Spensieran Love and Sexuality: Classical Substructures in The Faerie Queene 1/3

Professor Leah Whittington

Paper #1: The Faerie Queen

By Bledar Blake Zenuni

Spenserian Love and Sexuality:

Classical Substructures in The Faerie Queene

Classicizing Elements in Spenser’s Ontology of Love and Sex

English 985lw: Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the Renaissance Imagination

Harvard University, Fall 2013

Shortly after the publication of The Faerie Queene Books I-III in 1590, Edmund Spenser addressed the question of his work’s intent: “the generall end therefore of all the booke,” he wrote to Sir Walter Raleigh,  “is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline”. In the next sentence of the letter, Spenser further explains that he chose to write this epic, “being coloured with an historicall fiction”, because his audience—ideally everyone who could read and write, but probably only the nobility in the late 16^th century—will enjoy reading it.[1] To Spenser, fiction is both what people take pleasure in reading and a means to educate.  Therefore, although Spenser’s concept of “fashioning a gentleman” raises difficult political and moral questions, (as does the question ‘what does it mean to be a nobleman?’), The Faerie Queene, widely popular in Queen Elizabeth’s court and all of England, is nonetheless able to captivate its intended audience because it is a work of colorful, ‘historicall’ fiction. [Emphasis added].

As a consequence of enthralling people who read it, The Faerie Queene incrementally educates line-by-line, verse-by-verse, canto-by-canto, and book-by-book. In particular, in Books I-III Spenser would like to educate the reader on one of the most taboo and controversial topics of his day: the dynamics between love and sexuality. To take the most obvious allegorical examples, Book III is dedicated to the heroine female Knight of Chastity, Britomart, who appears to promote chastity as a virtue within marriage. Britomart is chastity itself, a virgin who loves the knight Arthegall faithfully, as she endures the trials and tribulations of her quest so that she may find Arthegall, marry him, and then lose her virginity to found a dynasty, thereby preserving her chastity through regeneration. Book II is dedicated to Guyon, the Knight of Temperance, as he struggles against temptations and ultimately succeeds in destroying the Bower of Bliss, an artificial garden harboring unrestrained lust and the sexually deviant Acrasia. In Book I, the Knight of Holiness, Redcrosse, commits a most grievous sin by first abandoning Una, or Truth, and then having sex with Duessa, or Duplicity; Redcrosse is subsequently severely weakened, making him easy prey for the giant Orgoglio, or Pride. By presenting vastly different episodes of love and sexuality in Books I-III, Spenser’s sexual politics in The Faerie Queene, remain a matter for considerable debate.

However, in every major encounter with love and sex presented to the knights of Books I-III, classical figures, ideas, or myths appear. In Book III, for instance, the goddesses Venus and Diana are central to how chastity and love are presented. In Book II, when Guyon enters the Bower of Bliss he can’t help but be almost spellbound by the ivory gate with reliefs from the story of Jason and Medea, let alone the beautiful meadow compared to Rhodope, Tempe, Ida and Parnassus. In Book I, Redcrosse encounters numerous captives, once powerful and mighty, from classical antiquity in the House of Pride; he escapes immediately, only to have sex with Duessa and drink from a cursed fountain that renders him too weak to defeat Orgoglio. In Books I-III, then, one way of making sense of Spenser’s ontology of love and sex is to look at how Spenser uses classical elements to create paradigms of understanding what sexuality means, and how the paradigms change or evolve throughout the first three books. In Books I and II, classical elements are harbingers of a demoralizing, destructive, and deadly force of sexuality, but in Book III Spenser presents something all too different; instead of equating classical figures and the ideas they embody with destructive sex, Spenser classicizes love; love is a means to reproduce, just as the sexual activity between Venus and Adonis is necessary to sustain creation, so too must Britomart fulfill her quest in order to engage in sexual activity with Arthegall to found a dynastic line that will sustain all of England.

Redcrosse, Una and Duessa: How Classical Figures Are Warnings Against Sex

In Book 1, Spenser uses classical elements, both from the Virgilian epic Aeneid and classical mythology, to define what his own epic has to say about love and sex. Spenser begins the opening lines of Book I by invoking the Aeneid. Structurally, the opening of the Aeneid serves as a model for the Faerie Queene, for the Aeneid begins with the lines: “I am he who once turned my song on a slender oaten reed… but now I sing of the terrible arms of Mars and the hero”; Book I’s opening lines echo not only the words, but also the pattern established by Virgil of a movement from pastoral to epic poetry:

            

“Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske,

            As time her taught in lowly Shepheards weeds,

            Am now enforst a far unfitter taske,

            And sing of Knights and Ladies Gentle deeds" (1 i 1-6)

            

Spenser relies on Virgil’s classical model so that he can use it to build his own. When he introduces Duessa, Spenser again borrows from the Virgilian classical substructure, for Duessa’s descent to the underworld in canto v borrows heavily, both in detail and in style, from the episode when Aeneas descends to Hades in Aeneid 6. But before Duessa descends to the underworld, Redcrosse is tricked by a false vision, implanted in him by Archimago, of Una, his one true love, having sex with a squire. He then deserts Una and meets up with Duessa. Shortly after, Duessa takes Redcrosse to Lucifera’s House of Pride where he encounters numerous figures from classical antiquity. These figures are arguably meant to be immediate red flags for Redcrosse, since their tragic flaws landed them there in the first place. In Canto v, some of the following captives Redcrosse encounters were once the most proud men of the classical era:

“All these together in one heape were throwne,

            Like carkases of beasts in butchers stall.,

            And in another corner wide were strowne,

            The Antique ruins of the Romanes fall,

            Great Romulus the Grandsyre of them all,

            Proud Tarquin, and too lordly Lentulus,

            Stout Scipio, and stubborne Hanniball,

            Ambitious Sylla, and sterne Marius,

 High Caesar, great Pompey, and fers Antonius.” (1 v 49)

Such figures are all lumped together for Redcrosse to observe, which should lead him to question his relationship with Duessa because she brought him there in the first place. It is clear that this episode is a warning to Redcrosse to either get out of the House of Pride, or risk being chained along with the rest of the captives; it is only with the aide of Una’s dwarf, however, that Redcrosse is able to escape by sneaking out the back way.

Word Count: 1187

---

[1] Spenser, Edmund, A. C. Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita, and Toshiyuki Suzuki. The Faerie Qveene. "Letter to Sir Walter Raleigh”, pp. 713-718.