either of which can also constitute parody by itself. These, too—complexity and ambivalence, criticism and sympathy, and content, expression, or both— are further points of emphasis.4 John Florio’s Italian–English dictionary of 1598 refers to parody, as does Henri Estienne’s Greek dictionary in 1572. The widely read J. C. Scaliger discusses parody in his Poetices libri septem of 1561 (Rose 9–10). Strictly English sources, namely the clergyman Thomas Walkington The( Optick Glasse of Humors, 1607) and Ben Jonson in Every Man in His Humor (performed 1598, published 1616), employ the term. Anciently, the term parody occurs in Aristotle’s Poetics, referring to the comic writings of Hegemon and Nicochares, parodists of epic style and matter.5 Ancient commentators on the writings of Aristophanes extend the term to “all sorts of comic literary quotation and allusion” (Rose, 15). Quintilian also refers to parody as imitation and as an abuse of language, a sort of extended catachresis.6 (Catachrestic form is a thought to ponder: in miniature, con- sider, analogously, the paradoxical phrases “coy submission” and “modest pride” to describe Milton’s Eve, for whom either word alone is insufficient and a single, proper word is lacking.)7 In the Middle Ages, comic wit and structural doubleness are notable in biblical parody, in musical and visual parody, in such an elaborate comic subplot as that of The Second Shepherd’s Play, and in Chaucer’s self-reflectiveTale of Sir Thopas and Tale of Melibee, both tales important to Spenser. In medieval England and Germany, parodies of the Mass were endemic in “the underworld of clerical writing,” as well as in the margins of religious and legal books; according to Miri Rubin, readers, hearers, and viewers were continually reconstructing the “eucharistic symbolic,” using “old materials to signify new perceptions and to express altered points of view.”8 By the later Renaissance, Petrarchan parody is so widespread as to have become a subject in itself. Under Queen Elizabeth and King James, John Donne parodies sacred subjects in erotic poems and erotic poetry in holy sonnets. The historical, complementary co-existence of such parody signals its play, its double-sidedness, its loos- ening of boundaries, its potential for inclusion and connection. Etymologically, parody derives from the Greek word for song or ode, oidē, and para, a prefix indicating “beside” or “against”—that is, either nearness or opposition—and by extension implying either sympathy, on the one hand, or contention, on the other. Use of the same prefix, para, in 16 Chapter 1 words such as paradox and parallel are analogously suggestive, particularly since they also convey notions of doubleness—with paradox, doubleness of thought; with parallel, doubleness of representation. Margaret A. Rose, to whose work I owe much, allows that humor was not always or necessar- ily present in ancient parody, but her own definition, sensitive to sourer and narrower modern theories, requires it: “the comic refunctioning of preformed linguistic or artistic material” (52). By refunctioning, she wants to signal creativity and, by preformed material, to get beyond the mislead- ing reduction of parody only to style. Again, she stresses the comic nature of parody, while nonetheless acknowledging exceptions. The word comic itself, I would add, also has a range of meaning, applicable both broadly to humor and to a tale with a happy ending, for example.

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