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'):f_.'._:..'. .-.!'.‘ 'O.‘ I? o. 0-0 .5 FLA“. . _‘ ON wrrpo-‘r‘ o-a'h fl-Pvafi—afi-O' 1 "O Y 9'” M "'7. "" '1"?! °'.¢’J"A ' {.6 t’!1"‘r'L‘1";:."T." ~r~,' :3; :..'”4'... ' -J.’.A-'o4';' « ago!“ ”3"" «EL-9' 'qucy oo-ooco40uv-d arv‘rwo "1‘?” ‘ , La. o - v A . - - 4- . c r - . 'J o... ’,(..... .--.hn‘.‘--I And: .... -- '-- c (-1 ff.‘ < wens smuammes (.15 .x (,VC / 1111111111 111111 1111111111 111111111111 11111 1 1 .. _, 1293 0078 I ‘ ‘“ \ 1.13%“ Y Michigan State University K M A This is to certify that the dissertation entitled THE RELATION OF SPENSER'S FAERIE QUEENE TO MALORY'S MORTE DARTHUR: AN INTERTEXTUAL APPROACH presented by Paul R. Rovang has been accepted towards fulfillment of the requirements for Ph.D. degree in Engllsh Damn—94f“ RGIMLAA‘ Major professor Dme 5 June 1991 MSU is an Affirmative Anion/Equal Opportunity Institution 0- 12771 PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record. TO AVOID FINES return on or before date due. DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE 11111144186 2003 as? 1, ——1 ____ __1 1+ MSU Is An Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution cWWt THE RELATION OF SPENSER'S FAERIE;QUEENE TO MALORY'S MORTE DARTHUR: AN INTERTEXTUAL APPROACH BY Paul R. Rovang A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English 1991 6fjfib~‘4‘¢4:3 ABSTRACT THE RELATION OF SPENSER'S FAERIE QUEENE TO MALORY'S MORTE DARTHUR: AN INTERTEXTUAL APPROACH BY Paul R. Rovang Because of a paucity of ostensibly Malorian borrowings by Spenser, critics in this century have tended to disallow a significant interrelatedness between The Morte Darthur and The Faerie Queene. Moreover, the only focused study on the subject has been Marie Walther's late nineteenth-century German inaugural dissertation, which goes little further than the citing of parallels between the two works. This study demonstrates the extent of Spenser's use of Malory as a source and explores The Faerie Queene's relation to the larger medieval tradition of chivalric romance narrative, using The Morte Darthur as a touchstone. It accounts for continuities and distinctions between Malory and Spenser in historical, cultural, and political terms. Chapter I compares the two authors' treatments of the major thematic correspondence of the two works-4the chivalric quest--and lays the groundwork for the application of intertextual criticism to be applied throughout the dissertation. Chapter II analyzes structural similarities between the two works and argues that Spenser owed a specific debt to Malory for the structure of his poem. Chapter III examines the socio-political applications of chivalry in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and explores how they are reflected in the two authors' renderings of the knight as an exemplar of virtue, and of chivalry as an ethical and political code. Chapter IV addresses the two works' treatments of Arthur as a political exemplar and shows how Malory's presentation of Arthur informs Spenser's. Chapter V analyzes a major force behind Spenser's transformation of Malory and the chivalric romance tradition--the sharper Renaissance distinction between history and fiction. Chapter VI explores the effects of the two authors' differing conceptions of history and fiction on their renderings of several themes and elements: the supernatural and the marvelous, humor and irony, and time and eternity. Copyright by PAUL R. ROVANG 1991 In memoriam Edison and Angel Ashouri Michael and Janice Schelling They jeoparded their lives unto the death in the high places of the field. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am particularly indebted to my dissertation director, Professor Donald M. Rosenberg, who patiently read and discussed with me every draft of every chapter, often when it was inconvenient for him, with never a complaint. I am also very grateful to Professors Lister Matheson and M. Teresa Tavormina for critiquing drafts of each of my chapters and offering useful suggestions. Additonally, I would like to thank Professors Susan Gass and Emily Tabuteau for reading the completed dissertation and participating in my defense. Finally, I owe more than I can say to my wife, Candy, who believed that I could accomplish this task and ardently supported me every step of the way. vi TABLE or CONTENTS INTRODUflION 0......0......0.0.0.0..........OOIOOOOOOOOOOO1 CHAPTER 1 Thematic Similarities in Malory and Spenser ... 6 A. B. C. D. The Faerie Queene and Medieval Chivalric Romance ... 6 Applications of a Theory of Intertextuality ........ 9 The Chivalric Quest Theme in the "Legend of the Knight of the Red Cross" and the Tale oerageth ... 12 The Nature of Spenser's Participation in the Intertextual Space of Chivalric Romance ........... 29 CHAPTER 2 Structural Comparisons of Malory and Spenser . 41 A. B. C. D. The Interrelatedness of Theme and Structure in Malory and Spenser ................................ 41 Evidences for the Influence of Malory's Structure on Spenser's Poem ................................. 46 Structural Peculiarities of Caxton's Edition ...... 51 Modifications of Gothic Structure in Malory and Spenser ....................................... 57 CHAPTER 3 Chivalry in Malory and Spenser ............... 64 A. B. C. D. E. F. Chivalry in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance England ........................................... 64 Comparison of the Two Authors' Applications of Chivalry ....................................... 71 The Two Authors' Representations of Chivalry ...... 73 The Political Significance of Chivalry in The Faerie Queene ....0..........OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO 80 The Political Significance of Chivalry in The Morte Darthur ................................. 94 Spenser's Transformation of the Chivalric Ideal .. 103 CHAPTER 4 The Arthur of Malory and Spenser ............ 110 A. A Brief Survey of Scholarship .................... 110 B. Spenser's Arthur as an Intertextual Construct .... 111 C. The Political Applications of Spenser's Arthur ... 123 vii CHAPTER 5 History and Fiction in Malory and Spenser (I) A. B. C. D. E. An Introductory Comparison of the Two Authors' Historical Approaches ............................ Malory's Treatment of the Roman War Story ........ Malory as Historiographer ........................ Spenser as Poet Historical ....................... The Influence of Historiography on Both Authors' Treatments of Arthur ............................. CHAPTER 6 History and Fiction in Malory and Spenser A. B. C. D. E. F. G. (II) o...0......o.cocoon-coo0.000.000.0000... Malory's Treatment of the Supernatural in General Malory's Treatment of Fairy Lore ................. Spenser's Treatment of Fairy Lore ................ Giants in Malory and Spenser ..................... Dragons in Malory and Spenser .................... Humor and Irony in Malory and Spenser ............ Time and Eternity in Malory and Spenser .......... wNCLUSION ......OCOOOOOO......OOOOOOOOOOOOCOO0.0.0.0... NOTES 00............OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO......OOOCCOOOOOOOOO LIST OF WORKS CITED ......OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO0.0.0.000... viii 142 142 144 150 156 160 168 168 176 179 183 189 195 203 209 215 252 INTRODUCTION I first became interested in the relationship between The Morte Darthur and The:Faerie,Qgeene in D. M. Rosenberg's doctoral seminar in Spenser at Michigan State University. To my first complete reading of The Faerie Queene I brought a long-standing interest in medieval Arthurian literature which had produced a master's thesis on Malory and Gottfried von Strassburg, written under the direction of Muriel Brown at North Dakota State University. During the course of the Spenser seminar, Professor Rosenberg mentioned the Malory-Spenser connection as a seemingly important one that had been little explored. At this point the topic began to germinate in earnest. In my own reading, I had already noticed a number of Malorian formulaic phrases adapted by Spenser (see pp. 82- 83 & n.3198-99). Furthermore, there was the chivalric quest theme and the characters which the two works had in common, foremostly Arthur, Merlin, and Tristram. The most immediate problem for me was that many of these elements were also to be found in other medieval romances. How could one demonstrate the extent of debt to Malory--if an appreciable debt even existed? I decided to test the waters with a seminar paper. In my initial search, I was not encouraged by the critics. The section on sources in volume one of the Variorum edition of Spenser contained a mere paragraph on 1 2 The Morte Darthur, in which F. M. Padelford declared: "On the whole . . . it is clear that in Book One Spenser has drawn less upon the Morte d'Arthur than its prominence would have led one to expect" (399). Other volumes of the Variorum, in their sources sections, addressed the question even more cursorily, if at all. Discovering the existence of Marie Walther's late nineteenth-century German inaugural dissertation, Malory's Einfluss auf Spenser's Faerie Queene, encouraged me, although it was not readily available for use in my seminar paper. I soon discovered, however, that twentieth-century scholars such as Josephine waters Bennett had dismissed Walther's study as presenting general romance commonplaces as borrowings from Malory (Bennett Evolution 63 n.). Although, having since obtained the seventy-nine page German study, I do not see this criticism as entirely valid, I knew at the time that I would have to approach the problem from a different angle than had Walther. Merely hunting for borrowings was bound to be redundant and ineffective. Rosamond Tuve's chapter on romance in Allegorical Imagery proved seminal to the strategy which I eventually developed. Tuve argues that the connection between The_ Faerie Queene and medieval romance consists of "deeply pervasive effects rather than precise borrowings of items" (335). I chose, experimentally, to apply this proposition to the Malory-Spenser question. Having found some plausible structural and thematic links, I then asked: How did 3 Spenser, as a Renaissance poet, respond to the chivalric romance themes, material, and structures which he saw in Malory? The problem thus became less one of direct borrowings--although that remained significant in its own right-~and more one of reception and reapplication. A further intriguing possibility was the fact that Spenser had been the first English writer since Malory successfully to treat the Arthurian matter. The result of this convergence of findings and questions was a seminar paper entitled "Spenser's Relation to Malory in the Evolution of the Arthurian Chivalric Quest Narrative." This dissertation has been in a large way an expansion of the seminar paper. The most significant new dimension brought to the dissertation phase has been a theory of intertextuality, which I first became acquainted with through Leland Ryken's Milton and Scriptural Tradition. The groundwork for my particular application of intertextual criticism is laid in the first chapter. Chapter one also traces the major thematic similarity of the two works, the chivalric quest, and attempts to account for and show the applications of Spenser's departures from Malory in rehandling that theme. The second chapter discusses structural relations between the two works and how the two authors' intertextual environments influenced them to modify the structures by which they arranged their chivalric romance material. The point is stressed that Spenser owed a specific debt to Malory for his poem's structure. 4 Where the first two chapters demonstrate the nature of the relationship between the two works, the third and fourth chapters concentrate on the motivation, purposes, and applications of that relationship. Chapter three explores the socio-political applications of chivalry in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and examines how these applications are reflected in the two authors' treatments of the knight as exemplar of virtue and chivalry as an ethical and political code. Chapter four addresses the two works' treatments of Arthur as a political exemplar and discusses how Malory's particular presentation of Arthur as a just Christian ruler who attains stable empire informs Spenser's presentation of Arthur as an allegory for Elizabeth. Chapters five and six explore a major force behind Spenser's rehandling of Malory--the clearer Renaissance distinction between history and fiction. Chapter five examines the influence of medieval historiography upon Malory's treatment of his source materials and compares how the evolving Renaissance historiography allowed Spenser to develop his materials with a much freer hand. Chapter six, an appendage of chapter five which I have separated for reasons of manageability, contains additional diverse topics which variously illustrate the history-fiction contrast: the supernatural and the marvelous, humor and irony, and time and eternity. The entire dissertation, but chapters five and six especially, show how medieval themes and literary forms were brought across the transitional period 5 leading to the Renaissance, and fitted to the needs, tastes, and beliefs of the time. For quotations from Malory I have chosen to cite Caxton's text in the main, instead of the currently more widely used Winchester version, since Caxton's was the version known to Spenser. At points, however, I quote and cross-reference the Winchester text. CHAPTER ONE Thematic Similarities in Malory and Spenser A. The Faerie Queene and Medieval Chivalric Romance Literary scholars have made much of The Faerie Queene's dependence upon Virgil's Aeneid and the romance epics of Ariosto and Tasso. While Spenser's poem is chivalric in content, it is often thought of as a Renaissance version of the classical epic retaining only vestigial links with the chivalric romances of the Middle Ages. Therefore, many have said that although the poem features knights, it is not a chivalric romance; and although it portrays Arthur, it is not an Arthurian romance. L. R. Gaylon's assessment of $22. Faerie Queene in The Arthurian Encyclopedia is characteristic of this attitude: "The Faerie Queene is a great poem, but not a great Arthurian poem." Josephine Waters Bennett has taken a more provocative and uncompromising stance on the question, calling "any account of the Faerie Queene which brackets it with Malory or implies a major debt to the Arthurian stories . . . simply and purely mistaken" ("Genre" 109).1 A thorough examination of The Faerie Queene in comparison with specific medieval chivalric romances, however, reveals it to be vitally within that tradition. 2 Warton in the eighteenth century and Taine in the 6 7 nineteenth have already made observations to this effect. Warton writes: Although Spenser formed his Faerie Queene upon the fanciful plan of Ariosto . . . yet it must he confessed, that the adventures of Spenser's knights are a more exact and immediate copy of those which we meet with in old romances, or books of chivalry, than they are of those of which the Orlando Furioso consists. Ariosto's knights exhibit surprising instances of their prowess, and atchieve many heroic actions; but our author's knights are more particularly engaged in revenging injuries, and doing justice to the distressed; which was the proper business, and ultimate end of the antient knight-errantry. And thus though many of Spenser's incidents and expedients are to be found in Ariosto, such as the blowing of a horn, at the sound of which the gates of a castle fly open, of the vanishing of an enchanted palace or garden, after some knight has destroyed the enchanter, and the like, yet these are not more peculiarly the property of Ariosto, than they are common to all antient romances in general. (13-14) Similarly, Taine, in discussing Spenser's foreign contemporaries who treated chivalry-~Ariosto, Tasso, Cervantes, and Rabelais--says: "Ils refont une chevalerie, mais ce n'est point une chevalerie vraie" (329). In this respect, their insular counterpart stands alone: Seul, Spenser la prend au sérieux et naturellement. Il est au niveau de tant de noblesse, de grandeurs, et de réves. Il n'est point encore assis et enfermé dans cette espece de bon sens exact qui va fonder et rétrécir toute 1a civilisation moderne. Il habite de coeur dans le poétique et vaporeuse contrée dont chaque jour les hommes s'éloignent davantage. 11 en aime jusqu'au langage: il reprend les vieux mots, les tours du moyen Sge . . . . Il entre de plain-pied dans les plus étranges songes des anciens conteurs, sans étonnement, comme un homme qui de lui-meme en trouve encore de plus étranges. Chateaux 8 enchantés, monstres et géants, duels dans les bois, demoiselles errantes, tout renatt sous sa main, la fantasia du moyen Sge avec la générosité du moyen age . . . (330) In Taine's view, therefore, the other authors mentioned treat chivalry, but according to the more skeptical and satirical temper of their own age. Only Spenser, he holds, treats chivalry in the spirit of the Middle Ages--of the "old romances or books of chivalry," as Warton phrases it. More recently Rosemond Tuve has argued for connections between The Faerie Queene and the chivalric romances of the Middle Ages, connections which she describes as "deeply pervasive effects rather than precise borrowings of items" (335). In order to reinforce this assertion she invites us to think of what an unimaginably different poem we should have had if Spenser had written Christian history like the Fletchers, du Bartas, Milton; if Spenser had kept to secular historical narrative like Drayton in his Legends and his two heroic poems on Mortimer, or had written of the Irish and Belgian conflicts as Daniel did of the Civil Wars; or if Spenser had written "classical" historical epics like a Petrarch or a Ronsard, or mythicized pseudo-classical narratives like a Jean Lemaire de Belges; or if he had confined himself to (instead of merely using) Italianized, Platonized mythological poetry of the kind found in the temples of Venus or Isis or the revolt of Mutability. (336) It is primarily "'mediaeval romance,'" Tuve asserts, that "is responsible for the character the Faerie Queene has as a narrative" (336). She affirms that while Spenser "finds use for" the narrative types enumerated above, 9 it has an extraordinary effect upon their durability and their absence of preciosity that they are set in a matrix of the most ordinary kind of storytelling in Europe for centuries: the straightforward tale of chivalric romance. (336) B. Applications of a Theory of Intertextuality What becomes evident from the critical appraisals just surveyed is that Spenser worked to a significant degree within a generic tradition comprising a vast body of texts, known to us as chivalric romance. Though we do not suppose that he read all or even most of the texts, it is certain that he was conversant with the tradition, its themes, and conventions, and was influenced even by works therein which he had not actually read. While it is demonstrable that Spenser drew upon such chivalric texts as Chaucer's Sggire's Tale and Tale of Sir Tho as, Egon of Bordgagr, Bevis of Ham ton, Arthur of Little Britain, Lybeaus Desconus, and, as I shall argue, The Morte Darthur, he was equally influenced, via the existing corpus of the tradition, by works which he had probably not read, such as the Prose Lancelot and Tristan, and the romances of Chrétien de Troyes. We only need pause momentarily to realize that without the works in the latter group, those in the former, particularly The Morte Darthur, could never have existed as we know them. A fortiori, the same rule applies for The_ Faerie Queene. Furthermore, works such as those mentioned above had by Spenser's time exerted a vast influence on 10 England's material culture, its social and political institutions, and its language. In this sense, Spenser, in writing chivalric romance, is not just 'borrowing' or 'using sources', he is, to use terminology originated by Julia Kristeva, participating in an 'intertextual space.‘ The text which he generates is interacting with, shaping, and being shaped by the entire existing generic tradition. As Kristeva has said, "'Ecrire' serait le 'lire' devenu production, industrie: l'écriture-lecture, l'écriture paragrammatique serait l'aspiration vers une agressivité et une participation totale" (181). Writing is the productive activity corresponding not merely to the reading of written texts, as Kristeva asserts, but also to the 'reading' of the 'text' of culture and language, of which written texts are one feature. This concept is what Jacques Derrida is talking about when he observes that "Around the irreducible point of originality" of Rousseau's writing "an immense series of structures, of historical totalities of all orders, are [sic] organized, enveloped, and blended" (161).3 The author's text, writes Kristeva, "est produit dans le mouvement complexe d'une affirmation et d'une négation simultanées d'un autre texte" (257). In his work the author is at every moment busy agreeing and disagreeing with, qualifying and expanding upon, not just a single text, but the whole complex which makes up the intertextual space of the genre in which he is working. 11 Jonathan Culler defines intertextuality as "an assertion of a work's participation in a discursive space and its relation to the codes which are the potential formalizations of that space" (1382). It is never possible to define the complete intertextual space of any work--a fact which proves obstructive to the critic attempting to apply a theory of intertextuality. We can, however, identify certain constituents of an intertextual space and relate them to a given work. In doing so, we do not stop with the question 'What did the latter borrow from the former?'--although that is often an important preliminary step. We must go beyond this to ask questions like 'How does the latter presuppose, affirm, negate, and extend the former?‘ Furthermore, we must inquire: 'How do the two works relate to their own cultural-historical settings and what bearing does the cultural-historical setting have on the way in which the later author reads, understands, and incoporporates the earlier work?‘ These are the sorts of questions I intend to ask in treating The Morte Darthur as a constituent of The Faerie Queene's intertextual space. I will establish a number of source relationships between the two works in order to demonstrate how consciously vital Spenser considered Malory's work to his own poem. But more often I shall treat The Morte Darthur as a repository of medieval themes and conventions which Spenser assimilated into his Renaissance version of the Arthurian chivalric romance. Realizing that 12 Malory himself fits his matiére to his eeee, I will at points compare how the two authors at once presuppose and reshape earlier conventions. The single great question that I shall eventually address is how Spenser, in translating the Arthurian chivalric romance tradition into the Renaissance, affirms and reasserts, negates and departs from TQe Morte Darthur. Implicit in this matter is the investigation of how changed cultural-historical factors influenced him to approach Malory in the way that he did. In expounding this question, I shall be commenting indirectly and to a lesser degree on the poem's relation to the entire generic tradition of chivalric romance. C. The Chivalric Quest Theme in the "Legend of the Knight of the Red Cross" and the Tale of Gareth The first two chapters of this dissertation will focus on how the grand theme of both works under examination, the chivalric quest, also governs both works' structures. We may most effectively begin to analyze these similarities by comparing Malory's Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney and Spenser's "Legend of the Knight of the Red Cross,‘ since they have more clearly observable elements in common than any other two sections of the respective works. Book I of the poem is also a logical starting point because, as Michael Leslie suggests, "our reading of subsequent books is always conditioned and informed by Spenser's opening legend" 12 Malory himself fits his matiére to his eeee, I will at points compare how the two authors at once presuppose and reshape earlier conventions. The single great question that I shall eventually address is how Spenser, in translating the Arthurian chivalric romance tradition into the Renaissance, affirms and reasserts, negates and departs from The Morte Darthur. Implicit in this matter is the investigation of how changed cultural-historical factors influenced him to approach Malory in the way that he did. In expounding this question, I shall be commenting indirectly and to a lesser degree on the poem's relation to the entire generic tradition of chivalric romance. C. The Chivalric Quest Theme in the "Legend of the Knight of the Red Cross" and the Tale of Gareth The first two chapters of this dissertation will focus on how the grand theme of both works under examination, the chivalric quest, also governs both works' structures. We may most effectively begin to analyze these similarities by comparing Malory's Tale of Sir Garethyer Orkney and ' since Spenser's "Legend of the Knight of the Red Cross,’ they have more clearly observable elements in common than any other two sections of the respective works. Book I of the poem is also a logical starting point because, as Michael Leslie suggests, "our reading of subsequent books is always conditioned and informed by Spenser's opening legend" 13 (104). In the greem to Book I, Spenser promises to "sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds" (1.5). "Fierce warres and faithfull loues"--two predominating elements of chivalric romances--he adds, "shall moralize my song" (9). At the opening of the first tale featuring the projected theme, we come upon a fledgling knight errant whose aim is that of almost every uninitiated warrior of medieval romance: "To proue his puissance in battell braue" (I.3.7)--in this case, against "a Dragon horrible and stearne" (9). Accompanying him is the comely victim of the dragon's ravages, mounted on a white ass and followed by a dwarf. What I have just summarized, however, is not the true beginning of the story. In his Letter to Ralergh Spenser explains: "The beginning . . . of my history, if it were to be told by an Historiographer should be the twelfth booke, which is the last" (738). As a creator of romance-epic, therefore, the poet has begun in medias res. We may presume from the above-cited comments that had he completed The_ Faerie Qgeene, the twelfth book would have developed the events summarized in the Letter: I deuise that the Faery Queene kept her Annual feaste xii. dayes, uppon which xii. seuerall dayes, the occasions of the xii. seuerall aduentures hapned, which being undertaken by xii. seuerall knights, are in these xii books seuerally handled and discoursed. (738) Each adventure, then, was to have its origin upon a 13 (104). In the greem to Book I, Spenser promises to "sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds" (1.5). "Fierce warres and faithfull loues"--two predominating elements of chivalric romances--he adds, "shall moralize my song" (9). At the opening of the first tale featuring the projected theme, we come upon a fledgling knight errant whose aim is that of almost every uninitiated warrior of medieval romance: "To proue his puissance in battell braue" (I.3.7)--in this case, against "a Dragon horrible and stearne" (9). Accompanying him is the comely victim of the dragon's ravages, mounted on a white ass and followed by a dwarf. What I have just summarized, however, is not the true beginning of the story. In his Letter to Raleigh Spenser explains: "The beginning . . . of my history, if it were to be told by an Historiographer should be the twelfth booke, which is the last" (738). As a creator of romance-epic, therefore, the poet has begun in medias ree. We may presume from the above-cited comments that had he completed 322. Faerie Qeeene, the twelfth book would have developed the events summarized in the Letter: I deuise that the Faery Queene kept her Annual feaste xii. dayes, uppon which xii. seuerall dayes, the occasions of the xii. seuerall aduentures hapned, which being undertaken by xii. seuerall knights, are in these xii books seuerally handled and discoursed. (738) Each adventure, then, was to have its origin upon a 14 successive day of the feast. The poet would have given a retrospective narrative of this time of beginnings after all of the adventures had been fulfilled. He provides a fuller background sketch for Redcrosse's quest than for any other of his heroes. In this sketch he relates how an unlikely looking "clownishe younge man" receives, in fulfilment of a boon from the Queen of Fairies, a quest on behalf of a lady of royal blood whose parents were being held captive by a dragon. After briefly narrating the youth's arming, knighting, and setting out on the quest, Spenser inducts the reader into the opening lines of Book I: "where beginneth the first booke, vz.[--]A gentle knight was pricking on the playne. &c." (738). If we turn to Malory's Tale oryGareth, we find numerous parallel features to this account. As Spenser's aspiring youth appears at Gloriana's feast, so does the unproven Gareth at "the hyhe feest of Pentecost" when Arthur is holding court at Kynkekenadonne (7.1). He too asks a boon, but it involves three gifts instead of one. The first gift he asks for corresponds to Spenser's remarks about his hero's "rusticity" (738); for Gareth requests: "gyue me mete and drynke suffycyauntly for thys tweluemoneth" (7.1). This request leads Kay to pronounce him "vylayne borne . . . for and he had come of gentylmen he wold haue axed of you hors and armour, but suche as he is, so he asketh." Disparagingly naming him "Beaumayns" because of his large hands, Kay consigns him to the kitchen, proclaiming "there 15 he shal haue fatte broweys euery day, that he shall be as fatte by the tweluemonthes ende as a porke hog" (7.1). There Gareth remains (cf. "on the floore" in Spenser's Letter to Raleigh) until the following Pentecost, when Arthur's court is again observing the feast, this time at Carlyon. During the occasion, much as in Spenser's scenario, a damsel appears at court seeking a champion to liberate her sister, who "is byseged with a tyraunte so that she may not oute of hir castel" (7.2). This account Spenser has altered to give it more cosmic implications, but the parallels are clear. The oppressor, although not a dragon, is ominous and powerful. When the lady mentions his name, 'the Red Knight of the Red Lands (later also referred to as Sir Ironsides), Gawain declares him "one of the perilloust knyghtes of the world," who possesses "seuen mennys strengthe." As we shall see again, one of Spenser's key strategies in applying his chivalric material is transforming its literal features into allegorical ones. In this instance, he replaces an extraordinary human with a mythical creature used in the Book of Revelation to represent Satan. Spenser has envisioned the theological possibilities for his chivalric material: the bondage of Una's parents to the dragon symbolizes Satan's enslavement of humanity through the fall. This arrangement transmutes the protagonist of the Malory's tale into a universal savior figure. After the lady has described her plight, Gareth, much 16 to her dismay, chooses to claim his two remaining gifts: that the king should grant him the adventure, and that he should be knighted by Lancelot. Arthur willingly grants both of these requests, but the lady, as in Spenser's version, does "much gainesaying" (738): "Fy on the," Lynet reproaches the king, "shalle I haue none but one that is your kechyn page?" (7.3). Spenser recounts that the lady, despite her reservations, supplies the youth with the armor and horse which her dwarf has led in. Gareth, too, is provided with armor and horse brought by a dwarf, but no overt connection is made between the arms and the damsel (7.3). Both authors use remarkably similar language to describe the striking transformation which occurs when the youth dons his new armor. Malory writes: "Soo whanne he as [sic] armed, there was none but few soo goodley a man as he was" (7.3). Spenser says of the arms: "which being forthwith put upon him with dewe furnitures thereunto, he seemed the goodliest man in al that company" (738). The improvement wrought by donning the armor also alters the lady's attitude toward the youth in Spenser, who mentions that he then became "well liked" by her. In Malory, though, it is a long time before we witness any such change in feelings. There, the lady angrily leaves the court without Gareth, and he must overtake and accompany her against her wishes. She remains positively disdainful of him and tries to rid herself of him until well into the 17 story. 1 Spenser's description in the Letter to Raleigh actually appears to draw on two or more versions of the Fair Unknown story. For instance, Spenser describes the lady as "riding on a white Asse." No such detail appears in Malory, but Lybeaus Qeeconus recounts "Milke white was hir destrere" (Lambeth MS. 1. 129). On the other hand, the Middle English verse romance makes no mention of a horse laden with armor led in by a dwarf, as found in Malory and Spenser. At the beginning of Book I, where Spenser unfolds the action which he has retrospectively projected in his Letter, we find that the story continues to move along the same lines as the Tale of Gareth. Although Spenser has freely rearranged the story to his liking and purposes, it is still a tale of the development and proving of an unknown and undistinguished youth--a bit of a bumpkin--accomplished by means of chivalric adventures--especially feats of arms--on behalf of a lady, culminating in victory over an ultimate foe, release of prisoners, and marriage. The action of Book I, however, contains not only large parallels to, but also particular correspondences with the action of the Tale of Gareth. As Marie walther has noted, both Una and Linet warn their knights of the perils they face as they progress in their guests (18). But the spirits in which the two ladies give their warnings are very different. As Redcrosse approaches Error's den, Una cautions, "Be well aware . . . / Least sudden mischief ye 18 too rash provoke: / . . . . therefore your stroke / Sir knight with-hold, till further triall made" (1.12.1-6). After Gareth, on the other hand, has in his first combat slain three knights and put three more to flight, Linet, scornful at his early success, jeers: "al this that thou hast done nys but myshappen the, but thou shalt see a syghte shal make the torne ageyne, and that lyghtly" (7.5). Another noteworthy correspondence between the two knights' quests, observed by Frederick Morgan Padelford, is that the hero slays a foe and must then face his avenging brothers (yer. I.394-95). Gareth kills the Black Knight, and consequently must contend with the Green, Red, and Blue Knights, each one seeking to avenge his fallen brother (Malory 7.7-12). Spenser relates this series of encounters with an imaginative flair and complexity not found in Malory, but the overall similarity in patterns is visible. After Redcrosse destroys Sansfoy (11.19), Sansloy, thinking he is fighting his brother's murderer, almost kills Archimago (who has disguised himself as Redcrosse) [iii.35-39]. Finally, the hero does battle with Sansjoy, the third brother, who is whisked off to Hades in "a darksome clowd" just as his opponent is about to place the fatal blow (v.13). There is a significant structural parallel between the two works, directly related to the correspondences in encounters just noted. Both heroes possess an innate but undeveloped nobility that is proved through a series of 19 increasingly difficult challenges. In Malory, the line of development is clear and uninterrupted. Redcrosse, on the other hand, must experience some vicissitudes in order to arrive at a state symbolizing Christian perfection and, as I have already suggested, become a Christ figure. It is through the challenges he must face, however, that he finally does arrive. Malory marks Gareth's ascendancy in defeating the Red, Green, and Blue Knights by the number of knights which the vanquished lord places in his service. The Green Knight grants Gareth thirty men (7.8); the Red Knight, sixty (7.10); and the Blue Knight, one hundred (7.12). Also, after the first two battles we witness two similar occurrences: Linet chides and mocks Gareth, whereas the defeated knight honors him for his nobility and prowess. Between the battles with the Red and the Blue Knights, however, when Linet has finally seen enough of Gareth's conduct to realize that he is no kitchen knave, she exclaims: O Ihesu, merueille haue I . . . what maner a man ye be, for hit may neuer ben otherwyse but that ye be comen of a noble blood, for 800 foule ne shamefully dyd neuer woman rule a knyghte as I haue done you, and euer curtoisly ye haue suffred me, and that cam neuer but of gentyl blood. (7.11) Gareth's prowess and courtesy have thus proved him to his harshest critic. But this is not all. After he has vanquished Persaunt of Inde, the Blue Knight, he passes 20 another critical test of his nobility. When Persaunt sends his fair young daughter to Gareth's bed to offer him her body, Gareth refuses the enticement on the grounds that it would make him "a shameful knyghte" and cause her father "disworship" (7.12). The girl's father, upon learning from her of this chaste refusal, proclaims him to be "of a noble blood" (7.12). Furthermore, when Gareth explains to Persaunt his intention to face the Red Knight of the Red Lands, Persaunt affirms that this climactic encounter will even further elevate his status to the company of Lancelot, Tristram, and Lameroke: "for and ye may matche the Rede Knyghte, ye shalle be called the fourth of the worlde" (7.13). In short space Gareth defeats the Red Knight, whose liege men all promise to serve Gareth if only he will spare their lord. Afterward, the Red Knight agrees to all of Gareth's requirements that he should make retribution to Lyones, Linet's sister, and submit to Lancelot and Gawain at Arthur's court (7.18). When the Red Knight later recounts Gareth's victory to Arthur's court, the retelling evokes acclamation from the hearers: "Ihesu mercy, said Kynge Arthur and Sire Gawayne, we merueylle moche of what blood he is com, for he is a noble knyght'" (7.18). This summary adumbrates Gareth's ascendancy, not to the end of the story, but to the completion of his initial quest to free Lyones. Redcrosse's rise may also be traced to the point where he liberates the captive Una's parents. Whereas Malory only implies, Spenser explicitly states the purpose 21 of his hero's quest. He has set out "to winne him worship" and to place himself in Gloriana's "grace" (1.1.3.4), but he also hopes "to proue his puissance in battell braue / Vpon his foe, and his new force to learne" (7-8)--"his new force" suggesting that of newly received, untried arms. Therefore, as in the story of Gareth, we are to witness the development of an unproven young knight through chivalric encounters and tests of arms. While traditionally chivalric, none of the hero's motives in these lines seems very Christlike. The point is that this flawed youth must become the knight of holiness via a process which he eagerly enters with all the wrong motives. When Redcrosse succeeds in his first adventure against Error, Una, much quicker to praise than Linet, proclaims him "worthy": "Well worthy be you of that Armorie, / Wherein ye have great glory wonne this day, / And proou'd your strength on a strong enemie" (1.27.5-8). We soon find, however, in tracing Redcrosse's development as a knight, that it is more complex than Gareth's--no straight road to glory. Between each victory which marks an increase in his prowess (suggestive also of an increase in virtue) comes an insidious influence of greater strength which dampens his moral excellence and abates his might. The first of these influences is Archimago, who causes Redcrosse to desert his lady (a fault of which Gareth is blameless); the second, Duessa, who leads him into moral lethargy; and the third, Orgoglio, who completely incapacitates and imprisons him. 22 It is because of Redcrosse's lapse under Archimago's influence that Spenser writes, "the sleeping spark / Of natiue vertue gan eftsoones reuiue" (11.19.1-2) when the hero combats Sansfoy. Redcrosse has gone into moral hibernation and in order to conquer must reactivate resources lying dormant deep within. Such an illustration shows effectively how armed encounters draw forth the knight's latent capacities which, in Malory's view, spring from nothing other than noble birth. Spenser, on the allegorical level, transfers Malory's concept of innate noblesse to spiritual regeneration. The true-born Christian warrior will, despite vicissitudes, exemplify in spiritual combat his heavenly lineage. In infusing this spiritual dimension, Spenser is reaching back, consciously or not, to a tradition of Arthurian spiritual allegory epitomized in earlier French grail romances, such as the Qeeste del Saint Graal (the closest extant version to Malory's unknown source for the Tale of the Sankgreal) and Perlesvaus. According to Eugene Vinaver, Malory had deliberately negated this tradition: His [Malory's] attitude may be described without much risk of over-simplification as that of a man to whom the quest of the Grail was primarily an Arthurian adventure and who regarded the intrusion of the Grail upon Arthur's kingdom not as a means of contrasting earthly and divine chivalry and condemning the former, but as an opportunity offered to the knights of the Round Table to achieve still greafier glory in this world. (Commentary 1535) 23 In defeating Sans Foy, Redcrosse, much like Gareth in his ingenuousness--"too simple and too trew" (ii.45.7)-- replaces Una with Duessa. In spite of the fact that Duessa is soon to lead the knight to his undoing at the hands of Orgoglio, Spenser once again highlights his genuine underlying nobility, this time accentuated by the prospect of facing Sans Loy: The noble hart, that harbours vertuous thought, And is with child of glorious great intent, Can neuer rest, vntill it forth haue brought Th'eternall brood of glorie excellent: Such restlesse passion did all night torment The flaming corage of that Faery knight, .Deuizing, how that doughty turnament With greatest honour he atchieuen might (v.1o1-8) When, after defeating Sans Loy, Redcrosse abandons this "vertuous thought" that is his natural estate, he becomes easy prey for Orgoglio. His doffing of his armor, his drinking from Phoebe's pool, and his lovemaking to Duessa all symbolize his moral dereliction (vii.2-7), leading to his capture by the giant. But at the same time as Redcrosse is languishing in Orgoglio's dungeon, having been "disarm'd, disgrast, and inwardly dismayde" (vii.11.6), Una's remarks to Arthur about her knight's "prowesse" remind us of his true nature (vii.47.6-7). This episode is reminiscent of one found in Malory's Tale of Lancelot, where the hero, having removed his helmet and lain down to sleep under an apple tree (6.1), is abducted by "foure quenes of grete estate" (6.3)--one of 24 whom is Morgan le Fay, an obvious counterpart to, if not a prototype for Duessa. Although Spenser does not directly state that Redcrosse is resting beneath a tree, he later insinuates it: "greene boughes decking a gloomy glade, / About the fountaine like a girlond made" (4.4-5). Both accounts stress the heat of the day, the knight's overwhelming weariness, and the inviting shadiness of the location: Malory writes, "the weder was hote about noone and Syre Launcelot had grete lust to slepe" (6.1), and Spenser mentions "the boyling heat" (4.3) and that Redcrosse "wearie sate" (2.6); in Malory, Lionel points out to Lancelot the "fayre shadowe" of the apple tree (6.1), and Spenser describes the shade as "cooling" (3.1) and "ioyous" (4.2). In both versions, this particular locus amoenus becomes a place of malevolent enchantment and abduction. Furthermore, while Duessa seduces Redcrosse on location, the four enchantresses (unsuccessfully) attempt the same with Lancelot after securing him in a castle prison. Behind both of these accounts lies the ancient Celtic motif of the otherworld fairy abduction. As Lucy Paton points out, the danger of such an occurrence from sleeping under a tree, especially an apple tree, is a commonplace in chivalric romance (52 n. 1). Both authors, however, have adapted this motif to their particular purposes. Malory, whose focus is on chivalry as an exemplary institution, stresses Lancelot's courage and fidelity in scornfully refusing his captors' propositions. Although Morgan can 25 cast spells, she and her companions are quite human, and Lancelot is transported "vpon his shelde . . . an horsbak betwixt two knyghtes" to an identifiable location, "the Castel Charyot" (6.3). Most of this is quite mundane and logical; and this is plainly the way Malory prefers it, since his emphasis is on earthly knighthood and human knights. In the twelfth-century Bataille Loguifer, which Paton cites as containing the most primitive extant version of this episode, Morgan and two other £§2§ fly through the air to abduct the sleeping Renoart. To render him defenseless they "change his club and his hauberk into birds, his helmet into a harper, and his sword into a lad," and spirit him off to Avalon "per_grant enchantoieee" (Paton 49-50). Spenser alters the motif--which, the evidence indicates, he must have known through Malory, although it was common enough in other romances--in order to exploit its potential spiritual significance. Whereas removing his helmet and going to sleep under a tree are for Lancelot purely pragmatic acts which result only incidentally in danger, for Redcrosse, every action is allegorically significant. In stopping by the fountain he is pausing, as indicated in the parallel account of Phoebe, "to rest in middest of the race" (5.4), which immediately calls to mind New Testament comparisons of spiritual discipline to running a race (cf. esp. Heb. 12:1; Gal. 5:7). In disarming he is removing his spiritual armor, as specified in the Letter to 26 Raleigh: "the armour of a Christian man" (738; cf. Eph. 6:13). "The ioyous shade," where Redcrosse and Duessa "gan of solace treat" (4.1-2), has become a cover for spiritual compromise (cf. Jn. 3:19; I Jn. 1:5-6). Each action leads steadily and significantly to the hero's spiritual demise, culminating in his hopeless imprisonment by Orgoglio. His condition, "in darksome dungeon, wretched thrall, / Remedilesse" (51.7-8), strikes us as remarkably different from that of Lancelot, who feistily insults his captors: "I wylle none of yow, for ye be fals enchauntresses" (6.3). The assistance of Arthur, allegorically representing heavenly grace, is required to win Redcrosse's release and to help him realize his inward nobility. After Arthur has slain Orgoglio and freed the captive, Una brings him to the House of Holiness to convalesce. Following this period of restoration and instruction, he is prepared to learn his true identity as St. George and to preview his destiny as England's patron, both unfolded before him by the hermit Contemplation on a high mountain (x.61.6-9). Shortly following, the hermit reveals to Redcrosse his royal ancestry, to which his valorous deeds have attested in the preceding action: "For well I wote, thou springst from ancient race / Of geree kings" (x.65.1-2). Now, and only now, is Redcrosse prepared to fight his ultimate foe and fulfil his quest. Even in victory, though, Spenser hints that it is not the hero's unerring prowess, such as Gareth displays, that conquers the dragon, but a 27 combination of the hero's strength and God'S'grace. It seems accidental when Redcrosse's spear, "glancing from" the dragon's "scaly neck," glides "Close vnder his left wing, then broadly displayd" (xi.20.6-7). The sacramental imagery that follows, the well and the tree of life, symbolize God's helping presence in the entire combat, and at the conclusion of the episode it is made explicit, through subtle use of pronoun reference, that God was forcefully active in the contest. Of Una it is related: "Then God she praysd, and thankt her faithfull knight, / That had atchieu'd so great a conquest by his might" (55.8-9). As A. C. Hamilton notes here, "his" is deliberately ambiguous and "refers to both God and the Knight" (154). In spite of setbacks, then, Redcrosse has, on the literal level, analogously to Gareth, ascended to a realization of his true identity as St. George, slayer of dragons. His actions also strongly suggest, as I have earlier indicated, those of Christ in conquering Satan and liberating fallen humanity. He is now openly honored by the freed lord and his subjects: Vnto that doughtie Conquerour they came, And him before themselues prostrating low, Their Lord and Patrone loud did him proclame, And at his feet their laurell boughes did throw. (xii.6.1-4) These celebrants are followed by "comely virgins" with "timbrels" (6-9) and "fry of children young" (7.1). This triumphal scene is reminiscent of Gareth and Lyones' wedding 28 at the end of the Tale of Gareth, where one party after another arrives at Arthur's court to do homage to the groom. Initially come in succession with all of their men the four knights whom Gareth has defeated. After these enter "thyrtty ladyes" who "semed wydowes" with "many fayre gentyllwymmen" (7.36). Kneeling before Arthur and Gareth equally, they recount to the king "how Syr Gareth had deliuerd hem from the Dolorous Toure, and slewe the Broune Knyght withoute Pyte," then proclaiming "therfore we and cure heyres foreuermore wille doo homage vnto Syr Gareth of Orkeney" (7.36). Both accounts end with weddings, and it is notable that in each case, the nuptials have earlier been postponed until the hero has achieved further exploits. After Gareth has defeated the Red Knight of the Red Lands, Lyones, incredible as it may seem, will "not suffre hym to entre" the castle. She tells him, rather, to go his way and "laboure in worshyp this twelve-monthe" until he is "callyd one of the nombre of the worthy knyghtes." Only then might he "haue holy" her "loue" (7.18). In the case of Redcrosse the deferment is voluntary. He cannot immediately marry Una because he is 'bound' "to returne to that great Faerie Queene, / And her to serue six yeares in warlike wize" (xii.18.6-7). In the context of the previous allegory, this delay suggests Christ's temporary departure from his bride, the Church, after liberating her by defeating Satan through his death and resurrection. 29 D. The Nature of Spenser's Participation in the Intertextual Space of Chivalric Romance We can see through the extended comparison of these two accounts that both trace the ascendancy of an unproven but aspiring youngster to the full stature of knighthood; that Spenser relied on Malory's TaleQrGareth and stories like it, such as Lybeaus Desconus, for much of his material; and, moreover, that romances of this type provided the poet with a framework for organizing his material. But Malory's model, as it stood, was unsuitable for the kind of spiritual and moral allegory Spenser was composing. As I shall discuss at length in following chapters, Malory was writing, in the less exact medieval sense of the word, historically, and was concerned with holding portraits of chivalric virtue from the past before his present age for emulation. What we see in Gareth, then, is an edifying presentation of an exemplary quasi-historical character who begins obscurely and rises, against all odds, steadily and unimpeded to the top. Such a pattern would never do for Spenser, whose object was not to present historical exemplars of virtue in order to challenge his age, but rather to define specific virtues, showing graphically both the requirements for attaining them and the fruits which they yield. Or, to frame Spenser's purpose in the words of his Letter to Ralei h, he sought "to 30 fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline" (737). In order to achieve this goal the poet had to begin with a character lacking in the virtue to be portrayed (in the case of Book I, holiness) and then show step-by-step how that virtue is attained and what are the pitfalls along the way. Spenser saw the marvelous potential of chivalric romance for unfolding such detail; as Michael Leslie notes, "the basic allegory of the poem depends upon the image of the knight on his quest, of an embattled man in progress toward salvation" (102). My interpretation of Book I in the light of the Tale of Gareth negates Bennett's contention that Spenser carefully avoided The Morte Darthgr because "it was not a suitable medium for teaching morality to Protestants" ("Genre" 109). Spenser renders Malory suitable not only for this task, but also for teaching the Protestant theological underpinnings for morality. Models predating Malory's, however, came closest to Spenser's exploitation of romance's potential for allegory of moral and spiritual development. The earliest known romances that involved the growth of a fallible, ignorant, morally flawed aspirant to knighthood through several vicissitudes toward a high degree of virtue are those of Chrétien de Troyes. Chrétien's Yvain, for instance, possesses great martial prowess but must through experience attain the moral enlightenment necessary to use it for the good of others, instead of for mere self-realization and glorification. Perceval, whose tale Chrétien never 31 completed, provides a similar model. Both of these heroes, like Redcrosse, through ignorance and inconsideration bring harm to women dependent on them: Perceval causes his mother's death by abandoning her to become a knight; Yvain leaves Laudine defenseless in order to seek adventures; Redcrosse, duped by Archimago's illusion, deserts Una. Though Spenser probably never read any of Chrétien's works themselves, these similarities show that he is reapplying a construct from Arthurian romances prior to the Tale of Gareth which more fully suit his didactic purposes. Lybeaus Desconge was probably his most immediate inspiration, although its author does not suggest that the hero's setbacks are due to moral and spiritual failings, as Chrétien so finely does. In Lybeaue Deeconue, however, as in "The Legend of the Knight of the Red Crosse," the hero falls under the influence of a sorceress (Lambeth MS. 1. 1461-1508). Resultantly, in the former poem the heroine is left without succour, much as is Una in the latter through the combined deceptions and enthrallments of Archimago, Duessa, and Orgoglio. Spenser therefore brings together multiple strands of the chivalric romance tradition, which enable him to develop his own unprecedented style of moral and spiritual allegory. As Peter Dembowski asserts, an intertextual approach to textual origins ought not to confine itself "5 la généalogie du texte (son évolution a partir de l'Original), mais mettre en valeur sa nature" (25). He adds: "Ce qui importe avant 32 tout, par conséquent, c'est moins que le texte ait telle Origine, que ce qu'il est devenu: la maniére dont il a été transformé par un processus évolutif" (25). Before the term 'intertextuality' ever dropped from a critic's lips Eugene Vinaver brought this very idea, with refreshing lucidity, to the Dolorous Stroke episode in the French romances. He attacked the motives behind much of the source hunting and Ur-text reconstructing conducted by traditional Arthurian scholars. Of A. C. L. Brown's 1910 article tracing the tale of Balin, in which the Dolorous Stroke occurs in later romances, back to supposed Celtic origins, Vinaver says: He seems to take it for granted that anything that survives must be corrupt, and conversely, that whatever is structurally valid in the surviving texts must belong to the distant past. Behind these assumptions there is the fundamental belief, strangley akin to the romantic theory of Naturdichtung, that as literature develops, so its themes deteriorate. Literary creation is conceived as an essentially destructive process. (176) Vinaver militates against such conceptions by showing how the French romancers progressively combine what eventually become the arch-motifs of the Dolorous Stroke episode into a meaningful synthesis. Three of the motifs, "the sacred lance, . . . the maimed king (or knight) and . . . the waste land" (176), were already present in Chrétien's Conte del Graal, but they were not "linked together in a coherent sequence" (176). Through the 33 following succession of related versions--the 'First Continuation' of the Conte gel Graal, the Queste del Saint Graal, the Estoire del Grael--the three elements gradually become more interrelated. It is not until the Suite du Merlin, though, "that the pattern of four essential themes in one narrative begins to emerge" (177). Vinaver comments: Here, then, at long last the Stroke, the Maimed King, the Waste Land and the miraculous healing coalesce to produce a single story. The chronology of our texts shows clearly that this was the work of a writer who had in front of him the material gathered by others and who set himself the task of arranging and elaborating it in a consistent manner; a writer, moreover, who performed his task so successfully that the four motifs which for a long time had existed in various combinations of two or three now seem to be inseparable from one another. (178) The point which Vinaver strives to make is that literature may, rather than degenerating at the hands of successive authors, attain a fuller integration of its elements, a greater endowment of mimetic, symbolic, and other types of power. The crowning touch wrought by the Suite du Merlin, according to Vinaver, was to make Balin, a knight already dogged by misfortune and a prime candidate for a foil to Galahad, the one to commit the Dolorous Stroke. Malory inherits this consummate artistry in taking the Suite as a source for his "Tale of Balin." Vinaver's study offers an excellent paradigm for what Spenser is doing with the chivalric romances, of which The Morte Darthur is our object of focus. He eclectically 34 chooses, recombines, and alters elements from different sources, often drawing on features common to the genre and from no single specific work. This matiére he tailors, with considerably more freedom than his medieval predecessors, to his new eege. Like the §gr§e_author, he sees potential in these existing elements that previous writers had overlooked, ignored, or had no reason to exploit. The point in tracing the chivalric elements in The Faerie Qeeene back to their sources, or in noting earlier analogues, is that we cannot fully understand or appreciate what they have become until we see what they were. This intertextual approach to sources and earlier parallels amounts, in Dembowski's words, to "1e déplacement d'un point de vue génétique et dogmatique vers une activité explicative et descriptive plus nuancée" (20). The later work, in the light of the preceding work or works, becomes "une oeuvre plus profonde" (20). This is not to make a progressionist assumption that the later work is somehow superior to its sources, but to say that it becomes in the reader's experience more profound as its complex of richly textured relations to its sources comes into view. Influences other than literary ones comprised Tge_ Faerie Qgeene's intertextual space, however. Two great movements which informed Spenser's recasting of the chivalric quest narrative were humanism and Protestantism. The new focus on human dignity fueled by the rediscovery of classical antiquity, combined with the Christian understanding of man as the crown of creation, generated an 35 exuberant confidence in human perfectability. Pico della Mirandola (c. 1486) declared: "On man when he came into life . the Father conferred the seeds of all kinds and the germs of every way of life. Whatever seeds each man cultivates will grow to maturity and bear in him their own fruit" (128). Pico insists on these grounds that, contingent on the faculties he chooses to cultivate, a man may degenerate to a vegetative or brutish state, or he may become one with God. Northern humanists such as Erasmus, whom the Tudor humanists read eagerly, were quick to embrace such ideas. In his 1529 educational treatise, De pueris etatim ac liberalrrer_ instituendis, he advises fathers: Nature, in giving you a son, presents you, let me say, a rude, unformed creature, which it is your part to fashion so that it may become indeed a man. If this fashioning be neglected you have but an animal still: if it be contrived earnestly and wisely, you have, I had almost said, what may prove a being not far from a God. (187) This vision of a malleable human nature resulted in an educational revolution. Arthur F. Kinney writes: "Man's total freedom for self-fashioning . . . created a vital need for humanist teaching; educ-ation, being led out of the best thought of the ancients, demanded symbiotic in-struction as the necessary coordinate" (6). One response to this felt need was "an explosion of grammar schools" (6); another was Spenser's didactic poem, designed "to fashion a gentleman." In England, however, this humanist optimism was generally tempered by Protestant theology, particularly 36 Calvinism, which taught that man is naturally depraved but can be spiritually regenerated and progress in virtue by God's grace. For Calvin, moral perfection was a state which Christians could pursue but never fully attain in this life. In the Institutes (1536) he exhorts followers of Christ: [let us] press forward to the goal . . . perpetually exerting our endeavors after increasing degrees of amelioration, till we shall have arrived at a perfection of goodness, which, indeed we seek and pursue as long as we live, and shall then attain, when, divested of all corporeal infirmity, we shall be admitted by God into complete communion with him. (750) But the propensity toward sin remains in even the most advanced Christians, according to Calvin. Commenting on Romans 7:15 he writes, "The godly . . . are so divided, that with the chief desire of the heart they aspire to God, seek celestial righteousness, hate sin, and yet they are drawn down to the earth by the relics of their flesh" (Commentaries 263). These central ideas of Renaissance humanism and Reformation theology help to account for some of the changes which Spenser wrought on the Tale of Gareth. Gareth rises not because of any actual moral or spiritual growth, but because of what he already is. Time and again, those who witness his prowess and gentility recognize his noble birth. In Malory it could be no other way. "Harlottys and haynxmen wol helpe us but a lytyll, for they woll hyde them in haste for all their hyghe wordys," proclaims Priamus (234; 5.10).5 37 On the other hand, Torre, who is raised by a cowherd and has no idea that King Pellinore is his real father, can be interested in nothing but chivalry and becoming a knight (3.3). We should not be surprised, then, when Gareth turns out to be Gawain's brother. Johan Huizinga points out that while the nobility of the late Middle Ages regarded as a truism "that true nobility is based on virtue, and that all men are equal," these notions remained "stereotyped and theoretical" (Waning 53). Chastellain, in his Miroer des Nobles Hommeerde France, informs his gentle audience: "Dieu, entre ceux de l'humaine nature, / Souvent vous crée excellens en facture, / Et singuliers en toute grace exquise" (204). As each estate has its God-given function, he explains to them: "Vos faits, vos moeurs, il [Dieu] veut faire mirer, / Et vos beaux corps des autres préférer, / Par vertu sourdre et maintenir justice" (205). In The Book of the Ordre of Ch alr , translated by Caxton, Ramén Lull recounts a foundation myth of knighthood. When the ancient world began to degenerate, "of each thousand was chosen a man moost loyal, most strong, and of most noble courage, & better enseygned and manerd than al the other" to be made a knight (15). Gareth, therefore, is statically virtuous and not so much in need of development as of opportunities to prove himself. In presenting past examples of noble conduct to his own age, it seems, Malory was not urging his noble audience to change, as much as to be true to their own 38 natures. An ignoble knight was an anomaly, comparable, we may suppose, to the angels who left their first estate. "What?" exclaims Lancelot when he hears of Perys de Forest Saveage, "is he a theef and a knyght and a rauyssher of of [sic] wymmen? He doth shame vnto the ordre of knyghtehode and contrary vnto his othe" (6.10). Lancelot declares, "hit is pyte that he lyueth," and shortly sees to it that he does not. The Renaissance revolutions in thought which we have discussed altered the view of human nature from a static to a dynamic one. Redcrosse is not just the unmolded clay of the humanists, but the tainted offspring of Adam, noble because of his heavenly provenance, but always liable to the weaknesses of the flesh. He must become, by a series of fits and starts, the Knight of Holiness. Although moral and spiritual virtue are his birthright and destiny, unlike Gareth's prowess and noblesse they are not innate. Redcrosse's experience and the guiding and regenerating influences that intervene in the story are what push him toward perfection. This process may be seen clearly, for instance, at the House of Holiness, where Redcrosse is nursed and educated by allegorical characters representing various Christian virtues. Gareth has no need of such nurturing since his virtue is inborn and simply needs to be drawn out by the challenges of the quest. In addition to these philosophical influences, Spenser had some literary precedence for revising chivalric romance 39 into Protestant allegory. Stephen Bateman's Travayled Pylgrime (1569), based on Olivier de la Marche's §e_ Chevalier Délibéré (1486), traces "the journey of a knight from error to salvation while praising the Tudors and denouncing Rome" (Prescott 194). John N. King asserts that The "Legend of Holiness" functions in the manner of a fictionalized defense of poetry through which Spenser exposes "false" genres and defines "true" ones in order to resuscitate literary forms like comedy and chivalric romance that were then under attack by humanist critics. (184) Spenser may or may not be voicing his personal sentiments about medieval romance when he makes E. K., commenting on line 120 of "Aprill" in The Shepheerdes Calendar, call "the Authors of King Arthure the great and . such like" "fine fablers and lowd lyers." But he is certainly speaking for some of the prominent humanists of his time, such as Ascham, More, and Erasmus.6 Instead of abandoning the romances for classical literature, however, Spenser transformed the controlling theme of chivalric romance, the quest, into the unfolding of an adventure of spiritual and moral growth. The powerful humanist realization of the individual as a bundle of potentiality, infinite in capacity for either virtue or vice, created an insatiable appetite for didactic writings. The concreteness and simplicity of the chivalric romance made it a fitting genre for meeting this demand, and the British nativity of many of its features made it even more so. In addition, 40 certain of The Merte Darthgr's structural qualities, which I shall discuss in the next chapter, made it a particularly likely choice. Another major feature of Spenser's contribution to the generic tradition was a freer fictionalizing exploitation of particulars in his stories. His lack of the concern for historical veracity which characterized most of his medieval romance predecessors7 allowed him more freely to arrange and manipulate details, so as to enhance their allegorical significance. we have already seen this transformation in many of the comparisons drawn in this chapter, such as that of Lancelot's and Redcrosse's abductions. As a final instance, we may observe that Spenser goes beyond any medieval romancer in treating a giant as an explicit symbol of pride. Although earlier romance giants often image pride, and some, such as the Giant of Mont-Saint-Michel in the Alliterative Morte Arthere, are hideous beyond belief, they must also conform to a degree of verisimilitude. For this reason, we do not find a medieval romance giant who, like Orgoglio (whose name means pride), suddenly deflates and leaves only "an emptie bladder" (viii.24.9), providing both a humorous and a perfectly expressive allegory of the nature of pride, and a wonderfully clear image of the New 8 Testament usage "puffed up" to describe the state of pride (e.g. I Cor. 4:18,19; 5:2). CHAPTER TWO Structural Comparisons of Malory and Spenser A. The Interrelatedness of Theme and Structure in Malory and Spenser Although no other book of The Faerie Qgeene contains so substantial a parallel to a complete tale in The Morte Darthur as does Book I to the Tale of Gareth, each of Spenser's books possesses a quest structure comparable to that of many of Malory's tales. Like Redcrosse, each of TQe_ Faerie Qgeene's major characters exemplifying a specific virtue undergoes one or more preliminary testings, a perfecting, and a final testing. John Erskine Hankins notes: In observing the pattern of Spenser's knightly guests, we may notice that each temple of Virtue is preceded by one or more houses of non-Virtue or anti-Virtue. These are not always evil in themselves but do provide severe tests of the knight in his or her particular virtue. Sometimes he wins by his own might, sometimes he is rescued by heavenly grace (Arthur). After the most severe of these he goes to his place of perfecting, or temple of Virtue, for strength and instruction. He then goes on to the most severe and fundamental test of all, in which victory completes the task of perfecting his virtue and fits him to return to Cleopolis, Panthea, and Gloriana's court. (44) The preliminary testings are usually either failures or limited successes, revealing the need for growth and perfection. But through the perfecting processes of the 41 42 guests, the characters finally arrive at a realization of their potentiality, allowing them to fulfill their ultimate goals. Guyon, for instance, must endure the temptations of Phaedria's Isle and Mammon's Cave, and be revived and enlightened at the House of Alma, before he can overthrow Acrasia's Bower of Bliss. Britomart must pass through the promiscuous Castle Joyous and the perversely lascivious House of Busyrane, and be educated at the Temple of Isis, before she can overcome Radigund and liberate Artegall. In discussing this recurrent pattern, Hankins argues that "the most obvious model for an Arthurian narrative" for Spenser to have built on "is Malory's Morte D'Arthur, in which the knightly guests may be described as circular" (34). Hankins outlines the quest pattern in Malory as follows: They [the quests] begin at Arthur's court, proceed through various mishaps and struggles to the accomplishment of objectives, then end at Arthur's court as each knight returns to report on the success of his mission. (34) Although we never see this pattern completed in TQe_ Faerie Qeeene (the knights do not return to Gloriana's court), it is expressed, as discussed in the previous chapter, in the Letter to Raleigh. The Tale of Gareth begins and ends at Arthur's court; Redcrosse, having set out from Gloriana's court, states his intentions to return there before consummating his marriage to Una. Also, much as Malory's knights errant send their conquered opponents back 43 to Arthur's court, whence they have gone out and where they will eventually return, so Guyon sends "the captiv'd Acrasia" back to Gloriana's court (III.i.2). Additionally, the nascence of Artegall's quest is described in the poem in terms identical to the beginnings shown in the Letter to Raleigh: Wherefore the Lady, which Irena hight, Did to the Faery Queene her way addresse, To whom complaining her afflicted plight, She her besought of gratious redresse. That soueraine Queene, that mightie Emperesse, Whose glorie is to aide all suppliants pore, And of weake Princes to be Patronesse, Chose Artegall to right her to restore; For that to her he seem'd best skild in righteous (V.i.4) [lore. Like the knights named in the letter, Artegall has issued from Gloriana's court to succour Irena and will presumably return there after fulfilling his quest. From this evidence we may conclude that there is a correlation between the quest patterns of the extant books and the patterns projected in the Letter to Raleigh and, furthermore, that in a completed Faerie Qgeene, each book would have followed the same course. As in Malory's work, then, the chivalric quest theme governs the general framework of Spenser's individual books. Spenser's projected pattern of juxtaposed, circular quests occurring in the same general time frame, I believe, led him to adopt one other particularly Malorian structural feature. In both works we have several loosely related books, each organized around the guest or the history of a single knight 44 or a related group of knights. Although integrated units in themselves, together with the other books they comprise a roughly defined whole. This configuration has led to an extended controversy on the issue of unity in Malory scholarship. Is The Morte Darthur a collection of separate books, or is it a single work composed of related episodes? We do not have the author's pronouncement on the issue, and, since he has drawn from a range of sources and the connectivity is in many places loose at best, it is difficult to know precisely what was his own view. Stephen Knight probably comes closest to the truth when he says that "it is only if we are happy with over-simplifications that we can speak of it as one book or as eight" (Structure 94).1 The Faerie Qgeene, although bearing a comparable books-within-a-book structure, has not been the focus of the same intensity of controversy surrounding unity, partly 2 because the author makes explicit his own conception. It is clear from his reference in the Letter to Ralergg to "this booke of mine . . . being a continued Allegory" (737) that he considered it a single work. At the same time, however, some critics have found Spenser's unifying scheme weak and unconvincing. J. W. Bennett compares Spenser's episodic work to a medieval stained-glass window, with its formal ordering of delicate, beautifully colored pictures arranged to tell a story. Spenser created lovely bits and fitted them together with great skill, but the general structure, the connecting frame of lead and iron, is hardly strong enough to support the weight of the colored glass put into it. 45 (Evolution 106-07) Graham Hough applies a similar analogy to illustrate his view that, while The Faerie geeene is made up of largely self-contained units, the total effect of harmony among them--"unity of atmosphere," "all-over pattern" (93)-- creates a "structural principle": We can compare The Faerie Qeeene to a page of medieval illumination, which exhibits a harmonious texture, bright and delicate detail everywhere, many individual miniatures which must be looked at separately--but no very striking general design, and what there is contributes little to the effect of the whole. (94) The structural mode governing Spenser's poem, as Richard Hurd was the first to assert (56-72), is Gothic, the predominating artistic mode of the Middle Ages. As I shall argue shortly, however, Spenser, likely through the partial inspiration of Malory, applies a modified Gothic structure. In his Social History of AEE: Arnold Hauser identifies "juxtaposition" as "the basic form of Gothic art" (10). As Bennett's and Hough's analogies emphasize, this is also the overall form of The Faeringeene. The portraits of individual knights are placed alongside one another in tales possessing their own organic unity but only loosely linked to the other tales. Yet, taken together, viewed from a distance, each one contributes to an overall pattern--a pattern of the interplay of the different moral virtues, their various qualities and the rigors and glories involved in apprehending them. Hauser writes that in observing a 46 piece of Gothic art "The viewer is, as it were, led through the stages and stations of a journey, and the picture of reality which it reveals is like a panoramic survey, not a one-sided, unified representation, dominated by a single point of view" (10). The primary emphasis "is not the subjective viewpoint, not the creative, formative will expressed in the mastering of the material, but the thematic material itself, of which both artists and public can never see enough" (11). What Hauser describes is the sort of structural pluralism with an overall effect of thematic unity which Malory appears to be applying in composing books within a book; which is, when examined, quite like what Spenser achieves in his structural organization of The Faerie Qgeene. B. Evidences for the Influence of Malory's Structure on Spenser's Poem There are some good reasons for believing that Spenser did not just utilize a structural mode common to medieval romance, but that he was specifically influenced by Malory's scheme of books within a book. John W. Draper cautiously intimates a connection between the pluralistic structures of the two works; the fact that Spenser "gives each book a separate hero with a separate story," he says, ". . . may go back to the Morte D'Arthur" (320). Derek Brewer, in arguing for the unity of The Morte Darthur, suggests but does not 47 assert a similar dependence: Probably the closest analogy to Malory's form in English is found in3The Faerie geeene. Spenser knew Malory's work, and it is possible that he understood Malory's form well enough. The Faerie Qgeene is vastly more subtle and learned than Malory, but it enables us to see how a series of stories may be linked only loosely together without much attempt at organic unity, and yet they must be regarded, as the six complete books of The Faerie Qgeene must be regarded, as one single work of art. ("hoole book" 62) There is indeed a remarkable resemblance in patterns. Malory recounts individually, for example, the tales of Arthur, Lancelot, Gareth, and Tristram, interlinking all 4 with the intermittent presence of Arthur. We do not find the tales of individual knights presented seriatim like this in earlier works.5 Malory's great achievement was to sort these tales out from the vast, interwoven cycles in which they existed, and to present them in condensed, accessible, linear narratives. Spenser arranges the tales of Redcrosse, Guyon, Britomart, Artegall, and others in much the same way. Although Arthur is purportedly the most important character in both works, we see comparatively little of him. Spenser enunciates, "I chose the historye of king Arthure, as most fitte for the excellency of his person" (Letter 737). Yet in the poem itself he appears only occasionally, usually to intervene on behalf of the protagonist, as we have already seen in Book I. Arthur's comparable presence woven into and among the separate accounts in other books constitutes a 6 vital unifying influence in their midst. Arthur is all 48 along carrying on his own quest for the Queen of Faeries (I.ix.15), but we catch only glimpses of him as his movements intersect those of other knights errant. Presumably, had Spenser written his projected twelve books, toward the end he would have focused on Arthur's quest in particular, since Arthur is "the perfection" of all the other knights and the virtues they represent (Letter 737). In The Morte Darthur, similarly, Arthur is the pervasive but often invisible presence that interlinks the stories and binds together the Round Table fellowship. In Malory's first two "tales," the Tale of King Arthur and the Noble Tale of King Arthur and the Em eror Lucius, Arthur dominates the action, first as a newly crowned young king, and then as a virile warlord who slays giants and conquers Rome. After these early sections, however, he recedes from the main action, only to reappear in the last tale. He does appear occasionally in the interlying tales, but it is usually at his court--as at the beginning and end of the Tale of Gareth--instead of in the field, where the true deeds of chivalry are accomplished. In other terms, he becomes a roi faineant. It is he who cements the fellowship of knights together, but the focus is on the knights themselves. Rather than remaining a key player, Arthur becomes a functionary and a figurehead, who provides a context and a point of identity for the individual knights on their separate guests. Again at the end, in the Mee§_ Piteous Tale of the Morte Arthur, Arthur returns to the 49 center of the action, although it is now because he is helplessly drawn into Gawain's feud with Lancelot. Structurally, therefore, the presence of Arthur provides a framing and cohesive device for a series of separate tales in which the action centers around his knights. One argument for the unity of The Morte Darthpr has 7 In the been the presence of the 'explicits' between tales. following discussion, I shall begin by referring to the Winchester version of The Morte Darthur, since the unity controversy has centered around it in particular. From there, however, I shall return to Caxton's edition. I select a characteristic explicit from the end of the Tale of King Arthur and the Emperor Lucius: "Here endyth the tale of the noble Kynge Arthure that was emperoure hymself thorow dygnyte of his hondys. And here folowyth aftir many noble talys of Sir Launcelot de Lake" (247).8 The Tale of Launcelot, which follows, begins with a reference to the end of the preceding tale: "Sone aftir that kynge Arthure was com from Rome into Ingelonde, than all the knightys of the Rounde Table resorted unto the kynge and made many joustys and turnementes" (253). This example shows how, through the use of explicits and opening textual references to preceding tales, the author attempts to create a sense of continuity and cohesiveness between rather loosely related accounts drawn from diverse sources--in this particular case from an English one (the Alliterative Morte Arthure) and a French one (the Prose Lancelot). 50 Although Spenser interjects no explicits like Malory's at the ends of his books, he consistently ties into the action of the previous book in the first canto of each new book. This is immediately observable of all books following the first, except for Book V. On closer scrutiny, however, we can see the same strategy being used, although not as fully and distinctively, in that book; for the main character, Artegall, is reintroduced in the first canto from Book IV, where he has been the object of Britomart's guest. I take the first canto of Book VI as an example of the sort of interlinking reference Spenseruses. Artegall, "returning . . . / From his late conquest" (VI.i.4.4-5) of the previous book, crosses paths with Calidore, the protagonist of Book VI. They hail each other; Artegall recounts his quest to Calidore. Calidore, in turn, after congratulating his fellow on a successful quest, reveals, "But where ye ended haue, now I begin / To tread an endlesse trace, withouten guyde" (6.1-2), and goes on to describe his current pursuit of the Blatant Beast. We see in Spenser, then, both an attempt and a strategy analogous to Malory's at making cohesive a series of individual accounts. One key difference is that Malory uses the explicits, in addition to interlinking references at the beginnings of the tales. Spenser has avoided the former more external device and integrates his cohesive references. Brewer, however, notes that the.£§££§£_£2_§2l2lflfl fulfills an external unifying function similar to that of Malory's 51 explicits: . . . each work owes its impression of cohesion to some extent to what may be called extra-aesthetic comments by the author. Thus our feeling about the cohesion of The Faerie Qpeene derives, to some extent, from the Letter to Raleigh, which is external to the poem proper, just as our feeling about the cohesion of The Morte Darthur derives to some extent from the ex licits, which might not be regarded, by strict standards, as part of the artistic form. (62) This is not to say, of course, that Spenser consciously meant his Letter to Raleigh to fulfill the function of Malory's explicits. But we can see both authors striving to impose unity on what could have easily been disjointed, isolated narratives. The idea of multiple quests and heroes presented separately, seen in Malory, calls for this type of problematic but fruitfully diversifying structure. It is the structure which Spenser adopts "for the more variety of the history" (Letter 737), and, as we have just observed, he develops strategies akin to Malory's for managing it. C. Structural Peculiarities of Caxton's Edition One question that will have arisen in the mind of every reader familiar with the textual history of The Morte Darthur is how would the reading of Caxton's edition rather than the Winchester MS. have affected Spenser's conception of the work's structure? Caxton's was with little doubt the version with which Spenser was familiar, as "his was the basis for all versions of Malory in circulation until early 52 in this century" (Spisak 605). Until very recently the Winchester MS. was unanimously considered to be Malory's final and authoritative version, which Caxton meddlesomely altered before publication. As Vinaver sardonically commented in his landmark edition incorporating the Winchester text, "It is only now that the damage due to Caxton's 'symple connynge' can be partially repaired" (Introduction xxxv). The more unified nature of Caxton's edition caused Vinaver to conclude that the printer had intentionally obscured the true nature of what Malory had originally compiled as eight separate, distinct books: "When these volumes fell into Caxton's hands he realized that, as a matter of practical expediency, he had to make them into a single 'book of King Arthur'" (xxxviii). Vinaver's conclusions on Caxton as redactor, however, are no longer unquestioningly accepted. William Matthews has argued that Caxton could not have revised the Roman War episode (The Noble Tale of King Arthur and the Emperor 9 Matthews' arguments are several, Lucius) in his edition. but the most substantial is that there is present in the Caxton version new material from three sources previously used in the Winchester MS.: the Alliterative Morte Arthure, the Old French Merlin, and Hardyng's Chronicle. Matthews concludes that Malory must have revised the episode himself, because Caxton could hardly "'have been aware of and had access to'" these sources "'so as to add details from them to the new version'" (Lumiansky, "Malory's Le Morte Darthur" 53 890-91). Malory, on the other hand, had already used the sources in the Winchester version. The Roman War episode represents by far the most drastic alteration between versions of The Morte Dareppr. Vinaver complains, again with a dose of sarcasm: Puzzled by the archaic character of the Tale, Caxton, 'simple person', reduced it to less than half its size, and while doing so rewrote it from beginning to end, with the result that until now it has not been possible to form an accurate idea either of the content of the story or of its position among Malory's romances. (xxx) The notion that Malory may have been responsible for this most substantial change has inevitably led other scholars to inquire whether he might not equally have made the other alterations between texts. Charles Moorman proposes that Caxton's working copy was actually a version of Winchester revised by Malory, retaining in it those elements he had so carefully added to his sources and differing from it principally in the radical reworking of the Roman War section, but also incidentally in the thousands of changes which resulted in a coherent, unified, and gracefully written book complete with preface, internal divisions, and rubrics. (111-12) Such arguments must remain inconclusive, especially as long as Matthews' paper remains unpublished. They have, however, led R. M. Lumiansky, no mean authority, to pronounce: "in my view Malory's final intention for his book is most nearly approached from the text in Caxton's edition, not from the Winchester manuscript" (897).10 If these scholars are correct, the Winchester MS. is 54 reduced to the status of a medial draft. This is a disturbing idea, given that the past fifty years of Malory scholarship, including Vinaver's monument, are based on the assumption that the Winchester is Malory's definitive text. In either case, however, Caxton's edition was considered definitive until 1934, when the Winchester MS. was discovered. Furthermore, Lotte Hellinga's careful inspection of the Winchester MS. has failed to detect any compositor's markings as evidence that it was ever prepared for press (128, 133), even though physical evidence11 demonstrated that the manuscript was in Caxton's workshop between 1480 and 1483, and either in or near it "at least as late as 1489" (134). (Caxton's edition was published in 1485.) All of this leaves very little doubt that Caxton's was the only version familiar to Spenser. He probably would have known it in one of the later printings: Wynkyn de Worde's of 1498 or 1529; William Copland's of 1557; or Thomas East's of 1578 (Crane 32,33,36,41; Esdaile 97; Gaines 11).12 The greatest and most obvious difference between the two versions is that Caxton's is divided into twenty-one books instead of the Winchester's eight. Caxton claims to have thus divided the books himself (Prolpgue 3). He '3 Another further subdivided the books into 506 chapters. related difference here concerning us is that Caxton substituted his own explicits for Malory's originals. Several of the explicits show no appreciable differences: 55 W: Thus endith the tale of Balyn and Balan, two brethirne that were borne in Northumbirlonde, that were two passynge good knyghtes as ever were in tho dayes. (92) C: Thus endeth the tale of Balyn and Balan, two bretheren born in Northumberland, good knightes. Sequitur III liber. (2.19) Lumiansky notes four such close correspondences among the explicits of the two versions (894). The important question for our discussion of Spenser's relation to Malory is what kind of overall structure for The Morte Darthur do Caxton's explicits imply? They range in descriptiveness from rudimentary to generous. The first, for example, simply reads: "Explicit liber primus. Incipit liber secundus" (1.27). The seventh, on the other hand, gives a fairly detailed summary of the books preceding and following: Thus endeth this tale of Syr Gareth of Orkeney, that wedded dame Lyones of the Castel Peryllous. And also Syr Gaherys wedded her syster Dame Lynet, that was called the Damoysel Saueage. And Syr Agrauayne wedded Dame Laurel, a fayr lady, and grete and myghty landes with grete rychesse gaf with them Kyng Arthur, that ryally they myght lyue tyl their lyues ende. Here followeth the VIII book, the which is the first book of Sir Tristram de Lyones, and who was his fader and his moder, and hou he was borne and fosteryd, and how he was made knyghte. (7.36) In every case we notice that Caxton's explicits provide a distinct bridge between books, imposing a stronger sense of continuity than the Winchester MS. explicits. This feature is in keeping with Caxton's stated aims 56 to enprynte a book of the noble hystoryes of the sayd Kynge Arthur and of certeyn of his knyghtes, after a copye unto me delyuerde, whyche copye Syr Thomas Malorye dyd take out of certeyn bookes of grensshe and reduced it into Englysshe. (Prologue It seems that Caxton felt he was strengthening the continuity inherent in Malory's collection of tales. The real question, then, is whether Spenser could have discerned a pattern of books within a book in Caxton's more unified edition. The answer would immediately appear to be yes, since Caxton calls each of his twenty-one sections 'books' and, as we have seen in his explicits, makes overt transitions between them. The feature which particularly qualifies them as probable models for Spenser, however, is that they tend, at times even more discretely than the Winchester MS., to treat the adventures of a single knight. The Winchester MS. is divided into eight books according to Malory's major sources, each book concluded by an explicit. The result is commonly that several different knights' adventures are found in a single book. The "Tale of Balin," for instance, which is a complete story in itself, beginning with Balin's appearance at Arthur's court and ending with his death, is included in the Tale of King Arthur in the Winchester MS. In Caxton's edition, on the other hand, it stands by itself as Book II. Other books that treat the adventures of single knights, such as the Tale of SEE. Launcelot de Lake and the Tege of Sir Gareth of Orkne , are the same in both versions. Caxton's longest book 57 corresponds largely to the Winchester manuscript's Book of Sir Tristram de Lyonee. But Caxton has broken up the beginning and ending sections in order to treat separately the self-contained story of La Cote Male Tayle and some of Lancelot's adventures. These distinctions make Caxton's edition an even closer parallel than the Winchester MS. to Spenser's structure of books within a book, with each book centering around the adventures of a questing knight. D. Modifications of Gothic Structure in Malory and Spenser In addition to the arrangements of books within a book with comparable linking strategies between the juxtaposed accounts, there are some significant parallels between the modifications both authors apply to the usual Gothic structure of previous romances. This in itself provides further argument for the dependence of_The Faerie Qpeene's structure on Malorian design and, of course, indicates how both authors responded to their intertextual environments. The French romances which Malory took for the most part as his sources were composed of intricately interwoven accounts of the parallel activities of separate knights. A thread of narrative would be dropped suddenly, and one or more other threads interposed before the earlier thread was resumed. Vinaver explains that Malory, in rehandling his French Vulgate Cycle sources, unraveled these threads into uninterrupted narratives: 58 . . . Malory's most successful and historically most significant contribution to the technique of the prose tale was his attempt to substitute for the method of 'interweaving' the modern 'progressive' form of exposition. (Introduction lxviii) As an example of this process, Vinaver notes that in adapting the French Prose Lancelot into his own Tale of Lancelot Malory "boldly dismisses" an interwoven "digression equal in length to 500 pages of the present edition" (lxxi). Thus, Malory produces a linear narrative in which Lancelot proceeds directly from his captivity by Morgan, which I discussed in the previous chapter, through a tournament where he contends on behalf of King Bagdemagus, whose daughter has helped him to escape Morgan's dungeon, and on to rescue his companion Sir Lionel, while he is at it freeing other prisoners, exterminating wicked knights, and ridding the country of pestilent giants. As Vinaver comments, "All this forms a consistent account, with 'a beginning, a middle and an end'" (lxxi). Nevertheless, Malory did not fully eradicate the entrelacement from his stories, which has led C. S. Lewis to proclaim, "To the present day no one enjoys Malory's book who does not enjoy its amba es, its interweaving" ("Morte" 13). Lewis summarizes: Certainly the evidence that he constantly simplified is irresistible. Whether he wanted to simplify still further and get rid of the Polyphonic altogether, or whether he wanted to go just as far as he has gone and liked the degree of Polyphony which survives under his treatment, we 59 do not know. If he wanted to get rid of it altogether, he has undoubtedly failed. (14) Sandra Ness Ihle argues that in simplifying as much as he did Malory was moving toward a style of "totality," as opposed to a style of "partiality." Ihle borrows these terms, used by Paul Frankl to discuss architecture, to contrast the effects achieved by Malory and the French authors.14 "In a Romanesque cathedral," she explains, "every part, such as each bay, appears to be total in itself and added to the rest, upon which it does not depend" (9). This style we may compare to what Malory accomplishes in disentangling the interlaced plots of his sources to produce separate, continuous narratives, and then juxtaposing them to assemble a loosely arranged series of chivalric tales perceivable as a complete work. "In a Gothic cathedral," on the other hand, "every part, again such as each bay, even if it is actually complete in itself, appears to be only fragmentary and unable to exist independently of the rest" (9). The French Vulgate Cycle romances achieved this effect to a great extent through interwoven narrative. As Ferdinand Lot has observed: Aucune aventure ne forme un tout se suffisant a lui-méme. D'une part, des épisodes antérieurs, laissés provisoirement de c6té, y prolongent des ramifications; d'autre part des episodes suhséquents, proches ou lointains, y sont amorcés. We witness in The Faerie Qpeene a modification of the interwoven structure which Spenser inherited most directly 60 from Ariosto, that is roughly analogous to Malory's alteration of the same from his French sources. Ariosto's Orlando Furioso is, like the French romances, a complexly and intricately interwoven poem--so much so that, as Hough comments, "the continuity of any one strand is hard to keep in mind" (26). The action of the complete poem, however, centers around the struggle of Christian against Saracen, beginning with the siege of Paris, and the love of Ruggiero for Bradamant. This thematic unity causes us to perceive the poem, despite numerous interruptions, as a unified narrative. Spenser, much as Malory with his French sources, has picked up some of this interwoven structure, but has chosen much more consistently than his immediate predecessor--Ariosto, whom he sought to 'overgo'--to compose uninterrupted narrative. Moreover, like Malory in comparison with his sources, he has assembled a collection of individual narrative accounts rather than an extended polyphonic narrative that carries the same major themes throughout the entire work. Hough briefly describes the varying structures of Spenser's books: Book I is complete and almost entirely self-contained. It is . . . a whole miniature epic in itself . . . . Book II is a complete unified guest with a single hero whose adventure is brought to a conclusion within the limits of the book. But Books III and IV are constructed on quite a different plan . . . . These are put together on the 'interwoven' plan of Ariosto . . . Book V on the whole . . . is a return to the earlier design, in that it has a single hero whose adventures we follow fairly consistently. With Book VI we return to a medley of romantic motifs, again put together mainly on the 61 'interwoven' principle. (85) This partial disentangling of Ariosto's interlaced narrative structure allowed Spenser to present concentrated portrayals of his characters and the virtues which they represented. This seems a more suitable approach for a poet interested in didactic allegory, as Spenser was. He could, for instance, even in the internally interwoven Book VI, present Calidore as at once hero and courtesy in action, in order to communicate his vision of courtesy--what it is and how it is practiced--for emulation. At the same time, retaining a certain degree of interweaving helped him to maintain variety and interest, and at points to juxtapose minor characters for purposes of illustrative contrast. To take Book VI once again as an example, Spenser there interjects Turpine as an allegory of discourtesy and a direct foil to Calidore, and the Savage Man as a figure of untutored 'natural' courtesy. Therefore, Spenser shows no signs of distaste for interlacing, such as Lewis hints that Malory may have possessed. It seems very probable, however, that Malory provided Spenser with a model of a chivalric romance employing both types of narrative structure and, furthermore, of loosely linked tales of separate knights and adventures within a single book. He certainly did not receive such a model from Ariosto, and there is no other apparent model among the medieval romances. From Spenser's complex of structural relations to Ariosto and Malory we may observe that as a literary 62 tradition, such as chivalric romance, grows, the author's intertextual space expands, widening his options. But at the same time, the newly broadened intertextual space will inevitably influence his contribution to that tradition, dictating that the new work show to a degree the stamp of contemporaneity. Thus, even had he so desired, Spenser could not have written a truly medieval chivalric romance, although he did assimilate features of that generic tradition to create a Renaissance chivalric romance-epic. Spenser had before him the contemporary model of the Orlando Furioso and the antiquated one of The Morte Darthur. He admired the high style and formal perfection of Ariosto's modern treatment of knighthood, things not found in the medieval romances. As R. E. Neil Dodge has put it, Ariosto "had reduced the wilderness of romance to complete artistic order" (159). Spenser found in Malory, however, certain structural characteristics which better suited his more didactic purposes and, at the same time, allowed him to make his own contribution to contemporary experiments with romance-epic. He could by conflating structural characteristics of both authors, and of Virgil, present a series of miniature epics, finally to be brought together into a kind of 'super epic'. Thus, we see Spenser performing on Ariosto alterations very similar to those Malory had already applied to his French sources. In both cases these structural choices were closely connected to the two authors' didactic and exemplifying purposes, as each 63 sought in his own way to present chivalry as a model of virtue in action. CHAPTER THREE Chivalry in Malory and Spenser A. Chivalry in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance England In the first chapter I proposed that not only preexisting literature, but also cultural and intellectual milieu composes a work's intertextual space. For both Malory and Spenser chivalry was a very important part of that milieu, although in significantly different ways. For Malory, chivalry was a living code on which political structures and ethical standards rested. He felt that in his day it was in need of more earnest application but that it was no less pertinent than ever. As Larry Benson has written, "Chivalry in the Morte Darthur is . . . neither nostalgia nor escape. A fifteenth-century knight could hardly escape chivalry, which was not one of a series of possible life-styles but a definition of the noble life itself" (198). A. B. Ferguson has similarly affirmed: Caxton, and the author of The Boke of Noblesse, Malory, and perhaps Stephen Hawes as well undertook to reaffirm chivalry as a living ideal, sufficient for the life of those responsible for the physical welfare of the community, not to reinstate something that had been displaced. (Indian Summer xiv) By Spenser's time this was certainly no longer the case. Chivalry was not considered a viable institution for 64 65 guiding the nation-state--a concept in itself foreign to the Middle Ages. But chivalry was still in the living memory of the Elizabethans and held a special romantic attraction for them. This made its trappings useful for propaganda and for adorning and dignifying governmental structures; and the theme of knighthood could still, as it did for Malory's day, provide examples for virtuous conduct. What allowed the Elizabethans to view chivalry from a romantic perspective was the new historical consciousness brought about by humanist scholarship. The resulting "sense of period," writes Ferguson, enabled Elizabethans "to understand something of the differences that . . . separated the chivalric world of the Middle Ages from their own" (Chivalric Tradition 57). This development in historical perspective "insured that any future revival [of chivalry] would be, in the special historical sense of the term, romantic" (57). It was as such that the Elizabethans rediscovered chivalry. Ferguson observes: In Elizabethan England, the learning of humanism and the mystique of chivalry were able to achieve a kind of symbiotic relationship, and Sidney and Spenser and the rest were able to deck out their essential humanism on occasion in the deliberately chosen costumes of medieval chivalry. (57) We find this symbiosis epitomized in Sir Philip Sidney, whom Spenser proclaimed "most worthy of all titles to both Learning and Chivalry." This same Sidney who set his Arcadia in the pastoral world of Greek romance, died of fatal wounds because of an insistence on observing an 66 extreme point of chivalric honor while fighting in Flanders: having met "the Marshall of the Camp lightly armed," recounts Sir Fulke Greville, ". . . the unspotted emulation of his heart . . . made him cast off his Cuisses" (128). We see it also in the pageantry of the day, where extravagant chivalric games present allegorized state propaganda and show of wealth and dignity. We may take as an example the pageant presented before a French embassage seeking "to promote a marriage between Elizabeth and the Duke of Alengon": Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville, the Earl of Arundel, and Lord Windsor, calling themselves the "Four Foster Children of Desire," lay siege to the Fortress of Beauty where Elizabeth resides. They are, of course, unsuccessful: Perfect Beauty“ (i.e., Elizabeth) is unattainable--no doubt a message to the French. The Foster Children submit gracefully, acknowledging "the blindness of their error," and admitting that "Noble Desire should have desired nothing so much as the flourishing of that Fortress." (Chivalric Tradition 80) Or, we may take the extraordinarily lavish Field of the Cloth of Gold which, as Benson points out, was intended by Henry VIII and Francis I both "to dazzle their subjects with a chivalric display" and "to establish a rapprochement between the European powers on the basis of chivalry" (191). According to Sir William Segar these sorts of pageants placed Tudor sovereigns rightfully among "the most mighty Monarches of the world," both ancient and contemporary: "neither France, Spaine, German , or any other Nation Christian was euer honoured with so many Military triumphes, 67 as England hath bene, chiefly in the raigne of her Maiestie who now liueth" (190). He particularly refers to the annual Accession Day Tilts as "a custom neuer before vsed not knowen in any Court or Countrey" (190). The ennoblement of the state through pageantry made chivalry indispensible to the Tudor government; but it was a ceremonial and romanticized, rather than a practical and vital chivalry. Its true nature was probably epitomized when Elizabeth herself, on the eve of the Armada, appeared to her troops at Tilbury horsed and armed as a lady knight and dramatically proclaimed, "Rather than any Dishonor shall grow by me, I myself will take up Arms" (E. C. Wilson 89, 199). The more distant, romanticizing attitude of Elizabethans toward chivalry allowed poets like Spenser to apply its ideals and symbols with a freer hand than their predecessors, like Malory, who sought to portray knighthood realistically yet typologically for literal emulation. Benson makes clear through many examples that as Malory and other late medieval prose romancers recounted for their day tales of past heroes and their noble deeds, contemporary aristocratic audiences fashioned their actions after what they read. Benson comments: Malory lived and wrote in the late Middle Ages, when, for the first time in Western civilization, noble gentlemen actually jousted to gain honor and please their ladies, tried to be true lovers, went on quests, and attempted to realize in their own lives the ideals of romance chivalry. (138) What had occurred by this time was a codification of 68 chivalric ideals which often resulted in strict imitation. Models from the past, presented in the form of handbooks of chivalry and romances, took on a powerful new authority. This is evidenced in part merely by the proliferation of chivalric handbooks published in English during the fifteenth century, among them The Book of the Ordre of Chypalrie, The Book oeroblesse, and Knyghthode and Bataile. A number of chivalric biographies, or "histories,' were produced also, whose subjects consciously follow the patterns of the romances in their daily lives. One of a number of intriguing examples is the Earl of Warwick's biography, which, Benson comments, "reads more like a romance than a true biography, and we might suspect it to be purely fiction if it were not substantiated by other records" (187). Benson summarizes Warwick's career, noting its correlation with those of both romance and contemporary real-life knights: Warwick's early life follows the pattern that we know from Malory's romances: he was knighted, and then he triumphed in the great tournament given to celebrate the marriage of Henry IV to Joan of Navarre, where he did such deeds "as redounded to his notable fame and perpetual worship" (5). He then went off to fight his king's enemies and thus earned a higher form of knighthood, reception into the Order of the Garter. The pattern of tournament-quest-higher form of knighthood is characteristic both of Malory's heroes and of knights in real life, such as Jacques de Lalaing, who in the 14408 jousted before his king, went on a quest (the "emprise del braclet"), defended a ‘pee (the Fountaine des pleurs), and earned a higher form of knighthood. Malory's knights earn a place at the Round Table, Warwick the Order of the Garter, Jacques the Toison d'or (the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece). (187-88) 69 We also see evidence of a continuing application of chivalry in chivalric ordinances of the time and in surviving records of their enforcement. A fifteenth-century manuscript folio entitled "How Knyghtis of the bath shulde be made" details the elaborate ceremony and requirements for that order. At the door of the ceremonial chamber, the king's steward was to take an oath of the aspirants before "all the lordis and knyghtis the kyngis mynstrellis and herawdis of armys": . . . ye schall love god above all thinge and be stedfaste in the feythe and sustene the chirche and ye schall be trewe un to yowre sovereyne lorde and trewe of yowre worde and promys & sekirtee in that oughte to be kepte. Also ye schall sustene wydowes in ther right at every tyme they wol ~requere yow and maydenys in ther virginite and helpe hem & socoure hem with yowre good for that for lak of good they be not mysgovernyd. Also ye schall sitte i no plase where that eny iugement schulde be gevyn wrongefully ayens eny body to yowre knowleche. Also ye schall not suffir noo murderis nor extorcioners of the kyngis pepill with in the Centre there ye dwelle but with yowre power ye schall lete doo take them and put them in to the handis of Justice and that they be punysshid as the kyngis lawe woll. (68) The socio-political function of knighthood is clear from the oath, which is, as we shall see later in this chapter, strikingly close to the one Arthur takes of his knights at the inception of the Order of the Round Table. Toward the end of their ceremony, aspirants to the Order of the Bath were to be warned by the king's master cook: "If ye be untrewe to yowre sovereyne lorde or doo 70 ayens this bye and worshipfull ordir that ye have takyn myne office is that y muste smyte of yowre hele be the small of yowre leggis and herefore I clayme yowre sporis" (69). Grafton's Chrggrcle records that in 1463, a Knight of the Bath named Rauf Grey, who was captured among a group of insurgents at Bamborough Castle, "was disgraded of the high order of knighthoode . . . by cuttynge off his guylt spurres, rentyng his Cote of armes, and breaking his sword ouer his hed: and finally, . . . his body was shortned, by the length of his bed" (II.4). Warkworth's Chronicle significantly recounts that the constable opens his summary of the charges against Grey by reminding him: "thou hast take the ordir of Knyghthode of the Batthe, and any soe taking that ordir ought to kepe his faithe the whiche he makes" (38). Warkworth also makes clear that the ceremonial punishment, which Grafton describes in part, was specific, elaborate, and related to the vows of the order. Grey is reminded: "The Kyng had ordenned that thou shuldest have hadd thy sporys striken of by the hard heles, with the hand of the maister cooke . . . as was promysed at the tyme that he tooke of thy spurres" (39). All of this was to the end that Grey should be "disgraded" of his "worshipp, noblesse, and armes, as of the order of Knyghthode." In the end, though, he was spared these indignities on the merits of his grandfather and, instead, unceremoniously beheaded. The entire incident, however, as preserved in both chronicles, indicates that the vows of knighthood were still taken very 71 seriously in the late fifteenth century and that they entailed specific solemn obligations. B. Comparison of the Two Authors' Applications of Chivalry Caxton advised readers of Malory's work to approach it as a repository of exempla for application to conduct. He was publishing it to the entente that noble men may see and lerne the noble actes of chyualrye, the ientyl and vertuous dedes that somme knyghtes used in tho dayes, by whiche they came to honour, and how they that were vycious were punysshed and ofte put to shame and rebuke. (2) Caxton's readers are to "take the good and honest actes in their remembraunce and to follow the same" (2), and they are promised that doing so will bring them "to good fame and renommee" (3). For his part, then, Caxton was offering The Morte Darthur as a kind of handbook for noble conduct, and the evidence just surveyed indicates that it would have been received as such. In the late sixteenth century, chivalry still held exemplary potential, but not in quite so literalistic a manner as in Caxton's and Malory's presentation of it. Ferguson writes: Sidney and Spenser, the high priests of the nee-chivalric cult, were both concerned with the commonwealth, the church, and the timeless moral values. What they saw in the chivalric tradition was a source of themes, examples, and symbols still relevant to their broader purposes, as well 72 as worthy of reverence in themselves, but no ginger a sufficient guide. (Chivalric Tradition As noted in the previous chapter, Protestantism and humanism had metamorphosed the chivalric romance into a repository of symbols, rather than a series of historical examples for imitation. Thus, in a fashion analogous to that of Caxton in his Prolo e, although different in conception, Spenser explains to Raleigh: "The generall end" of his book "is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline" (737).2 He declares that he is following "all the antique Poets historicall, first Homere, who in the Persons of Agamemnon and Vlysses hath ensampled a good governour and a vertuous man" (737). Therefore, his purpose, he holds, is fundamentally didactic. His poem is to be a collection of tales set forth to cultivate moral virtue in his audience. Although he defends this plan by allusion to Renaissance theories about the didactic value of epic,3 for his characters and their deeds and activities he turns once again to the chivalric romances. Much like Malory, Spenser typologizes his knights. Beverly Kennedy has shown that The Morte Darthur presents a typology of knighthood based on models extant in the Middle Ages. Whereas Malory adheres to realistic models, Spenser categorizes his knights according to specific virtues. In Malory, for instance, Gawain is the Heroic knight of feudal chivalry, Lancelot the Worshipful knight of courtly 73 chivalry, and Galahad the True knight of religious chivalry (Kennedy 6). Spenser, in a roughly analogous manner, presents Redcrosse as Holiness, Guyon as Temperance, and Britomart as Chastity. To borrow Caxton's exhortation, Spenser's readers are meant to "Doc after the good and leue the euyl," and thus attain "to good fame and renommee" (3). In both works the action presents for the betterment of readers examples of "noble chyvalrye, curtosye, humanyte, frendlynesse, hardynesse, loue, frendshyp, cowardyse, murdre, hate, vertue, and synne" (3). The large difference is that Malory and Caxton portray, from their perspectives, the past deeds of real-life heroes; for Arthur and his knights were popularly believed to have lived and the material found in the romances to be, in the imprecise medieval sense, historically true. Spenser, on the other hand, made no serious pretense of historical veracity4 but sought to lure his readers into his didactic content with "an historical fiction, the which the most part of men delight to read, rather for variety of matter, then for profit of the ensample" (737). C. The Two Authors' Representations of Chivalry Both works are comparable in tone, perspective, and emphasis regarding chivalry, in that they are historically retrospective and in that they demonstrate a code and its maintenance (or breach). In these respects Spenser is of 74 the same spirit as Malory, the serious-minded proponent of chivalry, however different he is in other respects. This likeness is evident in the transformation Spenser casts upon a borrowing from Ariosto. In Canto I of Orlando Furioso, Angelica, the fearful beauty pursued, like Florimell, by all knights, escapes as the pagan Ferrau and the Christian Rinaldo fight over her. When Rinaldo points out that as they try to kill each other the prize is gaining distance, they agree to postpone their combat. Since Rinaldo has lost his horse, he convinces Ferrau to let him ride behind. In a ridiculous tableau the knights ride off double mounted and half armed, forgetting about the crusade to pursue their mutual selfish and lascivious interest. The narrator flippantly declares: Oh gran bonta de' cavallieri antiqui! Eran rivali, eran di fé diversi, e si sentian degli aspri colpi iniqui per tutta la persona anco dolersi; e pur per selve oscure e calli obliqui insieme van senza sospetto aversi. Da guattro sproni il destrier punto arriva ove una strada in due si dipartiva. (I.22) 0 noble chivalry of knights of yore! Here were two rivals, of opposed belief, Who from the blows exchanged were bruised and Aching from head to foot without relief, (sore, Yet to each other no resentment bore. Through the dark wood and winding paths, as if Two friends, they go. Against the charger's sides Four spurs are thrust until the road divides. (Reynolds I.22) The entire stanza is steeped in irony--part1y contextually, ;partly internally generated. Donald Cheney, noting the 75 double end-rhymes "diversi," "dolersi," and "aversi," comments: This comic exploitation of the ottava rima (in a fashion which an English reader recognizes as Byronic) clearly points up the conflict between the premises of militant Christianity on the one hand and those of nonsectarian eroticism on the other; and it does so in a predominantly satirical tone. (84) For Malory to have written thus of chivalry, although he is at times critical of its practice, would have been unthinkable. Spenser is writing in a different era, in which most of the prominent continental authors who treated chivalry did so satirically or parodically (Tasso being the notable exception). Having drawn upon Malory and the medieval English chivalric tradition, however, Spenser is much closer to The Morte Darthur in his treatment of knighthood, and, hence, much closer to the true medieval spirit. Malory presents an earnest portrayal of true knighthood through quasi-historical knights; analogously, Spenser offers speaking pictures of specific virtues through chivalric allegories. In the first Canto of Book III, where Spenser alludes to Ariosto, Britomart has unhorsed Guyon with her enchanted spear. Guyon, infuriated, attempts to resume the battle on foot, but Arthur dissuades him and "reconcilement was between them knit," whereat "goodly all agreed, they forth yfere did ryde" (12.1,9). Here the narrator breaks into an apostrophe modeled on Ariosto's cited above: 76 0 goodly usage of those antique times, In which the sword was seruant vnto right; When not for malice and contentious crimes, But all for praise, and proof of manly might, The martiall brood accustomed to fight: Then honour was the meed of victorie, And yet the vanquished had no despight: Let later age that noble vse enuie, Vile rancour to auoid, and cruell surquedrie. (13) It is true, as Cheney makes apparent, that by means of context and allusion to Ariosto Spenser creates an ironic comment on the conflicting claims of chivalric honor and erotic love (86-88). Spenser's irony is not deeply incisive, however, and the criticism implied is counterbalanced by his honorific vision of chivalry. Britomart and Guyon, we are told, have been "with that golden chaine of concord tyde" (12.9). This is far from Ariosto's cynical depiction of Ferrau and Rinaldo compromising their loyalties, faiths, and obligations to 5 Moreover, Spenser consistently join in chasing a woman. sets forth chivalry as a thing of honor, from which the present age can profit by example, albeit not necessarily by literal emulation. The pages of Malory are permeated with a comparably idealistic and honorific vision of chivalry, also conspicuously set in the past. In the Tale of Tristram Sir Blamor de Ganis has accused King Angwysshe of "treson" (8.20). Readers are reminded of the pastness of action and setting: For the custome was suche in tho days that and ony 77 man were appealed of ony treason or murther, he shold fyghte body for body, or els to fynde another knyght for hym. And alle maner of murthers in tho dayes were callid treason. (20) Tristram rejoices at the opportunity to take up the gauntlet for King Angwysshe. In one of Malory's classic ' and, battle narratives "euer they fought lyke wood men,‘ finally, "Syre Tristram smote Sir Blamor suche a buffet vpon the helme that he there felle doune vpon his syde" (22). The action that follows is a showcase of knightly honor. Blamor pleads that Tristram, because he has the proper credentials, should slay him: I requyre the, as thou art a noble knyghte and the best knyghte that euer I fond, that thou wilt slee me oute, for I wold not lyue to be made lord of alle the erth. For I haue leuer dye with worship than lyve with shame . . . (23) He adds, "I wille neuer saye the lothe word [i.e. 'surrender'J." Here Tristram is in a dilemma: he must either spare Blamor and let his accusation stand, or slay him and break faith with Lancelot, Blamor's cousin. Tristram turns to the judges, who are also kings, imploring them "for their worshippes and for Kynge Arthurs and Sir Launcelots sake" to undertake the matter. He argues: hit were shame and pyte that this noble knyght that yonder lyeth shold be slayne, for ye here wel, shamed wille he not be, and I pray to God that he neuer be slayne nor shamed for me. And as for the kyng for whome I fyghte fore, I shalle requyre hym, as I am his true champyon and true knyghte in this felde, that he wille haue mercy 78 upon this knyghte. (23) Angwysshe agrees to "be ruled" by Tristram and the judges next confer with Sir Bleobris, Blamor's brother, who advises: "rather than he shold be shamed . . . lete Sir Tristram slee hym oute." The judges contend, "It shalle not be 500 . . . for his parte aduersary, bothe the kynge and the champyon, haue pyte of Syre Blamors knyghthode." What precipitates is a gentlemen's agreement grounded in the confraternity of knighthood. Bleobris quickly agrees: "I wille ryght wel as ye wille." In the action that follows, to use Spenser's phrasing, "reconcilement was betweene them knit" and they are "with that golden chaine of concord tyde" (III.i.12.1,9): Thenne the kynges called the Kynge of Irland and fond hym goodely and tretabyl. And thenne by alle their aduyses Syre Tristram and Syre Bleoberys toke vp Sire Blamore, and the two bretheren were accorded with Kynge Angwysshe and kyssed and made frendys foreuer. And thenne Sire Blamor and Sir Trystram kyssed togyders, and there they made their othes that they wold neuer none of them two bretheren fyghte with Syre Trystram, and Syre Trystram made the same oth. And for that gentyl bataille alle the blood of Syre Launcelot loued Sire Trystram foreuer. (8.23) All present honor Tristram for his chivalrous conduct, and "the kynge lete make it knowen thoroute alle the land how and in what manere Syre Trystram had done for hym." Furthermore, Isolde, yet unmarried, makes over him "ioye" such as "there myghte no tongue telle." The clear import is that the chivalry of old was an 79 honorable thing, and those who practiced it in verity not only won worship and love for themselves but also stabilized the social and political order. Malory held such pictures of true knighthood before his own troubled times, when Englishmen were taking up arms against one another in the Wars of the Roses, and, as Stephen Knight reminds us, division and disintegration were evident in many sectors: The increasing recognition of the power of the individual is a feature of the period in many spheres. Financially, a market economy has developed to the point of capitalist take-off and as a result of personal mobility, both social and geographic, has become a reality that cagnot be ignored as it was in previous centuries. The same patterns exist in religion: the Lollard movement had been in essence an individualist struggle for the collective property, both economic and spiritual, of the church, but that quasi-heresy had largely been suppressed. In the fifteenth century those same forces were channelled into the cult of devotio modern; which focuses on the private Christian. In literature and art there is a marked development of concern with the individual in the 'dance of death' motif especially, but also in the development of realism, a mode which bases itself on the validity of the individual sensual response. (Arthurian Literature 146) In the standards of true chivalry, Malory implied, stood an alternative to this scene. Particularly in the Round Table knights he presented ideals of conduct that held a remedy for his own troubled generation. As Ferguson states, "For Malory, chivalry served as a broad-spectrum ideal, one, moreover, that he held with the intensity of a secular faith" (Chivalric Tradition 30). Its code is most clearly expressed early in The Morte Darthur: 80 . . . the kyng stablysshed all his knyghtes and gaf them that were of londes not ryche, he gaf them londes, and charged hem neuer to doo outragyouste nor mordre, and alweyes to flee treason. Also by no meane to be cruel, but to gyve mercy vnto hym that asketh mercy, Vpon payn of forfeture of their worship and lordship of Kyng Arthur foreuermore, and alweyes to doo ladyes, damoysels, and gentylwymmen sucour vpon payne of dethe. Also that no man take noo batails in a wrongful quarel for noo lawe, ne for noo worldes goodes. Vnto this were all the knyghtes sworne of the Table Round, both old and young, and euery yere were they sworne at the hyghe feest of Pentecost. (3.15) Vinaver comments that this summary "is perhaps the most complete and authentic record of Mlalory]'s conception of chivalry" (Commentary 1335). Although Tristram is not yet a member of the Round Table at the time of his duel with Blamor,7 he still conspicuously practices--or even supersedes--the standards of the code. He not only avoids "outragyouste," "mordre," and "treson," but he goes out of his way to show "mercy," even when Blamor has specifically requested to be slain. We have in The Morte Darthur, then, a book of action in which the precepts of true knighthood, only briefly stated, are demonstrated time and again through the deeds of famous knights. D. The Political Significance of Chivalry in The Faerie Queene Returning to The Faerie Queene, we still find a mood of historical retrospection and a presentation of a code and 81 its maintenance--but to what end? We have already seen that Elizabethan chivalry was somewhat of a charade and that its applications were more diplomatic and propagandistic than legal, administrative, or practical.8 Moreover, Spenser's knights are primarily allegorica1--"faceless knights," as C. S. Lewis calls them (Spenser's Images 113)--rather than hortatory exemplars intended for literal emulation, such as Malory and Caxton offer.9 The chief purpose of the knight in The Faerie Queene aligns with the code expressed in The Morte Darthur. In a number of places Spenser interjects commentary on the standards and purpose of chivalry through authorial intrusion, narration, and utterances of characters. Several examples follow: Nought is more honorable to a knight, Ne better doth beseeme braue chevalry, Then to defend the feeble in their right, And wrong redresse in such as wend awry. (Voiio103-4) Of Guyon and Redcrosse: Full many Countries they did oueronne, And many hard adventures did atchieue; Of all the which they honour euer wonne, Seeking the weake oppressed to relieue, And to recouer right for suche, as wrong did grieve. (III.i.4-9) Arthur to Guyon: Are not all knights by oath bound, to withstond Oppressours poure by armes and puissant hond? 82 These passages communicate much of the chivalric idealism of Malory's code. A number of Spenser's episodes, too, purport the same idealism. Artegall defends Irena from Grantorto (v.1), and Arthur delivers Belge from Gerioneo (V.xi). However, the action following the first above-cited comment on chivalry subverts all of Spenser's apparent chivalric idealism. The tone and action of Artegall's battle with Pollente ring mildly of Ariostan parody. Pollente's custom is to challenge his foes to combat on a bridge rigged with a trapdoor, and when they fall through it into the river below, to assail them in the water, where he has the advantage. In a burlesque of heroic conflict, the opponents are compared to "a Dolphin and a Sele" which ""snort," and "bounce" in their aquatic spectacle "snuf, (V.ii.15). Artegall is said to be "in swimming skillful" (16.6), and thus, prescribes the narrator, "so ought each Knight" to be (8-9). The poet inserts distinctively Malorian usages, as if to call to mind that author's religiously serious treatment of chivalric combat: "But Artegall was better breath'd beside, / And towards th'end grew greater in his might" (17.5-6). In The Mogte Darthur we find "but Sir Lancelot was better brethed" (8.26). While this precise formula does not recur, Malory has a number of very close approximations: "Sir Trystram waxed . . . better wynded and bygger" (8.7); "at the last Sir Palomydes waxed bygge and better wynded" 83 (10.62). Malory also uses the non-comparative "well brethed" several times (9.11:10.62,83;12.14;18.18). Where Spenser has "grew greater in his might," Malory has the non-alliterating "his myghte encreaced" (4.18[x2];20.21[x2], 22).10 Finally, there is the hero's decapitation of his foe, followed by the antics of the severed head: That as his head he gan a litle reare Aboue the brincke, to tread Vpon the land, He smote it off, that tumbling on the strand It bit the earth for very fell despight, And gnashed with his teeth, as if he band High God, whose goodnesse he despaired quight (18.2-8) The episode so far amounts to a comic subversion of chivalry. The poet's sympathetic enhancement of knighthood deconstructs before our eyes, and we are left wondering what has become of Milton's "sage and serious Spenser." The action turns from parody and burlesque to black humor as Talus ferrets out Pollente's daughter, Munera, first mutilating and then drowning her: "But he her suppliant hands, those hands of gold, / And eke her feete, those feete of siluer trye, / . . . . Chopte off, and nayled on high, that all might them behold" (26.6-9). Such treatment of a lady, any lady, directly violates the code of chivalry found in Malory. We note that the first great misfortune of the ill-fated Balin is his slaying of a woman who has come under safe conduct into Arthur's court. Balin has his just reasons--she has killed his 84 mother and intends to kill him. Yet Arthur declares: "I shalle neuer foryeve you that trespas" (II.3). Arthur's primary reason is because the lady was under his "sauf conduyte," although we cannot but think that her sex contributed to the odiousness of the deed. Even more pronounced is the episode where Gawain, in his refusal to show mercy to the vanquished Alardin, who has pleaded for it, accidentally slays his lady instead when she throws herself upon Alardin as Gawain's sword falls. The cardinal sin here is not beheading the lady but failing to show mercy. However, killing the lady becomes a horrifying consequence of the moral failure. Gaheris proclaims that the "shame" of slaying the lady "shal neuer from yow" but adds, "Also ye shold gyve mercy vnto them that ask mercy, for a knyght without mercy is without worship" (III.7). It is especially significant that Gawain's misdeed occurs in the same book as the oath of chivalry, where Arthur's knights must swear to show mercy to those who ask it and to succor women. Ironically, Gawain is saved from death only by the intervention of four ladies, who mete to him, because he is Arthur's nephew, a lesser penalty: "that he should here the dede lady with hym," her head "aboute his neck" and her corpse "before hym on his hors mane" (8). Michael Murrin observes that from antiquity a common technique of allegorists has been "to overwhelm the senses with a strong image and impress the memory and yet, to distort the image and create a nonvisual effect." This kind 85 of "deliberate distortion" of the image impels the reader "behind the veil to the truth" (142). In the scene with Munera, the "distortion" is not so much of the image, although it too possesses its disconcerting absurdity, as of the intertext. The incongruity of the action with the codes of the earlier chivalric romances forces readers versed in that tradition into recourse to an allegorical reading: Munera is no lady, but the attractive profit of unjust gain. Merlin L. Neff has identified the target of the entire bridge episode as royally sanctioned commercial monopolies, which reached new heights under Elizabeth. The moral allegory of Talus' merciless subduing of Munera helps to justify the incompatibility of the act with the most basic tenets of chivalry. Execution of justice may result in the destruction of beauty and the ruin of those who have thrived on corruption. At this raw justice, one's aesthetic and humane sensibilities shrink, as Artegall Munera's "seemless plight did rew" (25.9). Talus, on the other hand, not troubled by such weaknesses, relentlessly carries out the law. This explanation, however, does not completely satisfy. It does not explain the subversion, both humorous and horrifying, of chivalry, which works against the tradition as a whole and against the general treatment of chivalry in the poem itself. In an article on "embattled allegory" in Book II of The Faerie Queene, Madelon S. Gohlke speculates that the problem that "the meaning of the book and its 86 apparent message 'meete not'" may point to Spenser's "concern with the subversive possibilities inherent in the allegorical mode, and thus towards some recOgnition of the dualism of the medium as a reflection of a dualistic vision" (140). Stephen Greenblatt exposes as a principle pervading the poem, "Civility is won through the exercise of violence over what is deemed barbarous and evil, and the passages of love and leisure are not moments set apart from the process but its rewards" (186). What is barbarous and evil is, Spenser shows, often also beautiful, even sympathetic. This conception is epitomized in an episode closely related to the one under discussion, Guyon's destruction of the Bower of Bliss. In Spenser's moral universe, therefore, in order to follow virtue one must at times not abandon, but set aside, aesthetic and humane sensibilities. Both Guyon and Artegall inwardly recoil at the ruthless acts, but Guyon follows through with vengeful zeal, and Artegall does nothing to hinder Talus. Regarding the Bower of Bliss, Greenblatt summarizes: "Temperance-—the avoidance of extremes, the 'sober government' of the body, the achievement of the Golden Mean-~must be constituted paradoxically by a supreme act of destructive excess" (172). In order to understand this puzzling episode fully, we must examine some technological and conceptual changes which occurred between the Middle Ages and Renaissance surrounding war. In the Middle Ages, whatever it was in practice, war was noble and virtuous in theory and representation. As 87 Sidney Painter remarks, "To Froissart the Hundred Years War was a long series of knightly deeds" (57-58). The French chronicler states as the purpose of his voluminous undertaking Afin que les grans merveilles et biau fait d'armes, qui sont avenu par les grans guerres de France and d'Engleterre et des royaumes voisins, dont 1i roy et leurs consaulz sont cause, soient notablement registré et ou tamps present et 5 venir veu et cogneu . . . (Prologue 1) In reality, of course, as Huizinga points out, Froissart "recounts an endless list of betrayals and cruelties without being very much aware of the contradiction between his general views and the contents of his narrative" ("Chivalric Ideas" 198). Other chronicles of the Hundred Years War also depict warfare as a gentlemanly pursuit. The chronicle of the Duke of Bourbon records that after his men had tunneled their way into the castle of Verteuil, the duke, in order to make the most of the occasion, sent a challenge for knights from opposing sides to duel in the mine. When Regnaud de Montferrand, the squire in charge of the castle, learned that he was to meet the duke in single combat, he exclaimed: "Je doi bien louer Dieu, quant il m'a aujourd'hui fait tant de grace et d'honneur d'avoir fait armes a ung si vaillant prince" (Chronigge 150). Furthermore, Regnaud agreed to surrender the castle if the duke would knight him "de sa main," since he could never have received the rank "plus honnorablement" (150-51). After the castle keys had been 88 turned over and Regnaud knighted, the two leaders agreed to postpone the formal surrender until the day following, so that each of their men could be "content d'avoir combatu en la mine" (151). During the Renaissance, accelerated trends toward warfare as an applied science began to dissolve these kindly illusions. Roger Aho marks the period from 1560 to 1660 in Europe as "a watershed period in military history," noting that, according to the estimation of Pitirim Sorokin, "war casualties in the seventeenth century increased by more than one hundred percent over what they appear to have been in the previous one hundred years" (194). John R. Hale writes: war had become more professional, more impersonal: it had become a study, a science, and though drum and fife, armor and horse trappings, pavilions and banners still gave an army a picturesque appearance, and though the highest commands were still allotted to birth rather than experience, and though inefficiency and peculation dogged every step between recruitment and battlefield, the wars of the Renaissance reflect the period's interest in statistics, learning, and method rather than its famed "individualism." (1) Where the fifteenth century had seen the publication of many handbooks of chivalry in English, the sixteenth century saw a surge of vernacular books on military science. Peter Whitehorne presented to Elizabeth his 1560 translation of Machiavelli's Art of War with the high claim: "Of many straungers [books], whiche from forrein countries, have here tofore in this your Majesties realme arrived, there is none in comparison to bee prefered, before this worthie 89 Florentine and Italian" (236-37). Machiavelli's concern for expediency over decorum is of course proverbial. In his book of military strategy he presents, in the place of deeds of brave knights, practical examples from his own observation and from his study of classical authors. Telling of his change in emphasis, particularly in light of the above-cited passages from chronicles of the Hundred Years War, is his advice to officers: "Teach your men to hold the enemy in contempt, as Agesilaus the Spartan did when he showed his men some naked Persians so that, having seen their soft, white skin, his men would no longer have cause to fear them" (129).11 Although warfare had undergone such pragmatic reemphases, Spenser generally dresses it up in heroic chivalric vestments, as he does the vanquishing of Orgoglio and Gerioneo by Arthur, and of Grantorto by Artegall. But its grimness and absurdity are no longer suppressed in scenes such as the aquatic battle with Pollente and the subsequent dissection of Munera. Aho asserts that the Reformation Protestant soldier, zealously centered on his goal and ideology, was less concerned than the medieval knight about how the battle was fought. The former, "in identifying his cause with the perfect righteousness of God, uses the ferocity of his violence as a confirmation of his own purityz" the latter, "in being asked to recognize himself in the enemy and the enemy in himself, is thus bound to deal with him within the limits of ritual propriety, 90 using only a restricted inventory of relatively harmless 12 weapons and strategies" (33). The inexorable efficiency with which Talus, who "represents military ruthlessness" (West "Art of War" 667), dispatches Munera very much seems to be a reflection of this development. As Spenser's experience in Ireland had taught him, such activities were a part of the "vertuous and gentle discipline" of "a gentleman or noble person." Greenblatt comments: It is there that he is fashioned a gentleman, there that he is transformed from the former denizen of East Smithfield to the "undertaker"-- the grim pun unintended but profoundly appropriate--of 3,028 acres of Munster land. (185) Spenser's new status meant that for the sakes of Protestantism and the crown, he would disregard humane and aesthetic constraints and become, like Artegall, an overseer of the ruthless, calculating destruction of a culture and its people. In A View of the State of Ireland Eudoxus argues against clemency toward the Irish on grounds of political expediency: So I remember that in the late government of that good Lord Grey, when after long travell, and many perillous assayes, he had brought things almost to this passe . . . that it was even made ready for reformation, and might have been brought to what her Maiesties would, . . . complaint was made against him, that he was a bloodie man, and regarded not the life of her subiects no more then dogges, but had wasted and consumed all, so as now she had nothing almost left, but to reign in their ashes; eare was soon lent therunto, and all suddenly turned topside-turvy; the noble Lord 91 eft-soones was blamed; the wretched people pittied; and new counsells plotted, in which it was concluded that a general pardon should be sent over to all that would accept of it, upon which all former purposes were blancked, the Governour at a bay, and not only all that great and long charge which shee had before beene at quite lost and cancelled, but also that hope of good which was even at the doore put back, and cleane frustrated. (432-33) The brutal slaughter of Munera accoutered in the superficies of chivalric enterprise becomes a self- incriminating apology, possibly even subconscious, for policy in Ireland. While posing as a romance knight, Artegall seems what he is--a Machiavellian captain overseeing his juggernaut war machine. The romance has gone out of combat, and the chivalric trappings prove insubstantial. Yet, as Michael West points out, the English were still using much of the hardware of chivalric warfare against the still less technologically sophisticated Irish: The guerilla warfare of the Irish marches made possible military anachronism that would have proved out of place in the increasingly mathematical siege warfare of the Lowlands. Spenser's nostalgia for the mounted knight obliquely reflects the essential backwardness of Elizabethan armies‘3among the last in Europe to abandon the lance. ("Art of War" 658-59) Therefore, while distinct changes in the procedures and codes governing war had occurred, just enough externals had remained the same to render convincing ruthless, calculating policy adorned in chivalric vestments. The Renaissance understanding of the trappings of knighthood as a veil for statecraft had made chivalry an 92 easy target for ridicule among continental authors. At the same time, because it was there more practicable, it continued to be held in relatively greater reverence in England. Therefore, Spenser can array the brutal treatment of Munera in chivalric vestments and try to cast it in the tradition of the noble deeds of the past, but, because times have changed, he cannot make it totally convincing. Thus, he is at times constrained to resort to mock-heroic and burlesque, despite his high esteem for chivalry itself. We learn from West that Spenser is incorporating Renaissance theories of aquatic combat in the battle between Artegall and Pollente. West notes illustrated in several 16th-century editions of Vegetius . . . . among some stunningly improbable engines for battering gates and lobbing projectiles, . . . a knight whose waterproof armor enables him not simply to swim but to engage in submarine warfare if desired. ("Swimming" 21) In medieval chivalric warfare, where the honor of the knight is based on his observance of protocol, the reliance on such unseemly gear and its associated stratagems would have seemed ludicrous. Although the longbow, perhaps the simplest medieval advancement in military technology, was immensely popular among the English, it was still a commoner's weapon, far beneath the knight's dignity. We note that it is never wielded by any of Malory's knights, while, on the other hand, Chaucer makes his ridiculous Sir Thopas "a good archeer" (l. 49). The French nobility disdained to acknowledge its usefulness, even after being 93 devastated by its application at Crécy in 1346. C. W. C. Oman comments that the French nobles, "unwilling, in the bitterness of their class pride, to ascribe the victory to the arms of mere peasants, . . . came to the conclusion that it was due to the stability of the phalanx of dismounted [English] knights" (129). Incredibly, the French again refused to take the point at Poitiers (1356), Agincourt (1415), Cravant (1423), Verneuil (1424), and the Day of the Herrings (1429), where, out of their insistence upon applying chivalric frontal attack strategies against archers, they were repeatedly trounced by the English. Oman states that the English longbow was "employed for the . . . end of terminating the ascendancy in war of the mailed horseman of the feudal regime,‘ a fact which, he speculates, would have "horrified" the Black Prince, had he realized it (116). While many Renaissance authors, including Spenser (EQ I.vii.13), condemn firearms as the devil's invention, Cervantes probably most poignantly highlights their incongruity with chivalric principles, and their destructive effects on the institution of knighthood. Don Quixote attacks them as the Cause that very often a cowardly base Hand takes away the Life of the bravest Gentleman; and that in the midst of that Vigour and Resolution which animates and inflames the Bold, a chance Bullet (shot perhaps by one who fled, and was frighted at the very Flash the mischievous Piece gave, when it went off) coming no Body knows how, or from whence, in a Moment puts a Period to the brave Designs and the Life of one that deserv'd to 94 have surviv'd many Years. (329) Malory appears to support this perspective in showing Mordred and his men alone using firearms, "grete gonnes," in battle (21.1). The continuing development of military technology, then, forced the transition from a practical and essential chivalry to an ideological and ornamental one. The aquatic combat in Spenser's bridge episode highlights the fundamental unseemliness of contorting the externals of ancient chivalry to accommodate new aims, tactics, and technology. As strategy and policy have gained the upper hand over honor and decorum, the poet finds that he must strain, sometimes to the point of absurdity, to clothe his matter in chivalric allegory. E. The Political Significance of Chivalry in The Morte Darthur Malory envisioned knighthood not as a cloak for government to masquerade in but as its very right arm. Knights were not mere courtiers but extensions of the king himself, agents acting on his behalf. The Morte Darthur bears out the idea that as long as Arthur's knights act consistently with the principles of chivalry, his kingdom will remain stable and prosper. But when the principles are not observed and the knights turn to self-interest, the kingdom is imperiled and finally collapses. The code of 95 chivalry and the aristocrats who uphold it are the mainstay of government--indeed, are the government. Ernst Kantorowicz explains that in late medieval England "the Crown was and remained a complex body, a body politic which was not separated from either its royal constituent as the head nor from those co-responsible for the status coronae as limbs" (382). This model was an elaboration of John of Salisbury, who, drawing upon Plutarch, specified: The place of the head in the body of the commonwealth is filled by the prince . . . The place of the heart is filled by the senate . . . The duties of eyes, ears, and tongue are claimed by the judges and the governors of provinces. Officials and soldiers correspond to the hands. (64-65) In The Morte Darthur, the agents most actively engaged in maintaining the realm--the right hand of the body politic, as it were--are the knights. We can see the proper valuation of the knight for this reason in Malory's contrasting examples of Arthur and Mark. Arthur, the good king, places his knights above his queen. He comments after Lancelot and Guenevere have left him: "More am I soryar for my good knyghtes losse than for the losse of my fayre quene; for quenys I myght haue inow, but such a felyship of good knyghtes shall never be togydirs in no company" (20.9). The greatness of Arthur's realm is contingent not solely upon his qualities as a ruler, but also upon the unprecedented company of peers he has assembled. Malory consistently 96 portrays Lancelot as Arthur's most valuable knight and the epitome of honorable knighthood. This portrayal is concentrated in Sir Ector's lamentation over his dead brother: A, Launcelot . . . 'thou were hede of al Crysten knyghtes. And now I dare say . . ., thou Sir Launcelot, there thou lyest, that thou were neuer matched of erthely hande. And thou were the curtest knyght that euer bare shelde; and thou were the truest frende to thy louar that euer bestrade hors; and thou were the trewest louer of a synful man that euer loued woman; and thou were the kyndest man that euer strake wyth swerde; and thou were the godelyest persone that euer cam emonge prees of knyghtes; and thou was the mekest man and the ientyllest that euer ete in hall emonge ladyes; and thou were the sternest knyght to thy mortal foo that euer put spere in the rest. (21.13) Arthur knows that the governance and continuation of his realm depends on good knights in his service, especially Lancelot--which is why he strives to ignore the adulterous goings on with Guenevere. It is plain that Arthur's knights are well aware of the liaison when Agravaine raises the subject in the king's absence. Nonetheless, Gawain, Gaheris, and Gareth will hear nothing of it--not because they do not believe it to be true but because they are loyal to Lancelot and realize his indispensability to the body politic. Gawain reminds Agravaine: "Ye must remember how oftymes Syr Launcelot hath rescowed the kynge and the queue. And the best of vs all had ben ful cold at the herte rote had not Sir Launcelot ben better than we, and that hath he preved hymself ful ofte" (20.1). Arthur enters just as the 97 dispute is coming to a contentious end. Gawain, Gareth, and Gaheris leave; then Agravaine and Mordred waste no time in renewing the topic with Arthur and offering, ostensibly out of righteous indignation, to catch the pair in the act. The king is strangely equivocal: "Yf hit be 300 . . . wete yow wel, he is none other; but I wold be lothe to begynne suche a thynge but I myght haue preues vpon hit" (20.2). Malory interjects an explanation that is especially relevant to our discussion: the kynge was ful lothe therto that ony noyse shold be vpon Syr Launcelot and his quene, for the kynge had a demynge, but he wold not here of hit. For Syr Launcelot had done soo moche for hym and the quene soo many tymes that, wete ye wel, the kynge loued hym passyngly wel. (20.2) Arthur's primary concern in the matter is not for his queen but for his best knight. When Mordred escapes with news that Lancelot has been caught in the queen's chamber, Arthur has no choice but to accept the evidence and render judgment. His great lament is not that he must have Guenevere burnt but that he has lost his best knight, which means the demise of his government: "Allas, me sore repenteth, sayd the kynge, that euer Syr Launcelot shold be ageynst me. Now I am sure that the noble felaushyp of the Round Table is broken foreuer, for with hym wille many a noble knyghte holde" (20.7). Arthur's forced judgment of the queen is the effective turning point in the demise of his kingdom, for it precipitates Lancelot's slaying of Gareth and Gaheris and his erection of what amounts to an 98 opposing government in exile at Joyous Gard. Although Arthur's attempt to burn Guenevere for her offense seems brutal, it is in keeping with medieval political theory; for a ruler was not to place his wife above his subjects in legal or political matters. John of Salisbury prescribed: "Princes should tolerate or remove the faults of their subjects" in the same way they would their wives, "for the bond which unites them is equal to or closer than conjugal affection" (264). Because Guenevere's adultery amounts to treason, Malory explains that "there shold be none other remedy but dethe" (20.7).14 Aegidius Romanus also warned of the perils of princely uxoriousness: "If a king were jealous of his wife, he would be apt to become involved with his own problems and neglect the more important ones, those of his kingdom" (E. Kennedy 194). Mark, Malory's contrasting example of a vicious and irresponsible ruler, conducts himself in exactly the opposite way toward his queen and his best knight. Mark comments, "I may not love Sire Trystram, bycause he louyth my quene and my wyf, La Beale Isode" (10.51). Yet it is clear that the welfare of Cornwall has been almost exclusively due to Tristram. None of the worthless Cornish knights is able to stand up to Marhalt, the Irish champion whom King Angwysshe has sent to collect the seven years' tribute owed by Mark. It is clear that without an effective fellowship of knights Mark is helpless as a ruler. He is further handicapped by the fact that Marhalt is a member of 99 the Round Table; therefore, he cannot borrow one of Arthur's able knights to fight for him. In this critical hour enters Tristram, a young unknown who has been living in France (and, unbeknownst to Mark at this point, is his very nephew). Mark promptly knights him, sets him to the task, and Tristram conquers but is gravely wounded with a poisoned sword. At this stage Mark properly recognizes the value of his best knight and acts accordingly. He is "passynge heuy" for his wounded nephew (20.8) and does everything in his power to save him. Malory even has Mark personally arrange the means for Tristram to go to Ireland and be healed at the place where "the venym came fro" (20.8). In Malory's 15 It source, Mark has nothing to do with this process. seems that the author is striving at this point to show that Mark realizes Tristram's value to his realm and is loyally committed to him.16 The relationship between king and knight deteriorates quickly, however, and Malory pointedly makes the object of contention a woman. When Tristram returns to Tintagel, Mark is "passyng glad," but presently "there befelle a ialousye and an vnkyndenes betwyxe Kynge Marke and Sir Tristram. For they loued both one lady, and she was an erles wyf that hyght Syre Segwarydes" (8.13). This situation sets the pattern for the rest of the story as Malory recasts it. Mark tries to kill Tristram in an ambush, and thereafter secretly hates and tries to destroy him on account of two women--first Segwarides' wife, then Isolde. Not having 100 recognized his nocturnal assailant, Tristram is long unaware of this animosity. These facts provide for strong dramatic irony when Mark comes to the bedside of his best knight, whom he has failed to kill: And 800 the kynge askaunce came to Sir Tristram to comfort hym as he laye seke in his bedde. But as longe as Kynge Marke lyued, he loued neuer Sire Trystram after that; though there was fayre speche, loue was there none. (8.14) Even Mark's sending of Tristram to Ireland for Isolde is calculated to destroy him. Mark finally succeeds. Lancelot recounts that whanne by meanes of treatyce Syr Tristram brought ageyne La Beale Isoude vnto Kynge Mark from onous Gard . . . . that fals traitour Kyng Marke slewe hym. As he sat harpynge afore his lady La Beale Isoud, with a groundyn glayue1be threst him in behynde to the herte. (20.6) Lancelot points up the reason for the grievousness of Tristram's murder: "for alle the world may not fynde suche a knyghte." This is a fact of prime importance of which Mark has been unappreciative, a failure that has brought shame upon him and made him an ineffectual ruler. Bors is quick to observe: "Kynge Arthur and Kyng Marke were neuer lyke of condycyons" (20.6). The knights of the Round Table consider Mark "the shamfullist kynge that is now lyuynge, for he is a grete enemy to alle good knyghtes" (10.8). His refusal consistently to treat Tristram as part of the body politic has nullified his status as a ruler. At one point, having lhungled an attempt to kill Tristram by himself, he commands 101 his bystanding knights: "I charge you, sle this traytowrel" (8.32). But the narrator recounts, "There was nat one that wolde meve for his wordys." Later, after Tristram has escaped from Mark's prison and taken Isolde to England with him, a knight18 brings news "that Kynge Marke is put in pryson by his owne knyghtes, and alle was for loue of Sire Tristram" (10.53). It is clear that Mark has lost control because he has attempted to act independent of the body politic, and, to follow the metaphor, the limbs have turned against the head. The king has been brought to nothing through his attempts to act absolutely and for his private interest, the marks of a tyrant in fifteenth-century political theory.19 As Elizabeth T. Pochoda observes, Mark has dealt similarly in murdering his own brother, Bodwyne, who delivered the realm from a Saracen invasion. "The consequence of Mark's behavior is that the best knights leave his kingdom, thus exposing it to both internal and external threats" (99). Arthur, on the other hand, does all in his power to retain good knights and uses them in governing his realm. Returning to the code of chivalry in Book 3, we see that Arthur assigns his knights peacekeeping and judicial duties, and in return they receive "londes," "worship," and "lordship of Kyng Arthur" (15). In the pages of Malory we witness Arthur's knights regularly carrying out tasks of this nature. Beverly Kennedy notes that Lancelot acts as one of Arthur's chief counselors along with Beaudoin 102 of Bretaygne, who later becomes vice-regent (196). Kennedy also observes that Lancelot acts as the king's justiciar when he authoritatively overrides local mob justice to free Palomides from twelve knights whose lord he has accidentally killed in a tournament (197; 10.84-85). For Malory, then, Arthurian knighthood was a working model of a just, effective government. It could be so, however, only as long as the members of the body politic upheld the standards of chivalry, as embodied in the code. When these standards are ignored or overshadowed by self-interest, the ties that bind and harmonize government and society quickly dissolve. As D. S. Brewer puts it, "When the honourable are not good, and when law becomes an instrument of revenge, when loyalties clash and good men are at odds, then treachery flourishes. The bonds of society fall apart and chaos is come again" (Introduction 30). This is the Arthurian tragedy. Pochoda insists that Malory, in showing the demise of Arthur's realm, is exposing the inadequacy of chivalry as a model for government in his present (104). Rather, I hold, Malory was presenting the final failure of Arthur and his knights to adhere to the high standards of chivalry as a warning to his present, a time when knighthood was loosely practiced, and self- interest and divisiveness were rampant. Chivalry was to Malory far from outmoded and was not yet a solely literary ideal. As Ferguson argues, it was really the only available Option in terms of secular political ideals: 103 Both Malory and Caxton sought to recall the laggard knights of England to their "high order" by the example of their ancestors. But this could not be taken to mean, as has frequently been the case, that they, and presumably the generation of Englishmen to whom and for whom they may be considered to have spoken, were harking back to a society and a culture they knew to be gone forever. Like Stephen Hawes, who also hoped to restore the "flower of chivalry," they hoped to "Renew that [which] hath been long decayed," not that which hath been long dead. The fact is, they did not need to look backward to find chivalry. It was all around them. Their tone is hortatory, rather than elegiac. The chivalric tradition may have needed revitalizing, much as the religious life of the community did in those days; but on neither account did fifteenth-century Englishmen have any real choice. As far as their secular values were concerned, chivalry was all they had. (Chivalric Tradition 21) F. Spenser's Transformation of the Chivalric Ideal As we have already seen, however, a major change was just around the corner, fostered by the nascent Tudor humanism, as well as by Tudor policy. Ferguson cites some trends underway by the 1530s: For diplomatic purposes, chivalry could in fact provide little more than a front, a familiar and cherished myth capable for a while of glossing over the Machiavellian realities . .f. . To the other problems becoming critical in that period, in the church, in the constitution, and in the countryside, chivalry had really nothing to say. Humanism, not chivalry, was to provide the language of public discussion during the critical years of social change in the thirties and forties. By the same toke [sic], chivalric themes and modes of expression were being diluted by those borrowed . . . from classical antiquity. (45-46) The new diplomatic form which chivalry took was also 104 encouraged by the reign of Henry VII, whose vigorous managerial style of politics has been recognized as constituting a turning point in English governmental policy (Grant 46-50). As R. L. Storey points out, "After his statesmanship had matured in 1492 . . . Henry VII turned his back on the chimera of military glory" (214). This sort of trade-off contributed to the development of chivalry as less practically essential, more symbolic and decorative. Furthermore, chivalry and its literature in general, and The Morte Darthur in particular, had come under attack by humanist scholars. More's Utopians disdained war, the source of chivalric honor, "as an activity fit only for beasts," considering "nothing so inglorious as the glory won in battle" (71). Erasmus, in his Enchiridion militis Christiani, substituted an ideal of spiritual knighthood and warfare for its military counterpart (Adams 30). And Roger Ascham singled out The Morte Darthur as particularly idle and harmful, although still only one tenth as bad as "these bookes, made in Italie, and translated in England" (231): In our forefathers tyme, whan Papistrie, as a standyng poole, couered and ouerflowed all England, fewe bookes were read in our tong, sauyng certaine bookes of Cheualrie, as they sayd, for pastime and pleasure, which, as some say, were made in Monasteries, by idle Monkes, or wanton Chanons: as one for example, Morte Arthure: the whole pleasure of which booke standeth in two speciall poyntes, in open mans slaughter, and bold bawdrye: In which booke those be counted the noblest Knightes, that do kill most men without any quarell, and commit fowlest aduoulteries by sutlest shiftes . . . ‘(230-31) 105 That chivalry was no longer a viable code for governing the state, and that its literature had come under censure from some of the foremost intellectuals of the time, no doubt encouraged Spenser to transcend its external and literal aspects in order to treat it as a network of symbols embodying moral and spiritual values. By doing so, the poet revitalized chivalric romance for the educated classes of his time. R. S. Crane comments: The most important result of the rejection of the romances by the leaders of Elizabethan letters and their increasing relegation to a somewhat humble public was to limit seriously their influence on current literature. (24) Spenser and Sidney, however, showed that the chivalric romance harbored great possibilities for a new era, in which chivalry was no longer the only, or even a viable, option for running the state. Spenser's knight is no more an exemplar to be literally emulated; he is a symbol of a specific virtue, an Everyman figure in quest of salvation. His weapons, his quest, his setting, and his enemies all take on a highly figurative significance which, with the qualified exception of the Tale of the Sank real, they 20 In this way, generally lacked in The Morte Darthur. whereas The Morte Darthur had been a sort of handbook for shaping the practical conduct of the nobility, The Faerie Queene became a handbook for shaping the moral and spiritual consciousness of the equivalent class. The highly charged symbolism of numerous elements in 106 Spenser's poem gathers around them manifold associations that simply did not exist in Malory and that are not as profuse in any medieval chivalric romance. Michael Leslie reveals the significations of the shields belonging to various knights in the poem. Some of these shields take their attributes from those possessed by Malory's knights, but, as we shall see, their symbolic associations expand in the process of reapplication. In The Mogte Darthur, King Evelake owns a shield which originally bore a crucifix, by means of which he once miraculously overcame King Tolleme: For whanne Euelake was in the batail, there was a clothe sette afore the sheld, and whanne he was in the grettest perylle he lete putte awaye the clothe, and thenne his enemyes sawe a fygur of a man on the crosse, wherethurgh they alle were discomfyte. (13.10) Sometime following this event, the crucifix mysteriously disappears, which moves Evelake and many of his subjects to undergo baptism. Joseph of Arimathea later restores the cross with "his own blood," predicting that "it [the cross of blood] shall be alweyes as freshe as it is now," and that none should be able to bear it until Galahad, who "shall do many merueyllous dedes" (13.11). Spenser transfers one aspect of this marvelous shield to that of Red Cross Knight and another to that of Arthur. Rather than mysterious but essentially literal ggmiga, as in Malory, the shield and its emblem become expressive symbols 21 of Redcrosse's piety and aspiration toward holiness. The "bloudie Crosse" on both "his shield" and "his brest" are 107 for "the deare remembrance of his dying Lord" and "for soueraine hope, which in his helpe he had" (I.i.2). Arthur's shield of adamant, on the other hand, like Evelake's, "all closely couer'd was" (I.vii.33.1): The same to wight he neuer wont disclose, But when as monsters huge he would dismay, Or daunt vnequall armies of his foes, Or when the flying heauens he would affray (I.vii.34.1-4) Arthur vanquishes not physical but spiritual enemies by means of his shield, which comes to symbolize the power of grace over sin. When Arthur is fighting Orgoglio, the veil falls from the shield "by chaunce . . . / The light whereof, that heauens light did pas, / Such blazing brightnesse through the aier threw, / That eye mote not the same endure to vew" (I.viii.19.2-5). This immediately incapacitates Orgoglio, who is a projection of the personal sin which has enthralled Redcrosse. The giant "has read his end / In that bright shield, and all their forces spend / Themselves in vaine: for since that glauncing sight, / He hath no powre to hurt, nor to defend" (viii.21.4-7). The makeup and condition of Arthur's and Redcrosse's shields is symbolically significant. On Redcrosse's "siluer shielde" are seen "old dints of deepe wounds . . . / The cruell marks of many'a bloudy fielde" (I.i.1.2-4). Upton has commented on the broad application of this symbolism to the individual Christian: "Those old dints have been made by the fiery darts of the wicked: and this panoply has been 1 ".|—_-~ 108 worn by every Christian man in every age" (Hamilton 49). Arthur's shield is consciously contrasted with Redcrosse's battered shield: Not made of steele, nor of enduring bras, Suche earthly mettals soone consumed bene: But all of Diamond perfect pure and cleene It framed was, one massie entire mould, Hewen out of Adamant rocke with engines keene, That point of speare it neuer percen could, Ne dint of direfull sword diuide the substance (I.vii.33.3-9) [would. Leslie compares the symbolic value of Arthur's shield with that of Redcrosse's: Arthur's diamond shield is superior to that of the Red Cross Knight as Christ is superior to the Christian soldier. Spenser may well intend us to recognise as much as a result of the reference to 'Adamant rock': the Latin adamas is obviously suitable for puns on the relationship between St. George, as the 'old Adam', and his saviour or redeemer Prince Arthur as the new. Indeed Spenser may be suggesting that Arthur is associated with Christ in his initial lines on the shield, where the insistent negative applied to 'earthly mettals' pliSes diamond in the heavenly sphere . . . (17) Malory relies on the widely accepted historicity of his knights for the authority of his examples; also, as we have seen, his examples of knighthood in action were shaped by the conditions of his day, and they literally shaped aristocratic conduct. Spenser, on the other hand, is not interested in reviving chivalry for its practical value, but sees in it a wealth of moral and spiritual symbolism capable of shaping and stabilizing the humanistic and Protestant values of his day--precisely that for which scholars like 109 Ascham contended it was unsuitable. Spenser's treatment of chivalry is no longer dependent on the credibility of the legends or the practical efficacy of knighthood but taps directly into the romantic and symbolic revival of chivalry under the Tudors. Each author, however, is in an analogous manner striving to cultivate his own ideal of virtue through a portrayal of knights and knighthood, and in this feature Spenser has obviously drawn much inspiration from Malory. We can also see a distinct correspondence in the moral dichotomy between characters in the two works. What Vinaver says about Malory's handling of the Tristram section generally applies to the rest of his tales, and also to Spenser's poem: "He insists on making his heroes uniformly happy and, like the French prose-writer, builds their happiness on a wholesale condemnation of their enemies" (Commentary 1445). For Malory, this black-and-white depiction of characters sprang from "his strong sense of the value of chivalry as the noblest human institution" (1446). The comparable tendency in Spenser arises from his nationalism, his religious convictions, and his political views, all of which he had found could be transmitted powerfully and effectively through chivalric symbolism. CHAPTER FOUR The Arthur of Malory and Spenser A. A Brief Survey of Scholarship The Arthur of The Faerie Queene has received relatively little attention due to the opinions of prominent critics such as Richard Hurd, Thomas Warton, R. E. N. Dodge, W. L. Renwick, and J. W. Bennett that Arthur was a superfluous add-on to the poem.1 This may seem odd in light of the fact that Spenser specifically states, "In the person of Prince Arthur I sette forth magnificence in particular, which vertue . . . is the perfection of all the rest" (Letter 737). Ronald Arthur Horton, in his 1978 summary of critical opinions on the relationship of the Letter to Raleigh to the poem, cites "the limited role of Arthur" as one of the three "most serious and persistent" objections to the letter as a reliable guide: "The impression that The Faerie Queene is not really about Arthur has caused many critics to dispense with the explanation offered in the Letter" (9). Charles Bowie Millican, in 1932, made a substantial contribution to our understanding of the importance of the Arthurian legend to Spenser's poem, and, since that time, several other critics have built on Millican's work to expose dimensions of Arthur's centrality to the poem. Edwin Greenlaw (1932) and, more recently, Michael Leslie (1983) 110 111 and A. Kent Hieatt (1988) have shown the historically and politically allegorical significance of Arthur in the poem. None until Hieatt, however, has given any serious consideration to the influence of Malory's King Arthur upon Spenser's Prince Arthur. Millican, in fact, at the outset quotes Lillian Winstanley's statement that Ascham probably "'dissuaded or helped to dissuade Spenser from making much use of Malory's Morte d'Arthure'" (3), and he gives virtually no attention to the Arthur of Malory in his book. Hieatt, whose argument I discuss in this chapter, is the first to build any kind of case for the debt of Spenser's Arthur to Malory's. While I am indebted to Millican, Greenlaw, Leslie, and Hieatt for my rendering of the present topic, this chapter is, to the best of my knowledge, the first focused study of the influence of Malory's Arthur in particular on Spenser's Arthur. B. Spenser's Arthur as an Intertextual Construct Spenser indicates in his Letter to Raleigh that his purpose in portraying Arthur is twofold, in emulation of the great "poets historicall": to represent both "a good gouernour and a vertuous man" (737). Having embraced this twofold purpose, the author projects a change of emphasis between the two large divisions of his work. The second part of his great romance-epic he never achieved, let alone finishing the first. He describes the Arthur of the first 112 twelve books as "the image of a braue knight, perfected in the twelue priuate morall vertues." Prince Arthur, then, is primarily Arthur the "vertuous man." Spenser's portrayal of King Arthur, contingent upon the favorable reception of the first twelve books, is to be of "the other part of polliticke vertues in his person," i.e., "a good gouernour." Spenser has chosen Arthur for his epic purposes because he envisions him as the closest native parallel to the epic heroes of Homer and Virgil. He enumerates as his reasons "the excellency of his person" and his distance "from the daunger of enuy, and suspition of present time." These are . obvious qualifications necessary for an epic hero and will not be the focus of my discussion. A particular advantage of Arthur as a choice is that, as Spenser mentions, he has already been "made famous by many mens former workes." Spenser, unlike Homer and to a greater extent than Virgil, worked from written texts. His hero was already an intertextual construct, which he incorporated into his own intertext. Hence, readers' recognition of Arthur in Thg_ Faerie Queene as "a good gouernour and a vertuous man" was vitally determined by Arthurian texts and traditions extraneous to the poem itself. This fact becomes especially important when we recognize that Spenser, like Arthurian writers before him, was depicting Arthur in both exemplary and allegorical modes. Although Arthur had been recast for political purposes by almost every author prior to Spenser who had treated him, 113 The Morte Darthur epitomized the portrayal of Arthur as a model for rulers and went further than most in making Arthur an historically allegorical figure.2 While Spenser takes most of his specifically Arthurian material from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, these two key strategies which the poet uses are patently Malorian. Furthermore, for contemporary readers of The Faerie Queene the most familiar context for understanding and visualizing the figure of Arthur would have been The Morte Darthur. As Ascham complained, "I know, when God's Bible was banished the Court, and Morte Arthure receiued into the Princes chamber" (231). In 1579 Nathaniel Baxter, Philip Sidney's tutor, expressed his disapproval of the "reading of vile and blasphemous, or at least of prophane and frivolous bokes, such as are that infamous K. Arthur (which with shame inough I heare to be newly imprinted)" (Gaines 11). It was one of the few medieval romances which continued to be reprinted well into the English Renaissance.3 We find a number of strikingly close parallels between Caxton's version of Malory's Roman War Story in Book 5, and Arthur's interventions on behalf of Mercilla and Belge in Book V of The Faerie Queene. In the Roman War Story, Arthur's realm is threatened by a world power which demands his recognition in the form of tribute. In the two episodes in Spenser, on the other hand, Arthur intervenes on behalf of others. The similarity lies in the fact that the threat is an oppressive world power and that Arthur, in conquering, 114 installs justice and attains a greatness suggesting or realizing empire. While the Roman War Story is found in earlier accounts originating in Geoffrey of Monmouth, Malory's version is unique in that Arthur retains the great empire which he justly conquers, and in that the conquest takes place early in his career. In other accounts-- Geoffrey, Layamon, wace, the Prose Brut, and Malory's major source, the Alliterative Morte Arthure--Arthur's conquest of Rome takes place just prior to the last battle, in which his entire kingdom disintegrates. Just as Rome is within his grasp, he receives the fateful news from England that Mordred has usurped his throne and forced Guenevere to marry him. In the Alliterative Mggtg the moral implications are made especially clear. Arthur has gone too far--his lust for empire has resulted in the destruction of his proper kingdom.4 In The Morte Darthur, by contrast, Arthur's conquests and hegemony are legitimated and established. As Arthur strides triumphantly eastward he delivers the oppressed rather than becoming increasingly oppressive, as he does in 5 When he arrives in Rome, instead the Alliterative gorge. of learning of chaos at home and being forced to rush back, he is magisterially "crouned Emperour by the Popes hand, with all the ryalte that coude be made" (5.12). Afterward, he remains in Rome for a time to install a just and stable government throughout his newly attained empire: [Arthur] establysshed all his londes from Rome 115 into Fraunce, and gaf londes and royammes vnto his seruauntes and knyghtes, to eueryche after his desert, in suche wyse that none complayned, ryche ne poure. (5.12) When all is to his satisfaction and he decides to return home, he is "nobly receyued of alle his commyns in euery cyte and burgh, and grete yeftes presented to hym at his homecomyng to welcome hym with." How completely different is this ending from any other surviving account of the story. The only remote equivalent is Hardyng's Chronicle, in which Arthur is "crowned . . . with crownes thre of gold / As emperoure moste principall" (145). But Hardyng's Arthur, much as in the other accounts apart from Malory's, must after a mere winter in Rome return "home in hast" in a vain and fatal attempt to quell domestic chaos (145-47). Far from a beleaguered, tottering, would-be emperor or an overreaching tyrant, Malory's Arthur is a just, benevolent, virile ruler who has fittingly been promoted to world emperor. How could a poet wishing preferment from a monarch in the process of acquiring an empire resist such a story as this? The accounts of Prince Arthur's interventions on behalf of Mercilla and Belge are close to the Roman War Story in spirit and details. The Romans in Malory's version have had a long record of oppressiveness. King Angwysshe counsels Arthur to refuse them the recognition of renewing the tribute because "when they regned on vs they destressyd oure elders and putte this land to grete extorcions and taylles" 116 (5.2). Furthermore, Rome is presented as, if not pagan itself, closely allied with the pagan nations which the Emperor Lucius summons to his aid, along with "fyfty geaunts, whiche had be engendred of fendys" to serve as his shock troops and personal bodyguards (5.2). The threats in both of Spenser's episodes are allegories for the foremost "pagan" (i.e. Roman Catholic) oppressive empire on the Elizabethan horizon--Spain. Therefore, as Hieatt speculates, "Spenser would have been grateful to know that [Malory's] Lucius is supported by many thousands of Spaniards" (184). Mercilla, "a mayden Queene" (viii.17.2), is menaced by the Sultan, a "miscreaunt" who "neither hath religion nor fay, / But makes his God of his vngodly pelfe, / And Idoles serues" (19.6-8) and who "with most fell despight and deadly hate, / Seekes to subuert her Crowne and dignity" (18.3-4). Similarly, Geryoneo, upon having gained all of the widow Belge's wealth by pretending to be her champion, . . . gan forth from that howre To stirre up strife, and many a Tragicke stowre, Giuing her dearest children one by one Vnto a dreadfull Monster to deuoure, And setting up an Idole of his owne, The image of his monstrous parent Geryone. (x.13.4-9) As the Arthur of the Roman War Story is the just and welcome conqueror, and liberator of the oppressed, so is the Arthur who intervenes on behalf of Mercilla and Belge. In this, he stands in sharp contrast to his foes. When 117 Enanllory's Arthur is encamped in Champagne, two messengers, "of whome that one was Marchal of Fraunce," bear him tidings '“t:]nat th'Emperour was entryd into Fraunce and had destroyed a grete parte, and was in Burgoyn, and had destroyed and made grete slaughter of peple, and brente townes and borowes" (5.2). The messengers plead urgently for Arthur's intervention: "Yf thou come not hastely, they must yelde up illneir bodyes and goodes." Belge renders to Arthur a similar picture of the destruction of her realm by Geryoneo: Are not all places full of forraine poures? My pallaces possessed of my foe, My cities sackt, and their sky-threating towres Raced, and made smooth fields now full of flowres? (X. 23.2.5) VVhen Malory's Arthur takes the city of Urbino, he orders "that none of his lyege men shold defoule ne lygge by no Zlady, wyf, ne maide" (5.12). Going beyond mere protection (:f the conquered, he "comforted them that were in sorou, and ordeyned ther a captayn." As Spenser's Arthur faces the Sultan in his "charret hye,6 / . . . arm'd dreadfully, / And drawne of cruell Esteedes" (viii.28.4-6), the narrator lays bare their <:ontrasting motives: Thus goe they both together to their geare, With like fierce minds, but meanings different: For the proud Souldan with presumpteous cheare, And countenance sublime and insolent, Sought onely slaughter and auengement: But the braue Prince for honour and for right, Gainst tortious powre and lawlesse regiment, In the behalfe of wronged weake did fight: More in his causes truth he trusted then in might. 118 (viii.30) When Arthur destroys Geryoneo he refuses any reward from Belge on the grounds that "vertue selfe . . . her reward doth pay" (xi.17.9). Belge then implores him to go even further: "Till ye haue rooted all the relickes out / Of that Vilde race, and stablished my peace" (18.6-7). It would be hard to imagine a more welcome conqueror. Finally, there is a resemblance between two of the accounts in that both Arthurs are named by the titles of the ‘Vranquished. While Malory's Arthur attains emperorship, EBpenser's Arthur, in his duel with the Sultan, is ssuggestively referred to as "infant" (viii.41.2),7 the ESpanish title for Prince Philip, whom the Sultan in his "charret hye" plainly represents. Although the narratorial conferring of title does not culminate in imperial dominion for Spenser's Arthur, as it does for Malory's, it appears to foreshadow it. And imperial status is portended even more strongly in the Belge episode, where Arthur is offered the territory he has retaken for her but magnanimously refuses it (xi.16.8-9;17). As Hamilton notes here, "Arthur's refusal reflects Elizabeth's" to receive sovereignty of the Netherlands (605 ) . That Elizabeth is represented at least partially by the allegorical Arthur here is indicated by Britomart's revelation in Merlin's cave. Merlin prophesies: Then shall a royall virgin raine, which shall Stretch her white rod ouer the Belgicke shore, 119 And the great Castle smite so sore with all, That it shall make him shake, and shortly learne to The "great Castle" to be smitten is, like the Sultan, a representation of Philip II. As Hamilton points out, "In 1irnee Dedicatory Sonnet to Lord Howard, S[penser] refers to titlee Spanish Armada as 'those huge castles of the Castilian king'" (334). Spenser, it seems, is not the only author who Elillegorizes a conquering English monarch in his presentation <>dE Arthur. Vinaver argues that Malory goes out of his way tZt: remind readers of Henry V in recounting Arthur's continental exploits. Much as Arthur is honorably received and crowned in Rome, . . . Henry V . . . was once acclaimed in his former enemy's capital as a victor and was, in the words of the 'Bourgeois de Paris', moult joyeusement gtfihonorablement receu. The French king himself-—Charles VI--had agreed by the Treaty of Troyes to let Henry V succeed him on his death. In the meantime Henry V had married Charles VI's daughter and taken possession of the Louvre and the Bastille. Not only in the eyes of Charles VI, but in those of the authorities and part of the population Henry V was virtually king of France. He died in 1422, two months before Charles VI, and so never received the French crown, but his infant son, Henry VI, was then proclaimed king simultaneously in England and France and crowned in Notre Dame in 1430 by Bishop Beaufort. All this seems to point irresistibly to the conclusion that the happy ending of Malory's story was calculated to make it appear as something more significant than a mere record of the rise and fall of a legendary kingdom. (Commentary 1368)8 BdEllory has even "altered his source so as to make Arthur's Zicaurney across the Continent resemble Henry V's itinerary" 120 (1 368, cf. 1396-97). Nellie Slayton Aurner has seen even more extensive allegorical connections running through the entire Me Darthgr. "In general features," she claims, the personality and career of Henry IV, Henry V, and Henry VI correspond respectively to (1) the Arthur of the first three books, (2) the Arthur of book four extending through to the Grail section, and (9) the Arthur of the post-Grail period. (367) There is no evidence that Spenser recognized any of illnese correspondences, but neither is it inconceivable that Ilse might have. He no doubt saw, however, that his own IPwolitical allegory favoring foreign conquest and domestic Stability would be more greatly enhanced by Malory's version ‘c>f the Roman War Story than by other extant versions. Iiieatt sets forth some compelling evidence that Spenser intended in his second twelve books to go beyond the early Jrumblings of foreign conquest seen in Prince Arthur's (exploits, to present a King Arthur who actually conquers Ikome. While browsing through the ancient tomes in the ZLibrary of Alma's castle, Arthur chances upon "an ancient lbooke, hight Briton moniments" (II.ix.59.6), which traces t:he line of British kings from Brutus to Uther Pendragon-- dL.e., up to Arthur himself, who was destined to consolidate Jrule for the first time under "one mans gouernments" (59.9). flPhe narrator's strategy in this section is not to recount lirince Arthur's precise reading of the chronicle, but to Summarize and comment on it for the "soueraine Queene" who is Arthur's descendant (x.4). 121 When the narrator comes to the place where Caesar achieves conquest over Britain through the treachery of Androgeous, he provides a bit of proleptic commentary to which Prince Arthur is not privy: Thenceforth this land was tributarie made T'ambitious Rome, and did their rule obay, Till Arthur all that reckoning defrayd; Yet oft the Briton kings against them strongly EIdLeatt bases his argument that Spenser's King Arthur would, after the manner of Malory's Arthur, conquer Rome on the Eitense of the word "defrayd" used here. In Malory's Roman War Story, Arthur pays the demanded tribute in a macabre Coin of corpses. He has the bodies of Lucius, nineteen foreign kings, and sixty senators placed in coffins, and