Allegory, Space and the Material World in the Writings of Edmund Spenser (Studies in Renaissance Literature)

Allegory, Space and the Material World in the Writings of Edmund Spenser Christopher Burlinson Studies in Renaissance Literature

Studies in Renaissance Literature Volume 17

ALLEGORY, SPACE AND THE MATERIAL WORLD IN THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND SPENSER

This book provides a radical reassessment of Spenserian allegory, in particular of Spenser’s poem, The Faerie Queene, in the light of contemporary historical and theoretical interests in space and material culture. It explores the ambiguous and fluctuating attention to materiality, objects, and substance in the poetics of The Faerie Queene, and discusses the way that Spenser’s creation of allegorical meaning makes use of this materiality, and transforms it. It suggests further that a critical engagement with materiality (which has been so important to the recent study of early modern drama) must come, in the case of allegorical narrative, through a study of narrative and physical space, and in this context it goes on to provide a reading of the spatial dimensions of the poem – quests and battles, forests, castles and hovels – and the spatial characteristics of Spenser’s other writings. The book reaffirms the need to place Spenser in his historical contexts – philosophical and scientific, military and architectural – in early modern England, Ireland, and Europe, but also provides a critical reassessment of this literary historicism. DR CHRISTOPHER BURLINSON is a Research Fellow in English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Studies in Renaissance Literature ISSN 1465–6310 General Editors David Colclough Raphael Lyne

Studies in Renaissance Literature offers investigations of topics in English literature focussed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; its scope extends from early Tudor writing, including works reflecting medieval concerns, to the Restoration period. Studies exploring the interplay between the literature of the English Renaissance and its cultural history are particularly welcomed. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the editors, or to the publisher, at the addresses given below; all submissions receive prompt and informed consideration. Dr David Colclough, School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS Dr Raphael Lyne, New Hall, Cambridge, CB3 0DF Boydell & Brewer Ltd, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of this volume

ALLEGORY, SPACE AND THE MATERIAL WORLD IN THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND SPENSER

Christopher Burlinson

D. S. BREWER

© Christopher Burlinson 2006 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

First published 2006 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge

ISBN 1 84384 078 2

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

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CONTENTS List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgements

xi

List of Abbreviations

xiii

Preface

xv

Part I: Space and Materiality in the Realm of Allegorical Romance 1. Accounting for the Material in Spenser’s Allegory 2. Space, Place, and Location: Inside and Outside the Poem

3 22

Part II: Architectural Space and the Status of the Object in The Faerie Queene 3. Galleries: Space, Mythography, and the Object

47

4. Royal Chambers: Space and Presence

73

Part III: Beleaguered Spaces 5. ‘Goodly Workemanship’: Fortifications and the Body

97

6. Defended Spaces, Fast Spaces, Proper Spaces

128

7. The Stones of Kilcolman: Spenserian Biography, the Ruin, and the Material Fragment

149

Part IV: The Physical and Allegorized Landscape 8. Deforestation and the Spenserian Wood

167

9. The Houses of the Poor

195

Conclusion

220

Bibliography

223

Index

247

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Robert Glover, Nobilitas Politica vel Civilis (1608)

88

2. John Derricke, The Image of Irelande with a Discouerie of Woodkarne, ed. by John Small (Edinburgh: Black, 1883), plate 12

91

3. Balthazar Gerbier, The Interpreter of the Academie for Forrain Languages, and Noble Sciences, and Exercises (London, 1648)

107

4. J. Errard de Bar-le-Duc, La fortification redvicte en art (Paris, 1594; repr. Frankfurt a. M., 1604)

121

5. N. P. Willis and J. S. Coyne, The Scenery and Antiquities of Ireland, 2 vols (1842), vol. 2

156

The illustrations are reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

Did they often think of the part Ireland had played in the poetry as well as the life of this new arrival at court? Did they realise that the mountains and forests, the clay cottages, the lonely castles, the crudely armed mobs, even perhaps the blood and crime and famine owed often a vague yet undoubted obligation to Ireland? Alexander C. Judson, The Life of Edmund Spenser

“In my account, for whose many failings I beg your pardon, the life cycle of the frog may sound allegorical, but to the frogs themselves it is no allegory, it is the thing itself, the only thing.” J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello

For Elizabeth Anne Burlinson (1951–2002)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In the process of writing this book I have had to find my way in and out of many wandring woods in which, but for the guidance of a number of people, I would have been lost for ever. Colin Burrow and Raphael Lyne, my two supervisors when this was just a doctoral dissertation, looked after it with the utmost care and kindness; the scope and rigour of their advice was a continual antidote to my stubborn dogmatism, and they have continued to provide muchvalued assistance. Since then, Raphael has also been a generous editorial presence, and I also owe my thanks to my editors at Boydell & Brewer, Caroline Palmer and Vanda Andrews. John Kerrigan and Richard McCabe were my Ph.D. examiners, and helped me with the project far beyond the call of duty. My theoretical interest in the subject was set in motion by an undergraduate conversation with Graham Ward, and Marie Axton, Helen Cooper, Claire Preston, and Jennifer Wallace gave me preliminary advice and subsequent encouragement of one sort or another. Andrew Zurcher’s continual prompting and enquiring, his guidance on Irish history, and on Spenser himself, as well as our collaborative work on Spenser’s secretarial career, has enriched my research almost daily; my debt to him is immense, and I thank him unreservedly. Jane Grogan has offered a patient ear and a critical eye for many years. John Stubbs listened to my complaints and read my drafts as the work was coming to an end. Many other friends and colleagues read through sections of the work at one stage of its development or another, suggested much-needed improvements or new directions, corrected my errors, checked my translations, endured my discussions and silences, answered my queries, or just gave me their counsel at difficult moments: André-Pierre Adler, Anne Barton, Paul Binski, Sarah Cain, Terence Clifford-Amos, Annamaria Costanza, Gabriel Heaton, Tom Herron, Catherine Howell, Eric Klingelhöfer, Hester Lees-Jeffries, Robert Macfarlane, Matthew Matthias, Marion Pellon, Oliver Rackham, Corinna Russell, David Starkey, Katja Šugman, Hattie Truscott, Michael Ullyot, Ross Wilson, and Joanne Woolway Grenfell. I thank them all; any errors or infelicities that remain are, of course, my fault and not theirs. Parts of this work were read in Cambridge, at the Renaissance Graduate Seminar, the Renaissance Research Group, the Conference of the International Spenser Society, and the British and Irish Spenser Seminar, and I thank those present for their attention. I also thank the staff and librarians at Little Moreton Hall, Peterhouse Library, Emmanuel College Library, Cambridge xi

Acknowledgements University Library, Lambeth Palace Library, the British Library and the National Archives, London, as well as the Master and fellows of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, for providing me with a scholarly and material environment in which I could bring the book to a conclusion. For their financial and administrative assistance I acknowledge and thank the Arts and Humanities Research Board and the University of Cambridge. My mother, Anne Burlinson, died as I was completing the dissertation on which this book is based, and I dedicate it to her memory; without her encouragement, and that of my father, Alan Burlinson, I would never have come close to writing it. I owe no less thanks to my wife, Patricia Pires Boulhosa, the most critical and most consoling reader of my work, whose help has been practical and spiritual as much as scholarly and intellectual, and no less continuous than cheerfully granted.

xii

ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS APC

Acts of the Privy Council of England, 1542–1631, 46 vols (London: HMSO, 1890–1964) BL British Library CCCHA Colin Clouts Come Home Againe CCP Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts Preserved in the Archiepiscopal Library at Lambeth, 6 vols (London: HMSO, 1867–73) Chronology Willy Maley, A Spenser Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994) CSPI Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Ireland, 1509–1670, 24 vols (London: HMSO, 1860–1910) ELR English Literary Renaissance FQ The Faerie Queene JCHAS Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society JGAHS Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society JMEMS Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies JRSAI Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland JWCI Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes MLN Modern Language Notes MLQ Modern Language Quarterly MLR Modern Language Review NQ Notes and Queries PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association of America RES Review of English Studies SEL Studies in English Literature Spenser The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. Encyclopedia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990) TNA (PRO) The National Archives (Public Record Office) View A View of the Present State of Ireland Quotations from The Faerie Queene are taken from the revised edition of A. C. Hamilton, text edited by Hiroshi Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki (Harlow: Longman, 2001). Quotations from Spenser’s other poems are taken from The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), and unless otherwise stated, are referred to by line numbers. Quotations from the View of the Present State of xiii

Abbreviations Ireland are taken from The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al., 11 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932–57), vol. 10, Prose Works, ed. Rudolf Gottfried (1949). All references to these works are given in the body of the text. Translations from Henri Lefebvre, La production de l’espace are taken from Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Translations from Michel de Certeau, Arts de faire are taken from Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Translations from Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels are taken from Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998). All other translations into English, unless noted in the footnotes, are my own.

xiv

PREFACE This book takes much of its substance, substantially transformed though it is, from my Ph.D. dissertation, ‘Edmund Spenser and Early Modern Spatial Production’ (University of Cambridge, 2002), a chapter of which was fashioned from my M.Phil. dissertation, ‘ “With a Golden Wall”: Castles in The Faerie Queene’ (University of Cambridge, 1999). The book sits somewhere in the space formed by the connections between the three points of its title – allegory, space, and the material world – and the first two chapters sketch out, as it were, the sides of that triangle. The first chapter talks about matter and materiality, about where we might look in The Faerie Queene for objects, substance, properties, and how this investigation might relate to the recent wealth of critical and theoretical work on early modern material culture and, in particular, Renaissance drama: what this field of study can tell us about the materiality of Spenserian allegory, and how allegory can in turn refine our sense of the way that literature and material culture intersect in the sixteenth century. The second chapter deals with place and space, discussing the spatial qualities of the narrative of The Faerie Queene, and the sense of place in the poem; it asks how these places and objects relate to the world outside the poem, and how we relate its fictional space to the spatial world of the sixteenth century. The following seven chapters provide, in one sense, readings of different aspects of Spenser’s poem in the light of this methodology. But they are also intended to develop the theoretical analysis and tie it together. Chapters 3 and 4, which discuss the galleries and royal chambers depicted in the poem, also provide test cases for thinking about the presence of the object in material history and allegory, and develop Henri Lefebvre’s critique of Umberto Eco’s semiotic account of reading and space. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 all very broadly deal with defended or beleaguered spaces: Chapter 5 discusses castles, Chapter 6 looks at the defence of other spaces and places, and Chapter 7 deals with Spenser’s home in Ireland, Kilcolman Castle. In a way, all three, especially Chapters 5 and 6, are thinking about history, and historicize the common romance and epic trope of the castle. But Chapter 5 also thinks about the human body, so often metaphorically connected in The Faerie Queene to the image of the castle, and the very peculiar materiality of the Spenserian body. Chapter 6 allows me to consider in detail the presence of Ireland, both in the poem and in the historicized accounts of Spenser’s life and works from the past twenty or thirty years, as well as in the View of the Present State of Ireland. And xv

Preface Chapter 7 discusses Spenserian biography, Spenserian allegory, and the conceptual role within them of the place at which The Faerie Queene was composed. It also returns to Walter Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama, a key theoretical text in my first chapter, and Benjamin’s image of allegory as ruin. Chapters 8 and 9 consider the ambiguously defined landscape of The Faerie Queene once again, looking at the presence in that landscape of forests and huts. Again, these chapters historicize common romance tropes, but also ask what can be achieved by such historicizing, and what effect it has on our reading of an allegorical narrative. The book as a whole moves, I hope, dialectically between historicized readings of the spaces in The Faerie Queene and questions about the validity of such historicism. If that movement allows its reader to reconsider and re-evaluate historical and theoretical views of literary space and literary materiality, the book will have done its job.

xvi

I Space and Materiality in the Realm of Allegorical Romance

Chapter 1

ACCOUNTING FOR THE MATERIAL IN SPENSER’S ALLEGORY1

A

T THE START of the Proem to Book 5 of The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser compares the ‘state of present time’, as he has done previously in the poem, to ‘the image of the antique world’ (V.Proem.1.1–2). The abounding of sin among men, as we are to learn in the first canto of this book, has led Astræa, daughter of Jupiter and figure of justice, to abandon the world. In the Proem, Spenser – who cannot himself do such a thing (‘loath this state of life so tickle, | And loue of things so vaine to cast away’, VII.viii.1.6–7) – makes a similar complaint: ‘Me seemes the world is runne quite out of square, | From the first point of his appointed sourse, | And being once amisse growes daily wourse and wourse’ (V.Proem.1.7–9). The trope of the world’s decline from a golden age (taken from Book 1 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses) leads to the depiction of a physical change in human subjects: For from the golden age, that first was named, It’s now at earst become a stonie one; And men themselues, the which at first were framed Of earthly mould, and form’d of flesh and bone, Are now transformed into hardest stone: (V.Proem.2.1–5)

Ovid too says that people from the most recent age have taken the stony property of their time, although by referring immediately to this quality, and by alluding in the immediately subsequent lines to the myth of Pyrrha and Deucalion (whereas Ovid postpones this myth until lines 348–415), Spenser compresses the cosmological and human narratives, and makes mankind’s physical transformation all the more explicitly part of the universal history. 1

Some of the ideas in this chapter were brought into shape as I attended to the papers given at the British and Irish Spenser Seminar, Cambridge, May 2004, in particular Tony Nuttall’s ‘Spenser and Elizabethan Alienation’ and Gordon Teskey’s ‘Spenser and Reflection’. These and other participants will probably recognise no trace of their arguments here, but as a member of their audience, I owe them my thanks.

3

Space and Materiality And Spenser’s use of this myth is very different from that of his source. As Ovid explains, Pyrrha and Deucalion are the only two humans to survive a great flood, who, despairing in their lonely plight, are told by the goddess Themis to cast stones behind themselves; these stones turn into men and women, and the world is repopulated. Here, then, the myth is etiological (‘inde genus durum sumus’ [for that reason we are a hard race], 1.414), and refers not only to mankind’s stoniness but also to their creation. In Spenser, the story is embedded within a comparative simile that refers to a negative human characteristic: we are made of stone ‘such as behind their backs (so backward bred) | Were throwne by Pyrrha and Deucalione’ (V.Proem.2.6–7). Whereas in Ovid, Deucalion’s desire to create people out of the earth (‘o utinam possim [. . .] animas formatae infundere terrae’ [Oh, that I might [. . .] breathe souls into the moulded clay], 1.363–64) is realized, and mankind’s stoniness refers at least partly to our ability to become accustomed to hard work (‘experiensque laborum’, 1.414), Spenser associates it with a decline from the earthliness, ‘earthly mould’, in which we were properly created. The metaphor takes on greater material emphasis as the language moves from participles that suggest shaping (‘framed [. . .] formed’) to indications that we have been transformed in substance. Spenser’s teleological cosmology of decline, as the world ‘from his perfection fell | Into all filth and foule iniquitie’ (V.i.5.6–7), comes not only to be figured in strongly material metaphors, but also to be associated with a falling into filth (where filth is not only immorality but matter), a change but also a gathering of materiality. The materiality of Spenser’s world is in a state of change and mutability, and it is the consequence of a decline. Nor is this the only Spenserian cosmological history that addresses questions of substance and material.2 We might compare Guyon’s reproach to Mammon in Book 2 Canto 7, in response to Mammon’s allegation that gold, being sought after by so many men, can be no bad thing: The antique world, in his first flowring youth, Found no defect in his Creators grace, But with glad thankes, and vnreproued truth, The guifts of soueraine bounty did embrace: Like Angels life was then mens happy cace; But later ages pride, like corn-fed steed, Abusd her plenty, and fat swolne encreace To all licentious lust, and gan exceed The measure of her meane, and naturall first need. Then gan a cursed hand the quiet wombe Of his great Grandmother with steele to wound,

2

I do not attempt to cover the cosmological scope of the poem here, although much else could surely be made relevant to the argument that follows; not least, perhaps, the generative account of the Garden of Adonis (FQ, III.vi).

4

Accounting for the Material And the hid treasures in her sacred tombe, With Sacriledge to dig. Therein he fownd Fountaines of gold and siluer to abownd, Of which the matter of his huge desire And pompous pride eftsoones he did compownd; Then auarice gan through his veines inspire His greedy flames, and kindled life-deuouring fire. (II.vii.16–17)

The association of the age of iron with mining, and the bringing into the world of iron, is typical of such descriptions of the ages of the world (see Metamorphoses, 1.127–40), even though it seems all the more pointed in the late sixteenth century, in the context of contemporary complaints about the destruction brought about by an expanding iron industry [see Chapter 8].3 There are good reasons why we should be seeing heaps of substance here, given the kinds of material temptation offered by Mammon to Guyon. In this history of the world, again destructive, the material is made to appear as we read the verse: it is disguised in stanza 16 (not just in its concealment from human eyes, but also in the apparently non-physical description of the ‘guifts of soueraine bounty’), seems to emerge in the intemperate, over-spilling enjambement in the final two lines, and is unearthed in the following stanza. In stanza 17, the image of the earth’s womb being wounded ‘with steele’ is partly a synecdochal figure of speech, but it resonates with the metals that are dragged out of the earth, to add to the sense of an over-abundance of material. The ‘matter of [man’s] huge desire’ leads to a bringing of matter into the world. The world has always been physical, but Spenser’s allegory seems to depict the appearance, the abundance of the material in it. What follows the Proem to Book 5 is a continued account of the introduction of justice into the world, and again it is strongly materialized. The sword which Astræa presents to Artegall is both an emblem of justice and a means, within the allegory, of effecting it: but Spenser tells us less about what it means than, physically, what it looks like and what it is made of. The sword is repeatedly a ‘steely brand’ (V.i.8.9; V.i.9.1), and is described in the following stanza: For of most perfect metall it was made, Tempred with Adamant amongst the same, And garnisht all with gold vpon the blade In goodly wise, whereof it tooke his name, And was of no lesse vertue, then of fame.

3

The trope was common in contemporary writing about the world. ‘I confesse blinde Pluto is now adaies more sought after, than quicke sighted Phœbus, and yet this dustie metall, or excrement of the earth (which was first deeply buried, least it should be an eiesore to greeue the corrupt hart of man) by forcible entrie made into the bowels of the earth, is rather snatched at of man to his owne destruction, than directly sent of God, to the comfort of this life.’ John Gerard, The Herball; or, Generall Historie of Plantes (London, 1597), fol. B5v.

5

Space and Materiality For there no substance was so firme and hard, But it would pierce or cleaue, where so it came; Ne any armour could his dint out ward, But wheresoeuer it did light, it throughly shard.

(V.i.10)

The over-laying and intersection of metals in lines 1–3 produces an almost grotesque effect.4 And the word ‘substance’ (line 6) takes on a progressively wider scope as one reads the stanza. At first, it appears to be a reference to the sword’s metal (and the syntax of lines 5–6, by themselves, would imply that the sword was of no less virtue than fame, because there was nothing as firm and hard as it); but line 7 reveals it to be the entire world that is being described as substantial (i.e. there was nothing, of all the substances in the world, so firm and hard that the sword could not pierce or cleave it). The substantiality emerges, and swells out, as the stanza goes on. This is not an assertion about poetic redundancy, that Spenser is a writer who (in reiterating the sword’s materiality) says the same things over and over again, although what I am identifying occasionally emerges through a linguistic repetition, such as when Talus is described as ‘an yron man [. . .] made of yron mould’ (V.i.12). It is to suggest that his is a poetry that on occasions overloads itself with material detail, which draws our attention to substances and materials: objects and what they are made of. The present chapter, then, addresses the question of what happens to objects in the rhetorical and poetic structure of Spenserian allegory, and will discuss, more fundamentally, the status of the object in that allegory. To what extent is The Faerie Queene a poem about things, about the material, materiality? How does it depict the material? Where would we look for it, and how would we define it? As the successive chapters of this book will show, we come to find material excess, material intrusions, throughout the poem, along with a descriptive method that, conversely, evades material specificity, that refuses to allow us to see the poem as a straightforward description or transformation of the sixteenth-century world.5 This book as a whole looks at the intersection of historical and theoretical versions of space and materiality. I shall ask how Spenser shapes material into (and how he materializes) both narrative spaces

4

5

For a reading of Mammon’s cave in the context of early modern grotesque, see David Evett, ‘Mammon’s Grotto: Sixteenth-Century Visual Grotesquerie and Some Features of Spenser’s Faerie Queene’, ELR 12 (1982), 180–209. See Kenneth Gross, Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985): ‘Spenser [. . .] comes to us as a paradox; he is a skeptical visionary, a demythologizing mythmaker, an iconoclastic iconographer. His writing inevitably develops a highly figured, wholly nonmimetic surface, as if the allegorical argument depended on images with an almost magical power to elevate and entrance the mind. And yet there is also a simultaneous tendency for such powerful images to evade determinate shape. Or rather, theirs is a determinacy and a centrality that transcend the fixed attractions of simple rhetorical patterning’ (pp. 15–16).

6

Accounting for the Material and accounts of physical space, as well as how the physical description in the poem reaches out to the world, whether and how we can historicize and locate it. It is to this project that this discussion of Spenserian poetics is a preliminary. In his book Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, Angus Fletcher argues that allegorical narrative tends to depict objects in isolated and fragmentary detail. It does not depict the world in the manner, say, of a realist painter, in an effort to provide a mimetic account of it: rather, Fletcher argues, ‘an allegorical world gives us objects all lined up, as it were, on the frontal plane of a mosaic’.6 He compares allegory to surrealism, in its provision of isolated and disconnected details, all described minutely, but not connected in the way that we would expect objects in our world to connect. This, he claims, partly derives from allegory’s primary attachment to its own meaning and to the ideas that it wants to convey: the images must be presented discontinuously, and often without reference to how objects are necessarily arranged in the world.7 And in his essay on ‘The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene’, Northrop Frye writes that ‘Spenser is not, like Coleridge, a poet of fragments. [. . .] He thinks inside regular frameworks – the twelve months, the nine muses, the seven deadly sins – and he goes on filling up his frame even when his scheme is mistaken from the beginning.’8 Frye is talking not about descriptive fragmentation or regularity, but about a kind of intellectual coherence, about Spenser’s way of thinking according to schemes. His point allows us to see a contrast between formal coherence and the descriptive fragmentation that Fletcher finds in the poem. Fletcher’s analysis actually holds truer at some points in Spenser’s poem than at others: and one thesis of the present book is that one sometimes does get the impression that objects are connected to one another, either in space or through a material repletion or detail. What we might add to Fletcher’s discussion of isolation and fragmentation, especially in the light of my opening discussion of the passages from Book 5 of The Faerie Queene, is that the poem is marked by a material fluctuation: some moments are significantly more materially sensitive than others. Fletcher writes that ‘the whole point of allegory is that it does not need to be read exegetically; it often has a literal level that makes good enough sense all by itself’, even though it inevitably becomes richer with interpretation.9 Attending to the material aspects of The Faerie Queene, though, need not be a matter merely of reading it with deliberate

6 7

8 9

Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), p. 104. Fletcher, Allegory, pp. 100–8. On the narratological aspect of the isolation of images in the poem, see John B. Bender, Spenser and Literary Pictorialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 101–4. Northrop Frye, ‘The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene’, University of Toronto Quarterly 30 (1960–61), 109–27 (pp. 109–10). Fletcher, Allegory, p. 7.

7

Space and Materiality naïvety, simply ignoring the allegorical meaning of the images, and pretending that it can be taken as a quasi-realist narrative. The very nature of the allegory’s material fluctuation is something that also demands examination. Other critics of allegory have frequently denied the importance of this materiality, and have suggested that it is either in some way ontologically incompatible with allegorical form, or that allegory works to take us away from materiality. According to Maureen Quilligan’s The Language of Allegory, personification, like allegory, is a linguistic phenomenon: it ‘requires a curious treatment of language as language’,10 because it concentrates on the very words that indicate the concepts personified, on the animation of inanimate nouns. Quilligan’s elimination of allegoresis from allegory, confining the importance of the allegorical narrative to the process of signification and more particularly to the very play of signifiers, reduces personification to a ‘reification of language itself’ that in no way refers to the world of things but to ‘the close scrutiny of the “things” embedded within words by etymology and puns’.11 She questions, moreover, the status of the other characters encountered by the titular knights; Redcrosse’s encounter with Fradubio, for instance, is a meeting with ‘a character who is a projection of his own psyche’.12 The argument that the characters and actions of an allegorical narrative display aspects of the protagonists’ psychological states, and are generated from them, is also put forward by Angus Fletcher: If the reader wants a sketch of the character of Redcrosse [. . .], he lists the series of adventures and tests undergone by Redcrosse, not so much for the pleasure of seeing how Redcrosse reacts in each case, as to see, literally, what aspects of the hero have been displayed by the poet.13

For Quilligan, that subjective unreality is extended to the worlds in which the characters are described: ‘Fraudubio [sic] is, of course, a meaningful part of Spenser’s landscape; but that landscape has no historical reality. Its relevance lies in its capacity to reify or project the protagonist’s state of mind’.14 One character who relates to the material world in a way that might corroborate Fletcher and Quilligan’s theories is Malbecco (FQ, III.x). Malbecco’s jealous flight and transformation from a character displaying jealousy into a personification, and the name, of jealousy – ‘woxen so deform’d that he has quight | Forgot he was a man, and Gelosy is hight’ (III.x.60.8–9) – involves his coming into a new relation to his material environment.15 The place where 10 11 12 13 14 15

Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 42. Quilligan, The Language of Allegory, pp. 115–16. Quilligan, The Language of Allegory, p. 111. Fletcher, Allegory, pp. 35–36. Quilligan, The Language of Allegory, p. 113. Spenser’s allegorical method, of course, relies at many points upon personification, the

8

Accounting for the Material Malbecco (in his new identity) comes to rest is described, physically, at considerable length; but since it is discovered at the very moment of his transformation (after which, Malbecco is in turn transformed into the mere abstract noun), it paradoxically seems to emerge from the jealousy that he embodies: On the rockes he fell so flit and light, That he thereby receiu’d no hurt at all, But chaunced on a craggy cliff to light; Whence he with crooked clawes so long did crall, That at the last he found a caue with entrance small. Into the same he creepes, and thenceforth there Resolu’d to build his balefull mansion, In drery darkenes, and continuall feare Of that rocks fall, which euer and anon Threates with huge ruine him to fall vpon.

(III.x.57–58)

process by which the agents of the allegorical narrative, in Angus Fletcher’s words, ‘are intended either to represent abstract ideas or to represent actual, historical persons’ (Fletcher, Allegory, p. 26). Spenserian personification is made explicit in the names of other characters that either etymologically (such as Grantorto, Acrasia, Turpine) or directly (for example Care, Mutabilitie, Errour) relate them to specific qualities, although a comparison of Errour and Turpine, for instance, will show that the qualities are embodied in quite different ways. When characters and incidents in the poem assume distorted or magnified characteristics of real historical individuals or events, another mechanism is at work, described by Fletcher as the ‘reverse type’ of such personification, ‘in which the poet treats real people in a formulaic way so that they become walking Ideas’ (Fletcher, Allegory, p. 28). This allegorization of historical individuals is most notable in Book 5: the Souldan is used to portray King Philip II of Spain at the time of the Armada, the trial of Duessa is a representation of that of Mary Queen of Scots, the rescue of Belge recalls English military intervention in the Low Countries, and Burbon represents Henri of Navarre, King Henri IV of France, in his renunciation of Protestantism to succeed to the French throne. On the historical allegory of Book 5 of The Faerie Queene, see for example René Graziani, ‘Elizabeth at Isis Church’, PMLA 79 (1964), 376–89; Jane Aptekar, Icons of Justice: Iconography & Thematic Imagery in Book V of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); Michael O’Connell, Mirror and Veil: The Historical Dimension of Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977); Richard A. McCabe, ‘The Masks of Duessa: Spenser, Mary Queen of Scots, and James VI’, ELR 17 (1987), 224–42; Tobias Gregory, ‘Shadowing Intervention: On the Politics of The Faerie Queene Book 5 Cantos 10–12’, ELH 67 (2000), 365–97; John D. Staines, ‘Elizabeth, Mercilla, and the Rhetoric of Propaganda in Spenser’s Faerie Queene’, JMEMS 31 (2001), 283–312; Thomas Herron, ‘The Spanish Armada, Ireland, and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene’, New Hibernia Review 6.2 (Summer 2002), 82–105. This form of allegory pervades The Faerie Queene, and the fact that it is the basis of a number of annotations within sixteenth- and seventeenth-century copies of the poem suggests that it is a way of reading that was recognized by Spenser’s contemporaries. For example, annotations made by one John Dixon, datable to 1597, identify characters within the poem as Leicester, Elizabeth, Mary, and the Earl of Cumberland; see Graham Hough, The First Commentary on ‘The Faerie Queene’: Being an Analysis of the Annotations in Lord Bessborough’s Copy of the First Edition of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (privately published, 1964).

9

Space and Materiality Malbecco’s cave also alludes to literary precedents, the ‘promontory where Suspicion dwells’ (‘lo scoglio ove ’l Sospetto fa soggiorno’) in the second of Ariosto’s Cinque Canti, and Gascoigne’s fable of Suspicion in The Adventures of Master F. J. (1573), itself based on Ariosto.16 Just as the materiality of the cave seems to vanish into the personification, the cave is also a very locus for the intertextual quality of many Spenserian environments (and, arguably, of Spenserian criticism), almost overdetermined by these literary origins which seem to forestall any effort to explain them by a reality beyond the literary domain. Paul de Man’s work on allegory provides a similarly deconstructive position to Quilligan’s, and, similarly, one that sees allegory as a flow of signification. The question that he claims that is raised by a study of allegory – ‘Why is it that the furthest reaching truths about ourselves and the world have to be stated in such a lopsided, referentially indirect mode?’ – is explained by two points: although allegory seems to represent in an emphatically clear way, it is not dealing with something that can be represented, and although the narrative form of allegory forces it to be temporal, it doesn’t deal necessarily with a temporal topic at all.17 The temporality of allegory, the passage from one image to another, does not, according to De Man, function to enforce a link with the physical world, to explain it; rather, it defers that correspondence. Like irony, allegory divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic. It can know this inauthenticity but can never overcome it [. . .] it remains endlessly caught in the impossibility of making this knowledge applicable to the empirical world. It dissolves in the narrowing spiral of a linguistic sign that becomes more and more remote from its meaning.18

For De Man, allegory’s non-referentiality to the empirical world and its status as linguistic sign go hand in hand; his view of allegory is of a mode that establishes its language in the semiotic void of the temporal difference that it sets up. What I have suggested above, though, pace Quilligan and De Man, is that Spenserian allegory, in spite of its fragmentation and fluctuation, does actually 16

17

18

Ludovico Ariosto, Cinque Canti, trans. Alexander Sheers and David Quint (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 122. See also William Nelson, ‘A Source for Spenser’s Malbecco’, MLN 68 (1953), 226–29; Waldo F. McNeir, ‘Ariosto’s Sospetto, Gascoigne’s Suspicion, and Spenser’s Malbecco’, in Festschrift für Walther Fischer (Heidelberg: Winter, 1959), pp. 34–48. Paul de Man, ‘Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion’, in Allegory and Representation: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1979–80, ed. Stephen J. Greenblatt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 1–25 (pp. 1–2). Paul de Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn (London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 187–228 (p. 222).

10

Accounting for the Material at points achieve the status of description of a material world of some sort, if not Spenser’s own. The way in which this fluctuating contact with materiality is managed might be further discussed with reference to the Letter to Ralegh, from the 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene. Spenser declares in the letter, of course, that his ‘generall end’ in the book is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline: Which for that I conceiued shoulde be most plausible and pleasing, being coloured with an historicall fiction, the which the most part of men delight to read, rather for variety of matter, then for profite of the ensample.

After discussing his use of the ‘antique Poets’ as models, he continues: ‘To some I know this Methode will seeme displeasaunt, which had rather haue good discipline deliuered plainly in way of precepts, or sermoned at large, as they vse, then thus clowdily enwrapped in Allegoricall deuises.’ What we need to ask in the first place is whether we can use these statements as a way of thinking about Spenserian allegory. Insofar as the Letter provides an interpretive tool for the poem, it presents many difficulties, not merely the elementary point about the narrative differences between the story that it promises to tell us and what actually happens in the poem. As Gordon Teskey points out, the Letter describes itself both as an originating moment behind the poem, ‘his whole intention in the course of this worke’ and ‘the wel-head of the History’, and also as an interpretive document, dated as the poem was going to press and acting as a criticism of it: It is both an act of criticism that arises belatedly in the course of the writing and the record of an original conception that has informed Spenser’s epic from the start. And it is neither. In a practical, editorial sense as well as in a metaphysical sense, we can position the ‘Letter to Raleigh’ nowhere.19

And in an extremely full and subtle critical account of the Letter, Wayne Erickson argues that we should read it not as a straightforward commentary on The Faerie Queene, nor as ‘a stable, unified discourse with a transparent and unmediated relation’ to the poem,20 but as a highly socially-determined document that attempts to mediate between his work and the forms of literary and political production that give it meaning. He emphasizes its public nature and its public ambitions: Spenser, ‘poised [. . .] between Ralegh and Burleigh, in a precarious social place at a crucial moment in his career’, adopts a voice of ‘paternal authority’, ‘chiding those who require the enticement of fiction and

19

20

Gordon Teskey, ‘Positioning Spenser’s “Letter to Ralegh” ’, in Craft and Tradition: Essays in Honour of William Blissett, ed. H. B. de Groot and A. Leggatt (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1990), pp. 35–46 (p. 44). Wayne Erickson, ‘Spenser’s Letter to Ralegh and the Literary Politics of The Faerie Queene’s 1590 Publication’, Spenser Studies 10 (1992), 139–74 (p. 140).

11

Space and Materiality allegory [. . .] to inspire moral behaviour and draw them toward virtuous civic duty’.21 It is a voice, says Erickson, that ‘guides its audience toward the desired conclusion: fictional events “clowdily enwrapped in Allegoricall deuises” are merely the pleasing surface of a national epic’.22 ‘In both cases,’ Erickson writes, ‘the poetical adornments are mere “showes”, superficial attractions and distractions, since the moral “ensample” inheres in the historical record as the doctrinal “rule” inheres in the philosophical discourse.’23 Erickson is right to stress that Spenser seems to talk about his allegory moving towards ‘ensample’ and ‘good discipline’, but what I would like to ask here is what the relation between the ‘showes’ and the example really is. What Spenser actually seems to be stressing in the letter is the separation of image and idea, a relation in which the images are rendered extraneous, and even on occasions superfluous, not an intrinsic part of an allegory that is moved beyond, or transcended in the movement towards meaning. Spenser writes that the ‘generall end’ of the poem is ‘coloured with an historicall fiction’: A. C. Hamilton glosses this with a passage from Boccaccio that remarks that ‘poetry veils truth “in a fair and fitting garment of fiction” ’,24 but when he says that this method provides ‘variety of matter’, distinct from the ‘ensample’ and apparently a result of the ‘historicall fiction’ that colours the work, Spenser seems to be stressing the partial extraneousness, if not redundancy, of the ‘matter’. The word ‘matter’ does not come to mean substance until 1690, according to the OED, but what it does at least denote here, as the context makes clear, is an element of superfluity. Spenser is apparently arguing that a gap exists between the image and its meaning: a gap which pulls apart as the majority of readers read the allegory. It is not that the meaning is never reached; rather, that the poetry comes to refer to the material as well as the immaterial. And what does Spenser mean by saying that the ‘discipline’ of his poem is ‘clowdily enwrapped in Allegoricall deuises’? He may be talking about the presence in the poem of episodes that are not strictly integral to the allegory (and the Letter to Ralegh suggests a difference between ‘accidents’ and ‘intendments’, suggesting that parts of the poem are central and others are incidental or superfluous), but he also seems to be saying something about the quality of his allegorical imagery, how image and meaning link together. The ‘enwrapping’ does not seem to indicate an integration of image and meaning, material and idea. The gap between object and meaning also appears at the level of signification: not just in the shape of the narrative, but also with regard to the way that the allegory means anything at all. This appears in the use of imagery of the veil, in the poem’s second and third dedicatory sonnets. 21 22 23 24

Erickson, ‘Spenser’s Letter to Ralegh’, p. 153. Erickson, ‘Spenser’s Letter to Ralegh’, p. 153. Erickson, ‘Spenser’s Letter to Ralegh’, p. 152. FQ, ed. A. C. Hamilton, p. 715.

12

Accounting for the Material Yet if their deeper sence be inly wayd, And the dim vele, with which from comune vew Their fairer parts or hid, aside be layd, Perhaps not vaine they may appeare to you. (Dedicatory Sonnet 2, lines 9–12) Receiue most Noble Lord in gentle gree, The vnripe fruit of an vnready wit: Which by thy countenaunce doth craue to bee Defended from foule Enuies poisnous bit. Which so to doe may thee right well besit, Sith th’antique glory of thine auncestry Vnder a shady vele is therein writ, And eke thine owne long liuing memory. (Dedicatory Sonnet 3, lines 1–8)

Michael Murrin has described the image of the veil as central to early modern allegorical theory; in the work of many early modern English rhetoricians (who also mention its ancient role as a preserver of mysteries), allegory is described as a form that deliberately hides the truth at the same time as revealing it.25 Here it implies not only a shielding of the allegory from eyes that are not prepared to read it, but also a gap between image and meaning: ‘th’antique glory of thine auncestry | Vnder a shady vele is therein writ’. If personification and the fleshing out of allegory can at times denote a kind of projection from the central figure’s state of mind or experience, it can also, especially as it is read and interpreted, reach out into history.26 And furthermore, the allegory’s contact with the material world, which can be conceived in several different ways, is in Spenser’s case very prominent. His interest in the material becomes all the clearer when we compare it with that of Tasso, especially in the ‘Allegory’ of Gerusalemme Liberata: Spenser writes in the Letter to Ralegh about his use of Tasso as a model. But Tasso’s allegorical method is very different: it demonstrates a closer amalgam of body and mind, action and contemplation, image and meaning. ‘The army,’ Tasso writes, ‘signifies mature man, [. . .] Goffredo [. . .] stands for the intellect’: much more clearly than Spenser, Tasso determines what everything is to mean. ‘It perhaps will not displease the readers,’ he goes on, ‘if I repeat some things previously stated and show in detail the allegorical sense hidden beneath the veil of their actions. Goffredo [. . .] stands for nothing else in the allegory than the intellect’.27 In 25

26 27

Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes Toward a Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). See also Mindele Anne Treip, Allegorical Poetics and the Epic: The Renaissance Tradition to ‘Paradise Lost’ (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), esp. pp. 23–27. See Janet Adelman, ‘Revaluing the Body in The Faerie Queene I’, Hugh Maclean Memorial Lecture, December 2004, Spenser Review 36.1 (Winter 2005), 15–25. Lawrence F. Rhu, The Genesis of Tasso’s Narrative Theory: English Translations of the Early

13

Space and Materiality Tasso, the allegory itself is much more closely identified with the sense beneath the image, whereas for Spenser it seems to be what enwraps the meaning, the image as well as that (or even rather than that) beyond it. This model of allegory finds resonance in other Renaissance writing on the subject, for example George Puttenham’s discussion in The Arte of English Poesie (1589). Puttenham defines allegory, partly, as a way of speaking, ‘when we speake one thing and thinke another’, but then as a kind of metaphor, ‘when we do speake in sence translatiue and wrested from the owne signification, neuerthelesse applied to another not altogether contrary, but hauing much conueniencie with it’.28 He goes on to define two kinds of allegory: Ye haue another manner of Allegorie not full, but mixt, as he that wrate thus: The cloudes of care haue coured all my coste, The stormes of strife, do threaten to appeare: The waues of woe, wherein my ship is toste. Haue broke the banks, where lay my life so deere. Chippes of ill chance, are fallen amidst my choise, To marre the minde that ment for to reioyce. I call him not a full Allegorie, but mixt, bicause he discouers withall what the cloud, storme, waue, and the rest are, which in a full allegorie should not be discouered, but left at large to the readers iudgement and coniecture.29

In a full allegory, in other words, the image would not declare what it meant: it would simply provide us with an image of an object or event (‘the stormes do threaten to appeare’, from which we would understand that they denoted strife). The mixed allegory, which Puttenham seems to describe as less perfect (‘which in a full allegorie should not be discouered’) tells the reader what the meaning of the physical image is, but in doing so, splits apart image and meaning. Allegory is always trying to bring together idea and object, to make them one, but they frequently fall apart. In telling us what makes a perfect allegory, Puttenham shows us that an allegorical image always has the potential to disintegrate in this way. Sir John Harington too, in his ‘Briefe Apologie of Poetrie’, prefatorial to his translation of Orlando Furioso (1591), provides a similar model of the structure of poetical imagery: The ancient Poets haue indeed wrapped as it were in their writings diuers and sundry meanings, which they call the sences or mysteries thereof. First of all for the litterall sence (as it were the vtmost barke or ryne) they set downe in manner of an historie, the acts and notable exploits of some persons worthy memorie; then in the same fiction, as a second rine and somewhat more fine, as it were

28 29

Poetics and a Comparative Study of their Significance (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), pp. 156–57, 159. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), p. 155. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 156.

14

Accounting for the Material nearer to the pith and marrow, they place the Morall sence, profitable for the actiue life of man, approuing vertuous actions and condemning the contrarie. Manie times also vnder the selfesame words they comprehend some true vnderstanding of naturall Philosophie, or somtimes of politike gouernement, and now and then of diuinitie: and these same sences that comprehend so excellent knowledge we call the Allegorie.30

The image of enwrapping, which also appears in Spenser’s Letter to Ralegh, along with Harington’s idea that the ‘literall’ and ‘Morall’ senses of the allegory can be figured in the image of concentric skins, speak of the relationship between image and meaning as one of enclosure but not complete union. As we move to comprehend the allegory, we seem, in the terms of this image, to peel the outer skins away: in doing so, we tear apart the physical image and its meaning. The Letter to Ralegh and Spenser’s dedicatory sonnets, then, like the writings of these late sixteenth-century rhetoricians, allow us to conceptualize the place of the material in Spenserian allegory. I began this chapter by discussing places where objects and substance were given a special prominence in The Faerie Queene. As I have argued, the poem gives us anything but a realistic view, or a simple mimetic representation, of the world and the objects in it. But there is a physical presence in the allegory that fits awkwardly with the idea of allegorical narrative as a transcendence of the material. Not only are the images in the poem fragmented; their contact with the physical world fluctuates. What I am now suggesting is that in this model of allegory, there appears a gap between the material and that which it represents: the material sometimes becomes excessive or superfluous. Furthermore, allegory, and its substantial component, is somehow unstable. Its material quality changes partly as we read it, so that the material that the allegorist wanted to subsume in the allegorical image becomes apparent. It also changes because the images themselves have a history: it is not just that the material partakes in history, but also that we as readers are within history, moving away all the time from the allegory. And at this point in my argument, I look towards Walter Benjamin. Benjamin speaks in his very suggestive (though itself fragmentary) text, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels [The Origin of German Tragic Drama], of the fragmented materiality produced by baroque allegory, and argues further that allegory is unable fully to contain the material within its idea. Although allegory forces (in the broadest sense) something to mean something else, it can never make this correspondence perfectly.31 Benjamin thus calls into 30 31

Sir John Harington, Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse (London, 1591), fol. ¶4r. Compare Gordon Teskey’s analysis of the violence that is done in the allegorical process, by the yoking of the material to the idea: ‘Allegory, Materialism, Violence’, in The Production of English Renaissance Culture, ed. David Lee Miller, Sharon O’Dair and Harold Weber (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 293–318. Teskey’s ideas are presented in a different form in his magisterial book, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).

15

Space and Materiality question the theory that allegory can be seen as a movement towards an idea beyond itself, which somehow dispenses with, and transcends the material that it makes use of.32 Moreover, he suggests that the capacity of an allegorical image to subsume the material within an idea decays through time: ‘Der falsche Schein der Totalität geht aus. Denn das Eidos verlischt, das Gleichnis geht ein, der Kosmos darinnen vertrocknet’ [The false appearance of totality is extinguished. For the eidos disappears, the simile ceases to exist, and the cosmos it contained shrivels up].33 The way in which the images mean changes as we move away from them. As time passes, the material is left more and more on view; we are left with an excess of materiality, material fragments apparently out of place.34 The process of history, according to Benjamin, is written into the material fragments left by allegory, a history which ‘prägt [. . .] nicht als Prozeß eines ewigen Lebens, vielmehr als Vorgang unaufhaltsamen Verfalls sich aus’ [does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay].35 Hence his image of the allegory as ruin: ‘Allegorien sind im Reiche der Gedanken was Ruinen im Reiche der Dinge’ [Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things].36 Benjamin allows us to return very briefly to the question of allegory and symbol. Coleridge’s definition of the symbol has been taken up and analysed by many modern critics of allegory:37 A Symbol [. . .] is characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative.38

A. D. Nuttall’s view of allegory as ‘instantly viewed universal’, for example, 32 33 34

35 36 37

38

See, for an example of this theory, Murrin, The Veil of Allegory. Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1963), p. 195. ‘In allegory naked matter shines through. It shines through as the failure of the idea to transform nature or thought.’ J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Two Allegories’, in Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, ed. Morton W. Bloomfield, Harvard English Studies 9 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 355–70 (p. 365). Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, p. 197 Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, p. 197. On allegories and ruins, as well as for a further discussion of Benjamin, see Chapter 7. See Murray Krieger, ‘ “A Waking Dream”: The Symbolic Alternative to Allegory’, in Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, ed. Morton W. Bloomfield, Harvard English Studies 9 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 1–22. On Coleridge’s writing about allegory and symbol, see also Jonathan Culler, ‘Literary History, Allegory, and Semiology’, New Literary History 7 (1975–76), 259–70. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Statesman’s Manual’, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, gen. ed. Kathleen Coburn, 16 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969–2001), vol. 6, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White (1972), p. 30.

16

Accounting for the Material seems to resonate with this definition of the symbol.39 Although, as Paul de Man shows, one can reject the myth that symbolism does not share allegory’s temporality,40 allegory differs from a Coleridgean symbolism precisely in the way that it declines to conceal the materiality of its image; it does not shine through that reality. As Terry Eagleton writes: ‘Baroque allegory lays bare the device, posing motto and caption in blunt, obtrusive relation to the visual figure, defeating the mystifications of symbolism.’41 Benjamin’s account of the fragmentary materiality that is produced by the decay of allegory, where ‘images, far from being hierarchically ranked, are piled in a seemingly haphazard way one on the other, with no “totalizing” aim in mind’,42 is actually opposed to the symbol. While he speaks of ‘der Wille zur symbolischen Totalität wie der Humanismus im Menschenbild sie verehrte’ [the voice of the will to symbolic totality venerated by humanism in the human figure], ‘als Stückwerk aber starren aus dem allegorischen Gebild die Dinge’ [it is as something incomplete and imperfect that objects stare out from the symbolic structure].43 The symbol seems to have a special affinity for the subject, the human subject, while allegory is a form that is especially relevant to the study of objects. This theoretical play of subject and object is something that I shall come back to shortly. I have suggested, then, that The Faerie Queene is marked by a fluctuation in its engagement with the material: at some points we are given a much more materialized, materially replete description than at others. In the light of Benjamin’s work on baroque allegory, we should look for a rupture within the allegory, which exposes the material content of the allegorical image. This material exposure emerges partly as we engage interpretively with the poem as a work that does not always aim for transcendence of the material world, and partly through history, as we move further from the moment in which the image was created. And Spenser’s narrative voice actually also demonstrates an awareness of, and consciously engages with, this fluctuating materiality. It is an engagement at odds with the Platonic rejection of the material in a work like the Fowre Hymnes: Thenceforth all worlds desire will in thee dye, And all earthes glorie on which men do gaze, Seeme durt and drosse in thy pure sighted eye, Compar’d to that celestiall beauties blaze, Whose glorious beames all fleshly sense doth daze 39 40 41 42 43

A. D. Nuttall, Two Concepts of Allegory: A Study of Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ and the Logic of Allegorical Expression (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 49. De Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin; or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981), p. 22. Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, p. 23. Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, p. 208.

17

Space and Materiality With admiration of their passing light, Blinding the eyes and lumining the spright. (‘Hymne of Heavenly Love’, lines 274–80)

As I have discussed above, the engagement of The Faerie Queene with ‘earthes glories’ is unstable: partly an avowal of the materiality of the verse, an interest in things and their substantiality and substance that often concentrates explicitly on the question of substance, and how substance and form are connected in physical bodies, and partly a disavowal of the relevance or importance of this material. As the materiality of Spenser’s allegory fluctuates throughout The Faerie Queene, the concern with the material – and importantly, the attempt to find poetic tropes to contain it – continually reappears. Consider the following stanza, from the description of the Temple of Venus: Right in the midst the Goddesse selfe did stand Vpon an altar of some costly masse, Whose substance was vneath to vnderstand: For neither pretious stone, nor durefull brasse, Nor shining gold, nor mouldring clay it was; But much more rare and pretious to esteeme, Pure in aspect, and like to christall glasse, Yet glasse was not, if one did rightly deeme, But being faire and brickle, likest glasse did seeme. (IV.x.39)

On the one hand, Spenser tells us that the substance from which the idol is made is difficult to understand – and perhaps impossible to describe – but the following lines, although telling us what it is not made of, place it within an abundance of materials, and remind us that it is made of something. Even the approximation to glass (‘like to christall glasse, | Yet glasse was not’) performs a syntactically clear double movement, drawing attention to the material and dematerializing the idol, performing a function similar to the rhetorical trope of occultatio or paralepsis. Spenser embeds the description of the idol in the world of substance, and a pure substance (‘costly masse [. . .] substance’) at that. This way of speaking about substance is extremely common in the poem, as for example in the following stanza, from the Castle Joyeous: But for to tell the sumptuous aray Of that great chamber, should be labour lost: For liuing wit, I weene, cannot display The roiall riches and exceeding cost, Of euery pillour and of euery post; Which all of purest bullion framed were, And with great perles and pretious stones embost, That the bright glister of their beames cleare Did sparckle forth great light, and glorious did appeare. (III.i.32)

18

Accounting for the Material Again, the material excess is presented through a trope of occultatio (I cannot say how sumptuous the chamber was, etc.), and here it seems to lead to a syntactic excess, as lines 6, 7, and 8–9 each add a new clause, and a new piece of information about the material qualities of the room. Spenser’s is a poetry that emphasizes terms like ‘masse’ and ‘substance’. It guides its readers towards an allegorized and moral meaning, but it also flaunts its own descriptions of and interest in substance and objects.44 Like Mammon himself, Spenser presents us with a superfluity of objects and material. English Renaissance literary studies in the last five years or so have been marked by an acute interest in material culture. A materialist interest in literature is not new;45 and although material history and the study of material culture has thrived in recent years, it also has its roots in earlier European historiographical traditions, back indeed to Marx.46 But unlike earlier Marxist studies, the ‘new materialism’, as it has come to be known, has been inflected through new historicism, in both its revision of notions of subjectivity and society, and in its interest in the marginal, the overlooked detail. The shape of this interest emerged, at least in Anglophone literary studies, partly in two collections of essays in the late 1990s. The introduction to Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (1996) stated its question explicitly: ‘even in recent critiques of Renaissance autonomy, the focus has remained the same: the subject at center and the object beyond the pale. What happens, we wish to ask, once the object is brought into view?’47 Renaissance Culture and the Everyday (1999) saw itself as a departure from new historicism in its concentration on 44

45

46

47

On ‘the moral ambivalence of the pleasures of the senses’, with particular reference to this passage about Castle Joyeous, see Hans P. Guth, ‘Allegorical Implications of Artifice in Spenser’s Faerie Queene’, PMLA 76 (1961), 474–79 (p. 477). See, for one example among many, C. E. Nicholson, ‘A World of Artefacts: The Rape of the Lock as Social History’, Literature & History 5 (1979), 183–93, which argues that The Rape of the Lock provides a consistent analysis of the attitude to objects and commodities in early eighteenth-century England. For a seminal declaration of the aims of material history, see Jean-Marie Pesez, ‘Histoire de la culture matérielle’, in La nouvelle histoire, ed. Jacques Le Goff, Roger Chartier and Jacques Revel (Paris: Retz CEPL, 1978), pp. 98–130. The contemporary proliferation of historical accounts of material culture and consumption can be seen in the following bibliographical review: Paul Glennie, ‘Consumption within Historical Studies’, in Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies, ed. Daniel Miller (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 164–203. On the Renaissance as a period in which material goods and commodities proliferated, see Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods (London: Macmillan, 1996); see also Chandra Mukerji, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), an intricate socio-political examination of the conditions that permitted material culture to flourish in the early modern period. For an exemplary study of material culture in early modern France, see Daniel Roche, A History of Everyday Things: The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600–1800, trans. Brian Pearce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 8 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 2.

19

Space and Materiality ‘the common in both a class and cultural sense’, but also different insofar as it situated ‘particular clusters of such myriad commonality within the context of the manifold details of cultural practice and representation – what we might call, evoking Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre, the “everyday” ’, in effect, in many of the essays in the collection, the objects and material practices of the everyday.48 It is a movement that has also met with a consistent criticism: its tendency to regard objects ‘not as vessels of and across diachronic history, but as portals through which may be glimpsed the contours of an overarching structure or system’.49 For Marx, and strictly Marxist criticism, the material is more than the merely physical. It embraces and covers labour and praxis: the social relations of production.50 And new materialism has felt the need to remind itself to view the object not only within history, but within material production: One consequence is a tendency to think of the object as a product, susceptible to the dialectic of renunciation and allure, but without a history of production, whether it be economic production of the object as commodity (not just through labour, but also through processes of exchange, appropriation, desacralization, etc.) or discursive production of the very category of the ‘object’.51

A particular beneficiary, both of this concentration on the object and of a conscious effort to look at it within its processes of exchange, has been the study of early modern drama. In this field, the object is commonly conceived as the property, and we are encouraged to see how the properties on the Renaissance stage take part in social exchanges that go beyond the theatre (and also how objects work within plays, that Renaissance drama is not just a dematerialized poetic space on an empty stage).52 48

49

50

51 52

Patricia Fumerton, ‘Introduction: A New New Historicism’, in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 1–17 (pp. 3–4). Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘The New New Historicism’s Wunderkammer of Objects’, European Journal of English Studies 4 (2000), 111–23 (p. 114); see also Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘Shakespeare’s Hair: Staging the Object of Material Culture’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 52 (2001), 479–91. Henry S. Turner, ‘Nashe’s Red Herring: Epistemologies of the Commodity in Lenten Stuffe (1599)’, ELH 68 (2001), 529–61, provides a nuanced account of the materiality that might be brought to bear on the early modern period. See Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda, ‘Introduction: Towards a Materialist Account of Stage Properties’, in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1–31 (p. 17). Harris and Korda argue that ‘increasingly, scholarship on early modern material culture is returning to Marx’s more dynamic, labor-oriented theories of materiality’ (p. 17). But on ‘the new materialism’s break with Marx’, see also Douglas Bruster, ‘The New Materialism in Renaissance Studies’, in Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Curtis Perry, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 5 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), pp. 225–38 (p. 234). Harris, ‘The New New Historicism’s Wunderkammer of Objects’, p. 116. See, for example, Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the

20

Accounting for the Material I have argued throughout this chapter that the question of materiality is especially relevant to a study of Spenserian allegory. As I have been suggesting, Spenser presents us with an abundance of objects, and disavows his interest in them; his allegory not only destabilizes the representational role of the material, but actually exposes it. As I now move on to discuss the material and narrative space of the poem, I want to suggest that if the property is the category that has enabled Renaissance studies to locate the object on the early modern stage, it is a consideration of space that will allow us to read an allegorical narrative with a sensitivity to materiality. And as I discuss the Spenserian object as something, in Harris’s terms, that is being discursively produced as ‘object’, and that has a history of production, I will come to see it as produced not just within the narrative space of The Faerie Queene, but also within the world from which Spenser is writing. It is not just the poem in which we might expect to find objects and commodities, but also Spenser’s Ireland, its rivers (in the following lines) filled with ‘heapes’ of fish: The first, the gentle Shure that making way By sweet Clonmell, adornes rich Waterford; The next, the stubborne Newre, whose waters gray By faire Kilkenny and Rosseponte boord, The third, the goodly Barow, which doth hoord Great heapes of Salmons in his deepe bosome.

(IV.xi.43.1–6)

And it is the relation between the narrative spaces of Spenser’s Ireland and England, and those of the poem, that I shall deal with in the next chapter.

Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Paul Yachnin, ‘Magical Properties’, and Anthony Dawson, ‘Props, Pleasure, and Idolatry’, in Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: A Collaborative Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 111–30 and 131–58; Harris and Korda, eds., Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama.

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Chapter 2

SPACE, PLACE, AND LOCATION: INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE POEM

But sith my web so diuerse now doth grow, To weave with many threads I must deuise. Sir John Harington, Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse

I

N L. SPRAGUE DE CAMP and Fletcher Pratt’s story, ‘The Mathematics of Magic’, a pair of time-travelling scientist-adventurers by the names of Harold Shea and Reed Chalmers make use of a fantastical machine to transport themselves into The Faerie Queene. The poem, according to Chalmers, provides a ‘brilliant and interesting world, and one in which I personally might have some place’, and although the two men acknowledge the dangers of participating in the later parts of the poem, ‘where Queen Gloriana’s knights are having a harder and harder time, as though Spenser were growing discouraged, or the narrative for some reason were escaping from his hands, taking on a life of its own’, they decide that they would like to help to solve this confusion: ‘why shouldn’t we jump right into that last part of the Faerie Queene and help Gloriana’s knights straighten things out?’1 The story alludes to the events of Spenser’s poem, but it generally goes beyond the bounds of the poem’s narrative; the two scientists don’t tend to participate in the events of the poem itself, but they witness and take part in encounters between its characters (and other characters, such as Sir Hardimour, invented for the purposes of the story) and wander through a generally Spenserian-looking country of forests and castles and tournaments. That the story is to be taken in good humour, and with a good pinch of salt, emerges in its conclusion (if not long before), which sees a rather tame and attractive Belphoebe (‘a tallish, slim girl in short-skirted tunic and soft leather boots’) returning from Faeryland as Shea’s demure and lovestruck fiancée. 1

L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, The Compleat Enchanter: The Magical Misadventures of Harold Shea (London: Millennium, 2000), pp. 119–20 (‘The Mathematics of Magic’ first published in 1941).

22

Space, Place, And Location Crucially, its conceit requires us to imagine that the gaps between and after events in the narrative of the poem are filled with periods of time in which other events take place, and that these events occur in a physical world where a group of characters are continually and simultaneously going about their business, could meet up with one another and probably do.2 In order to imagine The Faerie Queene in this way, ‘The Mathematics of Magic’ also needs to suppose that the narrative of the poem exists as, and within, a ‘world’ which continues of its own accord, with similar events and occurrences, after the poem has finished: Shea said: ‘I know how you feel. Travelling through Faerie is just one damned encounter after another.’ [. . .] Chalmers mused: ‘It is logical that it should be so. The Faerie Queene indicates that this is a world wherein an endless and largely planless concatenation of encounters are a part of the normal pattern of events.’3

Faeryland (as imagined by Sprague de Camp and Pratt) comes to denote the conditions that govern encounters within The Faerie Queene, but it also becomes a coherent, if not realistically described, location. Rather than extending the events of The Faerie Queene in the manner of a continuation, ‘The Mathematics of Magic’ transforms the narrative of the poem into a ‘world’: The Faerie Queene both is a world, and describes a world that exists beyond the events that take place in it. This chapter, then, is going to ask how we can, and indeed whether we should, think about the events of the poem as corresponding to or taking place within a geographical space. I proposed at the end of the previous chapter that a consideration of space might provide a way for us to conceptualize the material presence in an allegorical narrative like The Faerie Queene. But if we come to believe that there are difficulties with regarding the poem as any kind of realistic narrative (and I argued in the previous chapter that this was indeed a feature of allegory), is there any way for us to talk about space in the poem? In this chapter, then, I discuss the narrative space of the poem, how we might go about converting its sequence of events into awareness of a physical space; but also how we can think about Faeryland as a world, or at least about the many ways in which criticism has conceived it as such, and how we are to deal with

2

3

It thus comes close to the ‘postmodernist gesture’ that Slavoj ½i¼ek imagines, in a hypothetical James Bond film – and are not the Bond films, with their narratives of danger, national triumph and sexual conquest in exotic locations, forms of modern romance? – that would detail the mundane business of the love affair that begins during one of his (filmed) adventures and is forgotten by the time of the next: ‘[staging] the mythical narrative itself as an ordinary occurrence’. Slavoj ½i¼ek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2001), p. 35 Sprague de Camp and Pratt, The Compleat Enchanter, p. 173.

23

Space and Materiality the ways in which it seems to reach out into the spaces and locations of the sixteenth-century world – Ireland, England, Europe, and beyond. What is the relevance of these historical spaces when we come to think about the fictional spaces of the poem? The first thing to note about The Faerie Queene is the narrative centrality in the poem, typical to romance, of questing and journeying. See, for example, the third stanza of the first canto, describing the Redcrosse Knight: Vpon a great aduenture he was bond, That greatest Gloriana to him gaue, That greatest Glorious Queene of Faery lond, To winne him worshippe, and her grace to haue, Which of all earthly things he most did craue; And euer as he rode his hart did earne, To proue his puissance in battell braue Vpon his foe, and his new force to learne; Vpon his foe, a Dragon horrible and stearne.

(I.i.3)

Redcrosse’s journey is defined at this stage by its end event, his battle with the dragon, and its consequence, his learning of his ‘new force’. It is an adventure, not a journey of which he already knows the route. If the pattern of his quest comes to involve testing, recuperation in the House of Holiness, and so on, that is not apparent to him or to us at this stage. It is the nature of these journeys that they send the knights into unknown or unfamiliar places. Guyon’s narrative begins as he meets Archimago, and is immediately led astray: ‘So now he Guyon guydes an vncouth way’ (II.i.24.1). This, indeed, is a common motif; even when not deceived, the knights are aware that they are travelling on unfamiliar routes, and most of them, unlike Guyon with his Palmer, must go without a guide: But where ye ended haue, now I begin To tread an endlesse trace, withouten guyde, Or good direction, how to enter in, Or how to issue forth in waies vntryde, In perils strange, in labours long and wide.

(VI.i.6.1–5)

Nor is it just the knights who travel in this way: Una and the Lion, deserted by Redcrosse after the incident in Archimago’s cabin, go ‘forward [. . .] | In ways vnknowne’ (I.iii.21.3–4). The narratives often involve the knights getting lost, as Redcrosse does almost as soon as Book 1 has begun: ‘So many pathes, so many turnings seene, | That which of them to take, in diuerse doubt they been’ (I.i.10.8–9). Joanne Woolway Grenfell has argued that in such a text, which uses geographical and spatial metaphor to denote the challenges to late sixteenth-century English national identity, and the ideologies of monarchical power, this trope of geographical confusion should encourage us to read the poem as ‘a lesson on how to read the signs, not just of landscape, but also of 24

Space, Place, And Location religion and literary interpretation’.4 Britomart talks about her quest – ‘All my delight on deedes of armes is sett, | To hunt out perilles and aduentures hard, | By sea, by land, where so they may be mett’ (III.ii.7.1–3) – in explicitly cartographic terms: ‘For such intent into these partes I came, | Withouten compasse, or withouten card’ (lines 6–7). This parallel between geographical space and moral knowledge is made clear by Woolway Grenfell, who writes that ‘it is not that real knights don’t use maps, rather that a map cannot be created until the territory becomes known and familiar’.5 It is a metaphorical comparison made all the more pertinent by the fact that the poem also describes itself as a kind of journey: The waies, through which my weary steps I guyde, In this delightfull land of Faery, Are so exceeding spacious and wyde, And sprinckled with such sweet variety, [. . .] My tedious trauell doe forget thereby;

(VI.Proem.1.1–4, 7)

As Spenser travels (and the travail/travel pun, with the poem also figured as a labour, is again familiar), we as readers also journey into unfamiliar places. Our encounters with the events and locations of the poem in some way correspond to those of the knights. The way in which the knights encounter events and locations in The Faerie Queene raises the question, related to those that I posed in Chapter 1, of the status of these places. In my discussion of allegory, I asked whether allegorical events could be regarded as projections or reifications of the protagonists’ states of mind or moral conditions, and perhaps now this question can be restated in terms of place. It is raised, in fact, by one of the first locations in the poem, the wood in which Redcrosse and Una take shelter from the storm: Yea but (quoth she) the perill of this place I better wot then you, though nowe too late, To wish you backe returne with foule disgrace, Yet wisedome warnes, whilest foot is in the gate,

4

5

Joanne Woolway Grenfell, ‘Do Real Knights Need Maps? Charting Moral, Geographical and Representational Uncertainty in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene’, in Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain, ed. Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 224–38 (p. 234). See also Joanne Woolway, ‘Spenser and the Culture of Place’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford, 1997), especially Chapter 1. Woolway Grenfell, ‘Do Real Knights Need Maps?’, p. 236. On representational and cartographical indeterminacy in early modern Ireland, see David J. Baker, ‘Off the Map: Charting Uncertainty in Renaissance Ireland’, in Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660, ed. Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield, and Willy Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 76–92.

25

Space and Materiality To stay the steppe, ere forced to retrate. This is the wandring wood, this Errours den.

(I.i.13.1–6)

Is Una recognizing a place that she has either seen before or knows something about, or are she and Redcrosse merely encountering a reified image of their own wandering and error? Is this encounter with a place merely our encounter with such a reified image of the poem’s events, another version of these events allegorized for the sake of the reader? Does the naming of this place as ‘the wandring wood [. . .] Errours den’ imply that it has the status of a physical place (which might have been named before), or is it the case that only when named does it acquire any sort of identity? Line 6 (‘This is . . .’) does not make this clear. Does it make any sense to think of the place as having any sort of reality before Redcrosse and Una encounter it? Do they, indeed, encounter it, or is it a projection of their mental and moral state? It seems that both of these possibilities are, or could be, partly true: Una speaks of her knowledge (‘better wot’), although it is hard to tell whether this is knowledge of her and Redcrosse’s plight (of which the wood might be an allegorical representation), or knowledge of the place that they have encountered. The location seems partly to have a physical reality within the allegory (no matter how unrealistically it is portrayed) and partly to refer only to something extra-material. Insofar as it relates to the depiction of place, again, the material component of the narrative appears unstable.6 These events, tied as they are to the encounter with or production of newly-discovered locations, are presented sequentially: the narrative simply passes from one event to the next, rather than providing a detailed, mimetic account of the protagonists’ passage through a world. That passage – how characters get from one place to another – is very ambiguous. The poem often intimates the time that its characters have spent travelling, or the distance that they have travelled, as when Guyon and Arthur arrive at the Castle of Alma: So talked they, the whiles They wasted had much way, and measurd many miles. And now faire Phoebus gan decline in haste His weary wagon to the Westerne vale, Whenas they spide a goodly castle.

6

(II.ix.9–10)

John Demaray, who sees the poem as spatially modelled on the images of the journey to centre of the map and the pilgrimage, insists that the Spenserian journey, and Spenser’s view of the world, is grounded in abstraction, and that these journeys involve a movement away from or against materiality, for example against the ‘crassly material’ dragon of Book 1. John G. Demaray, Cosmos and Epic Representation: Dante, Spenser, Milton and the Transformation of Renaissance Heroic Poetry (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1991), p. 145. Given the conclusions of my previous chapter, this idea of a movement away from materiality is something that I want to question.

26

Space, Place, And Location However, as in this case, the space through which the characters journey is spoken of only as an indication of the fact of their travel: the ‘miles’, in themselves, have no importance, or even place, in the narrative. Even when characters in the poem wander through a place that seems to be set apart from other characters and events, this is merely a prelude to their encountering another figure there. Thus, when Redcrosse encounters Archimago: He passed forth, and new aduenture sought, Long way he traueiled, before he heard of ought. At length they chaunst to meet vpon the way An aged Sire.

(I.i.28–29)

Such sentences, often containing these adverbial clauses such as ‘at length’ or ‘at last’, are extremely common throughout the poem, and are indicative of the way that it treats travel from location to location: the journey is imagined in no spatial detail, and is only described as the antecedent to the event that is about to happen.7 The ‘long way’ that Redcrosse travels is not described or imagined in itself, and is mentioned only retrospectively, as the time that it has taken for him to hear of anything: the syntax of this line, with the ‘before [. . .] ought’ clause, again only accounts for the journey between two locations, or events, as something that comes to have preceded the second event. As also at the start of Book 2: Then Guyon forward gan his voyage make, With his blacke Palmer, that him guided still. Still he him guided ouer dale and hill, And with his steedy staffe did point his way: His race with reason, and with words his will, From fowle intemperance he ofte did stay, And suffred not in wrath his hasty steps to stray. In this faire wize they traueild long yfere, Through many hard assayes, which did betide, Of which he honour still away did beare, And spred his glory through all countryes wide. At last as chaunst them by a forest side To passe, for succour from the scorching ray, They heard a ruefull voice.

(II.i.34–35)

After the ‘forward’ travel, we again see an ‘at last’ clause, which introduces the event that ‘chaunst’ to Guyon and the Palmer. And the location – the forest – emerges at the moment of this chance occurrence. 7

For example: ‘The better part now of the lingring day, | They traueild had, whenas they far espide | A weary wight’ (I.vi.34.1–3); ‘He had not trauaild long, when on the way | He wofull Ladie, wofull Vna met’ (I.vii.20.1–2); ‘They sadly traueild thus, vntill they came | Nigh to a castle’ (I.viii.2.1–2).

27

Space and Materiality At these points, The Faerie Queene clearly declines to depict a spatial continuum. The spaces that lie between the locations where events take place are elided in the narrative; we might say, furthermore, that these in-between spaces exist in the poem only insofar as they are needed to describe an approach to one of these locations. We see another example of this if we concentrate on how the word ‘waste’ functions in these descriptions. ‘Waste’ (like ‘desert’) is often used in the poem to describe somewhere that characters go when they have left a location: it sometimes describes the secret places where the knights discover individuals who have hidden themselves away, or at other times the places that are inimical to civility and propriety, such as the ‘Island, waste and voyd’ where Guyon encounters Phaedria (II.vi.11.3) and the ‘wide wastfull ground’ where he comes across Mammon (II.vii.2.8). Similarly, characters who are lost or banished from civility are shown within wastes, such as Una, who ‘in wildernesse and wastfull deserts strayd, | To seeke her knight’ (I.iii.3.4–5), and Duessa, who flees to ‘the wastfull wildernesse’ (I.viii.50.3) and is subsequently discovered by Archimago ‘in waste wildernesse, | Lurking in rockes and caues far vnder ground’ (II.i.22.2–3). ‘Waste’ is here a topographical description, telling us what a kind of space is like. As Julia Reinhard Lupton points out, it is a precise term denoting unproductive land with special resonance in sixteenth-century writings about Ireland.8 It is apparently in this sense that the unoccupied fields of the shepherds in Book 6 are described as ‘waste and emptie’ (VI.xi.26.7). This sense also allows for the verb ‘waste’ to be used actively, when land is made unfit for use; this enables Spenser to write, for example, that the dragon has ‘forwasted’ the land of Una’s parents (I.i.5.8). As such, waste becomes part of a spatial pattern, the inverse of civility. But the waste itself is not described as a continuum linking other places; in The Faerie Queene, waste places are as discrete as any other. This being so, any sense that the poem consists of a single, integrated ‘landscape’ becomes difficult to maintain. The word ‘landscape’ came into use in the English language at the end of the sixteenth century, from the Dutch landschap: the word denoted a unit of human occupation as well as an artistic depiction of the land, (though the earliest references in the OED, from 1598 and 1603, both refer to paintings).9 In The Faerie Queene, though, the components of the landscape seem to shift: if we encounter landscape at all, we encounter several landscapes. Note the following description in Book 6 of Calidore pursuing the Blatant Beast: Full many pathes and perils he hath past, Through hils, through dales, throgh forests, and throgh plaines In that same quest which fortune on him cast, 8

9

Julia Reinhard Lupton, ‘Mapping Mutability; or, Spenser’s Irish Plot’, in Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660, ed. Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield, and Willy Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 93–115. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: Harper Collins, 1995), p. 10.

28

Space, Place, And Location Which he atchieued to his owne great gaines, Reaping eternall glorie of his restlesse paines. So sharply he the Monster did pursew, That day nor night he suffred him to rest, Ne rested he himselfe but natures dew, For dread of daunger, not to be redrest, If he for slouth forslackt so famous quest. Him first from court he to the citties coursed, And from the citties to the townes him prest, And from the townes into the countrie forsed, And from the countrie back to priuate farmes he scorsed. From thence into the open fields he fled, Whereas the Heardes were keeping of their neat, And shepherds singing to their flockes, that fed, Layes of sweete loue and youthes delightfull heat: Him thether eke for all his fearefull threat He followed fast, and chaced him so nie, That to the folds, where sheepe at night doe seat, And to the little cots, where shepherds lie In winters wrathfull time, he forced him to flie.

(VI.ix.2–4)

The landscape in these stanzas, such as it is, is really a mosaic-like arrangement (to return to Angus Fletcher’s description of allegory) of elements, reflected in the parallel clauses of stanza 3 lines 7–9, and the repetition and asyndeton of stanza 2 line 6; a similar structure is to be seen in the following canto: ‘the perfect pleasures, which doe grow | Amongst poor hyndes, in hils, in woods, in dales’ (VI.x.3.5–6). When the woods appear at greater length in Book 6, they appear as a conventional pastoral image: ‘The woods did nought but ecchoes vaine rebound’ (VI.xi.26.6). By contrast, the landscape in the description of Belphoebe in Book 3 is based on an opposition of court and country, civility and forest: Well may I weene, faire Ladies, all this while Ye wonder, how this noble Damozell So great perfections did in her compile, Sith that in saluage forests she did dwell, So farre from court and royall Citadell, The great schoolmaistresse of all courtesy: Seemeth that such wilde woodes should far expell All ciuile vsage and gentility, And gentle sprite deforme with rude rusticity.

(III.vi.1)

This world seems to be less a landscape than an opposition between ‘saluage forests’ and ‘court’, in which the different elements are ‘farre’ from one another: a dichotomy rather than a continuous spatial world. Spenser does not imagine locations within a coherent and continuous 29

Space and Materiality spatial plane; instead, the narrative of The Faerie Queene presents a consecutive series of events tied to often discrete locations. Insofar as we think about its narrative in this way, it is a poem of places or locations, not space, in the sense of a coherently imagined world. However, just as I argued in Chapter 1 that the materiality of the poem fluctuates – sometimes abstract and dematerialized, and sometimes (often at the same time) excessively material or imbued with a fascination for substance – I want to suggest here that the same is true of its spatial qualities. The poem juxtaposes locations and places with varying degrees of spatial coherence, and with varying degrees of connectedness to a world beyond them. In Book 1, Una and Satyrane are making a journey: ‘they the woods are past, and come now to the plaine’ (I.vi.33.9). Why not ‘to a plaine’? Perhaps because there is no question of this being a world in which there are many places, of this being one plain among many in a wide world: the only important thing is the isolated immediacy of this location – where the characters find themselves at that time. But shortly before this, in a discussion of Satryane’s birth, the narrator talks about his decision to return to the woods where he was born: ‘those natiue woods [. . .] | To see his syre and ofspring auncient’ (I.vi.30.3–4). It is hard to measure the specificity of ‘those natiue woods’, to decide whether the narrator is talking about one particular wood, where Satyrane was born (and he does seem to know that he will find his family there), or whether he is talking in general about the forest, which was his native environment.10 The image also seems to balance a sense of material reality (the woods exist, and Satyrane is returning to them) and allegorical projection (Satyrane is returning to a place which exists to allegorize the savagery that is still a part of him). How, then, can we talk about space in a poem that is as fragmented and fluctuating in its narrative spatialization as it is in its materiality? There certainly are spatial patterns in The Faerie Queene, and many critics have expanded upon them to make them central to an interpretation of the poem. Angus Fletcher, for example, in The Prophetic Moment, argues that the poem is structured both spatially and thematically by a dialectical opposition between types of image that he calls the ‘temple’ and the ‘labyrinth’. The temple, for Fletcher, is ‘a sacred, separated space’, and a ‘place of enlightenment’, where characters have special access to the truth and which ‘arrests the ordinary unbroken duration of temporal flow’.11 C. S. Lewis, in Spenser’s Images of Life, frequently imagines ‘images of good’12 either as themselves 10 11

12

Cf. the seeming specificity of the reference to ‘those same woods, ye well remember may’ (III.v.27.5). Angus Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 14, 20, 21. See also William Blissett, ‘Caves, Labyrinths, and The Faerie Queene’, in Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, ed. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 281–311. C. S. Lewis, Spenser’s Images of Life, ed. Alastair Fowler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 64.

30

Space, Place, And Location spatial, or as directly associated with a location, such as the Garden of Adonis or the Temple of Venus. ‘Images of evil’, such as the Bower of Bliss, are likewise associated in Lewis’s argument with places, and many, like the House of Busyrane, are characterized as types of ‘the Waste House’.13 James Randall Fisher sees Book 2 of the poem as spatial patterned on the image of a celestial journey through the signs of the zodiac,14 and Joanne Woolway sees the spatial references in the poem, particularly the emphases on centrality and compassing, as ‘provid[ing] a spatial vocabulary with which to describe the nature of English nationhood, particularly as it manifests itself through the symbols of political power’.15 But the mixture of specific and non-specific location that I have discussed above casts doubts on many critical efforts to understand the space of the poem, even as it invites us to imagine that we can see it clearly, to construct a map of its events. The links between early modern cartography and literature have been much explored in recent years;16 Eudoxus’s illustrative use of a map in the View of the Present State of Ireland has made it especially important to criticism of that text.17 I will discuss the View at greater length later in this book. But it is a theory that works less well for The Faerie Queene, for the reasons discussed above.18 As Matthew Woodcock writes, ‘Spenser evinces little concern to construct fairyland as the kind of coherent, autonomously operating world that has long been proposed by many critics. Attempts to “map” fairyland merely hearken back to a perennial feature of Spenser criticism: the quest to find some kind of unity in The Faerie Queene’.19 Up to this point, then, I have been discussing the production of narrative space in The Faerie Queene: how places and locations join up, what kind of

13

14

15 16 17

18

19

Lewis, Spenser’s Images of Life, p. 71. Kathleen M. Graney, ‘New Maps for Old: A Topological Approach to The Faerie Queene and Shakespeare’s History Plays’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Auburn University, 1994), sees the journeys in the poem shaped by a ‘dialectical pattern of movement between inside and outside spaces’ (p. 68). James Randall Fisher, ‘Certaine Signes of the Zodiac: Patterns through Time and Space in Book II of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Southern California, 1993). Woolway, ‘Spenser and the Culture of Place’, p. 6. See, for example, Bernhard Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001); the book makes considerable use of Spenser’s writings. On the map in the View, see Bruce Avery, ‘Mapping the Irish Other: Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland’, ELH 57 (1990), 263–79; Mercedes Maroto Camino, ‘ “Methinks I See an Evil Lurk Unespied”: Visualizing Conquest in Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland’, Spenser Studies 12 (1998), 169–94; Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, pp. 65–67. Though see Rhonda Sanford’s relation of the river catalogue, with the marriage of the Thames and Medway (FQ, IV.xi), to Renaissance forms of ceremonial map. Rhonda Lemke Sanford, Maps and Memory in Early Modern England: A Sense of Place (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 27–52. Matthew Woodcock, Fairy in ‘The Faerie Queene’: Renaissance Elf-Fashioning and Elizabethan Myth-Making (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 78.

31

Space and Materiality spatial continuity or discontinuity the narrative presents to the reader. I now want to move outwards, and ask about critical attempts to conceptualize the space of the poem as a whole: what is Faeryland? How does it relate or correspond to the world outside the poem? One of the best-known statements about the spatiality, or non-spatiality of the poem, comes in a lecture of Coleridge’s: You will take especial note of the marvellous independence and true imaginative absence of all particular space or time in the Faery Queene. It is in the domains neither of history or geography; it is ignorant of all artificial boundary, all material obstacles; it is truly in land of Faery, that is, of mental space. The poet has placed you in a dream, a charmed sleep, and you neither wish, nor have the power, to inquire where you are, or how you got there.20

The true non-materiality of the poem is, clearly, something that I have been arguing strongly against (albeit with great qualifications). Coleridge is stressing the imaginative nature of the space of the poem,21 but his move to an assertion of the absence of particularity is questionable. He goes on to quote some lines of his own from Remorse – ‘It were a lot divine in some small skiff | Along some ocean’s boundless solitude | To float for ever with a careless course’ – and compares them with a stanza of The Faerie Queene: As Pilot well expert in perilous waue, That to a stedfast starre his course hath bent, When foggy mistes, or cloudy tempests haue The faithfull light of that faire lampe yblent, And couer’d heauen with hideous dreriment, Vpon his card and compas firmes his eye, The masters of his long experiment, And to them does the steddy helme apply, Bidding his winged vessell fairely forward fly.

(II.vii.1)

We can see, though, how different the lines are. Coleridge is describing a mental state that abandons itself to directionlessness; Spenser is speaking about a ‘forward’ journey that sometimes loses its way. ‘So the poet through the realms of allegory’, Coleridge writes of the Spenserian stanza;22 although Spenser is describing Guyon rather than himself, we have already seen that he

20

21

22

Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (London: Constable, 1936), p. 36. The lecture is the third in a series from 1818, which Raysor takes from The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, collected by Harry Nelson Coleridge (1836). Cf. Harry Berger, Jr., ‘The Renaissance Imagination: Second World and Green World’, in Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 3–40, on ‘the second world as the imaginary or hypothetical world of fiction’ (p. 14). Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism, p. 37.

32

Space, Place, And Location does indeed speak of himself as travelling and travailing. But this very notion of travel implies something more spatialized than Coleridge grants. Michael Murrin, similarly, although he modifies Coleridge’s position in some respects, moves from an acknowledgement of the spatial incoherence of the narrative (‘no one seriously wonders what road Arthur took from Orgoglio’s Castle to the area by Mammon’s vale’) to an assertion that Faeryland, of which we have but a ‘dreamy sense’, should be taken as a mental state, or rather mental standpoint, ‘an eternal viewpoint on the temporal order in which we live’.23 We might juxtapose with this the famous section from the Proem to Book 2, in which Spenser is talking about Faeryland, asking what it is, and also reminding us of the imaginary nature of the narrative: Right well I wote most mighty Soueraine, That all this famous antique history, Of some th’aboundance of an ydle braine Will iudged be, and painted forgery, Rather then matter of iust memory, Sith none, that breatheth liuing aire, does know, Where is that happy land of Faery, Which I so much doe vaunt, yet no where show, But vouch antiquities, which no body can know. But let that man with better sence aduize, That of the world least part to vs is red: And daily how through hardy enterprize, Many great Regions are discouered, Which to late age were neuer mentioned. Who euer heard of th’Indian Peru? Or who in venturous vessell measured The Amazons huge riuer now found trew? Or fruitfullest Virginia who did euer vew? Yet all these were when no man did them know, Yet haue from wisest ages hidden beene And later times thinges more vnknowne shall show. Why then should witlesse man so much misweene That nothing is but that which he hath seene? What if within the Moones fayre shining spheare, What if in euery other starre vnseene Of other worldes he happily should heare? He wonder would much more, yet such to some appeare. Of faery lond yet if he more inquyre By certein signes here sett in sondrie place 23

Michael Murrin, ‘The Rhetoric of Fairyland’, in The Rhetoric of Renaissance Poetry: From Wyatt to Milton, ed. Thomas O. Sloan and Raymond B. Waddington (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 73–95 (pp. 86–7, 94).

33

Space and Materiality He may it fynd; ne let him then admyre But yield his sence to bee too blunt and bace That no’te without an hound fine footing trace. And thou, O fayrest Princesse vnder sky, In this fayre mirrhour maist behold thy face And thine owne realmes in lond of Faery, And in this antique ymage thy great auncestry.

(II.Proem.1–4)

This passage seems to place Faeryland somewhere between imagination and reality. It is in some way an idealized England (as in stanza 4); this is emphasized by Ronald Horton, who argues that ‘the moral action of the poem in terms of the geographical symbolism is the extension of the civilizing influence of Cleopolis over the back country, the reclamation of the “wastfull wood” from which the hope of England has emerged’.24 Wayne Erickson argues that Faeryland is not the world of the poem; rather, that world goes beyond it in a way that corresponds to a generic difference between romance and epic.25 It seems odd that Spenser should choose to defend a charge against allegory (as ‘painted forgery’) through empirical means (that Faeryland might, as other previously unknown places, come to be known to exist). But this also further emphasizes the connection between Faeryland and other worlds, the Indies and Americas.26 The question of the status of Faeryland is answered in a radically different way in Terence Clifford-Amos’s work on the poem. Clifford-Amos argues that events in the poem refer or correspond exactly to places in England: houses, geographical locations, and so on. Book 1 of The Faerie Queene is seen as explicitly allegorizing a journey from the Midlands into the North (‘Eden’), to put down the rebellion of 1569. There is a strongly biographical aspect to this article, Eden ‘allegorizing singularly the most important event in the life of young Spenser’.27 In a way, by explicitly disavowing the importance of Ireland in the poem, Clifford-Amos’s work marks a geographical intervention in the argument over what is centrally important to Spenser studies. But it also makes demands on our conception of the poem’s narrative space, and demands that the poem have a geographical coherence that corresponds to that of the world: the journey in Faeryland has to start and finish in a specific,

24 25 26

27

Ronald Arthur Horton, The Unity of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1978), p. 33. Wayne Erickson, Mapping ‘The Faerie Queene’: Quest Structures and the World of the Poem (New York: Garland, 1996). See David Read, Temperate Conquests: Spenser and the Spanish New World (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000). See also Lorna Hutson, ‘Chivalry for Merchants; or, Knights of Temperance in the Realms of Gold’, JMEMS 26 (1996), 29–59, who reads this passage in the context of an English admiration for, and desire to emulate, Spanish colonial achievements. Terence Clifford-Amos, ‘ “Certaine Signes” of “Faeryland”: Spenser’s Eden of Thanksgiving on the Defeat of the “Monstrous” “Dragon” of Albion’s North’, Viator 32 (2001), 371–415.

34

Space, Place, And Location identifiable place, and has to follow a route that exactly corresponds to one that could have taken place in late sixteenth-century England. As I have suggested, the gaps in the journeys in The Faerie Queene make this correspondence between narrative and real spaces difficult to sustain. This analysis thus requires that we see the poem, if not as literal itself, as only explained by reference to the real: once we discover what the poem actually corresponds to, it will make sense.28 It is a theory that thus stands in a peculiar relation to the new materialism that I discussed in Chapter 1. Both of these assertions – about the poem’s spatial coherence and its unambiguous reference to reality – should, as I have suggested, be questioned, but not entirely disregarded. The Faerie Queene often gives us the sense that it is describing places in the real world, or at least somehow attached to the real world. At other points, though, this impression disappears, or else Spenser appears to acknowledge the geographical inconsistencies that he is setting up. See, for example, the following stanza, which occurs after Redcrosse has run off, believing that Una is dishonest: Yet sad he was, that his too hastie speed The fayre Duess’ had forst him leaue behind; And yet more sad, that Vna his deare dreed Her truth had staynd with treason so vnkind; Yet cryme in her could neuer creature find, But for his loue, and for her owne selfe sake, She wandred had from one to other Ynd, Him for to seeke, ne euer would forsake, Till her vnwares the fierce Sansloy did ouertake.

(I.vi.2)

How should we read the verb (‘wandred had’) in line 7? Is it a conditional subjunctive (‘she would have wandered’) or an indicative (‘she had wandered’)? Are the Indies actually part of the world of the poem, as the second of these syntactical possibilities seems to imply, or is that world so similar to the real world that such an image (perhaps just meaning ‘from one side of the world to the other’) makes sense?29 And if not, should we read the line as a deliberately self-aware disjunction (perhaps a kind of joke), or a moment of forgetfulness on Spenser’s or the narrator’s part? It is difficult to tell: the syntactical ambiguity of the lines seems to place the geography of the poem in an ambiguous relation to that of the world of the reader. A similar but more elaborate interplay of real and fictional space is to be

28 29

See especially Clifford-Amos, ‘ “Certaine Signes” ’, pp. 401–2, on the ‘literal perspective’. Cf. the second appearance of Archimago in Book 1: ‘face all tand with scorching sunny ray, | As he had traueild many a sommers day, | Through boyling sands of Arabie and Ynde’ (I.vi.35.4–6). And even more pertinently, perhaps, given Spenser’s Irish history, the following reference: ‘As when a swarme of Gnats at euentide | Out of the fennes of Allan doe arise’ (II.ix.16.1–2).

35

Space and Materiality seen in the stanzas in Book 3 which locate Merlin in Wales, and describe Britomart and Glauce’s expedition to find him: For though beyond the Africk Ismael, Or th’Indian Peru he were, she thought Him forth through infinite endeuour to haue sought. Forthwith them selues disguising both in straunge And base atyre, that none might them bewray, To Maridunum, that is now by chaunge Of name Cayr-Merdin cald, they tooke their way: There the wise Merlin whylome wont (they say) To make his wonne, low vnderneath the ground, In a deepe delue, farre from the vew of day, That of no liuing wight he mote be found, When so he counseld with his sprights encompast round. And if thou euer happen that same way To traueill, go to see that dreadfull place: It is an hideous hollow caue (they say) Vnder a Rock that lyes a litle space From the swift Barry, tombling downe apace, Emongst the woody hilles of Dyneuowre.

(III.iii.6–8)

This passage, particularly insofar as it provides a set of geographical references, seems to be undermining itself. The last three lines of stanza 6 provide a geographical reference similar to those examined above, and once again to the Indies: again, the subjunctive subordinate clause here (‘for though [. . .] he were’) leaves it unclear what place the Indies have in the world of the poem, or whether they are just a point of comparison with relevance only to the narrator and reader. The mythical, topographical narrative in stanza 7 is then juxtaposed with a perhaps rather joking piece of advice to prospective, real travellers in stanza 8. The repetition of ‘they say’ embodies this ambiguous juxtaposition: first, as it were, acknowledging the mythicalness of the Merlin narrative and then signifying that the narrative is providing empirical evidence for the location of his cave. In his edition of the poem, A. C. Hamilton points out the inaccuracy of the description of a ‘little space’,30 but we might go further than that, to say that Spenser is deliberately obscuring the geography of this passage, both apparently providing precise references and declaring the impossibility of doing so (as in stanza 7 lines 7–9, ‘of no liuing wight [. . .] mote be found’). Nevertheless, having discussed the considerable problems that we would face if we were to try simply to map the world of Spenser onto the world of the poem, and having suggested that the poem itself is implying that reference to 30

‘More than 50 miles, according to Osgood.’ FQ, ed. A. C. Hamilton, p. 312.

36

Space, Place, And Location the real world is both essential and impossible, I want to pursue this relation between imaginary and real space. I suggested at the end of Chapter 1 that space was an important category for understanding Spenser’s interest in the material world. The fluctuating narrative spatiality of the poem that I have discussed above provides a parallel to the fluctuating materiality that I described in Chapter 1. What is more, we can gain a much more satisfactory idea of the way that historical space influences the poem if we think about space not simply as a narrative feature, but also in relation to material production. Space has been a central term in much contemporary critical thought, not just sociology and geography, but also literary theory: it has become the ‘everywhere of modern thought’, in the partly cautioning words of a recent anthology.31 The ideas that this book raises about space and spatiality are guided very significantly by the work of one of the originating figures of this movement, Henri Lefebvre, particularly La production de l’espace [The Production of Space] (1974).32 Although Lefebvre’s work refers mostly to the urban spaces of capitalist society, he does raise questions about the applicability of spatial theory to literature, questions that I shall address shortly. Lefebvre considers space at three levels, ‘la pratique spatiale’ [spatial practice], ‘les représentations de l’espace’ [representations of space], and ‘les espaces de représentation’ [representational spaces].33 He supposes a dialectical relationship between a society’s spatial practice – how members of the society behave, and are instructed to behave, in spatial terms – and the way in which spaces are produced within and around it. ‘L’espace (social),’ he writes, ‘n’est pas une chose parmi les choses, un produit quelconque parmi les produits; il enveloppe les choses produites, il comprend leurs relations dans leur coexistence et leur simultanéité’ [(Social) space is not a thing among other things, nor a product among other products: rather, it subsumes things produced, and encompasses their interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity].34 It is never produced ‘comme un kilogramme de sucre ou un mètre de toile’ [in the sense that a kilogram of sugar or a yard of cloth is produced], but is rather a precondition and a result of social structures: Produit qui s’utilise, qui se consomme, il est aussi moyen de production; réseaux d’échanges, flux de matières premières et d’énergies façonnent l’espace et sont déterminés par lui.

31 32

33 34

Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, ‘Introduction’, in Thinking Space, ed. Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, Critical Geographies 9 (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 1–30 (p. 1). On Lefebvre’s importance and relation to later writers, see Andy Merrifield, ‘Henri Lefebvre: A Socialist in Space’, in Thinking Space, ed. Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, Critical Geographies 9 (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 167–82. Henri Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, 3rd edn (Paris: Anthropos, 1986), pp. 42–43. Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, p. 88.

37

Space and Materiality [Though a product to be used, to be consumed, it is also a means of production; networks of exchange and flows of raw materials and energy fashion space and are determined by it.]35

This relation between the production of space and spaces – architectural, geographical, urban – and the production within space of actions and behaviour contrasts with the view of space as a neutral continuum against which actions take place: Produire l’espace. Cet accouplement de mots n’avait aucun sens lorsque les philosophes régnaient sur les concepts. L’espace des philosophes, seul Dieu peut le créer comme sa première œuvre, le dieu des cartésiens [. . .], ou l’Absolu des post-kantiens. [‘To produce space’: this combination of words would have meant strictly nothing when the philosophers exercised all power over concepts. The space of the philosophers could be created only by God, as his first work; this is as true for the God of the Cartesians [. . .] as for the Absolute of the post-Kantians.]36

Lefebvre’s model of space can be very closely interconnected with the discussion of materiality in Chapter 1. From the very beginning of his book, he writes that he does not want to deal with an abstract or geometrical idea of space: rather, he is interested in the occupation and production of space, not so much the qualities of objects themselves as the links between these objects and spatial social practice. I argued in Chapter 1 that The Faerie Queene bears, at times, the marks of a strong interest in this material practice. While it cannot account for all of the things that I will want to discuss, Lefevbre’s space – a study of how materials are produced in space and how their production and exchange generates a space – provides a model for the integration of spatiality and materiality. So, as I shall argue in later chapters of this book, even such Spenserian locations as forests, which occasionally seem to be little more than romance tropes, backdrops to other events, take on at other points a material quality that needs to be analysed through a discussion of the ideas and forces of production that operate in society at large.37 And furthermore (as I shall argue at much greater length in Chapter 6), Spenser’s writings emerge from an Irish context in which attention to all space had become a political and military necessity. Many of the locations within the poem and the actions of its characters can be analysed

35 36 37

Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, p. 102. Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, p. 89. I will be looking, then, for something unlike the emphasis on the phenomenology, memory and experience of spaces in Gaston Bachelard, La poétique de l’espace [The Poetics of Space] (first published 1958). Bachelard does find a way of linking literature and experience, and his book in itself provides a moving and poetic testimony to the power of space, but my emphasis on material production is quite different.

38

Space, Place, And Location in relation to the production of these spaces, as well as being seen as simple extensions of the psychological states of the protagonists: indeed, doing so will allow us to find our way through the fluctuations of materiality within it. General notions of space were going through great changes in the late sixteenth century, with revolutions in global exploration and cartography, as I have discussed above and as many critics have pointed out;38 Lefebvre himself sees the period as key to his history of spatial practice. This historical change will be important to this study, too, even if what I have already written about the fragmentation of space and material in the poem will lead me more towards a discussion of more localized moments. And indeed, the account that I have given above, of the narrative relation of space and place in The Faerie Queene, can be related to Lefebvre’s theory of space. Geographer Andrew Merrifield, using a Lefebvrian framework stating that ‘social space must be posited as a material process’, writes that ‘capital fixity must, of necessity, take place somewhere, and hence place can be taken as a specific form emergent from an apparent stopping of, or as one specific moment in, the dynamics of capitalist social space’. Space and place are related in that ‘space internalizes conflictual and contradictory social forces and social conflict is thereby “inscribed in place”.’39 The social conflicts with spatial practice are manifested at places. For Merrifield, Lefebvre’s theory of space posits places as points where spatial practices are formalized; in The Faerie Queene, places seem to exist discretely, but as I will argue, they are full of an (albeit unstable) materiality, and a materiality that we can see as heavily involved in spatially inflected exchanges and practices. That The Faerie Queene is a poem of locations need not stop us from thinking about space within it, and actually this model would encourage us to see the places within the poem as manifesting spatial concerns. But Lefebvre’s theories present a difficulty that should be acknowledged and explored immediately. In La production de l’espace, he criticizes analysis of space that uses models from literary theory and interpretation, in particular the semiological interpretation that takes physical space as a series of signs to be read. Our understanding of space, he says, cannot be exactly analogous to our reading of a text: Si l’on applique à des espaces (urbains par exemple) des codes élaborés à partir de textes littéraires, une telle application reste descriptive; il n’est pas difficile de le montrer. Que l’on s’efforce de construire ainsi un codage – une procédure décryptant l’espace social – ne risque-t-on pas de réduire celui-ci à un message, et sa fréquentation à une lecture? Ce qui élude l’histoire et la pratique. 38

39

On the relation between Spenser’s works and the general spatial conditions of the late sixteenth century, see, for example, Graney, ‘New Maps for Old’; Woolway, ‘Spenser and the Culture of Place’. Andrew Merrifield, ‘Place and Space: A Lefebvrian Reconciliation’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, n.s. 18 (1993), 516–31 (p. 521).

39

Space and Materiality [When codes worked up from literary texts are applied to spaces – to urban spaces, say – we remain, as may easily be shown, on the purely descriptive level. Any attempt to use such codes as a means of deciphering social space must surely reduce such space itself to the status of a message, and the inhabiting of it to the status of a reading. This is to evade both history and practice.]40

One such attempt to apply semiology to architecture is Umberto Eco’s essay, ‘La funzione e il segno’ [‘The function and the sign’], which analyses parts of a house, asking what function they communicate. For Eco, architectural constructions are taken as signs, denoting cultural structures. His model ignores the forces of production, or sees production as merely following ‘un modello, una struttura’ [a model, a structure]. This model becomes abstracted from any functional or politicized production, into a repertoire of cultural signs and meanings: ‘Il codice architettonico genera un codice iconico’ [the architectural system produces a system of signs].41 Lefebvre, however, attacks what he calls Eco’s ‘naïveté idéologique’, in his assumption that ‘le communicable se déchiffre et “tout” dans la culture devenant communicable, chaque aspect, chaque élément constitue un système sémiologique’ [the communicable is [. . .] decipherable, and consequently everything in the culture – each element or aspect of it – is said to constitute a semiological system].42 He grants that spaces admit of many kinds of readings, symbolisms, and significations, and speaks for example of a spatial ‘code’ that existed from the Renaissance city to the nineteenth century: un code à la fois architectural, urbanistique, politique, langage commun aux habitants des campagnes et des villes, aux autorités, aux artistes, permettant non seulement de ‘lire’ un espace mais de le produire. [a code at once architectural, urbanistic and political, constituting a language common to country people and townspeople, to the authorities and to artists – a code which allowed space not only to be ‘read’ but also to be constructed.]43

He argues emphatically, however, that an analogy cannot be made between reading a space and reading a text: Lecture de l’espace? Oui et non. Oui: le ‘lecteur’ déchiffre, décode. Le ‘locuteur’, qui s’exprime, traduit en discours ses parcours. Et cependant non. L’espace social n’est jamais une page blanche sur laquelle on (mais qui?) aurait écrit son message. L’espace naturel et l’espace urbain sont surchargés. Tout y est brouillon et brouillé. Des signes? Plutôt des consignes, des prescriptions multiples, interférentes. S’il y a texte, trace, écriture, c’est dans un contexte de conventions, 40 41 42 43

Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, p. 14. Umberto Eco, ‘La funzione e il segno (semiologia dell’architettura)’, in La struttura assente: introduzione alla ricerca semiologica (Milan: Bompiani, 1968), pp. 189–249 (p. 193). Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, p. 311. Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, p. 14.

40

Space, Place, And Location d’intentions, d’ordres, au sens du désordre et de l’ordre social. L’espace est signifiant? Certes. De quoi? De ce qu’il faut faire ou ne pas faire. [Does it make sense to speak of a ‘reading’ of space? Yes and no. Yes, inasmuch as it is possible to envisage a ‘reader’ who deciphers or decodes and a ‘speaker’ who expresses himself by translating his progression into a discourse. But no, in that social space can in no way be compared to a blank page upon which a specific message has been inscribed (by whom?). Both natural and urban spaces are, if anything, ‘over-inscribed’: everything therein resembles a rough draft, jumbled and self-contradictory. Rather than signs, what one encounters here are directions – multifarious and overlapping instructions. If there is indeed text, inscription or writing to be found here, it is in a context of conventions, intentions and order (in the sense of social order versus social disorder). That space signifies is incontestable. But what it signifies is dos and don’ts.]44

Accordingly, making use of Lefebvre’s theory and his rejection of semiotic readings of space, I will question the approach to The Faerie Queene that sees intertextual allusions, political significances and symbolic meanings inscribed palimpsestically onto the landscape. Rather than arguing that allegory inscribes ideas onto natural structures that are anterior to human intervention, I want to emphasize the role of material production, even in objects and spaces such as forests (see Chapter 8 below) that seem to exist naturally. Indeed, as I have argued above and in Chapter 1, I will propose that the material, human production of spaces and places and the production of ideologies relating to them is actually recorded, implied or deliberately concealed at many points in The Faerie Queene and the View. The material spaces and places that are allegorized are not merely written over, effaced by the allegorical meaning that is attached to them; as I argued in Chapter 1, through my discussion of Benjamin’s theory of allegory, I want to suggest that the material actually survives the process, albeit manipulated and made fragmentary. Lefebvre also questions the use of literary texts in the study of space, on the grounds that spaces are described in almost all literature, thus making a proper selection of texts impossible: Dès que l’analyse cherche l’espace dans les textes littéraires, elle le découvre partout et de toutes parts: inclus, décrit, projeté, rêvé, spéculé. De quels textes considérés comme privilégiés pourrait partir une analyse ‘textuelle’? [The problem is that any search for space in literary texts will find it everywhere and in every guise: enclosed, described, projected, dreamt of, speculated about. What texts can be considered special enough to provide the basis for a ‘textual’ analysis?]45

As David Harvey reminds us, though, ‘the strength of the Lefebvrian 44 45

Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, p. 167. Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, p. 22.

41

Space and Materiality construction [. . .] is precisely that it refuses to see materiality, representation and imagination as separate worlds’. If we move beyond a simple examination of depictions of places, we see that ‘representations of places have material consequences in so far as fantasies, desires, fears and longings are expressed in actual behaviour’.46 This book, then, is not just going to be reading spaces within The Faerie Queene (although how the poem asks us to read them will be a question), but asking how social exchanges and forces, which Lefebvre speaks about as fundamentally spatial, are inscribed within the poem; how the making of an allegory disguises these social process or ideologies. And this understanding of space provides a further way of integrating the materiality that I discussed in Chapter 1 into a reading of the poem. If material objects and practices are produced in space (and if material production produces space), and a discussion of the representation of space also requires an engagement with the social forces that are implicated in them, what I will seek to find at points in The Faerie Queene is an ideological view of space and material. The ideological bases of the poem link with a Lefebvrian understanding of space. And here I take ideology as it is described by Terry Eagleton, not as a false or imposed consciousness but as, in general terms, the ‘ideas and beliefs (whether true or false) which symbolize the conditions and life-experiences of a specific, socially significant group or class’, and which account for ‘the promotion and legitimation of the interests of such social groups in the face of opposing interests’.47 As Eagleton stresses in Criticism and Ideology, these ideas and beliefs are ‘realised in certain material apparatuses and related to the structures of material production’.48 The descriptions of the material world in The Faerie Queene are produced through the medium of these ideologies, not recorded empirically. The poem does not report these ideologies neutrally, nor does it merely generate or reproduce power struggles; it also responds, in an ideologically significant way, to ideologies that are current in sixteenth-century England and Ireland. This is the relation between literature and ideology that Eagleton describes: The text enters into relation with an always partial range of the historically determined values, interests, needs, powers and capacities which surround it: not that it ‘expresses’ or ‘reproduces’ such things [. . .], but that it constructs itself in relation to the ideological signs which encode them.49

Eagleton stresses the distance between the text and the forces outside it; in 46

47 48 49

David Harvey, ‘From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflections on the Condition of Postmodernity’, in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. Jon Bird et al. (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 3–29 (pp. 22–23). Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), p. 29. Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory, rev. edn (London: Verso, 1998), p. 54. Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, p. 186.

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Space, Place, And Location emphasizing that the text is not productive, by itself, of ideology or power, he stands at a distance from the New Historicist criticism that follows some years after him. The material world is not to be treated as just a function of the text. There is something outside the text, and for Eagleton the text can be used as ‘the productive instrument by which a resourceful ideological world is so “internally distantiated” as to yield up the wealth of its prejudices and perceptions’.50 This model provides a contrast with Lefebvre: for Lefebvre, literary texts are simply descriptive, which is one of the reasons why they are less useful. This model allows us to see them as more productive of ideology. The ideological nature of the distance between the poem and materiality is another reason why it ought not to be taken as empirically reflecting a ‘real world’. It is the reason, furthermore, why this book does not catalogue every aspect of the physical world of the narrative, treating them as equally significant: it concentrates on those aspects which show the (ideological) responses of The Faerie Queene to the material world, loaded as it is with competing ideologies, beyond itself. As Eagleton points out, furthermore, this need not imply that we are drawing out textual effects or ways of reading of which the author himself would have been deliberately aware; in fact, this self-knowledge is something to be worked against: Criticism is not a passage from text to reader: its task is not to redouble the text’s self-understanding, to collude with its object in a conspiracy of eloquence. Its task is to show the text as it cannot know itself, to manifest those conditions of its making (inscribed in its very letter) about which it is necessarily silent.51

Therefore, while I am not looking within The Faerie Queene for complete or empirically sound descriptions of the world, I shall want to suggest that the poem contains accounts of spaces and places, social practices and productive forces which, however distorted, have to be examined in relation to the ideological–material world. And this, to conclude, again takes us back to Chapter 1. I have argued throughout this chapter that the spatiality and materiality of The Faerie Queene are connected, not just in the sense that both are fragmented, fluctuating, but also by comparative discussion of Lefebvre’s Production de l’espace, which sees space as conditioning, and conditioned by, material production. I have argued again in this chapter, with respect to space, that using the ‘real world’ to make the meaning of the poem fall into place is tempting, and essential at some points, but misleading at others. The rest of this book will continue to explore this paradox. Spenser’s biography has proved to be a common critical method of locating the real in his works; it will be explored further in Chapter 7, which will discuss Kilcolman Castle and the biographical myths 50 51

Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, p. 186. Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, p. 43.

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Space and Materiality surrounding it. The same is true of Ireland, which will be a presence throughout much of this book.52 Both Spenser’s home in Ireland and his career as secretary in the English administration have attracted recent critical attention; both provide evidence about the topographical and material realities of Spenser’s life.53 Space and materiality are both susceptible to historicizing, and both provide models of historical practice; both of them attract ideologies that can be traced in the poem. But both, within the allegorical and narrative method of the poem, are unstable; it is their fluctuating presence that I will now go on to trace.

52

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A bibliographical review of the book-length studies of Spenser’s Irish context, let alone articles, that have appeared even in the last twenty-five years would require a lengthy chapter of its own, and will not be attempted here; discussion of Irish material will appear at a number of points later in the book. Extensive bibliographies of this secondary literature can be found, for example, in Willy Maley, ‘Spenser and Ireland: A Select Bibliography’, Spenser Studies 9 (1991), 227–42, and ‘Spenser and Ireland: An Annotated Bibliography, 1986–96’, Irish University Review 26 (1996), 342–53; Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). For literary critical references to Spenser’s home in Ireland, see, among many others, Louis A. Montrose, ‘Spenser’s Domestic Domain: Poetry, Property, and the Early Modern Subject’, in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 8 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 83–130; Lupton, ‘Mapping Mutability’, which sees Arlo Hill as the centre and determinant of the reality of Spenser’s Irishly-inflected writings, both a ‘site of survey’ (p. 109) over Ireland – and itself a site that has been surveyed – and also ‘the confluence [. . .] of a series of rhetorical currents: the New English apologetics of the “Irish plot”, the antiquarian, topographic tradition of Anglo-Irish representation, Ovidian metamorphosis ex Ponto, and the legal contest of titles and best rights’ (p. 111). On Spenser’s career, see Richard Rambuss, Spenser’s Secret Career, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Christopher Burlinson and Andrew Zurcher, ‘ “Secretary to the Lord Grey Lord Deputie here”: Edmund Spenser’s Irish Papers’, The Library, seventh series 6 (2005), 30–75.

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II Architectural Space and the Status of the Object in The Faerie Queene

Chapter 3

GALLERIES: SPACE, MYTHOGRAPHY, AND THE OBJECT

O

N 29 APRIL 1609, Thomas Howard, third Viscount Bindon, then extending his house at Bindon Abbey with a long gallery, wrote a short letter to Robert Cecil.1 Galleries, or long galleries, are rooms commonly associated with English architecture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,2 even if many of the larger houses and palaces built in England from at least the fourteenth century did have covered corridors (used primarily as means of communication, for example between houses and their chapels).3 Bindon’s letter to Cecil contained a request for a gift that he could place in his gallery: 1

2

3

Much of the detail in this chapter is indebted to Rosalys Coope’s comprehensive and illuminating account: Rosalys Coope, ‘The “Long Gallery”: Its Origins, Development, Use and Decoration’, Architectural History 29 (1986), 43–84. They were also built in certain houses of the period in Ireland. The house of the Earl of Ormond and Ossory at Carrick-on-Suir, which Spenser may be describing in his dedicatory sonnet to Ormond as ‘thy braue mansione’, also incorporated many features of English Elizabethan architecture, including a long gallery. See further Brian de Breffny and Rosemary Ffolliott, The Houses of Ireland: Domestic Architecture from the Medieval Castle to the Edwardian Villa (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), p. 25. The construction of houses by the colonial elite in early modern Ireland is dealt with by Eric Klingelhöfer, ‘The Architecture of Empire: Elizabethan Country Houses in Ireland’, in Archaeologies of the British: Explorations of Identity in Great Britain and its Colonies, 1600–1945, ed. Susan Lawrence (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 102–15, who analyses them according to ‘socio-political factors of imperial and colonial expansion’ (p. 102). A discussion of Carrick-on-Suir as a ‘construction of identity’ can be found in Tadhg O’Keeffe, ‘Concepts of “Castle” and the Construction of Identity in Medieval and Post-Medieval Ireland’, Irish Geography 34 (2001), 69–88 (pp. 84–86). Hanneke Ronnes, ‘ “A Solitary Place of Retreat”: Renaissance Privacy and Irish Architecture’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 8.2 (June 2004), 101–17, raises the question of private space in early modern Irish architecture, with specific reference to Carrick-on-Suir. See also footnote 32 below. See P. A. Faulkner, ‘Some Medieval Archiepiscopal Palaces’, Archaeological Journal 127 (1970), 130–46. The function may still have been partially present in England around the middle of the sixteenth century, when galleries were often built in royal houses to connect the public space of the presence chamber and the exclusive privy chamber, thus leading to them

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Architectural Space a request to be beholdyng for the bystoying [sic] your Lordships picture yn the garter robes, to be plased yn a gallyrey I lately made for the pyctures of sundry of my honorabll frends, whos presentatyon therby dayly to byhold, wyll gretely delyght me to wawlk often yn that place where I may see so cumfortabll a syght.4

Bindon seems to be anticipating a multiplicity of activities in his gallery. It will not just be a place where he can examine the paintings, and gain delight and comfort from the sight of Cecil in his state robes; he will also go there to refresh his spirits and, as he takes exercise, his body. In the same way, fifteen years later, in his Elements of Architecture (1624), Henry Wotton would list the gallery among those rooms in a house ‘that are appointed for gentle Motion’.5 Bindon describes the collection in the gallery, and his daily walks within it, while neither specifying exactly what his collection will contain, nor anticipating a sole benefit that he will derive from it. He will hang pictures of ‘sundry of my frends’, the precise contents of the collection presumably being partly contingent on which of his friends reply favourably to his letter, and the size of the collection depending upon how many such gifts he can accumulate. I argued in Chapter 2, as part of my discussion of Henri Lefebvre’s model of the production of space, that architectural spaces are not created independently from social and political interaction; they are produced to accommodate different types of social practice, and the continuities and changes in this behaviour and these relations affect or sustain their design. I also argued that when we read literary descriptions of these spaces, we could identify and analyse ideological responses to particular modes and instances of spatial production, as well as studying their narratological approach to the physical spaces that they describe. In the case of the gallery, a room where one might expect pictures or tapestries, often iconographic, to be hung, there is a possibility that the description of the room will contain little more than accounts of the paintings therein, and that the account of the space will arguably come to seem equivalent to the meaning contained within these decorations. Lefebvre cautions us against semiotic readings of spaces, reducing them ‘à un message, et sa fréquentation à une lecture’6 [to the status of a message, and the inhabiting

4 5 6

occasionally being described as ‘junctions’ between the two domains. See Simon Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and Court Life 1460–1547 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 125. The complexes of rooms around such private places often included a number of small galleries, as well as a larger one. Equally, however, a gallery could be built apart from the other main rooms in the house, and not connected to the hall, or privy or withdrawing chamber, at all. The gallery at Little Moreton Hall, near Congleton, Cheshire, for example, plays no function in connecting other parts of the house. It extends across the entire width of the top floor, from which it juts out, and apart from the stairs which provide access to it, it leads only to a small ante-room. For other ‘skied’ and ‘attic’ galleries, see Coope, ‘The “Long Gallery” ’, pp. 54–56. Hatfield House, Cecil Papers, vol. 127, no. 33. Henry Wotton, The Elements of Architecture (London, 1624), p. 8. Henri Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, 3rd edn (Paris: Anthropos, 1986), p. 14.

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Space, Mythography, and the Object of it to the status of a reading], but this might be exactly what this kind of description seems to ask of us. How does our understanding of these narrative and physical spaces interact with the reading that the poetry forces us to make of the images? How do Spenser’s descriptions of these rooms ask us to interpret the meanings of objects that they contain? Analysing these episodes in The Faerie Queene thus presents an opportunity for us to ask questions about space and signification, as well as about the production and depiction of social space. Few rooms in The Faerie Queene are explicitly called galleries, and I am not using the presence of the word ‘gallery’ in the verse as a criterion for my discussion: what I shall be discussing in the first place are rooms where we see pictures, tapestries, or other images hanging. One such set of rooms appears in Busyrane’s castle (in III.xi–xii), another in Castle Joyeous (III.i), and others are described incidentally, including in the House of Pride (I.iv), where we read mention of galleries and a tapestried hall. The poem seems at these points to be describing spaces that bear comparison with the long galleries of late sixteenth-century England, but the difficulty of making a precise correspondence points up the contrast between social space, literary spaces, and space as metaphorical meaning. In dealing with a type of room that could house collections of many kinds of artworks, artefacts, and antiquities, I will also consider at further length the place of the material, and the object, in The Faerie Queene. I begin by examining Britomart’s sojourn in the rooms of Busyrane’s castle, firstly because of the extended length and detail of this episode, and secondly because it is an important critical focus for the question of how painterly images in the poem are to be read and interpreted. At the start of this narrative, Britomart breaks through the fiery gate of the castle of the enchanter Busyrane; this gate has prevented Scudamour from rescuing Amoret, who is being held captive inside the castle. In the ‘vtmost’ part of the house, Britomart spends a day and a night within a series of rooms.7 In the first of these, ‘abounding with all precious store’ (III.xi.27.9), the reader is told that ‘the wals yclothed were | With goodly arras of great maiesty’ (III.xi.28.1–2). These tapestries are decorated with mythological scenes, all of which relate to the sexual encounters of the classical gods – Jove, Phoebus, and so on – and many of which correspond, in detail and in the order in which they are presented, with those woven by Arachne in Ovid’s account of her weaving contest with Minerva (Metamorphoses, 6.1–145). In his study of numerology in The Faerie Queene, Alastair Fowler attempts to analyse the images on these tapestries as a coherent and significant scheme.8 7

8

Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) compares Busyrane’s rooms with the presence chambers at Hampton Court, on the grounds that they are richly adorned and ‘open sequentially’ (p. 124). Alastair Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964).

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Architectural Space His account of this scene in the poem claims to identify a precise numerical correlation between the tapestries and the Masque of Cupid which Busyrane subsequently performs, with the participation of Amoret, in front of Britomart. Fowler also relates the tapestries to numbers which he sees as influencing the overall themes and modes of the books of the poem, and to the Ptolemaic numerologies which apply to the stars within the constellations that he associates with these numbers. ‘There cannot be the slightest doubt’, Fowler claims, ‘that each [the gallery of tapestries and the Masque of Cupid] is a numerological representation of Taurus’.9 As Fowler himself admits, though, ‘the numerology of the tapestries will not be easy to disentangle’, as is indicated by the narrator’s statement that the images of the victims of Cupid appear countless:10 But to declare the mournfull Tragedyes, And spoiles, wherewith he all the ground did strow, More eath to number, with how many eyes High heuen beholdes sad louers nightly theeueryes.

(III.xi.45.6–9)

The assumption that such a numerology is accessible does not require a reader of the poem to imagine with certainty every detail on the tapestries, but it does, I think, imply that they can be located stably in the description – that we can be sure what we are reading about. The very next stanza challenges this assurance: Kings Queenes, Lords Ladies, Knights and Damsels gent Were heap’d together with the vulgar sort, And mingled with the raskall rablement, Without respect of person or of port, To shew Dan Cupids powre and great effort.

(III.xi.46.1–5)

This passage suggests either that the tapestries that we have read about in the preceding stanzas are displayed in a confused (‘heap’d [. . .] mingled’) way, or that the room contains more tapestries than have been described to us, again all mingled together. Although one might assume that the narrator is referring back to the images in the previous stanzas, it is difficult to tell the extent to which the two groups overlap. And the ‘heaping together’ implies more than just interspersal, I would suggest: it both describes an organizational principle and makes the tapestries overtly material (‘heap’ is a word that I will come back to later in this chapter). Stanzas 44–45 present us with similar questions:

9 10

See also Joseph B. Dallett, ‘Ideas of Sight in The Faerie Queene’, ELH 27 (1960), 87–121. Although Dallett acknowledges that ‘the number of scenes in each arras is indeterminate’, he argues that the arrases constitute a ‘continuous or progressive narration’ (p. 99). Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time, p. 153. Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time, p. 148.

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Space, Mythography, and the Object Long were to tell the amorous assayes, And gentle pangues, with which he maked meeke The mightie Mars, to learne his wanton playes: How oft for Venus, and how often eek For many other Nymphes he sore did shreek, With womanish teares, and with vnwarlike smarts, Priuily moystening his horrid cheeke. There was he painted full of burning dartes, And many wide woundes launched through his inner partes. Ne did he spare (so cruell was the Elfe) His owne dear mother, (ah why should he so?) Ne did he spare sometime to pricke himselfe, That he might tast the sweet consuming woe, Which he had wrought to many others moe.

(III.xi.44–45)

Are these stanzas describing a new tapestry, a new group of tapestries, or the tapestries that we have already read about, or these and others? By beginning with a figure of occultatio – ‘long were to tell’ – the narrator seems on the one hand to decline to tell us about all of the images, and on the other to apologize for the length of his account. ‘How oft [. . .] how often’ (44.4) suggests that this stanza is summarizing many images (perhaps to avoid such a long description), though it could just as easily be describing a single tapestry with several images in it. ‘There was he painted’ (line 8) might refer to the same tapestry or tapestries as above, though it might seem hard to accommodate the ‘burning dartes’ within it (and the same is true for the ‘wide woundes’. It is hard to say. What we can say with certainty is that the deictic ‘there’ is destabilized: it seems to be pointing towards a specific tapestry, but the stanza leaves us confused as to exactly what we are looking at. Taken together, then, these stanzas suggest two things about the tapestries in Busyrane’s castle, and about Spenser’s description of them: firstly the instability of descriptions of objects, and secondly a miscellaneous arrangement within the room itself. The tapestries in the room all treat the same theme – ‘all of loue, and al of lusty-hed, | [. . .] | And eke all Cupids warres they did repeate’ (III.xi.29.3–5) – but, as though as a consequence of the disruptive nature of their subject, they are displayed not in any meaningful arrangement, but in disorder. The heaping together of pictures of the aristocracy with those of ‘the vulgar sort’ (46.2) and ‘the raskall rablement’ (46.3) implies that this chaotic indecorum also extends to the social order. To ask how Busyrane has put his collection together (as with Viscount Bindon) is clearly over-literal, and rather beside the point. And yet we are led to understand that Busyrane’s gallery is in some respect a miscellany, in that pictures and tapestries, albeit treating the same general themes, have been apparently arbitrarily juxtaposed. The history of the long gallery at Hardwick Hall suggests that a collection of pictures in an English house of the time would have been assembled according 51

Architectural Space to a similar principle.11 The building of the new hall at Hardwick was completed in October 1597, and in 1601 an inventory was drawn up of the contents of each room. Although it may not represent an entirely accurate account of the way that objects were routinely distributed around the house, it comes so soon after the furnishing of the Hall that we might assume that the list of paintings and tapestries corresponds closely with the collection that was originally hung there. The inventory shows a quite miscellaneous group of decorations. The gallery is hung with ‘thirtene peeces of deep Tapestrie hanginges’ depicting ‘the storie of Gedion’,12 over the top of which are displayed portraits of English monarchs from Edward II to Elizabeth, family members including the Earl of Shrewsbury and Henry Cavendish, diplomats and politicians such as Bacon, Cromwell, and Wyatt, religious scenes like ‘the picture of Our Ladie the Virgin Marie’,13 as well as, more surprisingly in the context of this display of patriotic and religious devotion, pictures of foreign monarchs, King Philip of Spain and Henri III of France, and also (perhaps less unexpectedly at the start of the seventeenth century) a portrait of King James of Scotland. The collection seems miscellaneous, not only in the way that it gathers up various hangings, some of which are linked by common subjects but not by any discernible design, but also because it is presented within the inventory as a consecutive list, rather than as a scheme or spatially specific arrangement.14 Likewise, an inventory taken of the property of Robert Dudley at Leicester House (which Spenser had visited in the late 1570s) at the time of his death in 1588 shows that ‘twentie eight pictures’ were kept in the gallery, but does not identify them or comment on their significance (though this does not, in itself, mean that there wasn’t one).15 Indeed, a different list which was made of the subjects of these pictures shows the same juxtaposing, accumulating tendency that seems to govern the Hardwick gallery: noblemen and diplomats, many European and many, although by no means all, from Protestant regions on the continent are hung with ‘the Picture of Occasion and Repentance’ and ‘the Picture of the baker’s daughter’.16 As in Busyrane’s

11 12 13 14

15 16

For other instances of English galleries as places for the display of pictures, see Coope, ‘The “Long Gallery” ’, pp. 62–63. Lindsay Boynton, ed., The Hardwick Hall Inventories of 1601 (London: Furniture History Society, 1971), p. 27. Boynton, ed., The Hardwick Hall Inventories, p. 29. See also Susan Foister, ‘Paintings and Other Works of Art in Sixteenth-Century English Inventories’, Burlington Magazine 123 (1981), 273–82. This article provides a review of a great number of inventories, and reveals the very broad range of subjects which interested English collectors in the period; it also notes, as in the Hardwick inventories, that ‘information on the authorship of paintings is never given’ (p. 273). See Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, ‘Essex House, Formerly Leicester House and Exeter Inn’, Archaeologia 73 (1923), 1–54 (p. 30). William J. Thoms, ‘Pictures of the Great Earl of Leicester’, NQ, 3rd series 2 (July–December 1862), 201–2 (p. 201).

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Space, Mythography, and the Object collection, the mixture of paintings and tapestries also produces a mixing of social ranks. Such a collection might have been assembled according to the themes of the paintings, but its coherence would not be interrupted by the addition of several other works of art on the same subjects. The Galerie François Ier at the palace of Fontainebleau provides a significant contrast to this accumulating principle in sixteenth-century English galleries, not only because it was itself built in the middle of the sixteenth century, but also because there are documentary records of English responses to it. English politicians and noblemen who found themselves travelling in France during the 1530s often made journeys to the palace, to see the work on the gallery under way or in completion.17 On 17 November 1540, one of Henry VIII’s ambassadors in France, Sir John Wallop, wrote to the king to inform him about the most recent developments of a number of small, ongoing negotiations between the two countries. As part of the letter, Wallop describes a visit to Fontainebleau (and to the gallery that was being completed there) which he has made during the week. Waiting in King François’s dining chamber for him to return from mass, Wallop is told by the French monarch’s constable that he will be escorted through this very room. ‘O monsieur lambassadour quod he/ vous soiez le tresbien venu./ prayng me to tarry awhile and the King wold shewe me his gallerey’.18 When the king returns, he takes Wallop first into an outer chamber where they discuss the furnishings on display there, and ‘from thense browght me into his gallerey’, which, as he describes, is stocked with pictures and statues: betwixt euery windowe./ standes grete anticall personages/ entier/ And in dyvers places of the said gallerey many fayre tables of stories sett in very fynely wrowgth./ as Lucretia and other.19

Wallop’s letter to Henry compares English galleries with what he sees at Fontainebleau. He tells the English king that ‘after that I had wel beheld the said gallerey/ me thought it the most magnifique that that ever I sawe’, dwelling as much on the paintings and statues in the gallery as on the sumptuous wooden floors and panels which cover the walls. His emphasis, though, is that Fontainebleau is quite different from what he has seen at home. ‘The rowff thereof ys seeled. with walnott tree./ and made after an other forme then your Maiestie vseth./ and wrougth with woode of dyvers cullers./ as before I haue rehersed. to your maiestie./ and is partly gilt.’ He even suggests that Henry should employ the same schemes at the palace which he had been

17

18 19

The Earl of Surrey, for example, visited Fontainebleau with the Duke of Richmond in the spring of 1533. See W. A. Sessions, Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 99–104. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 1/163, fol. 231r. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 1/163, fols 231v–232r.

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Architectural Space building at more or less the same time as King François’s gallery was being assembled20 – ‘in the gallerey at St James the like wold be wel made’ – and tells him that the French king would be prepared to show him the plans, or the gallery itself: Yf your pleasur be to haue the paterne of this here. I knowe I knowe [sic] right wel the French king will gladly geve it me/ And in this shewing me his gallerey [. . .] I wisched your Maiestie there to haue seene it:/ par ma foy monsieur Ambassadour quod he/ yf he were I wold make hym good chere.21

The fact that, by the 1630s, the gallery at St James’s had indeed been stocked with representations of ‘anticall personages’ and ‘peeces or pictures of Emperours heades that were done by Titiano painted ouer in a sad wallnuttree cullor’ is an indication of the continental ideas which would become influential in the years to come, if not in Henry’s reign.22 Perhaps the most complete account of the Galerie François Ier remains the study by Dora and Erwin Panofsky of the friezes, pictures and decorations which the king commissioned the artist Rosso to make inside it: some of them depicting mythological subjects, such as the Death of Adonis, others allegorical, such as ‘L’Unité de l’État’, and others with literary or legendary subjects, such as the education of Achilles. The Panofskys analyse the twelve decorative tableaux one by one; they note that, since even the tiniest spaces on the walls of the gallery are filled with devices, emblems and decorations, ‘the iconographic relation between all these elements varies almost ad infinitum’.23 Their critical project depends nonetheless on the assumption, and indeed goes toward suggesting the conclusion, that the iconographic scheme is ‘a coherent and, on its own complex premises, consistent system’, even if it is ‘open and elastic rather than closed and stable’.24 Though they claim that we are left with the feeling that the decoration ‘might be prolonged indefinitely’, and that it was designed flexibly enough to allow the artists to amend and substitute images as they were designing the gallery, they still assume that the decorative scheme would relate specifically to the life of the king.25 It is hypothetically (if not practically) understandable as an integral and meaningful whole, in which every element – even those the meaning of which the Panofskys are uncertain – is both important and allocated a certain signification.26 This is not to say that 20

21 22 23 24 25 26

St James’s Palace was built between 1531 and 1541; see further The History of the King’s Works, ed. H. M. Colvin et al., 6 vols (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1963–82), IV (1982), pp. 241–52. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 1/163, fols 231v–232r. TNA (PRO), Exchequer, E 351/3265. Erwin and Dora Panofsky, ‘The Iconography of the Galerie François Ier at Fontainebleau’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6th series 52 (1958), 113–77 (p. 118). Panofsky and Panofsky, ‘Iconography’, pp. 158–59. Panofsky and Panofsky, ‘Iconography’, p. 159. André Chastel, ‘Le système de la galerie’, Revue de l’Art 16–17 (1972), 143–52, praises the

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Space, Mythography, and the Object galleries in sixteenth-century continental Europe were places where only iconographic schemes were important. Wolfram Prinz’s assertion, regarding French and Italian galleries, that ‘die Begriffe “Galerie” und “Sammlung” waren [. . .] um 1600 im allgemeinen Sprachgebrauch schon synonym geworden’ [the terms ‘gallery’ and ‘collection’ [. . .] had already become synonymous in general usage in 1600] may be a misrepresentation;27 the galleries at Fontainebleau, certainly by the seventeenth century, were also places where the court went to hear music and enjoy other diversions.28 Nonetheless, the fact that the gallery of the French king was planned, commissioned, built, stocked, and paid for within the space of about ten years may support the idea that it represents a fully completed imaginative structure.29 This conclusion has also been drawn from the decorations of the baths at Fontainebleau, through which John Wallop was escorted after leaving the gallery.30 What John Wallop does see in common between Henry’s galleries and the one which he explores at Fontainebleau is the control which both monarchs exercise over physical access to their rooms. It is a similarity which he is quick to point out to the French king, and which his host seems to enjoy. Wallop notes that it is King François personally who admits him to the gallery: keping the key therof hym self./ like as your Maiestie vseth./ and so I shewed hym./ wherewith he toke pleasur.31

This control means that King François can use the Fontainebleau gallery as a private space; in conjunction with the paintings of the walls of the gallery, it also suggests that the meaning contained within the gallery, such as it is, is closely linked to this privacy and spatial control. King François is the one person who can open the room, and his presence and guidance are inevitable when his guests are looking around it. François is present to prompt the visitor into understanding the significant and meaningful scheme formed by the decorations in the gallery. The meaning which can be derived from a reading of these decorations, and indeed the extent to which such an understanding of

27 28

29 30 31

Panofskys, for their explanation of the ‘suite d’exégèses’ which led to the recognition of ‘un programme préétabli’ (pp. 144–45). Wolfram Prinz, Die Entstehung der Galerie in Frankreich und Italien (Berlin: Mann, 1970), p. 11. Paul F. Rice, The Performing Arts at Fontainebleau from Louis XIV to Louis XVI, Studies in Music 102 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989) discusses what he calls ‘performance sites’ (p. 11) in the palace, a useful phrase which implies the role of the performances in producing and sustaining the spaces examined. See Sylvia Pressouyre, ‘Chronologie des travaux’, Revue de l’Art 16–17 (1972), 40–41. Work started around 1528, and final payments were being made around the end of 1540. See Chantal Eschenfelder, ‘Les Bains de Fontainebleau: nouveaux documents sur les décors du Primatice’, trans. Aude Virey-Wallon, Revue de l’Art 99 (1993), 45–52. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 1/163, fol. 231v.

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Architectural Space the decorations is intended to signify such a meaning, is contingent upon the way in which the gallery is used.32 Most of the critics who have not gone as far as Alastair Fowler’s numerological interpretation of Busyrane’s gallery have, nonetheless, analysed the tapestries hung in this room in terms only of the images that they depict. The experience of Britomart in this gallery has frequently been measured by the relation between the subjects of the pictures and what Britomart learns, what she should learn, or is meant to learn from the images as a whole.33 Harry Berger, Jr., for example, analyses the tapestries as a coherent message, a largely successful attempt to express an anatomy of his view of the experiences of love: ‘Busirane displays before Britomart a slanted history, articulated into three rooms or phases – his phases. His message is that erotic experience must inevitably terminate in torment and breakdown.’34 According to this view, the narrative of the episode is one of reading, interpretation, and incomprehension. Lauren Silberman describes the conflict between the two protagonists as ‘an inescapable battle for interpretation’.35 She claims that both Busyrane, with his tapestries depicting classical rapes, and the narrator himself, who describes these images of love as examples of ‘Cupids warres’ (III.xi.29.5), present a specific, coherent picture of sexual love and desire. She argues that this imposition of an interpretation of love also involves the reader, who as well as Britomart has to engage with and resist the ‘highly tendentious picture of sexual love’ represented in the tapestries. Silberman sees Britomart as a ‘reader surrogate’, whose response to Busyrane as a sexual villain is analogous to, and indeed implicated with, her response to him as ‘a manipulative poet’, who ‘covertly seeks to retain the power of interpretation exclusively for himself’. This ‘doubling’ between reader and sexual victim, she writes, ‘underscores the

32

33

34 35

On the decorative scheme in the gallery at Carrick-on-Suir, see also Jane Fenlon, ‘The Decorative Plasterwork at Ormond Castle: A Unique Survival’, Architectural History 41 (1998), 67–81. Fenlon argues convincingly, and with considerable detail, that the gallery ‘was a room created for display and also as a visual demonstration of the earl’s [of Ormond’s] loyalty’; there was a ‘clear political message incorporated in [the] decorative scheme’, and, Fenlon argues, ‘it is not surprising [. . .] that Ormond should make such use of the most public room of his state apartment, where these symbols would be seen and clearly read by all who visited there’ (pp. 72–75). Another interpretative tradition has claimed that the tapestries also represent Amoret’s exaggerated fear of marriage; in common with the tradition outlined below, it sees the tapestries in relation to a sexual subjectivity. Exemplary here is Thomas P. Roche, Jr., ‘The Challenge to Chastity: Britomart at the House of Busyrane’, PMLA 76.3 (June 1961), 340–44. The implications of this tradition are denounced in Susan Frye, ‘Of Chastity and Violence: Elizabeth I and Edmund Spenser in the House of Busirane’, Signs 20 (1994–95), 49–78 (pp. 50–51). Harry Berger, Jr., ‘Busirane and the War between the Sexes: An Interpretation of The Faerie Queene III.xi–xii’, ELR 1 (1971), 99–121 (p. 100). Lauren Silberman, Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 60.

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Space, Mythography, and the Object homology between sexual love and semiosis that functions throughout Book III’.36 Feminist critics have also looked within these cantos for evidence of ‘the emergence of character within figure’, and more specifically, for the depiction, in Britomart, of a female character capable of acting independently of the designs of the male artist.37 This search for a differentiated female personality assumes that the episode is to be understood as a competition between different ways of reading and interpreting the images on Busyrane’s tapestries. Mary Ellen Lamb writes: In the house of Busirane, these lyrics, masques, and myths all contribute to the patriarchal ‘spell’ of a culture that holds Amoret captive. Britomart refuses to interpret the meanings of the tapestries, and it is this [. . .] that creates her immunity to their power. [. . .] In this episode, women’s narratives have won, hands down.38

The terms of the debate suggest that the ‘real’ or ‘literal’ qualities of such episodes depend upon whether a coherent and rounded personality, or character, is being described. In these terms, such a feminine character emerges from the readings which Britomart makes, or fails to make, of the tapestries in Busyrane’s gallery and then of the Masque of Cupid. This interpretation, however, contains no analysis of the place that reading might ever have had in a gallery, or the fact that the nature of this reading might be dependent upon the physical use of the space. The narrative of the episode presents a succession of images to the reader. As soon as Britomart enters the room, we read descriptions not of her presence or activity in it, but of a sequence of images, albeit images that are destabilized in the way described above – ‘And in those Tapets weren fashioned’ (III.xi.29.1) – which follow with no mention of her, or of what she is doing. After the tapestries have been described, though, we are given a succession of descriptions of Britomart ‘reading’ the images that follow – that is, the statue of Cupid and the ‘warlike spoiles’ of the next chamber. And these descriptions suggest that her experience of the tapestries could have been a good deal less sequential than ours, or at least could have occurred in a different sequence. She spends a disproportionate time looking at the statue, but isn’t able to 36 37

38

Silberman, Transforming Desire, pp. 58–60. For the comparison of Busyrane as rapist and Spenser as poet, see also Frye, Elizabeth I, pp. 130–34. Susanne Lindgren Wofford, ‘Gendering Allegory: Spenser’s Bold Reader and the Emergence of Character in The Faerie Queene III’, Criticism 30 (1988), 1–21 (p. 3). For a discussion of the ‘pressure’ which the criticism of the 1960s put on the ‘characterization’ of Britomart, see Richard A. Lanham, ‘The Literal Britomart’, MLQ 28 (1967), 426–45 (p. 427). Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘Gloriana, Acrasia, and the House of Busirane: Gendered Fictions in The Faerie Queene as Fairy Tale’, in Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age, ed. Patrick Cheney and Lauren Silberman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), pp. 81–100 (pp. 98–99).

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Architectural Space satisfy herself (‘Ne seeing could her wonder satisfie, | But euermore and more vpon it gazd’, 49.7–8). She then casts her eye ‘backward’ (50.1), and again spends a long time reading the motto above the door, repeatedly (‘she oft and oft it ouer-red, | Yet could not find what sence it figured’, 50.4–5). Once again, looking around the room, she ‘ne could satisfie | Her greedy eyes with gazing a long space’ (53.3–4), and looking back at ‘that same dore’ (54.2), she once again tries repeatedly to understand it, and once again fails (‘That much she muz’d, yet could not construe it | By any ridling skill, or commune wit’, 54.4–5). The scene as a whole, then, seems in the first place to exclude the confused act of reading and Britomart’s physical presence in the room, and then retrospectively to imply it. In doing so, the narrative implies very strongly that Britomart, who spends a night in the room and is free to move around, look at and disregard the tapestries in ways that contradict that sequence, has had a different experience of the space from the reader of the poem, but refuses to specify exactly what that experience was. To read Spenser’s description of the gallery in Busyrane’s house as merely a succession of images awaiting interpretation is to disregard the materiality of the tapestries and the room itself, and to decline to consider the way in which the narrative reveals or disguises that materiality: the gallery is treated as a space only in metaphorical terms. Susanne Wofford, for example, writes that Britomart’s exploring of Busyrane’s house ‘is glossed by Spenser as an activity like reading, and like other inner worlds, the House of Busyrane is treated as textual space, furnished with a multiplicity of intertextual references’.39 Clearly, to read about Busyrane’s gallery is not to read a space, or to read a very coherent or detailed description of one. But what is at stake, I would argue, is not the validity or otherwise of an iconological or allegorical analysis of the tapestries hanging in Busyrane’s gallery. It is the recognition that these tapestries are not presented in the poem as beyond the realm of objects, either de-materialized in themselves or isolated from other artefacts – and indeed that the narrative voice materializes them, draws attention to the difficulties of representing their physical reality, and indeed depends on a response to them as properties. Treating Busyrane’s gallery as a purely textual space draws us away from regarding galleries as physical spaces in any meaningful sense, and seems to assume that such a physical space can be translated without difficulty into an allegory of a scheme of reading. As I have suggested, however, the miscellaneous accumulation of pictures and hangings in English galleries of the sixteenth century, a miscellaneity that Spenser’s narrative voice responds to, despite its apparent orderly succession, might not easily accommodate such a scheme. 39

Wofford, ‘Gendering Allegory’, p. 10. For an exclusively intertextual interpretation of this and other episodes in the poem, see Robert R. Wilson, ‘Narrative Allusiveness: The Interplay of Stories in Two Renaissance Writers, Spenser and Cervantes’, English Studies in Canada 12 (1986), 138–62 (pp. 147–54).

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Space, Mythography, and the Object In fact, much of the information that we are given about the tapestries (through Britomart’s or the narrator’s perspective) emphasizes their material properties, in particular their richness. The first room is said, first of all, to be ‘abounding with all precious store’ (III.xi.27.9), so that the preciousness of the contents of the room is shown to the reader before the contents are identified. Likewise, the second room is described first of all not according to its contents but by the rich material of its ‘glistring walles’ (III.xi.52.1): ‘not with arras made in painefull loome, | But with pure gold it all was ouerlayd’ (III.xi.51.3–4). Much of the anxiety that appears to be aroused by the subjects of the tapestries in the first room is actually attendant upon the very display of this rich material.40 The cloths are said to be: Wouen with gold and silke so close and nere, That the rich metall lurked priuily, As faining to be hidd from enuious eye; Yet here, and there, and euery where vnwares It shewd it selfe, and shone vnwillingly; Like a discolourd Snake, whose hidden snares Through the greene gras his long bright burnisht back declares. (III.xi.28.3–9)

Here, the malevolent connotations of the image of the snake are attached to the display of the gold which shows through the weave of the material. The ‘rich’ gold implies the wealth of its owner, and it is this, as much as the images on the tapestries, which Busyrane intends to display, and feigns not to want to display. Spenser seems to condemn Busyrane because he is trying to incite the ‘enuious eye’ of whoever looks at his tapestries. Even though neither Amoret nor Britomart can be thought of as a visitor, in any normal sense, to Busyrane’s house, the language of public display and ‘shewing’ is prominent in this stanza. So, in this case either Britomart, a bad reader, has made a mistake, not recognizing the malevolent contexts of the gold and silk that the poetry reveals to us, or the reader of the poem is at least being made aware of a more materialized reading of the tapestries. Given the attraction to and ambivalence about material abundance and richness in so much of The Faerie Queene (as discussed elsewhere in this chapter and in Chapter 1), I would suggest that this is likely. Spenser’s narrative, indeed, shows the tapestries that hang in this room in conjunction with other objects. Passing out of Busyrane’s gallery of tapestries, Britomart comes across another room where different items have been collected and displayed: 40

‘The gold thread in the tapestry “fains” (and feigns) not to be seen, yet its bad faith is deconstructed in its very manifestation: the gold in the thread is a snake-in-the-grass. No good can come from the figures wrought against such fallen ground.’ John Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 17.

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Architectural Space And all about, the glistring walles were hong With warlike spoiles, and with victorious prayes, Of mighty Conquerours and Captaines strong, Which were whilome captiued in their dayes, To cruell loue, and wrought their owne decayes.

(III.xi.52.1–5)

Conventional topoi of love are presented in a recognizably materialized context, and in the process, the tapestries acquire the same narrative status as other objects. And although the two rooms are places for collections of objects which relate to love and violence, and sexual violence, the collections have no necessary limits; like the gallery at Hardwick Hall, the epistemological principle of the collections is accumulation on a particular theme, and the acquisition of any number of items for them would not disrupt their continuities.41 That the theme of ‘Cupids warres’ (III.xi.29.5) extends across a series of rooms again disrupts the idea that the first room – the gallery of tapestries – is arranged according to a precise numerological pattern. Furthermore, by noting the juxtaposition of the tapestries with other properties, which are being displayed in an equivalent way, we can question the procedure of a critical method that attempts to take them, as pure images, out of the material world. For Sheila Cavanagh, the tapestries are important as ‘images featuring deific deception and domination over unprotected human women’;42 I would suggest, in addition, that the way in which these images are to be read depends fundamentally on our assessment of the hangings as objects, and that only by reading the scene with this material (as well as iconological) analysis in mind can we come to a proper assessment of Busyrane’s house and his behaviour.43 What does it mean to think about decorative hangings as properties? An inventory of Henry VIII’s property at Hampton Court, contained in the first of two large volumes drawn up after Henry’s death to list the contents of the royal houses, lists galleries and private chambers together, including a room which it 41

42 43

A further comparison is provided by the ‘ragged monuments of times forepast’ that hang on the walls of Ate’s dwelling (IV.i.21.2). All of the objects in this collection are intended to demonstrate ‘the sad effects of discord’ (21.3), yet they are utterly miscellaneous – for example, the ‘signe of antique Babylon’, ‘the golden Apple’, ‘the name of Nimrod ’ (IV.i.22) – and the narrator suggests, as in the gallery of Busyrane, that the great number and heaping up of objects forestalls any numerological signification: ‘And eke of priuate persons many moe, | That were too long a worke to count them all’ (IV.i.24.1–2). Sheila T. Cavanagh, Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 156. Similarly, the presence of an inscription on the door of the gallery is not dissimilar to those on the walls of many English galleries of the period. The gallery at Little Moreton Hall, for example, is by no means unusual in having large painted inscriptions at its two ends. The representations and accompanying captions describing ‘The wheele of fortvne whose rvle is ignavrance’ and ‘The speare of destinye whose rvler is knowledge’ have been copied from the title page of Robert Recorde’s The Castle of Knowledge (1556).

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Space, Mythography, and the Object calls ‘the litle Galorie next the withdrawing Chambre dore’.44 The inventory shows, just as Viscount Bindon’s letter suggests, that the royal galleries were set aside for more than simply the viewing of paintings. The galleries in Hampton are well stocked with paintings, or ‘tables’; the long gallery contains a number of representations of the Passion, such as a ‘folding table of criste vppon the crosse’, portraits of royal figures, including ‘my Lorde Prince’, and other painted scenes which are less easy to attribute, such as ‘a table cont a man enbrasing a woman she having a dagger in her hande’. The inventory of this room also lists other items, though: a ‘rownde mappa mundi’,45 several mirrors, ‘seven paire of virginalles in cases of printers Lether’ and one ‘facioned like a harpe’, ‘a standinge deske’, a clock, candlesticks, stools and cupboards, and another musical instrument, a small, manual pipe organ: ‘a paire of Regalles in a case couered with crimson vellat’.46 The inventories of galleries in Henry’s other royal houses show similar combinations of objects. In the ‘Kynges Gallery’ at Greenwich are listed ‘a fayer Steele glasse couered with white velvet’, a table and a chair made from walnut, ‘with dyuers devyses’, ‘a paier of Virgynalles’, which suggests that, as at Hampton, the gallery was a place in which Henry or members of his court could play and listen to music, ‘a Hanging clocke in a case of glasse with plommettes’, and one painting: ‘a table with the picture of the frenche King’. In a room within this gallery there are ‘fyve latten Candlestickes’, another two chairs, a table and cupboard, a ‘fier shovell’, ‘fier forke’, and ‘a paier of tonges’, and an unidentified ‘ymage caste in metall’. In the next gallery there are more chairs, tables, and a cupboard, a map of England, a ‘barbe for a horsse’, and ‘iii formez and one sawing pece of woodde’.47 In the Greenwich inventory, the hangings are listed separately from the ‘Stuffe and Implementes’ found in the different rooms of the house;48 in this case, at least, the pictures are not exclusively associated with any particular place. They come under the control of the ‘Guarderobe [. . .] in the Chardge of Thomas Mayneman’, and are listed alongside cloths of estate, chairs, carpets, cushions, curtains, and bed-linen. The other ‘stuffe’ is listed separately: the hangings are not part of it, but they are being classified as kinds of object, rather as iconographic images. One has to be cautious about the value of such inventories. We cannot be sure that they account for objects within the rooms

44

45

46 47 48

BL, Harleian MS 1419A, fol. 245v. See also The Inventory of King Henry VIII: Society of Antiquaries MS 129 and British Library Harley MS 1419, ed. David Starkey and Philip Ward (London: Harvey Miller, 1998). For a specific study of the display of maps by persons of power, see Molly Bourne, ‘Francesco II Gonzaga and Maps as Palace Decoration in Renaissance Mantua’, Imago Mundi 51 (1999), 51–82. BL, Harleian MS 1419A, fols 246v–247r. BL, Harleian MS 1419A, fols 57v–58r. BL, Harleian MS 1419A, fol. 54r.

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Architectural Space where they were used in everyday life, nor indeed that they can list all of the many places in a house to which any particular object might be brought, and where it might be put to use. Furthermore, the lack of attention which seems to be given to details of pictures and tapestries, or indeed any such bias, may reflect the preoccupations of the inventory-taker, rather than those of the owner of the house. The inventories do not record how the house was used; they leave us only with traces. But their method of organizing and describing their objects might encourage us to look at the tapestries in galleries as properties, as ‘stuffe’, rather than concentrating exclusively on the subjects of the paintings and cloths. The hangings are certainly not ignored, but they are hardly privileged above the other properties, nor are the tapestries and hangings in these galleries associated with unchangeable decorative schemes. It is as properties, as well as in the context of images which we can analyse, that they should be considered. The galleries in The Faerie Queene, not unlike those of the England of Spenser’s day, are spaces where objects are gathered, heaped up. I have already discussed the narratological accumulation of physical details, but in the context of the foregoing discussion on the ‘stuffe’ contained in galleries, this accumulation also comes to look like a material excess, or superfluity. Spenser is not only consistently attracted to such physical superfluity, but seems consistently to suggest that it is distinctive to court, and here, ‘heape’ is an important term. The House of Pride (which itself is described as a ‘goodly heape’, I.iv.5.1), is full of ‘heapes of people’ (I.iv.16.7) and has a ‘heape’ of carcases outside it (I.v.49.1). It also has ‘galleries [. . .] ouer laid’ (I.iv.4.7): we don’t see these rooms, but we do see that they are haphazardly superposed. It is also a term used to describe the qualities of Gloriana herself: In her the richesse of all heauenly grace, In chiefe degree are heaped vp on hye: And all that els this worlds enclosure bace, Hath great or glorious in mortall eye, Adornes the person of her Maiestye; That men beholding so great excellence, And rare perfection in mortalitye, Doe her adore with sacred reuerence, As th’Idole of her makers great magnificence.

(II.ii.41)

The terms that imply material wealth or the worship of it (‘richesse [. . .] Adornes [. . .] Idole’) do not here seem to refer to anything meretricious, as they may in the ‘rich array and costly arras’ (I.iv.6.6) of the House of Pride, an account that stresses expense, not appearance. In that case, the surface materiality of the house is described in the first passage about the house: A stately Pallace built of squared bricke, Which cunningly was without morter laid,

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Space, Mythography, and the Object Whose wals were high, but nothing strong, nor thick And golden foile all ouer them displaid, That purest skye with brightnesse they dismaid: High lifted vp were many lofty towres, And goodly galleries farre ouer laid, Full of faire windowes, and delightful bowres; And on the top a Diall told the timely howres.

(I.iv.4)

It is an account that suggests an analogy with Spenser’s own poetic method (and the ambiguities of the accusations of ‘painted forgery’ in the Proem to Book 2). What I would like to suggest here, then, is not just that we attend to the way that Britomart is described, and the ways in which her subjectivity emerges, in co-existence with the objects of the world, but also that we should be prepared to regard the poetic world of The Faerie Queene (and these particular spaces in it) as a place in which objects are being thrust before our attention, to be accounted for, described, and discussed. In response to the attention that Spenser draws in The Faerie Queene to the material, we should (as I suggested in Chapter 1) think about the objects’ histories as objects: how the status of the material is produced in the poem and how descriptions of objects circulate there, as well as how they are produced and circulated in the world outside the poem. As Igor Kopytoff argues in a seminal essay on the study of material culture, one can draw up ‘a biography of things’ in the same way as of a person, character, or civilization: One would ask questions similar to those one asks about people: What, sociologically, are the biographical possibilities inherent in its ‘status’ and in the period and culture, and how are those possibilities realized? Where does the thing come from and who made it? What has been its career so far, and what do people consider to be an ideal career for such things? What are the recognized ‘ages’ or periods in the thing’s ‘life,’ and what are the cultural markers for them? How does the thing’s use change with its age, and what happens to it when it reaches the end of its usefulness?49

The displaying of an object, as Arjun Appadurai emphasizes in the introduction to the volume where Kopytoff’s article appears, can be part of this cultural biography.50 And the significance of displaying, and the way in which it is judged, can be seen in an incident in the first canto of Book 3. Britomart, in her masculine disguise, is admitted together with the Redcrosse Knight to Castle Joyeous. They pass through an exquisitely and extravagantly decorated

49

50

Igor Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 64–91 (pp. 66–67). Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in The Social Life of Things, pp. 3–63 (p. 28).

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Architectural Space ‘great chamber’ where the lady of the house, Malecasta, is present, and where groups of knights are being entertained and served by their ladies: But for to tell the sumptuous aray Of that great chamber, should be labour lost: For liuing wit, I weene, cannot display The roiall riches and exceeding cost, Of euery pillour and of euery post; Which all of purest bullion framed were, And with great perles and pretious stones embost, That the bright glister of their beames cleare Did sparckle forth great light, and glorious did appeare.

(III.i.32)

The stanza uses the now-familiar trope of occultatio, declaring the impossibility of describing the scene, and then describing it. Poetic description is figured as labour (labour lost), as an attempt to ‘display’ what Malecasta is also displaying: her accumulation of objects is in some way analogous to his. Redcrosse and Britomart then enter an unspecified ‘inner rowme’: whose royaltee And rich purueyance might vneath be red; Mote Princes place be seeme so deckt to bee. Which stately manner when as they did see, The image of superfluous riotize, Exceeding much the state of meane degree, They greatly wondred, whence so sumptuous guize Might be maintaynd, and each gan diuersely deuize.

(III.i.33.2–9)

The walls of this room, the narrator continues, are decorated with tapestries, ‘costly clothes of Arras and of Toure’ (III.i.34.2), which portray episodes from the myth of Venus and Adonis: the next five stanzas (stanzas 34–38) describe the scenes which are depicted on the tapestries. Within this episode, it is on these ekphrastic lines that the critical eye has alighted. Claud A. Thompson writes that ‘the reader’s attention is undeniably drawn to the tapestries’, which are ‘filled with the breath of life’.51 The opportunities that they provide for mythographical exegesis, or merely for identifying a familiar narrative, may indeed mean that this is the case, just as the effects and significance of obviously isolated ekphrastic passages are ready subjects for study, as in the

51

Claud A. Thompson, ‘Spenser’s “Many Faire Pourtraicts, And Many a Faire Feate” ’, SEL 12 (1972), 21–32 (p. 21). Thompson also provides an account of the ‘rhetorical devices’ (p. 23) which make the descriptions so effective; he is replying in part to Frederick Hard, ‘Spenser’s “Clothes of Arras and of Toure” ’, Studies in Philology 27 (1930), 162–85, which, while contextualizing the passage within Spenser’s possible experiences of great houses, still focuses on the tapestries themselves, and on the poem’s vivid and sensuous recording of their visual qualities.

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Space, Mythography, and the Object excellent investigation by Page DuBois.52 However, like the criticism which discusses Busyrane’s gallery according only to the images on his tapestries, this analysis isolates the images from the material descriptions that the poem furnishes us with, and also implies that iconological reading is the principal action of the scene. Although, as in the episode in Busyrane’s gallery, the reader is presented with a series of mythographic images, Britomart and Redcrosse do not ‘read’ the room in the same way. Their immediate responses are directed not to the pictures on view, but to the ‘superfluous riotize’ and ‘sumptuous guize’. Moreover, the narrator directs the reader first of all to what might be ‘red’ not in the story of Venus and Adonis, but in the ‘rich purueyance’ of the decorations. Malecasta’s wealth, and the splendour of her house, is on display as much as the subjects of her tapestries. It is this splendour which attracts the reading eye of the visitors to the room, and also of the narrator: reading, in this context, would be something different from analysis of ekphrastic images. The tapestries, like those in Busyrane’s house, seem to be intended to display their owner’s wealth and capacity to decorate her houses in ‘sumptuous guize’. Perhaps because the tapestries can incorporate ornate and rich fabrics and materials, what the galleries have in common is that they are places where this display takes place.53 What a narrative in The Faerie Queene, with its selective and fragmentary physical world, does not show is the full network of social relations by which this symbolic capital is acquired: it might be affected, nonetheless, by the fact that entry into a gallery space in the late sixteenth century entailed a personal assessment of the wealth that the owner of the house had chosen, or indeed had been able, to display there. Paying attention to objects allows us to think more historically about them, how their histories are inscribed or effaced both within the poem and in the world from which the poem emerges. Such questions invite a partly historicized reading, looking at the literary passage describing the hangings against the physical contexts which informed gallery spaces in the sixteenth century, but also a reading that is sensitive to the poem’s approach to objects and the difficulty that it has (and flaunts) in describing them. This analysis asks of the tapestries the same types of questions which Igor Kopytoff would ask in their ‘cultural biographies’. How are they acquired? How are they displayed? What is the function of their display? This history is not explicitly discussed, but Britomart’s thought that ‘straunge thing it seem’d, that none was to possesse | So rich purueyaunce’ (III.xi.53.8–9) seems to be an acknowledgement that such materiality is a valid subject of attention. After the description of the tapestries, the attention of Britomart and 52 53

Page DuBois, History, Rhetorical Description and the Epic: From Homer to Spenser (Cambridge: Brewer, 1982). Similarly, on the use of conspicuously expensive pigments in fifteenth-century religious art, see Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 21–25.

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Architectural Space Redcrosse is turned once again to the room in the Castle Joyeous itself, and what is going on in it: So was that chamber clad in goodly wize, And rownd about it many beds were dight, As whilome was the antique worldes guize, Some for vntimely ease, some for delight, And pleased them to vse, that vse it might: And all was full of Damzels, and of Squyres, Dauncing and reueling both day and night, And swimming deepe in sensuall desyres, And Cupid still emongest them kindled lustfull fyres. And all the while sweet Musicke did diuide Her looser notes with Lydian harmony; And all the while sweet birdes thereto applide Their daintie layes and dulcet melody, Ay caroling of loue and iollity, That wonder was to heare their trim consort. Which when those knights beheld, with scornefull eye, They sdeigned such lasciuious disport, And loath’d the loose demeanure of that wanton sort.

(III.i.39–40)

Like Henry’s gallery at Hampton Court, this is a place where music is played, heard and danced to; not, however, as a series of individual performances, but, it appears, continuously – ‘both day and night’. The beds in the gallery also show that the room is a place of ‘lustfull fyres’. Malecasta’s gallery is a place where many activities are taking place, and where recreation appears to be the governing principle. It is a place where the knights and ladies of the castle go to dally, to waste time, apparently a place where they go without any prescribed activity, and it is this that Britomart and Redcrosse notice. And it is what goes on in a gallery that I now want to discuss. The activities that typically go on inside a long gallery at the end of the sixteenth century, such as exercise and entertainment, are outside the domestic husbandry and business of the household. An early twentiethcentury commentator on the long gallery in England, J. Alfred Gotch, is very aware of its indistinctness of purpose. His remarks, though, suggest that he believes that this has to do with our own inability to divine the room’s meaning: The purpose of such a long apartment has never been fully explained [. . .]; it may have had its origin from reasons of display or in imitation of royal palaces, where its use as an ante-room [. . .] is easily understood; or it may have been merely a development in planning dictated by fashion.54 54

J. Alfred Gotch, Early Renaissance Architecture in England, 2nd edn (London: Batsford, 1914),

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Space, Mythography, and the Object This undetermined quality is indeed a principle behind the gallery in sixteenth-century England, and further, the activities which go on there are typically presented, themselves, as indeterminate. Rosalys Coope’s identification of the ‘recreative’ functions of the gallery in England could be an important principle, governing not only the space but also the actions which demand that such a space be created, and the repeated rehearsal of which sustains it.55 As a fictional setting in narratives from the late sixteenth century, the gallery is often used as a place where illicit behaviour, or activity outside the usual life of the household, can take place. George Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master F.J. (1573), for example, takes place almost entirely within and around a great house, and much of it is occupied with descriptions of domestic detail.56 Gascoigne’s work provides an illuminating comparison with Spenser’s poem, because it takes as a setting a number of spaces, not strictly with symbolic connotations, but with distinct roles in the anatomy of domestic and social life. One can map out Gascoigne’s house, as a social topography if not as an architect’s drawing; it is then the gallery which catches one’s eye. Master F.J., a young man in residence ‘in the north partes of this Realme’,57 meets and becomes infatuated with the beautiful Mistress Elinor. He cultivates her company, falls further in love, and very soon writes her a poem protesting his feelings, which however does not meet with a favourable response. The lovers’ combat, though (to use the language of the narrator), begins only when F.J. meets Elinor unexpectedly in the gallery of her house: ‘His chaunce was to meete hir alone in a Gallery of the same house: where (as I haue heard him declare) his manhood in this kind of combat was first tryed’.58 The gallery is a likely place for chance meetings, because characters go there with little purpose. Its further association with illicit sexual affairs becomes clear when Elinor and F.J. later arrange a rendezvous there. Carrying ‘his naked sword’, F.J. takes his leave from the man whom he is about to cuckold and makes his

55

56

57 58

p. 223. Olive Cook, The English House Through Seven Centuries (London: Nelson, 1968) also lists the ‘various suggestions’ that have been made to explain the purpose of the room, and speculates that it ‘may have come into existence quite simply as a result of the designer’s pleasure in varying the shapes and sizes of apartments to suit his creative impulse rather than to serve a practical end’ (pp. 126–27). Coope shows that the term ‘long gallery’ arose ‘just when the “recreative gallery” was becoming fashionable’; Rosalys Coope, ‘The Gallery in England: Names and Meanings’, Architectural History 27 (1984), 446–55 (p. 448). The domestic aspects of this work have been largely ignored, however, and critics have chosen instead to look at its satirical or moral qualities. See, though, Leicester Bradner, ‘The First English Novel: A Study of George Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master F.J.’, PMLA 45 (1930), 543–52, on the ‘presentation of the complete mise-en-scène in which the characters are placed’ (p. 547). George Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres Bounde vp in one Small Poesie (London, [1573]), p. 205. Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, pp. 209–10.

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Architectural Space way to the gallery, where he finds Elinor occupying her time in the way which galleries direct those who enter them, walking up and down: F.I. discretely dissimuling his ioye, toke his leaue and returned into the great chamber, where he had not long continued before the Lord of the Castell commaunded a torch to light him vnto his lodging, whereas he prepared himselfe and went to bed, commaunding his seruant also to go to his rest. And when he thought aswell his seruaunt, as the rest of the houshold to be safe, he arose again, & taking his night gowne, did vnder the same conuey his naked sword, and so walked to the gallerie, where he found his good Mistresse walking in hir night gowne and attending his comming.59

The gallery becomes the scene of adultery, of the subversion of the social relations of the household. In The Adventures of Master F.J., it stages not only chance encounters but also illicit encounters: more than just a location where these actions happen to occur, it actually produces the space within the house for them to take place. It is a space that provides and produces the opportunity, in other words, for the two lovers to meet and have sex. As Gascoigne’s narrator gloats over the sexual liaison, he remains actively conscious of the place where it is happening: Were it not that I knowe to whom I write, I would the more beware what I write. F.I. was a man, and neither of vs are sencelesse, and therfore I shold slaunder him, (ouer and besides a greater obloquie to the whole genealogie of Enæas) if I should imagine that of tender hart he would forbeare to expresse hir more tender limbes against the hard floore.60

In this welter of periphrasis and innuendo, after the implications of the sexual act described so suggestively and so evasively, it is ‘the hard floore’ of the gallery which returns the image to the physical and material reality of the house. I argued earlier in this chapter that Spenser imagines Busyrane’s gallery in accordance with the way in which such a space was arranged in late sixteenth-century England. A gallery in England at this time was not a place where people would go with the single purpose of analysing mythographic scenes. Britomart spends her second day waiting by ‘wandering, | And gazing on that Chambers ornament’ (III.xii.29.1–2); she is looking at the ‘ornament’ rather than only at the tapestries, and she is also waiting, or being made to wait, before she can see Amoret. The fact that it is Busyrane who has the privilege of using his gallery as a waiting chamber, or at least as a room where he can make Britomart wait before seeing him and Amoret, shows that it is a space in which he, as owner, can exert a certain power. The power relations that work in this

59 60

Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, p. 233. Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, p. 234.

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Space, Mythography, and the Object space are all the more visible in the conclusion of Britomart’s adventures in Busyrane’s house. For not only is Britomart made to watch the Masque of Cupid inside Busyrane’s gallery; she also manages to break out of it and, to Busyrane’s shock and surprise, to snatch Amoret away. The gallery is a place where expectations and systems of power can be upended and overturned, and it is to this social dynamic that The Faerie Queene responds. And to conclude this discussion, I return to Hardwick Hall. On 10 January 1602, Sir Henry Brouncker sent a hastily written letter to Queen Elizabeth, to report on a visit he had made the previous day to Hardwick Hall.61 Arabella Stuart, the granddaughter of the Countess of Shrewsbury, had persistently been the subject of rumours which linked her with a politically contentious marriage to William Seymour, a descendant of the Suffolk and Hertford lines, and was at that time in residence at the hall. Brouncker, sent by the queen to Hardwick to deliver a letter of reprimand, is summoned by the countess ‘into her gallery’, where she is apparently taking the exercise that was commonly carried out in that room: ‘she was walking with the Lady Arbella & her sonne William Cavendishe’. Brouncker introduces himself and declares the purpose of his visit: ‘I toulde her Ladyship in the heringe of her grandchylde that your Highness havinge occasion to sende me downe into those partes. commaunded me to see her Ladyship & to commende your maiestie vnto her with all gratious favour.’ He then delivers the letters which Elizabeth has sent him to carry: Drawinge her on with other complementes towardes the farther ende of the gallery to free her from the younge ladye I delivered your maiesties letter. In the readinge therof I observed some chaunge of countenaunce which gave me occasion agayne to comforte her with the assuraunce of your maiesties goode opinion & favour, & to desire that accordinge to your Heghnes pleasure I might speake privatly with the Lady Arbella. Which after protestation of her owne innocencye & love to your maiestie she easily graunted. so leavinge her there I led the Lady Arbella to the other ende of the longe gallery where I toulde her that your maiestie wished her well, gave her thankes for her newe yeres gifte & did gratiously accept it.62

Welcomed into Bess of Hardwick’s house, Brouncker is able to turn his attention to her granddaughter, and reduce her to humility: ‘I was forced to make a collection of all the particulars wherwith she was charged which she willingly confessed & humbly besoughte your maiesties pardon.’63 The account is remarkable for the ease (at least in his own words, and with the further caution that the queen’s authority is itself a powerful weapon) with which Brouncker is able to turn the situation to his advantage. His description (‘drawinge [. . .] 61 62 63

See Coope, ‘The “Long Gallery” ’, p. 60. Hatfield House, Cecil Papers, vol. 135, fol. 113r. Hatfield House, Cecil Papers, vol. 135, fol. 114v.

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Architectural Space on’, ‘led [. . .] to the other end’) takes on the language of the stage;64 just as a theatrical character might use the width of the stage to ‘draw off’ those with whom he wishes to speak, Brouncker’s manipulation is enacted within a space which, as the reference to the family’s exercise reminds us, has already been produced and created to house a certain activity. As he manipulates the countess and Arabella through space, he is also manipulating the practices for which that space has been produced. Michel de Certeau’s Arts de faire analyses the ways in which people are capable of subverting such structures, of acting within the bounds of ordered domains, while defying or reorganizing the rules which are to be followed there. He analyses actions which ‘interviennent dans un champ qui les régule à un premier niveau’ [intervene in a field which regulates them at a first level], but which ‘introduisent une façon d’en tirer parti qui obéit à d’autres règles et qui constitue comme un second niveau imbriqué dans le premier’ [introduce into it a way of turning it to their advantage that obeys other rules and constitutes something like a second level interwoven into the first].65 His analysis dwells in particular on the way that a ‘tactique’, as he calls it, can work within arrangements which he describes metaphorically as spatial: Elle s’y insinue, fragmentairement, sans le saisir en son entier [. . .]. Elle ne dispose pas de base où capitaliser ses avantages, préparer ses expansions et assurer une indépendance par rapport aux circonstances. [A tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety [. . .]. It has at its disposal no base where it can capitalize on its advantages, prepare its expansions, and secure independence with respect to circumstances.]66

De Certeau’s analysis depends on the notion of place, and in particular that of proper place, in other words the idea of a place which has been appropriated for a person’s actions and the performance of those actions in it. In De Certeau’s general theory, the owner of such a place will behave according to what he calls a strategy, a type of action which distinguishes ‘d’un “environnement” un “propre”, c’est-à-dire le lieu du pouvoir et du vouloir

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65 66

See Hamlet (Q1), where it is ‘here in the gallery’ that Hamlet’s berating of Ophelia and ridiculing and manipulating of Corambis/Polonius takes place (the equivalent of parts of Act 2 scene 2 and Act 3 scene 1 in modern composite editions); The First Quarto of ‘Hamlet’, ed. Kathleen O. Irace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), scene 7, line 103. Galleries are frequently used as stage locations, in large part presumably because of the design of the early modern stage: Ben Jonson’s Sejanus, for example, summons Eudemus ‘to me, in the gallery’ (Ben Jonson, Sejanus, ed. Philip J. Ayers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 1.193). Michel de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien 1: Arts de faire, rev. edn (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), p. 51. De Certeau, Arts de faire, p. xlvi.

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Space, Mythography, and the Object propres’ [its “own” place, that is, the place of its own power and will, from an “environment”].67 A tactic, he argues, is an action which ‘doit [. . .] jouer avec le terrain qui lui est imposé tel que l’organise la loi d’une force étrangère’ [must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power].68 De Certeau’s theory uses space as metaphor, but it also shows how strategies and tactics can be enacted within literal spaces. Emphasizing this literal understanding of spatial strategies and tactics provides a conceptual framework for looking at the Hardwick episode, for while Brouncker does not seize control of the gallery, he does manage to achieve command over Arabella Stuart while she is engaged in an activity that is particular to that space. He manages to turn the countess’s strategies on their head while remaining within her special space. Britomart’s final recovery of Amoret from Busyrane’s galleries also makes sense in relation to the tactical seizures of power which De Certeau analyses. For although Busyrane does not try to interfere when Britomart is looking at his tapestries, or to guide her interpretations, his Masque of Cupid, which Britomart watches him performing within the gallery, is more demonstrably controlled by him. The beginning of Book 4 reveals that he had shown it to Scudamour and Amoret at their ‘bridale feast’ (IV.i.3.3), and his control over the actual circumstances of its performance is matched by a precise allegorical mode, with characters immediately named as personifications, that seems quite different from that influencing the arrangement of the tapestries in the gallery. Moreover, there is no deliberate numerical uncertainty here, making a numerological interpretation more suitable. But in contrast to what one might call a strategic use of the gallery, in which Busyrane has planned what Britomart will see, it is Britomart, inside Busyrane’s own, proper space, who is able to act tactically. By seizing Amoret, she overturns his plans, and indeed upon seeing her his first reaction is surprise: Soone as that virgin knight he saw in place, His wicked bookes in hast he ouerthrew, Not caring his long labours to deface.

(III.xii.32.1–3)

By emphasizing Busyrane’s ownership of the gallery, as well as his absence when Britomart stays there during the night, I have shown how Busyrane’s decision to keep Britomart waiting in his galleries, and her ability to overturn his control over events there depend on a peculiar dynamic of power produced within gallery spaces. This relation is crucially affected by the presence or absence of the owners of these galleries, and their control over a space which in sixteenth-century England was used for a number of pursuits. I have also shown how The Faerie Queene produces an account of the gallery space that 67 68

De Certeau, Arts de faire, p. 59. De Certeau, Arts de faire, p. 60.

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Architectural Space concentrates not only upon the relations between the people who are visiting the gallery, but also on the objects that are stored there. In my next chapter I shall discuss how tracing another courtly architectural space – the presence chamber – and ideas of presence through The Faerie Queene again allows us to think about objects in space and objects in narrative.

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Chapter 4

ROYAL CHAMBERS: SPACE AND PRESENCE

A

S SIMON ADAMS warns his readers in an article on the court in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ‘neither Spenser’s experience of, nor his attitude towards, the court is easy to establish’.1 It is not just that it is difficult to be certain of what personal knowledge Spenser had of the court:2 Adams also reminds us of recent critical opinion that ‘an overly literal interpretation of allusions to persons and events in his work’ is dangerous.3 On the other hand, several episodes in The Faerie Queene take place inside discernibly courtly locations. Redcrosse and Duessa encounter Lucifera inside the chambers of the House of Pride (I.iv); Una and Redcrosse enter the ‘Hall’ of the House of Holiness (I.x) and return to the palace of her parents after Redcrosse has killed the dragon (I.xii); Arthur, Artegall, and Talus are received at Mercilla’s court, where they witness the trial of Duessa (V.ix). What is common to a number of these episodes is reference to the term ‘presence’: many take place either in a presence chamber, or in the presence of a monarchical figure. In the House of Pride, Redcrosse and Duessa ‘to the Presence mount’ (I.iv.7.2), and in Mercilla’s court, Artegall and his companions are ‘guyded by degree | Vnto the presence of that gratious Queene’ (V.ix.27.1–2). The task of this chapter, in large part, is to examine these courtly episodes in the context of contemporary court culture, and more particularly contemporary courtly space (insofar as the relation between space and culture was discussed in Chapter 2 above). By also concentrating on the idea of presence, it will allow us further to refine our critical understanding of courts and courtliness in The Faerie Queene. And like the previous chapter, it will also discuss not only the place of objects in the courtly spaces of sixteenth-century England,

1 2 3

Simon Adams, ‘Court’, in Spenser Encyclopedia, pp. 193–94 (p. 193). Though for a summary of the biographical evidence, see Chronology. Adams, ‘Court’, p. 193. Though see Graham Hough, The First Commentary on ‘The Faerie Queene’: Being an Analysis of the Annotations in Lord Bessborough’s Copy of the First Edition of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (privately published, 1964), and p. 9 above. On Spenserian biography and interpretation, see Chapter 7 below.

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Architectural Space but also the materiality of Spenser’s allegorical accounts of them. It will not be arguing for a more or less court-centred view of Spenser, but it will hope to provide evidence to suggest that the spaces described in his poem can indeed be historicized: not only how Spenser treats the historical material at his disposal, but that he is making use of it. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of Colin Clouts Come Home Againe: through attention to the concept of presence, it will contribute to critical discussion about the establishment of an alternative courtly space in that poem. The presence chamber was a part of the system of royal lodgings in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England – the sequence of great chamber, presence chamber and privy chamber – which remained a constant basic pattern through the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII, and indeed lasted, mutatis mutandis, into the reign of Elizabeth.4 David Starkey’s accounts of the spatial and institutional separation of these chambers in the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII, and the process by which the presence chamber became a junction between private and public life, have remained exceedingly influential here.5 In an article on the presentation of New Year’s gifts, Starkey points out two significant aspects of the name of the presence chamber: The word ‘presence’ had a double significance. The throne and canopy, or chair and cloth of estate, were treated as though the King were always present; the ‘presence’ was also the throng of courtiers who assembled in the room to attend the King and his ‘coming forth’ from the privy lodgings.6

The concept of ‘presence’ connects not only the chamber and the cloth of estate in it (which denotes the royal presence); it also encompasses the people present in the room and around the cloth, and the way in which they behave. The outer rooms of the lodgings, the watching and presence chambers, were used as places of public ceremony throughout the sixteenth century. Henry VIII frequently entertained ambassadors and important visitors there; he also began quite early in his reign to invite guests into his privy chamber.7 Elizabeth also met visitors in the presence chamber, though when she met Monsieur de Maisse, the French ambassador, in the winter of 1597 to discuss 4 5

6 7

For an overview of this system, see Hugh Murray Baillie, ‘Etiquette and the Planning of the State Apartments in Baroque Palaces’, Archaeologia 101 (1967), 169–99. David Robert Starkey, ‘The King’s Privy Chamber, 1485–1547’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1973); David Starkey, ‘Intimacy and Innovation: The Rise of the Privy Chamber, 1485–1547’, in The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War, ed. David Starkey et al. (London: Longman, 1987), pp. 71–118. In the first of these works, Starkey acknowledges his debt to the earlier, suggestive writing of Roy Strong: see Roy Strong, Holbein and Henry VIII (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), pp. 29–32. David Starkey, ‘The Presence Chamber: New Year, 1538’, in Henry VIII: A European Court in England, ed. David Starkey (London: Collins & Brown, 1991), pp. 126–35 (p. 126). See Simon Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and Court Life 1460–1547 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 122–25.

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Space and Presence the wars in the Netherlands, she was recovering from a heavy cold and waited for him in the privy chamber. De Maisse wrote in his journal that he simply waited in the presence chamber, until the Lord Chamberlain escorted him onwards: He led me along a passage somewhat dark, into a chamber that they call the Privy Chamber, at the head of which was the Queen seated in a low chair, by herself, and withdrawn from all the Lords and Ladies that were present, they being in one place and she in another.8

Access to these parts of the court was not granted to everyone. Thomas Platter, a Swiss visitor to England at the end of the sixteenth century, wrote that he had met a friend of his, Caspar Thoman, waiting to pass a message to the queen in Richmond Palace. In Platter’s account, Thoman does not enter the presence chamber, and in fact intends only to hand the note to Elizabeth as she passes by. Platter speaks to Elizabeth’s secretary, who offers his assistance but not entry to the chamber, and sees Elizabeth walk ‘alone out of her presence chamber, followed by all her lords, councillors, body guard and retinue’.9 These private royal chambers, as Pam Wright has shown, underwent a set of changes in Elizabeth’s reign. As well as making the household predominantly female, Elizabeth formally moved a group of privy chamber servants to her bedchamber, ‘thereby creating a definite hierarchy based on nearness of access’.10 The descriptions of guests in Elizabeth’s court show that the presence chamber was far from a private sanctum, but they also suggest strongly that entry into the chamber was strictly controlled, and had to be keenly sought. Physical entry to such a room conferred access to the monarch and to courtly circles, albeit to highly formalized and regulated encounters with these figures. This type of access, as many scholars have pointed out, was essential to a political career,11 or to the outcome of private local disputes.12 The monarch’s ownership of this royal space, the space of the royal lodgings, is produced by his or her constant presence, and also by efforts taken to control the access which subjects have to it. In the courtly episodes in The Faerie Queene, physical access to the chambers of the royal lodgings is frequently a point of contention. At the gate of 8

9 10 11 12

A Journal of All that was Accomplished by Monsieur de Maisse Ambassador in England from King Henri IV to Queen Elizabeth Anno Domini 1597, trans. G. B. Harrison and R. A. Jones (Bloomsbury: Nonesuch Press, 1931), p. 23. Thomas Platter’s Travels in England 1599, trans. and ed. Clare Williams (London: Cape, 1937), p. 228. Pam Wright, ‘A Change in Direction: The Ramifications of a Female Household, 1558–1603’, in Starkey et al., eds., The English Court, pp. 147–72 (p. 149). See G. R. Elton, ‘Tudor Government: The Points of Contact, III. The Court’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series 26 (1976), 211–28. See Penry Williams, ‘Court and Polity under Elizabeth I’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 65.2 (Spring 1983), 259–86.

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Architectural Space Mercilla’s palace, Artegall and Arthur are met by a giant porter, and although the doors stand ‘open wyde’ to them, they are guarded with constant vigilance: Yet warded well by one of mickle might, That sate thereby, with gyantlike resemblance, To keepe out guyle, and malice, and despight, That vnder shew oftimes of fayned semblance, Are wont in Princes courts to worke great scath and hindrance. (V.ix.22.5–9)

The action of ‘keeping out guile’ is an image made all the more physical and tangible in the wake of the episode that has just passed, in which the knights and Talus grapple with the shape-changing villain Malengin, whom the argument to the canto also identifies as ‘Guyle’. Malengin lives far from Mercilla’s palace, but this stanza shows a concern that guile can infiltrate the court. When it comes in human forms, and human forms, moreover, that are as adept as Malengin at hiding behind false fronts, it takes a watchful sentinel at the door to keep it out of places where it would do harm. And this very vigilance calls our attention to its absence at the doors of Lucifera’s house. Redcrosse and Duessa are also admitted to this palace, but this is because admission is refused to nobody: Arriued there they passed in forth right; For still to all the gates stood open wide, Yet charge of them was to a Porter hight Cald Maluenù, who entrance none denide:

(I.iv.6.1–4)

Rigorous control over who is permitted to enter the court is not merely a metaphor for moral control over those who are already there. The rulebooks which codified and established orders for maintaining the English royal court and household in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries demonstrate a constant anxiety about limiting access to the royal apartments. These books of regulations continued to be read, and added to, long after they had been written, allowing a continuity of regulations from monarch to monarch, and even from royal house to royal house.13 They represent systems of the ideal behaviour that was expected in certain places and in certain circumstances. Two of the first commands in the ordinances of 1445, although relating to the hall rather than to the chamber of presence, are demands that the strictest attention be given to who is admitted into the outer rooms of the king’s lodgings: §4 [. . .] that the marshall of the halle suffre no lord ne other persone that haue men syttynge in the halle by appointment to haue mo sittinge therein but after

13

See David Starkey, ‘Henry VI’s Old Blue Gown: The English Court under the Lancastrians and Yorkists’, The Court Historian 4 (1999), 1–28 (p. 19).

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Space and Presence the appointement. And that they dayly set no straunger in the haulle but suche as they thenken by there discrecions ben for the kynges worship. [. . .] §5 Also, that the usshers of the halle kepe out of the halle dore all men at mele tymes but suche as shoulde come in of deute and strangers such as they thynken by there discrecions ben for the kynges worship.14

The ordinances of 1471, additions to Edward IV’s Black Book, also decree that ‘noe manner of man come within our chamber where wee bee, saueing only such lordes as shall please vs and our knightes for our bodie and our vshers and all other to vnderstand our pleasure’.15 The monarch’s power over his court seems to have been perceived to depend, quite largely, on his ability to control the ways that his subjects moved about within it. It is his ‘pleasure’ that ought to determine these movements: the royal will is exercised on the space which his courtiers occupy. It was not only seen as important to keep strangers away from the chambers of personal power. These books of ordinances also establish rules for keeping undesirable or untrustworthy members of the court away from such places. The Black Book demands ‘that the rascals and hangars vppon thys court be sought out and auoyded from euery offyces monethly’.16 The Eltham ordinances, drawn up in 1526 and referred to throughout the sixteenth century, also forbid the bringing of any ‘boyes or rascalls’ into the court, or ‘any greater number of servants, then a person of his degree lodged within the court is allowed to keepe there’.17 Such ‘rascalles’ might include the counsellors who proceed through Lucifera’s court in a parade of the seven deadly sins, the procession of which figures provides a wealth of material for iconographic study.18 Their presence in the chamber arouses concern for more reasons than their symbolic meanings. These are bad counsellors, hangers on in the terms of the Black Book, and the fact that they have been allowed to be there, in itself, is evidence that a commonly accepted code of courtly rules has been allowed to break down. The court of Lucifera is also distinguished by sudden and frantic movement, and this aspect of its conduct is also described with condemnation. The

14 15 16 17

18

The Household of Edward IV: The Black Book and the Ordinance of 1478, ed. A. R. Myers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959), pp. 63–64. The Household of Edward IV, p. 201. The Household of Edward IV, p. 162. A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations for the Government of the Royal Household, Made in Divers Reigns: From Edward III to King William and Queen Mary (London: Society of Antiquaries, 1790), pp. 147–49. For discussion of these figures, see Joan Heiges Blythe, ‘Spenser and the Seven Deadly Sins: Book I, Cantos iv and v’, ELH 39 (1972), 342–52; John M. Crossett and Donald V. Stump, ‘Spenser’s Inferno: The Order of the Seven Deadly Sins at the Palace of Pride’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 14 (1984), 203–18.

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Architectural Space warning about ‘rascalles’ in the Eltham ordinances is a part of a series of commands that the crowds and commotion of the court, with the dirtiness, confusion, and petty thievery of household items that it brings, should be limited as much as possible, largely by preventing courtiers from travelling with their own hangers on and retinues. While Duessa and Redcrosse are being entertained, Lucifera ‘suddein vpriseth from her stately place’ (I.iv.16.1); this sets into motion the courtiers in the presence chamber – ‘all hurtlen forth’ (I.iv.16.3) – and also the people waiting in the next chamber, the hall, who clamour for her to emerge: The heapes of people thronging in the hall, Doe ride each other, vpon her to gaze: Her glorious glitterand light doth all mens eies amaze.

(I.iv.16.7–9)

Thomas Platter’s account of seeing the queen emerge from her presence chamber and pass through the hall shows that it was customary for outsiders to wait, in this way, to see Elizabeth. However, the account of the commotion at Lucifera’s court appears to imply a perceived danger that the rules of the court will break down altogether. A crowd which pushes against itself so violently, in an effort to see into the presence chamber, and to see the queen as she emerges from it, would also present a threat that the barriers between one room and another would be entirely breached. It is this danger which the people in the outer rooms of Mercilla’s court, also described as a ‘throng’, present. The knights and Talus, having been allowed into the palace by the porter, are greeted in the hall by an unruly crowd: They passing in Went vp the hall, that was a large wyde roome, All full of people making troublous din, And wondrous noyse, as if that there were some, Which vnto them was dealing righteous doome. By whom they passing, through the thickest preasse, The marshall of the hall to them did come; His name hight Order, who commaunding peace, Them guyded through the throng, that did their clamors ceasse. (V.ix.23)

This is a very menacing description, where physical uproar seems on the brink of breaking out, and where the open fear of ‘some, | Which vnto them was dealing righteous doome’ suggests a brewing factional discord. It is in part the order of the marshall and in part the unusual sight of two armed knights and an iron man that silences the crowd: ‘They ceast their clamors vpon them to gaze’ (V.ix.24.1). The presence of the marshall reminds us of his place in the ordinances of 1445, where it is ‘the marshall of the halle’ and the ushers who are responsible for keeping those out of the chambers from which they are forbidden. 19 The 19

The Eltham ordinances also require that ‘the marshalls of the hall shall give their dayly

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Space and Presence narrative of Monsieur de Maisse shows how, by the end of the sixteenth century, his job largely entailed escorting, ‘guyd[ing]’ guests from one part of the court to another, but this episode suggests that his role as policeman has not been forgotten. In The Faerie Queene, the marshall is needed to restore order in the hall even of a court whose monarch is an acknowledged figure of justice, as it was deemed necessary for a marshall to maintain order in the Tudor and earlier courts. The kings and queens of these courts made great efforts to control the movement of the subjects and courtiers attending upon them. Mercilla’s high throne not only allows her to be seen by her courtiers; it also gives her a vantage point from which to check on them: ‘sate on high, that she might all men see, | And might of all men royally be seene’ (V.ix.27.3–4). The control exerted by Mercilla depends upon her ability, which early modern monarchs tried to achieve through sets of ordinances and by employing marshalls and sergeants to keep order in court, to see when her courtiers begin to move out of place, and to stop them from doing so. The Mercilla and Lucifera episodes in The Faerie Queene show the influence of a palpable sixteenth-century anxiety surrounding the idea of invasions of the spaces of the royal lodgings. Another instance of this anxiety, which occurred slightly later than the publication of The Faerie Queene, can be seen in a letter sent to Sir Robert Sidney on 29 September 1599 by his steward, Rowland Whyte, which describes the return to court of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. Essex was in some disgrace after his military command in Ireland, backed by an unprecedented sum of money, had led only to a series of defeats and what was seen by some as a humiliating treaty with the Earl of Tyrone.20 He received letters of rebuke from the queen and, very soon making for England, he found Elizabeth and her court at Nonsuch: Upon Michelmas Eve, about 10 a clock in the morning, my Lord of Essex lighted at Court Gate in post, and made all hast up to the presence, and soe to the Privy Chamber, and staied not till he came to the Queen’s bed chamber, where he found the Queen newly up, the heare about her face; he kneeled unto her, kissed her handes, and her faire neck, and had some privat speach with her, which seemed to give hym great contentment; for coming from her Majesty to goe shifte hymself in his chamber, he was very pleasant, and thancked God though he had suffred much trouble and stormes abroade he found a sweet calme at home. Tis much wondred at here, that he went so boldly to her Majesties’ presence, she not being ready and he soe full of dirt and mire, that his very face was full of yt.21

20

21

attendance, in execution of their office in every behalfe’. A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations, p. 143. For a thorough account of this background, although not of Essex’s return itself, see Wallace T. MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I: War and Politics 1588–1603 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 404–30, 514–36. Historical Manuscripts Commission: Report on the Manuscripts of Lord De L’Isle & Dudley Preserved at Penshurst Place, 3 vols (London: HMSO, 1934), II, pp. 395–96.

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Architectural Space This account – which reads, with Elizabeth’s discomposed hair and Essex’s kisses, like the meeting not of monarch and subject, but of two lovers – allows us to see that it was not only the timing of Essex’s return,22 but also the way in which he conducted it, which shocked his contemporaries. One does not need to anticipate his ill-fated rebellion, two years later, to see his behaviour before the queen as presumptuous and improper. The alarm of the other courtiers forms part of the narrative – ‘tis much wondred at here’ – and shows that Essex’s entry into the presence and privy chambers and bedchamber, and his conduct there, was immediately shocking to this late sixteenth-century narrator.23 It is an act which breaks the commands of the statutes which I have shown above organizing the behaviour of courtiers in the royal lodgings. The Eltham statutes, for instance, specifically state that even high-ranking courtiers are not permitted to enter these private chambers without permission: Noe person, of what estate, degree, or condicion soeuer he be, from henceforth presume, attempte, or be in any wise suffered or admitted to come or repaire into the King’s privy chamber; other then such onely as his grace shall from time to time call for or command.24

Essex, dishevelled and grimy, is unprepared for the meeting, as is Elizabeth, but her unpreparedness is, at least in part, a matter of where she is when he enters the room: he finds the queen literally out of place, not on her throne or beneath her cloth of estate. What seems at least as surprising as Essex’s behaviour, though, is the leniency which Elizabeth shows at first to this obvious breach of practice and custom. It is only when Essex visits her later that day that he receives the reprimand which one would have expected earlier: Then he went up to the Queen, but found her much chaunged in that smal tyme, for she began to call hym to question for his return, and was not satisfied in the manner of his coming away and leaving all things at soe great hazard.25

By bursting into Elizabeth’s most private room, Essex seemed to have thrown her off guard, and she needs to make an active effort to reassert the discipline which her servants evidently expected of her. She is ‘much changed’, but only to the extent that things have returned to the way that the rules of the court 22 23

24 25

See L. W. Henry, ‘The Earl of Essex and Ireland, 1599’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 32 (1959), 1–23. For evidence that kissing and sexual behaviour were strictly controlled in the royal chambers, compare Hatfield House, Cecil Papers, vol. 20 no. 65, where William Fouke reports on 25 October 1591 that ‘Mr Dudley is forbyden the court for kyssing Mrs Candishe in the presens, being his wyffe as is sayd’. The incident is also mentioned by Fouke in another letter one day previously: Hatfield House, Cecil Papers, vol. 168, no. 55. A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations, p. 154. Historical Manuscripts Commission: De L’Isle & Dudley, II, p. 396.

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Space and Presence dictate that they should be, and the fact that such a ‘change’ is necessary points up the oddness of her previous behaviour. Elizabeth is able to effect this discipline only when she has imposed once again the rules which create and govern her personal spaces, when Essex comes for an audience with her only when summoned. When Mutabilitie bursts into Jove’s council chamber in the penultimate canto of The Faerie Queene, she catches him, similarly, unawares. Like Elizabeth in her bedchamber, he is out of his throne when the intrusion takes place. Shee there arriuing, boldly in did pass; Where all the Gods she found in counsell close, All quite vnarm’d, as then their manner was. At sight of her they suddaine all arose, In great amaze, ne wist what way to chose. But Ioue, all fearelesse, forc’t them to aby; And in his soueraine throne, gan straight dispose Himselfe more full of grace and Maiestie, That mote encheare his friends, and foes mote terrifie.

(VII.vi.24)

Like the account of Essex’s irruption, this stanza includes an explicit description of the shock, the ‘great amaze’, which the event causes among the courtiers. Jove also has to reassert his power over the other gods and over Mutabilitie, and as in the case of Elizabeth, this reassertion is a conspicuous act. Jove has to move immediately to his correct place, the throne, and he is then in a position to govern more effectively. When the monarch’s subjects do not assent to the regulations and controls of the court, though, the effort needed to enforce them becomes conspicuous. Assessing the cultural anxieties to which this incident seems to respond may help us to move to a more comprehensive understanding of the moral status of Mutabilitie’s action. It has been argued by some critics that her rebellion is justifiable, or even admirable. For William Blissett, she is an embodiment of righteous, if dangerous, ambition, ‘a force of restless innovation’, and he writes that ‘we cannot help admiring her audacity, her resolution, her virtù’.26 He compares her with Milton’s Satan, and asserts that her tenacious constancy ‘in demanding her rights’ gives her a greater dignity and authority than Jove himself.27 Despite the acknowledgement that Blissett is prepared to make about the subversive quality of Mutabilitie’s action, and the parallels which he draws between the courts of Cynthia and Elizabeth, his account still seems to picture her in the role of a daring champion of liberty:

26

27

William Blissett, ‘Spenser’s Mutabilitie’, in Essays in English Literature from the Renaissance to the Victorian Age Presented to A. S. P. Woodhouse, 1964, ed. Millar MacLure and F. W. Watt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), pp. 26–42 (pp. 28–29). Blissett, ‘Spenser’s Mutabilitie’, p. 34.

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Architectural Space Storming into the palace of Cynthia, the bold intruder orders the goddess to give up her throne, to the amazement of the witnessing stars. The scene is brisk and violent, especially so for Spenser, and if the modern reader is stimulated by it, how much more shocked would be the reader for whom the poet wrote.28

Mutabilitie’s conduct before Jove is intended to appear unseemly in itself, as the narrator implies before he begins to tell the story: ‘Ne shee the lawes of Nature onely brake, | But eke of Iustice, and of Policie’ (VII.vi.6.1–2). If ‘Policie’ refers to her conduct in relation to laws of the state, then the breach of the ‘lawes [. . .] of Policie’ may include Mutabilitie’s disruption of the order of Jove’s court, and the spatial regulations on which that order depends. Taking her action as merely impetuous, or simply as the courageous act of an admirable revolutionary, is not sufficient. The poem dramatizes a fear that the laws governing the royal space will be broken, and as I have shown, this fear, not just ‘amazement’, is also written into the account of the scene between Essex and Elizabeth. Mutabilitie is offered little compromise so long as she behaves in this way. What reconciliation she does achieve comes only after she behaves more obediently at the court of Nature, a court which has been set up in the fashion of a parliament, as was Mercilla’s, to judge Mutabilitie’s case. Nature is installed in her throne, and in her ‘presence’ Mutabilitie behaves with what is presented as proper humility: Thus sitting in her throne as I haue teld, Before her came dame Mutabilitie; And being lowe before her presence feld, With meek obaysance and humilitie, Thus gan her plaintif Plea, with words to amplifie.

(VII.vii.13.5–9)

The orderliness of even Nature’s specially convened court, though, is precarious, and it has had to be enforced. As in Mercilla’s great chamber, the crowds of courtiers seem to be threatening constantly to become a disordered rabble, to spill over into places where they are forbidden; the marshall who has to keep control here even shares his name with the sergeant of Mercilla’s palace: And had not Natures Sergeant (that is Order) Them well disposed by his busie paine, And raunged farre abroad in euery border, They would haue caused much confusion and disorder.

(VII.vii.4.6–9)

The concerns which are so patently attached to the act of bursting into the 28

Blissett, ‘Spenser’s Mutabilitie’, p. 29. G. B. Harrison’s account of Essex and Elizabeth similarly implies that Essex, in a comparable situation, has achieved unparalleled erotic success through his impetuousness: ‘No living man had ever seen her undressed before.’ G. B. Harrison, The Life and Death of Robert Devereux Earl of Essex (London: Cassell, 1937), p. 249.

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Space and Presence royal chambers may provide another reason, to add to those many already proposed, for why the Letter to Ralegh does not match the action of the poem.29 In the Letter, Spenser describes the event which he sees as setting in motion the actions of the poem: The beginning therefore of my history, if it were to be told by an Historiographer should be the twelfth booke, which is the last, where I deuise that the Faery Queene kept her Annuall feaste xii. dayes, vppon which xii. seuerall dayes, the occasions of the xii. seuerall aduentures hapned.

These ‘occasions’ take the form of the entry of a number of strangers into the hall during the queen’s feast: The first was this. In the beginning of the feast, there presented him selfe a tall clownishe younge man, who falling before the Queen of Faries desired a boone (as the manner then was) which during that feast she might not refuse: which was that hee might haue the atchieuement of any aduenture, [. . .] Soone after entred a faire Ladye in mourning weedes, [. . .] The second day ther came in a Palmer bearing an Infant with bloody hands, [. . .] The third day there came in, a Groome.

The Letter clearly presents a different account from the events in the poem, not only in its incidental details but also in its general scenario. For The Faerie Queene does not show the court of Gloriana as the source of the quest, and it does not show characters entering into her hall. Critics have long attempted to explain why this should be so. A. C. Hamilton proposes that the letter ought to be read not as a narrative summary, but as a ‘formalized pattern or argument’, and that in this context it makes appropriate sense.30 W. J. B. Owen, on the other hand, claims in a series of articles that the discrepancy is undeniable.31 He suggests that Spenser had intended to revise the poem accordingly, but was prevented from doing so, firstly by the short time which he had between receiving the letter and publishing the volume, and secondly by the structural inconsistencies inherent in the model which the letter puts forward. As Ivan Schulze showed even earlier, though, an entry into a hall was much more than a conventional literary frame; it was also a component of many of the chivalric episodes which formed part of the life of the Elizabethan court.32 He describes Elizabeth’s Accession Day tilts, and refers to a passage from

29 30 31

32

On the Letter to Ralegh, see Chapter 1, pp. 11–15 above. A. C. Hamilton, ‘Spenser’s Letter to Ralegh’, MLN 73 (1958), 481–85 (p. 483). W. J. B. Owen, ‘A Spenser Note’, MLR 43 (1948), 239–41, ‘ “In These XII Books Severally Handled and Discoursed” ’, ELH 19 (1952), 165–72, ‘Spenser’s Letter to Ralegh: A Reply’, MLN 75 (1960), 195–97. See also Donald Baker, ‘The Accuracy of Spenser’s Letter to Raleigh’, MLN 76 (1961), 103–04. Ivan L. Schulze, ‘Elizabethan Chivalry and the Faerie Queene’s Annual Feast’, MLN 50 (1935), 158–61.

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Architectural Space Holinshed describing her coronation banquet, in which Sir Edward Dimmocke, ‘hir champion by office’, came riding into the hall in faire complet armor, mounted vpon a beautifull courser, richlie trapped in cloth of gold, entred the hall, and in the midst thereof cast downe his gantlet: with offer to fight with him in hir quarrel, that should denie hir to be the righteous and lawfull queene of this realme.33

In the twelve days of feasting over Christmas and New Year, Schulze finds a precedent for the Faerie Queene’s festivities. He does not present any evidence that such entries to the queen’s presence – which were also a commonplace of courtly entertainments – were thought of as dangerous. But, unlike Essex’s unplanned intrusion into Elizabeth’s bedroom, they are not spontaneous or unexpected acts. These anxieties may exist without being explicit in every part of the poem, and Spenser could have edited his poem at the last minute to avoid a narrative motif, typical in Arthurian romance narratives, which might arouse concern by suggesting a breach of presence chamber decorum. Schulze wisely warns us not to see the incidents which he describes as direct sources for the poem: they are episodes ‘that, translated and transformed, find their way into the structural forces of a poem glorifying Elizabeth and the poet’s friends and patrons’.34 The ideological and political implications of this type of entry into the monarch’s presence also find their way into the poem, affecting not only the depiction of certain episodes but also, perhaps, its overall structure. The episodes in the courts of Lucifera and Mercilla both include references to the cloth of estate, which was always hung behind the throne in the presence chamber.35 Lucifera is seated on ‘a rich throne, as bright as sunny day’, and ‘high aboue all a cloth of State was spred’ (I.iv.8.1–2). The cloth that hangs behind Mercilla is described at greater length: All ouer her a cloth of state was spred, Not of rich tissew, nor of cloth of gold, Nor of ought else, that may be richest red, But like a cloud, as likest may be told, That her brode spreading wings did wyde vnfold; Whose skirts were bordred with bright sunny beams, Glistring like gold, amongst the plights enrold, And here and there shooting forth siluer streames, Mongst which crept litle Angels through the glittering gleames.

33 34 35

Raphael Holinshed, The First and Second Volumes of Chronicles, 2 vols (London, 1587), II, p. 1180. Schulze, ‘Elizabethan Chivalry’, p. 161. See Baillie, ‘Etiquette’, pp. 169–70.

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Space and Presence Seemed those litle Angels did vphold The cloth of state, and on their purpled wings Did beare the pendants, through their nimblesse bold.

(V.ix.28–29)

The throne and cloth denoted the monarch’s continuous presence in the chamber, for they were present even when the monarch was absent. The account of a Spanish visitor to London in the middle of the sixteenth century, for example, shows how this symbolic equation of king and cloth demanded obedience of the king’s subjects in the presence chamber: In the third saloon were nobles, knights, and gentlemen, and here was a canopy made of rich figured brocade, with a chair of the same material. To this canopy and chair the same respect was paid by all as if the King himself were present; every one standing on foot, with his cap in his hand.36

The cloth, as well as denoting the king’s continued presence in the chamber, marks out the way in which the room is to be spatially arranged, for the place below the cloth was assigned to the monarch alone: ‘No manner of whatsoever degree he be of be so hardye to come nighe the Kinges Chayre nor stand vnder the Clothe of estate’.37 The cloth of estate could be easily raised in any house where the king or queen happened to be in residence. Fiona Kisby’s study of the early Tudor court has demonstrated that its peripatetic itinerary, which has been well documented, was determined by the secular and sacred ceremonies of the royal chapel, the ‘ritual year’. The royal itinerary also allowed for the personal preferences of the monarch as well as the need to clean the buildings thoroughly after the court had been in residence for any period of time. But by timing itself alongside the ceremonial calendar, Kisby writes, it also ‘lay at the heart of kingship in this period, as it underpinned those ceremonial occasions which re-articulated symbolic relationships between ruler and ruled’.38 Royal space could be created in private houses when the king or queen visited on progress; this production is documented in the records of the preparations for these events. A series of papers, for example, survives at Hatfield House which shows the changes which William Cecil made to the private rooms at his house, Theobalds, when Queen Elizabeth visited in 1572. In ‘the great howse’, he decided to substitute ‘the hawle for the great chamber’, ‘the great parlor for the presence chamber’, and ‘the dyninge chamber, for the privie chamber’; on ‘the highest story’, the ‘withdrawinge chamber’, the ‘bedchamber’, and the ‘gallary’ were all set aside ‘for the Quenes maiesty’.39 Accommodating the 36 37 38 39

‘Narrative of the Visit of the Duke de Nájera to England, in the Year 1543–4’, ed. Frederic Madden, Archaeologia 23 (1831), 344–57 (p. 351). BL, Adams Manuscript 21116, fol. 8v. Fiona Kisby, ‘Kingship and the Royal Itinerary: A Study of the Peripatetic Household of the Early Tudor Kings 1485–1547’, The Court Historian 4 (1999), 29–39 (p. 29). Hatfield House, Cecil Papers, vol. 140, no. 18.

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Architectural Space court in a succession of houses was made easier because the rooms in the major Tudor residences – Greenwich, Windsor, Richmond, Nonsuch, and other palaces – were essentially equivalent: the houses contained the same basic sequence of chambers, and so could at a moment’s notice be made to house the king and his entourage in the same way.40 This was also made possible, though, by the ease with which the cloth of estate – and in the sixteenth century all of the royal palaces had a store of them41 – could be raised over the throne in the chamber of presence. In an instant, like a magnet drawing iron filings into neat lines and patterns, the cloth of estate, the symbol of the monarch’s continued presence, and the producer of his control over the presence chamber and the neighbouring rooms, could be raised and take effect.42 Being in a space, as Henri Lefebvre reminds us, involves obeying prohibitions; indeed, it is those prohibitions that are the agents of spatial production. Just as, for Lefebvre, prohibitions inhere in monumental space, here they are related to the presence of an object. As in Chapter 3, I have argued here that the narrative of Spenser’s poem depends on an awareness of the relations between movement through space and the presence of objects in that space; but here we can also see objects, cloths of estate, working on people when they cannot be read, and Spenser makes them extremely prominent in his descriptions of royal chambers. In Mercilla’s court, the throne and cloth are visible to all courtiers at all times. An essay by Douglas Northrop has explored the similarities between the description of this court and Parliament. The knights arrive at the court just as Mercilla is considering whether to punish Duessa (whose presence here and in Lucifera’s court does provide a structural parallel) ‘about affaires of common wele, | Dealing of Iustice’ (V.ix.36.3–4). Northrop looks not only at parallels between the action of this episode and the trial of Mary Stuart, conducted in Parliament in 1586, but also at more general ‘suggestive similarities in the physical descriptions of the setting’ between Mercilla’s court and the interior of a contemporary Parliament.43 He uses as a source a description of the 40 41

42

43

Starkey, ‘The King’s Privy Chamber’, pp. 1–11. BL, Harleian Manuscripts 1419A and 1419B, the inventories taken on the death of Henry VIII, show, for example, that five cloths of estate were stored at Greenwich, two at Nonsuch, three at Windsor, and three at Westminster. See also an incident in George Cavendish’s Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey (1557), describing Wolsey awaiting the appearance of Henry VIII at a masque in which the king is acting in disguise: ‘ye shall perceyve that the tables ware sett in the Chamber of presence / Bankett wyse couered / my lord Cardynall syttyng vnder the clothe of estat / And there hauyng all his seruyce all alone’. As soon as Henry unveils himself, though, Wolsey immediately surrenders his place beneath the cloth of estate: ‘The kyng toke his seate vnder the clothe of estate comaundyng no man to remove but sit still as they dyd byfore.’ George Cavendish, The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey, ed. Richard S. Sylvester, Early English Text Society 243 (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 26–28. Douglas A. Northrop, ‘Mercilla’s Court as Parliament’, Huntington Library Quarterly 36 (1972–73), 153–58 (p. 153).

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Space and Presence proceedings of the 1585 Parliament, written in 1608 by Robert Glover, Nobilitas Politica vel Civilis, and an illustration from that book that shows the queen presiding in the chamber [Plate 1]. What we could add to Northrop’s account is the corresponding prominence of the cloth of estate, in the description of the chamber, in the illustrations, and in The Faerie Queene. For just as the description of Mercilla dwells for over a stanza on the cloth of estate behind her, and for over a stanza more on the sight of the queen in her throne, the rows of politicians in the illustration, as well as the prominent perspectival arrangement of the floor-tiles, all point to Elizabeth in her throne. Glover also mentions the magnificence of the throne: ‘Hæc sella (quam Thronum potiùs dixerim) omni ex parte affabrè illustrata & deaurata, argenteo quem vocant panno & puluinis eiusdem magnificentissimè adornata fuit’ [This seat (which I should rather call a throne) was ingeniously adorned and gilded on every side with what people call cloth of silver, and it was most magnificently decorated with pillows made of the same material].44 The ‘argenteo [. . .] panno’ may be either the material with which the throne has been upholstered, or it may signify the cloth of estate. Once the queen is installed in her throne, the nobles are permitted to enter the room and sit down in prescribed order, which Glover prints in full: ‘Quâ posteaquam se Regina collocâsset, hoc ordine equis insidentes per binos progressum est’ [After the Queen had sat down, the lords proceeded, sitting down in twos in this order].45 Spenser’s approach, both moral and narratological, to this proliferation of objects can be seen in the following stanza from Book 1. Arthur is searching for Redcrosse in Orgoglio’s house, and comes into a room: There all within full rich arayd he found, With royall arras and resplendent gold, And did with store of euery thing abound, That greatest Princes presence might behold. But all the floore (too filthy to be told) With blood of guiltlesse babes, and innocents trew, Defiled was, that dreadfull was to vew, And sacred ashes ouer it was strowed new.

(I.viii.35)

What kind of room are we meant to assume that Arthur has entered? The ‘royall arras’ does remind us of the cloth of estate in a chamber of presence, and the gold certainly denotes magnificence. And it is the phrase ‘Princes presence’ that suggests that this might be a presence chamber. The narrator is not saying explicitly that this is the case, but the line is ambiguous: what does it mean? That the room contains everything that would make us believe that it is a presence chamber? That it contains everything that one might see in a

44 45

Robert Glover, Nobilitas Politica vel Civilis (London, 1608), p. 116. Glover, Nobilitas Politica vel Civilis, p. 116.

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Architectural Space

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Plate 1: Robert Glover, Nobilitas Politica vel Civilis (1608), image facing p. 126

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Space and Presence presence chamber? Or everything that a prince (periphrastically, the ‘greatest Princes presence’) might see around himself? It is the owner of the house that is absent from the stanza, though, and ‘the greatest Prince’ – unless that refers to Arthur himself. The crowds that we expect to see in such rooms, and the control over their movement that are characteristic to them, aren’t there. What we do see there is a heaping of objects – a ‘store of euery thing’ – and whereas I have argued earlier in this chapter that royal presence could be implied by the presence of objects, here they seem to remind us of royal absence. But the stanza also articulates a moral ambivalence to these objects, albeit ambiguously: lines 5–9 are clearly in opposition to lines 1–4, but the connecting conjunction (‘But’) does not make it clear whether the image of the babies’ blood is telling us symbolically about the true nature of the luxury of the chamber, or whether it is merely grotesquely juxtaposed with it, the bad side of the positive image that we have been shown. And this moral ambivalence about this superfluity of objects appears all the clearer when we take into account the possible half-reference to the House of Pride: ‘rich array and costly arras dight’ (I.iv.6.6). But it is made more confusing by the following account of the home of Una’s parents: And after to his Pallace he them bringes, With shaumes, and trompets, and with Clarions sweet; And all the way the ioyous people singes, And with their garments strowes the paued street: Of all, that royall Princes court became, And all the floore was vnderneath their feet Bespredd with costly scarlot of great name, On which they lowly sitt, and fitting purpose frame. What needes me tell their feast and goodly guize, In which was nothing riotous nor vaine? What needes of dainty dishes to deuize, Of comely seruices, or courtly trayne? My narrow leaues cannot in them contayne The large discourse of roiall Princes state. Yet was their manner then but bare and playne: For th’antique world excesse and pryde did hate; Such proud luxurious pompe is swollen vp but late.

(I.xii.13–14)

The luxury of the palace is plain to see in stanza 13: ‘all, that royall Princes court became’ reminds us of ‘euery thing [. . .] | That greatest Princes presence might behold’ in the palace of Orgoglio. But stanza 14 suggests a deeply ambivalent attitude to describing such splendour. ‘What needes me tell?’ (line 1) seems extremely reticent after having told us about the setting, and to say that there was ‘nothing riotous nor vaine’ about the feast and entertainment seems both to set up a potential contrast with the ‘costly scarlot’ of the setting, and 89

Architectural Space also even to intimate that there is something vain about that luxury. Again, the ‘yet’ of line 7 seems not only to contrast the bareness and plainness of the palace with what we would expect from ‘roiall Princes state’, but with what we have seen of their state. The two stanzas give us a narratorial voice that wants to tell about material luxury, and then not only cancels out the potentially negative moral implications of it, but tries to negate it altogether. It is the presence of the monarch, insofar as he is surrounded by such material luxury, that provides the opportunity, or necessity, for this pattern of thought. I have thus suggested that the special quality of the space of the presence chamber depends more upon the relation of the people within the chamber to the monarch, than on the architectural design of the room or its structural relationship to other spaces in a house or palace. I have also suggested that the artefacts in the presence chamber, the cloth of estate and throne, can produce or indeed be substituted for these social relations. The responses of visitors to presence chambers frequently, and in particular when the king or queen is absent, direct themselves to these objects. As I showed in the case of galleries, the objects within these rooms are not merely incidental to the activities that go on there, but are actually instrumental in prompting and demanding certain ways of behaving. Objects are not separable from an abstract spatiality; they, in part, produce the space. This, I argue, makes it possible for the presence to be erected very quickly in a number of places, as I described taking place in Theobalds, for example, or to be transported from place to place. The space itself is transportable, in the process of transporting the artefacts that produce it. And like the tapestries in the previous chapter, these objects are given special prominence in a poetic method that both draws attention to materiality, and attempts to occlude or condemn it. This permits us to move our attention to Ireland, for the artefacts that produced the presence in this way could equally be transported there. Sir Geoffrey Fenton, then Her Majesty’s Secretary in Ireland, wrote to England in 1591 ‘to haue out of the Wardropp some peces of hanginges to furnish the Councell Chamber, with a great Quishinge and a Cheare for the Lord Deputie to sytt in’.46 If these hangings and this chair are to be used as an equivalent for the monarch’s cloth of estate and throne, this suggests that the Lord Deputy sat in a space physically similar or analogous to Queen Elizabeth’s presence.47 This may also have been the case with other Irish officials; a copy, with an endorsement by Spenser, of a 1582 letter from the Countess of Desmond asks the Lord General of Munster, the Earl of Ormond, for ‘license to repaire to your presence, for conference sake’.48 Even if presence chambers, as such, are not being 46 47

48

TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/161/55. British ambassadors abroad were similarly supplied with cloths of estate during the seventeenth century. See D. B. Horn, ‘Rank and Emolument in the British Diplomatic Service 1689–1789’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series 9 (1959), 19–49 (p. 32). TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/83/6(II).

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Space and Presence

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Plate 2: John Derricke, The Image of Irelande with a Discouerie of Woodkarne, ed. John Small (Edinburgh: Black, 1883), plate 12 following p. 144

described here, these references suggest that Irish officials and lords could occupy spaces where their presence had a similar spatial effect to that of the English monarchs. The twelfth (and final) woodcut in the series that is found in the Edinburgh University Library copy of John Derricke’s Image of Irelande (1581) bears this out, and shows how the erecting of the presence of the Irish Deputy depended upon items similar to those found in the presence chambers of English courts. The woodcut shows Sir Henry Sidney receiving the supplication and submission of Turlough Luineach O’Neill, followed by his soldiers [Plate 2]. O’Neill is pictured in the centre of the woodcut, and the verses that accompany it describe him ‘prostrating him before, the presence of this Lord’. Sidney, on the right hand side of the woodcut, sits on a raised chair, in front of an ornate cloth 91

Architectural Space of estate, with a mace beside him and flanked by his knights. The verses read: ‘Loe where he sittes in honors seate, most comely to be seene, | As worthy for to represent, the person of a Queene’.49 Willy Maley writes that this woodcut provides a ‘portrait of viceregal aspirations’, and situates it in the context of the relation between court and colony as it is manifested in the Lord Deputy of Ireland and the absent monarch.50 Henry Sidney’s ‘representation’ of the ‘person of a Queene’ partly consists of the way in which he acts as her constitutional representative, her proxy in Ireland, and is shown to be doing so by the cloth of estate. It also results – within the woodcut itself – from the way that the image replicates the iconography of royal presence, and the term ‘presence’ in the verses suggests that Sidney’s position in Ireland, and before O’Neill, is equivalent to that of the Queen in England, before her subjects. Because this ‘presence’ is represented, and produced, by the cloth of estate and throne, which can easily be moved from place to place and quickly erected, the space of ‘presence’ can be found here, in an Irish field away from any courtly buildings. The space of presence is not bound to the location of the Queen. The possibility of establishing a space of presence in Ireland, and its equivalence to or difference from the presence of Elizabeth in the English court can be read in Spenser’s Colin Clouts Come Home Againe. Colin’s voyage to the court of Cynthia, which allegorizes Spenser’s journey to the court of Elizabeth in the company of Ralegh, has its conclusion in the queen’s ‘presence’: ‘Foorth on our voyage we by land did passe, | (Quoth he) as that same shepheard still us guyded, | Untill that we to Cynthiaes presence came’ (CCCHA, lines 330–32). The poem implictly compares Colin’s experiences in the English court in the ‘presence’ of Cynthia with his position among his fellow shepherds. Colin does not sit in a court among the shepherds, but he commands their attention absolutely, and holds sway over their movements: Sate (as his custome was) upon a day, Charming his oaten pipe unto his peres, The shepheard swaines that did about him play: Who all the while with greedie listfull eares, Did stand astonisht at his curious skill.

(CCCHA, lines 4–8)

This description apparently shows the shepherds simultaneously ‘play[ing]’ and standing ‘astonisht’ around the seated figure of Colin. This seems analogous (though in contrast) to the position of the monarchs in presence as they are described in The Faerie Queene, and indeed Colin is later described as being surrounded by a bustling crowd, as are the courts of Lucifera and Mercilla: ‘They all gan throng about him neare, | With hungrie eares to heare his 49 50

John Derricke, The Image of Irelande with a Discouerie of Woodkarne, ed. John Small (Edinburgh: Black, 1883), plate 12, following p. 144. Willy Maley, Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997), p. 100.

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Space and Presence harmonie’ (CCCHA, lines 52–53). In the context of this comparison, and with another reference to the ‘presence’, the poem criticizes the moral faults of the English court, and explains Colin’s decision to return to his former home: Happie indeed (said Colin) I him hold, That may that blessed presence still enjoy, Of fortune and of envy uncomptrold, Which still are wont most happie states t’annoy: But I by that which little while I prooved: Some parts of those enormities did see, The which in Court continually hooved, And followd those which happie seemd to bee. Therefore I silly man, whose former dayes Had in rude fields bene altogether spent, Darest not adventure such unknowen wayes, Nor trust the guile of fortunes blandishment, But rather chose back to my sheep to tourne. (CCCHA, lines 660–72)

Christopher Highley has argued that Colin Clout’s bardic persona places him in an alternative culture, which parallels the humanist aspirations of England and Europe, and which opens up ‘new cultural identities and imaginative possibilities’:51 The assembly of shepherds listening to Colin composes a kind of outdoor rural congregation of which Colin is the undisputed center. The poem dramatizes Spenser’s Irish court, a court in which he is neither servant nor dependent but the presiding authority.52

We might also add that the cultural possibilities of this alternative court are dangerously close to practices condemned or viewed with suspicion in the View, of bardic poets and illegal Irish assemblies. The poem does indeed offer this comparison, though, and by contrasting this alternative court with Cynthia’s ‘presence’, it suggests that Colin, as poet and spokesman, can be thought of as creating around himself an alternative yet analogous space to the royal presence. The transportability of royal or courtly space permits alternative spaces of presence to be set up in Ireland, and it also, I suggest, permits Spenser to propose the fiction of himself – as Irish poet – establishing such an alternative court around himself. Andrew Hadfield writes that the poem ‘clearly signals an alternative Englishness in Ireland’, and casts the New English in the role of guardians of a tradition of English public poetry which is able to stand outside and by-pass the constraints of a purely courtly culture. It is they, 51 52

Christopher Highley, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 23 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 20. Highley, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland, p. 36.

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Architectural Space the poem suggests, who are able to maintain the relatively unfettered speech community of the public sphere at the expense of enjoying a harmonious pastoral existence.53

Similarly, Louis Montrose analyses Colin Clouts Come Home Againe as ‘a poem of place’, in which there are ‘two distinct and potentially opposed settings: the royal court, where the queen is the cynosure, and the pastoral world, where the shepherd-poet is the cynosure’. He associates this contrast with Spenser’s establishment of a ‘domestic domain’ in Ireland, and his capacity to deny Elizabeth the central position in his later work.54 We can read this attempt to establish a new ‘domestic domain’ in Ireland in connection with the transportation of the space of presence to Ireland. This transportation is possible because of the way in which certain objects and artefacts, which also act as symbols of the royal presence, produce that space.

53 54

Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 189–90. Louis A. Montrose, ‘Spenser’s Domestic Domain: Poetry, Property, and the Early Modern Subject’, in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 8 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 83–130 (p. 102).

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III Beleaguered Spaces

Chapter 5

‘GOODLY WORKEMANSHIP’: FORTIFICATIONS AND THE BODY

To looke vpon a worke of rare deuise The which a workman setteth out to view, And not to yield it the deserued prise, That vnto such a workmanship is dew, Doth either proue the iudgement to be naught Or els doth shew a mind with enuy fraught. FQ, Commendatory Verse 7

T

HE CASTLE, a building with specific importance in military and architectural history, also frequently appears in literary works like The Faerie Queene as an allegorical or symbolic image.1 Studies of The Faerie Queene have tended to disregard, or indeed to deny, the influence of specific military practices on the poem. Alastair Fowler argues that Spenser is less interested in physical combat than a different type of heroism, ‘a spiritual struggle’, and that he ‘seldom poeticises detailed particulars of modern war to the extent that Milton does’.2 Michael West’s analysis proves the influence of some of these particulars, but suggests that the incomplete extent to which they are absorbed into the poem creates a ‘slightly absurd’ effect.3 And in his 1

2

3

It is in reference to its symbolic connotations that Mary Frances Fahey, ‘Imaginary Castles in Western European Literature’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Davis, 1997), chooses to discuss the castle as ‘an imaginative domain that reveals fundamental cultural attitudes towards the individual and the community’ (p. 1). Compare the earlier study by Frederick Hard, ‘Princelie Pallaces: Spenser and Elizabethan Architecture’, Sewanee Review 42 (1934), 293–310: ‘It is a mistake to regard [Spenser’s descriptions of buildings] as mere castles in the air. [They are] far more substantial and orderly than those found in the conventional examples of “literary” architecture’ (p. 300). Alastair Fowler, ‘Spenser and War’, in War, Literature and the Arts in Sixteenth-Century Europe, ed. J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 147–64 (pp. 148–51). Michael West, ‘Spenser’s Art of War: Chivalric Allegory, Military Technology, and the Elizabethan Mock-Heroic Sensibility’, Renaissance Quarterly 41 (1988), 654–704 (p. 684).

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Beleaguered Spaces broader study, Michael Murrin sees Spenser as the epitome of a tradition of English writers of ‘peaceful epic’, who turned their attention away from war on account of their lack of military experience, and their interest in other themes.4 Changes in European warfare during the sixteenth century had brought about rapid and profound changes in the ways that military architecture was designed and built.5 The study of the practical techniques and the mathematical explanations and justifications of fortification had as a consequence become an especially important science. In 1494, King Charles VIII of France had attacked Italian cities with cannons far smaller, lighter and more powerful than any which had previously been used in battle. No longer immobile targets for the towns’ defences, and able to move quickly across battlefields in order to exploit breaches and weaknesses in city walls, these guns enabled Charles to bring the cities, once able to withstand sieges years in length, to the point of surrender within hours. An increasingly innovative use of gunpowder and artillery at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth had immediately forced soldiers and military engineers to invent new methods of fortification and civic defence.6 The defenders of Pisa in 1500 had improvised a type of rampart which enabled their walls to withstand artillery charges, and French-held Bologna in 1512 saw the first use in Europe of a defensive counter-mine. Mere practical resourcefulness worked so quickly that within the first half of the sixteenth century, in Christopher Duffy’s words, ‘military opinion came to appreciate that a suitably-prepared fortress had a good chance of withstanding an attack’.7 English fortifications had not developed at such speed; the absence of any protracted battles at home meant that there was little urgency for change. However, work was done during the sixteenth century on English border towns, such as Berwick, and on towns on the south coast, as well as in northern France. The particular interest of William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, in maps and mapping led him to order and collect a large number of plans for such fortifications.8 4 5

6

7 8

Michael Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 240. For this European history see William Anderson, Castles of Europe: From Charlemagne to the Renaissance (London: Elek, 1970); Christopher Duffy, Siege Warfare: The Fortress in the Early Modern World 1494–1660 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979). On the effect of gunpowder on fortification design, see Simon Pepper, ‘Firepower and the Design of Renaissance Fortifications’, Fort 10 (1982), 93–104; Volker Schmidtchen, ‘Castles, Cannon and Casemates’, Fortress 6 (August 1990), 3–10. Michael Howard, War in European History (London: Oxford University Press, 1976) describes the influence of attacking and defensive innovations. Duffy, Siege Warfare, p. 21. See R. A. Skelton and John Summerson, A Description of Maps and Architectural Drawings in the Collection Made by William Cecil, First Baron Burghley, now at Hatfield House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). MS CPM I.32, dated c. 1585, for instance (plate 9), shows Portsmouth with a projected bastioned defence. On Burghley’s interest in maps, see Peter Barber, ‘England II: Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps, 1550–1625’, in Monarchs, Ministers and

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Fortifications and the Body As well as in this general context, the castles that are described in The Faerie Queene might profitably be considered in relation to the fortifications that existed, and were being built, in Ireland at the end of the sixteenth century, the same time as Spenser’s presence there as part of the English colonial administration. Ireland contained a great number of castles, many of which dated from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in the words of Harold Leask, the ‘great castle building period in Ireland’.9 Many of these, and later castles, were built on the sites of earlier fortifications or adapted from their very structures: Kilcolman Castle, Spenser’s home, was an example of such adaptation.10 From the fifteenth century, there was a proliferation in Ireland of tower houses, individual fortified houses typically built for the Irish or Anglo-Irish gentry.11 Because so many of these castles were destroyed or abandoned, the Irish landscape at the end of the sixteenth century was dotted with ruined fortifications; the View mentions the ‘sundrie Castells’ of the Irish, ‘of which the ruines doe theare onelye now remaine’ (View, p. 171). Individual fortified houses did continue to be built in the sixteenth century, although Irish domestic architecture began to change significantly at that time, so that houses in Ireland resembled those built for the gentry in England.12 English military operations in sixteenth-century Ireland, with the more sophisticated artillery that they brought, contributed to the decline of medieval forms of fortification;13 as I shall discuss in this chapter, they also began to introduce contemporary theories of fortification into Ireland. This chapter, then, will discuss the influence of these changes and historical conditions – including the various projects and strategies engaged in by English military leaders for building new castles and demolishing those of the Irish families against whom they were fighting – on the castles and fortifications described in The Faerie Queene, and the spaces within them. The early 1590s saw major re-fortifications of a number of Irish towns, in particular

9 10 11 12

13

Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Buisseret (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 57–98. Harold G. Leask, Irish Castles and Castellated Houses (Dundalk: Tempest, 1941), p. 25. See D. Newman Johnson, ‘Kilcolman Castle’, in Spenser Encyclopedia, pp. 417–22. See also Chapter 7 below. See Leask, Irish Castles, pp. 75–91; Mark Samuel, ‘A Tentative Chronology for Tower Houses in West Cork’, JCHAS, 2nd series 103 (1998), 105–24. See John O’Callaghan, ‘Fortified Houses of the Sixteenth Century in South Wexford’, Journal of the Old Wexford Society 8 (1980–81), 1–51. On the transition to other forms of domestic architecture, see E. M. Jope, ‘Moyry, Charlemont, Castleraw, and Richhill: Fortification to Architecture in the North of Ireland 1570–1700’, Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 3rd series 23 (1960), 97–123. The impact of gunpowder on medieval Irish forts can be over-estimated, though; undeveloped road networks meant that it was often difficult to approach the castles with the cannon, and so for a period medieval and early modern technologies co-existed. See W. A. McComish, ‘The Survival of the Irish Castle in an Age of Cannon’, Irish Sword 9 (1969–70), 16–21; Conrad Cairns, ‘Guns and Castles in Tipperary’, Irish Sword 16 (1984–86), 110–16.

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Beleaguered Spaces southern cities such as Cork and Waterford, and their castles and citadels.14 Concurrent with this were repeated attacks by English troops on Irish castles, as part of the campaigns of the early and mid-1580s, and also those of the late 1590s and early seventeenth century that are recorded in Thomas Stafford’s Pacata Hibernia (1633). Stafford’s account of ‘Ireland Appeased and Reduced’ shows English troops fighting a series of mostly one-sided battles, which largely result in their taking possession of medieval castles, the occupants of which apparently recognize that they cannot withstand the assaults of modern English guns. I shall argue that the castles in The Faerie Queene are locations that respond to a complex set of material ideologies, practices, and strategies, and that we should pay attention not only to what goes on in them, but also what we are told about their construction and physical substance, and how this is made part of their allegorical meaning. Partly because of the larger scale of the new fortifications in late sixteenth-century Ireland, the building projects mentioned above required great amounts of labour; I shall also ask how The Faerie Queene depicts the relation between work and fortified space, and the ideological implications of that relation. These broader questions about workmanship and construction will lead to a discussion of the human body: a figure in the poem often related to that of the castle, and one where questions of creation, substance, and form again meet. At the beginning of January 1590, a notice was sent by the English Privy Council to Edmund Yorke, commanding him to travel to Ireland immediately. The enduring belief that Spanish forces were preparing an invasion of the island, and the perception that important Irish cities and other sites there were lacking in defences, had encouraged the Council to have an engineer sent to Ireland, ‘to view certaine places, and to consider how they may be fortefied’.15 Yorke had given advice on the defence of the Norfolk and Suffolk coasts in 1588, and had also prepared plans for the fortification of Yarmouth.16 He was told that he was to meet John Perrott in Milford Haven, before crossing the Irish Sea, and then Richard Bingham, Richard Grenville, Warham Sentleger and Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam in Ireland, to ‘use their advice’: in what sorts the Townes of Cork, Waterford and Limerick may be strengthened, and fortefied in shortest time by Rampering the said Townes within the walles, or by raiseing up of Forts or Sconses with earth either within the Townes, or to adjoine to the same without any great charge, in such sort as they may be 14

15 16

For a detailed account of the stages of the fortification of Galway during this period, see M. D. O’Sullivan, ‘The Fortification of Galway in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, JGAHS 16 (1934–35), 1–47. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/149/55; also printed in APC, 1589–90, pp. 298–301. APC gives the date of the ‘Instructions’ as 2 January 1589/90. The History of the King’s Works, ed. H. M. Colvin et al., 6 vols (London: HMSO, 1963–82), IV (1982), pp. 411–12.

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Fortifications and the Body guardable for a time, by casting up of certaine trences of earth without the said townes, in such sort as the said Trenches may be Flanked with Muskett shott, and may be guardable without the use of great store of Ordinance.17

For the next five months, Yorke worked with Sir Thomas Norreys, Vice President of the Council of Munster, inspecting these cities and then supervising the construction of the fortifications that he subsequently planned for them.18 On 27 May 1590 he told Burghley that ‘the workes hear ar almost finished’,19 and felt sufficiently confident to make boasts about his work to Perrott: For the workes hear I hope your honour shall by all men of Iugment vnderstand. that they ar bothe defensible, beautifull and tenable: and for the Charges, that I dar Say, ther was neuer any thinge, of that Substance and quantity dune In that tyme, nor for thrise so muche mony In any plase of the world.20

Why is an association between this contextual material and The Faerie Queene valid, or indeed profitable? Spenser was present in Cork for much of the time immediately before 1590; as will be discussed later, the upheaval caused by this building project would have required significant amounts of labour, which Spenser would certainly have observed if not been engaged in. Furthermore, the earthen trenches that were built as part of these schemes provide demonstrable evidence of the increasing influence of modern theories of fortification in Elizabethan Ireland. The material history of the fortification of Ireland in the late sixteenth century, and the ideologies behind it, are also central to Books 5 and 6 of the poem. The events of 1589 and 1590 could have influenced what Spenser added to the poem and published in 1596, but are we justified in looking for their influence in the first three books of the poem, the 1590 Faerie Queene? What we know of the chronology of the publication of the 1590 Faerie Queene suggests that it coincides generally with the Munster fortification, even if it cannot demonstrate an exact relationship between the two.21 Spenser had also been close to John and Thomas Norreys when he worked on the Council 17 18 19 20 21

TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/149/55. See John S. Nolan, Sir John Norreys and the Elizabethan Military World (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), pp. 159–70. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/152/47. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/152/48. The poem is entered in the Stationers’ Register on 1 December 1589, suggesting that Spenser had brought the manuscript from Ireland to England by that date. This would not necessarily have been the date, however, on which it was taken to the printhouse, and in any case there is evidence that Spenser continued to work on it for some time. The letter to Ralegh is dated ’23. Ianuary. 1589’, which according to the old style calendar signifies a date in January 1590, and thus shows that the poem could not have been printed until then; it also shows that Spenser was still adding new material at that point. The first edition of The Faerie Queene is dated 1590, but this shows only that it was not printed after the first months of 1591; there is much to suggest that work may have been done on the poem during 1590, at the same time or possibly

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Beleaguered Spaces of Munster between 1584 and 1588.22 Although it might be too speculative to suppose that he had discussed the fortifications with them during that time, or even overheard such discussions, it would not be fanciful to say that he was in contact, during a period when fears of a Spanish invasion of Ireland were high, with the soldiers who would later assist in implementing the defence of these cities. We might also assume that even when in England, Spenser would have had contact with Ireland; it is also quite possible that he returned there for some time, possibly to handle lawsuits with Lord Roche.23 Furthermore, since many of the proposals for the fortification of the Irish cities came from the Privy Council in England, we need not suppose that a biographical history that shows Spenser out of Ireland in 1590 would prevent him from learning about such plans. Books like Paul Ive’s Practise of Fortification were in print in England before 1590; although they may not have been overly common in English libraries,24 we may at least assert that they had begun to disperse continental ideas of fortification in the years before Spenser published his poem, and thus that a narrow discussion of Spenser’s whereabouts at any particular date need not isolate him from the ideas that were put into practice when defences were built around Limerick, Cork and Waterford. Furthermore, emphasizing the practical experience that Norreys and Yorke, among others, would have brought to Ireland avoids an unequivocal dependence on the passage of information through printed books. The extent to which critical attention has overlooked the influence of contemporary theories of fortification on The Faerie Queene appears quite manifestly in a survey of some of the writing that has been lavished on the so-called arithmological stanza of the poem. The stanza is part of the description of the besieged Castle of Alma, and consists of a general comment on the shape of the castle: The frame thereof seemd partly circulare, And part triangulare, O worke diuine; Those two the first and last proportions are, The one imperfect, mortall, foeminine; Th’other immortall, perfect, masculine,

22 23 24

after the fortification of Waterford and the other cities in Munster had been accomplished. For a summary of these dates, see Chronology. See Raymond Jenkins, ‘Spenser and the Clerkship in Munster’, PMLA 47 (1932), 109–21. As is suggested by Chronology, p. 54. E. S. Leedham-Green, Books in Cambridge Inventories: Book-Lists From Vice-Chancellor’s Court Probate Inventories in the Tudor and Stuart Periods, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) does not list a single copy of Ive. Comparing Leedham-Green’s book with a list of contemporary European books on fortification (Horst de la Croix, ‘The Literature on Fortification in Renaissance Italy’, Technology and Culture 4 (1963), 30–50) reveals that only two books dealing with the subject were named in Cambridge inventories, neither of which is an outright treatise on fortifications: Franciscus Patricius’s De Institutione Reipublicae and Polydorus Vergilius’s De Inventibus Rerum.

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Fortifications and the Body And twixt them both a quadrate was the base, Proportioned equally by seuen and nine; Nine was the circle set in heauens place, All which compacted made a goodly diapase.

(II.ix.22)

Ever since Kenelme Digby proposed that the stanza, even by itself, provides ‘evident testimonie’ that Spenser ‘was throughly verst in the Mathematicall Sciences, in Philosophy, and in Divinity’,25 critics have pursued references to musical harmony,26 and to a mixture of Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Pythagorean numerological systems and theories of the relation of body and soul, as well as other mathematical symbolisms.27 Alastair Fowler remarks that ‘the first thing to notice about these lines is the remarkable polyvalency of their meaning’. They are ‘a tour de force of ambiguity’, he writes, ‘for they can simultaneously be approached either as an architectural description of Alma’s Castle or as a geometrical description of the human body, or as generally allusive arithmology, or as step-by-step instructions for a specific geometrical construction or arithmetical operation’.28 Nevertheless, there has been almost no attention to their relation to contemporary architecture. E. W. Naylor writes that, reading the passage ‘as a definite description of an actual building, it is not impossible to imagine a castle, or rather a temple or a palace, in three stories [sic], the ground floor square, with a triangular hall over it, and a circular dome for roof’.29 However, the conjectural drawing that he provides – a semi-spherical dome protruding out of a triangular turret on top of a small, medieval-style box-like castle – seems to have more to do with indiscriminate fantasy than either the extensive sequence of rooms that Alma shows to Guyon and Arthur, or any kind of building from the sixteenth century or earlier, or indeed later. What this might suggest to us, in part, is that the physical spaces and locations in The Faerie Queene are impossible to visualize in full, or that the abundance of physical descriptions with which Spenser provides us can frequently 25 26 27

28 29

Kenelme Digby, Observations on the 22. Stanza in the 9th. Canto of the 2d. Book of Spencers Faery Queen (London, 1643), p. 4. E. W. Naylor, The Poets and Music (London: Dent, 1928); Richard Douglas Jordan, ‘The Faerie Queene, II.ix.22: The Missing Link’, RES, n.s. 31 (1980), 436–40. See, for example, Spenser’s Faerie Queene: A New Edition with a Glossary and Notes Explanatory and Critical, ed. John Upton, 2 vols (London, 1758), II, pp. 480–81; Vincent Foster Hopper, ‘Spenser’s “House of Temperance” ’, PMLA 55 (1940), 958–67; Alastair Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964); R. M. Cummings, ‘A Note on the Arithmological Stanza: The Faerie Queene, II.ix.22’, JWCI 30 (1967), 410–14; Jerry Leath Mills, ‘Spenser’s Castle of Alma and the Number 22: A Note on Symbolic Stanza Placement’, NQ 212 (1967), 456–57; Elizabeth H. Hageman, ‘Alma, Belphoebe, Maleger, and the Number 22: Another Note on Symbolic Stanza Placement’, NQ 216 (1971), 225–26; Piotr Sadowski, ‘Spenser’s “Golden Squire” and “Golden Meane”: Numbers and Proportions in Book II of The Faerie Queene’, Spenser Studies 14 (2000), 107–31. Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time, p. 260. Naylor, The Poets and Music, p. 134.

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Beleaguered Spaces make such visualizations incoherent. But the arithmetical details of the stanza might also suggest that the poem does make physical play with the geometric designs for the new type of fortified castle which European architects had been drawing up for over a hundred years before the poem was composed. From the 1470s and 1480s onwards, designers of fortifications had increasingly begun to make use of the bastion, or the ‘bulwarke’, an angular projection jutting from the corners of the walls, which enabled the fort’s defenders to pay closer attention to the ground immediately in front of the wall and protect it with cross-fire.30 Bastioned forts were being built in England from the mid sixteenth century, and by 1600 they were established in Ireland.31 According to Paul Ive, they were ‘the chiefest and royalest defences’ and had to be built ‘where they may domayne and commaund ouer the ancomings to the Fort’.32 Fortifications, such as those built in Turin in 1564, assumed a new grandeur and geometric regularity, and the newly devised systems became ever more coherent as engineers and architects, particularly in Italy in the later sixteenth century, worked together in loosely connected groups and schools, and travelled abroad to offer their services to whichever European nations could afford to employ them.33 The same theories were also being applied, on a larger scale, to European towns. Complete bastioned schemes were more often planned than realized, but many towns, including Palmanova in Italy, were built in this way and still survive. This change was in part driven by financial necessity: the money that rulers required to keep pace with the rapidly developing military technology of the period could be raised only in collaboration with great cities, which in turn saw their power consolidated by the acquisition of powerful artillery and strong defences.34 In turn, the new style of fortification, with its many widely spread and intricately arranged circuits of earthworks and defensive walls, needed to be built on a scale that could be achieved only around cities and towns. Designs for cities had begun in the early Renaissance to take on the geometric regularity that also characterized the blueprints and drawings of fortresses. Examining the interrelation, in these descriptions, of a strongly delineated sense of visual perspective and rational geometry, Lise Bek sees them as a reflection of a growing humanist sense of the regularity of the human mind, and the capacity of that mind to be perfected on earth: The city in its architectonic appearance now no longer symbolizes a state of 30

31 32 33 34

J. R. Hale, ‘The Early Development of the Bastion: An Italian Chronology c. 1450–c. 1534’, in Europe in the Late Middle Ages, ed. J. R. Hale, J. R. L. Highfield, and B. Smalley (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), pp. 466–94. See the diagram of a bastion in Paul Ive, The Practise of Fortification: Wherein is Shewed the Manner of Fortifying in all Sorts of Scituations (London, 1589), p. 20. Jope, ‘Moyry, Charlemont, Castleraw, and Richhill’, pp. 114–15. Ive, The Practise of Fortification, p. 8. Duffy, Siege Warfare, pp. 34–41. Duffy, Siege Warfare, pp. 1–2.

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Fortifications and the Body perfection never to be reached in time, but foreshadows far more, as an architectonic representation, a perfection to be reached by man some time in his future by means of his rationality.35

Michael J. Lewis, on the other hand, analysing a set of seventeenth-century plans for fortified towns, emphasizes that this geometric quality had been quickly transformed from ‘a comprehensive ordering system [which] pursued abstract and regular geometry for its own sake’ into ‘a practical concern, a matter of basic survival’.36 Towns needed to be fortified according to geometric rules, in order to ensure an effective defence, as well as to symbolize an external or human order.37 Furthermore, the proliferation of handbooks and studies of permanent fortification, beginning in 1527 with Dürer’s Etliche Underricht zu Befestigung der Stett Schoss und Flecken, saw a gradual move away from models inspired by medieval architecture towards the same essential design, as new fortified buildings started regularly to assume the Italian style.38 These books are generally written according to the same pattern; they usually offer a brief history of architecture and a scrupulous explanation of the construction of a number of formulaic buildings. Their proliferation in the second half of the sixteenth century, and in particular the development of more detailed illustrations made from metal engravings, led to both a dissemination and a standardization of ideas among engineers.39 It had been recognized from the very beginning of the revolution of fortification-building in Italy that the occupation required a skill in drawing and design,40 and subsequent manuals were quick to emphasize the importance of geometric form: ‘L’art de fortification ne consiste en autre chose, qu’à cliner ou decliner les lignes sur lesquelles sont jettez les fondements d’vne place [. . .]. Ceste inclination de lignes ne se peult faire sans angles’ [The art of fortification consists of no other thing than declining the lines on which the foundations of a place are laid [. . .]. This arrangement of 35

36 37

38 39

40

Lise Bek, ‘The Changing Architectonic Aspect of the Ideal City in the Early Renaissance’, in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Hafniensis: Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, Copenhagen 12 August to 17 August 1991, ed. Rhoda Schnur et al. (New York: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1994), pp. 143–53 (p. 145). Michael J. Lewis, ‘Utopia and the Well-ordered Fortress: J. M. von Schwalbach’s Town Plans of 1635’, Architectural History 37 (1994), 24–36 (p. 24). See Horst de la Croix, ‘Military Architecture and the Radial City Plan in Sixteenth-Century Italy’, Art Bulletin 42 (1960), 263–90, which describes both positions and suggests a transition from one to the other. For extensive surveys of this literature, see De la Croix, ‘The Literature on Fortification’; John Bury, ‘Early Writings on Fortifications and Siegecraft: 1502–1554’, Fort 13 (1985), 5–48. Quentin Hughes, Military Architecture: The Art of Defence from Earliest Times to the Atlantic Wall, 2nd edn (Liphook: Beaufort, 1991), pp. 92–97; on the particular importance and the history of interrelations between the illustrations in these texts, see Quentin Hughes, ‘Military Architecture and the Printed Book’, Fort 10 (1982), 5–21. See J. R. Hale, Renaissance Fortification: Art or Engineering? (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), p. 14.

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Beleaguered Spaces lines cannot be made without angles].41 But the mathematical models in them appealed as much to the scholar as to the soldier. Just as the Vitruvian theory of architecture dictated that the discipline was actually a consummation of all other scientific and humanist studies – ‘of all artes, the most noble and excellent, Contayning in it sundrie sciences and knowlaiges wherwyth it is furnished and adourned’42 – the authors of fortification manuals often insist that a broad education is necessary to apply many of their theories: ‘Il est bien necessaire aussi que l’Ingenieur discoure à propos de toutes les parties de sa science’ [It is also clearly necessary that the engineer be able to hold forth about all parts of his science].43 In particular because many of their authors were equally interested in civic health, architecture, and engineering, and because the study embraced other humanist disciplines, the manuals and their subject enjoyed a considerable fashion. The details in the stanza of The Faerie Queene do not create a coherent or extensive architectural description.44 They do, however, at least suggest that Spenser was aware that buildings, in particular fortified buildings, were being constructed according to such mathematical schemes, schemes drawn up as much for the sake of practicality as for the benefit of symbolic significance. The association between the Castle of Alma and these schemes can be seen, for example, in the triangular elements of Spenser’s imaginary building. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century handbooks of fortification often include commentaries on the construction of triangular buildings, or diagrams of them; but although they had been popular in the fifteenth century,45 they tend later to be seen as too difficult to defend to merit sustained examination. ‘Le triangle equilateral’, writes Errard de Bar-le-Duc, for example, ‘ne se peut simplement fortifier qu’auec beaucoup d’incommoditez & imperfections qui se trouuent en la construction’ [The equilateral triangle cannot be easily fortified without difficulties and imperfections which there are in the construction].46 A design combining circular and triangular elements would not have been out of place in one of these books. Drawings in Balthazar Gerbier’s Interpreter of the Academie (1648), for example, show both triangular and quadrilateral elements, and also figures within circles [Plate 3]:47 it is possible to find 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

J. Errard de Bar-le-Duc, La fortification redvicte en art (Paris, 1594; repr. Frankfurt a. M., 1604), p. 21. John Shute, The First and Chief Groundes of Architecture: Used in all the Auncient and Famous Monymentes (London, 1563), fol. B2v. Errard de Bar-le-Duc, La fortification redvicte en art, p. 18. See Michael Leslie, ‘Edmund Spenser: Art and The Faerie Queene’, Proceedings of the British Academy 76 (1990), 73–107 (pp. 88–97). Hughes, Military Architecture, p. 71. An example of such a building appears in Errard de Bar-le-Duc. Errard de Bar-le-Duc, La fortification redvicte en art, p. 48. Balthazar Gerbier, The Interpreter of the Academie for Forrain Languages, and all Noble Sciences, and Exercises (London, 1648), image facing p. 80.

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Fortifications and the Body

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Plate 3: Balthazar Gerbier, The Interpreter of the Academie for Forrain Languages, and Noble Sciences, and Exercises (London, 1648), image facing p. 80

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Beleaguered Spaces sketches of almost precisely the same content in nearly all of the manuals of this sort from the mid sixteenth century onwards. Spenser’s description in this stanza is not an exact representation of these theories. But it may be taken as showing the influence, not only of contemporary military and technical information, and the books in which this was transmitted, but also of a tradition of the pictorial representation of this knowledge. Despite suggesting a knowledge of contemporary practices of fortification, however, Spenser’s description is essentially fantastical. This quality is also manifested in another Elizabethan romance, Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia, where Basilius’s star-shaped lodge suggests the geometric descriptions in contemporary manuals of fortification: ‘The lodge is of a yellow stone, built in the form of a star, having, round about, a garden framed into like points; and beyond the garden, ridings cut out, each answering the angles of the lodge’.48 Nevertheless, however much this evokes a bastioned fortress, Sidney presents it as a conceit rather than as a mathematical construction. The smaller lodge where Pamela lives is described in a simile: ‘At the end of one of them is the other, smaller, lodge, but of like fashion, where the gracious Pamela liveth; so that the lodge seemeth not unlike a fair comet whose tail stretcheth itself to a star of less greatness’.49 Victor Skretkowicz argues that the lodge ought to be read as symbolic, because of the significance of the form of the star. He also suggests that contemporary examples of what he calls ‘symbolic architecture’, such as Tycho Brahe’s Stellenborg, built in 1576, which is based around the figure of the four points of the compass, or Archduke Ferdinand’s Stella lodge in Prague, may be read either as sources for fantastical buildings in literature, or as inspired by them.50 Although there is evidence that geometric buildings were justified in practical terms, and built for practical reasons, they might in their turn be represented as fantastical. Sidney’s description re-enters architectural theory in just that way: when Henry Wotton refers to it in his Elements of Architecture, a compilation of architectural theories and writings, he does so both as an example of Sidney’s ‘Wit’, and as a ‘Forme’ symbolic of Basilius’s ‘Fancie’: And heere likewise I must remember our euer memorable Sir Philip Sidney, (whose Wit was in truth the very rule of Congruity) who well knowing that Basilius (as hee had painted the State of his Minde) did rather want some extraordinary Formes to entertaine his Fancie, then roome for Courtiers; was contented to place him in a Star-like Lodge; which otherwise in seuere Iudgement of Art had beene an incommodious Figure.51 48 49 50

51

Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia), ed. Victor Skretkowicz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 85–86. Sidney, Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, p. 86. Victor Skretkowicz, ‘Symbolic Architecture in Sidney’s New Arcadia’, RES, n.s. 33 (1982), 175–80. See also Scott Wilson, ‘Love and the Labyrinth: Sir Philip Sidney and the Extraordinary Forms of Desire’, Assays 7 (1992), 43–69 (pp. 57–58). Henry Wotton, The Elements of Architecture (London, 1624), p. 120.

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Fortifications and the Body Wotton’s reference demonstrates that, just as the fantastical forms of early modern buildings may conceal practical requirements, a discussion of these practical requirements might admit of fancy. Where Spenser’s description of the Castle of Alma differs from Sidney’s description of Basilius’s lodge, however, is in its emphasis on the material construction of the building. It is this very emphasis, I want to suggest, that permits us not only to read it in closer connection to contemporary fortification, but also – as I will go on to discuss shortly – to think about the materiality of the Spenserian human body. The first part of the castle that Alma shows to Guyon and Arthur is the wall: First she them led vp to the Castle wall, That was so high, as foe might not it clime, And all so faire, and fensible withall, Not built of bricke, ne yet of stone and lime, But of thing like to that AEgyptian slime, Whereof king Nine whilome built Babell towre, But O great pitty, that no lenger time So goodly workemanship should not endure: Soone it must turne to earth; no earthly thing is sure.

(II.ix.21)

The stanza speaks about the construction of the castle, and moreover, relates it to the material qualities of the fortifications which I have proposed as a context for this episode. Indeed, this material reference arises precisely because of the nature of the allegory, discussing as it does the earthly precariousness of the physical human body.52 Like the arithmological stanza, which comes immediately after this, the material context and the allegory are both based on the same physical detail, in this case the ‘earth’ of the fortifications and the ‘earthly’ nature of the human bodily existence. In Ireland, the defences built by Edmund Yorke were based around systems of earthworks. At the end of 1589, Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam was told that Yorke had been asked ‘to repaire with all speed into that Realme to the Province of Mounster to viewe certaine places there and to consider howe the same might be fortyfied with trenches of yerthe’.53 A letter of 30 October 1590, from Nicolas Lumbarde to his son, shows that the defences in Waterford were being completed with a series of earthworks. ‘First atrenche with aditche ower the same hath ben begon’, Lumbarde writes, ‘indented wise from the Rounde towre next benorth my garden right ower sent thomas is hyll (into the winde myll Place weastwarde).’ The fortifications, ‘made of earth and soodes’, have trenches eight feet deep, at least in places, and defensive ramparts, the ‘ditches’ of Lumbarde’s description 52

53

See also Walter R. Davis, ‘The Houses of Mortality in Book II of The Faerie Queene’, Spenser Studies 2 (1981), 121–40. Davis notes that the ‘stress on the physical’ in this allegory is ‘uniquely proper to a discussion of temperance, and the physical is where Spenser’s narrator locates us insistently’ (p. 122). APC, 1589–90, p. 285.

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Beleaguered Spaces up to twenty feet high. As Lumbarde describes the fortifications, he refers to landmarks in the town that his son will recognize: ‘It goeth southwarde along by tholde howses without the bawne vnto the clef ower the sandye baye’. This also allows him to identify gaps in the fortifications, and to describe their weaknesses quite specifically; at one point he expresses a concern that they are at the mercy of seasonal weather: The dytche within the bawne aboute the clesur is not asyet ioyned to the towre by theest syde / nor also in the northwest syde but is as yet oppen and voyde. The wurke also in theeste syde of mr fentones wurke to the lowe water marke is made nothinge sensyble as yet / but lyeth subiect to this winter stormes to be all destroyed.54

The allegorical comparison between human body and castle was a trope common in medieval writing, at least as far back as the thirteenth-century French Chasteau d’Amour.55 It persisted well into the sixteenth century and far beyond the bounds of allegorical romance, so that Sir Thomas Elyot called his medical manual, which went through several editions in the first half of the century, The Castel of Helthe. Care of the body, and of the self, is expressed in the image of care of a castle, and Elyot’s text is perhaps alluded to in The Faerie Queene, in Despair’s dungeon: ‘How may a man (said he) with idle speach | Be wonne, to spoyle the Castle of his health?’ (I.ix.31.1–2). Michael Schoenfeldt has also discussed the influence of Galenic physiology and medicine on Alma’s castle. Schoenfeldt proposes an ethically allegorized physiology, in which the regulation of bodily humours (with the vigilance accorded to places of expulsion in the castle) relates to the struggle to respond temperately and continently to the passions that affect the self. Schoenfeldt explores the allegorical ambiguity of portraying the state of temperance through fighting, but argues that ‘it is a warfare [. . .] that is constructive rather than destructive of the self, both because of the radical inwardness such introspection demands and because the battle prevents the self from being overrun by a series of undifferentiated passions’.56 Schoenfeldt’s image of the body, as it is represented by the Castle of Alma, is something that is controllable; the disciplining of the body and the control of the self are allegorically linked. ‘The castle was built by God,’ he writes, ‘whose workmanship one is to admire, but it is maintained by heroic human labor of regulation.’57 But while his analysis teases out an important frame of reference in the canto, what we should add here is that the description of the Castle of 54 55 56

57

TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/155/22. See C. L. Powell, ‘The Castle of the Body’, Studies in Philology 16 (1919), 197–205. Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 49. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, p. 41.

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Fortifications and the Body Alma, as we have seen above in stanza 21, actually implies that the body will decay. And this negative teleology exposes the materiality of the body: ‘So goodly workemanship should not endure: | Soone it must turne to earth; no earthly thing is sure’. Just as the polyptoton in this line (‘earth [. . .] earthly’) draws our attention to a kind of material decay, the earthliness and earthiness of man is contrasted with the workmanship of the previous line. And a similar movement has taken place in the previous lines: the castle is not ‘built of bricke, ne yet of stone and lime, | But of thing like to that AEgyptian slime, | Whereof king Nine whilome built Babell towre’. It is constructed, in other words, from a substance beyond our immediate experience, and yet the reminders of what it is not built from gives it an abundantly material frame of reference. The ‘goodly workemanship’ of the walls of the castle continues to be pointed out during the knights’ tour of the building. The canto begins with lines that describe the human body as a divine work: Of all Gods workes, which doe this world adorne, There is no one more faire and excellent, Then is mans body both for powre and forme.

(II.ix.1.1–3)

And it is notable, partly when we consider the castle-building context that I have proposed for the poem, and partly within Schoenfeldt’s Galenic frame of reference of bodily regulation, that it is frequently the defences of the castle that earn this praise. The two gates of the house are ‘placed seemly well’ (II.ix.23.1), and fashioned with great skill: The one before, by which all in did pas, Did th’other far in workmanship excell; For not of wood, nor of enduring bras, But of more worthy substance fram’d it was.

(II.ix.23.2–5)

The ‘goodly order, and great workmans skill’ of the nether gate is noted once again (II.ix.33.1), as is the ‘great workemanship, and wondrous powre’ (II.ix.47.2) of the human head, and of the eyes, of which the narrator exclaims, ‘O who can tell the prayses of that makers might?’ (II.ix.46.9). It is also a term that is used at the end of Book 2, when Spenser describes Guyon’s destruction of the Bower of Bliss: ‘Ne ought their goodly workmanship might saue | Them from the tempest of his wrathfulnesse’ (II.xii.83.3–4). The reminders of the divine workmanship that has built the castle are accompanied by an insistence that the shape that makes it like the body, and that makes the body a ‘worke diuine’ in the form of God, will slip away. As we have seen elsewhere in the poem, Spenser declares that what he is describing is unlike any physical substance to which it could be compared, but, through this very declaration, imbues the passage with an excess of materiality: Therein two gates were placed seemly well: The one before, by which all in did pas,

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Beleaguered Spaces Did th’other far in workemanship excell; For not of wood, nor of enduring bras, But of more worthy substance fram’d it was; Doubly disparted, it did locke and close, That when it locked, none might thorough pas, And when it opened, no man might it close, Still open to their friendes, and closed to their foes. Of hewen stone the porch was fayrely wrought, Stone more of valew, and more smooth and fine, Then Iett or Marble far from Ireland brought;

(II.ix.23–24)

The phrase ‘of [. . .] substance fram’d’ seems to be poised between describing the shape and the physical composition of the castle; and the reference to the black marble common to parts of southern Ireland, although it speaks of what the castle is not constructed from, places the castle within at least the idea of a system of material value and exchange. At the same time as the poem dematerializes the castle, it insists on describing it in terms of a circulation of material. The language of work and workmanship is also used in The Faerie Queene to describe bodies in themselves, not just in the allegorical form of castles. We see the False Florimell, for example, being constructed by the witch of Book 3 for her lazy, lovesick son: By their deuise, and her owne wicked wit, She there deuiz’d a wondrous worke to frame, Whose like on earth was neuer framed yit, That euen Nature selfe enuide the same, And grudg’d to see the counterfet should shame The thing it selfe.

(III.viii.5.1–6)

The two stanzas that follow say more about the construction of this counterfeit woman: The substance, whereof she the body made, Was purest snow in massy mould congeald, Which she had gathered in a shady glade Of the Riphœan hills, to her reueald By errant Sprights, but from all men conceald: The same she tempred with fine Mercury, And virgin wex, that neuer yet was seald, And mingled them with perfect vermily, That like a liuely sanguine it seemd to the eye. In stead of eyes two burning lampes she set In siluer sockets, shyning like the skyes, And a quicke mouing Spirit did arret To stirre and roll them, like to womens eyes;

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Fortifications and the Body In stead of yellow lockes she did deuyse, With golden wyre to weaue her curled head; Yet golden wyre was not so yellow thrise As Florimells fayre heare: and in the stead Of life, she put a Spright to rule the carcas dead.

(III.viii.6–7)

The False Florimell should remind us of Alma’s castle, not just in the language of workmanship, ‘worke’, and ‘frame’, but also in the anatomical details such as the lamps that provide her eyes. Her ‘carcas dead’ is clearly a reminder of her status, but we know that Alma’s castle is always in the process of decay, too, and the body that it represents material, and mortal. The snow of the Riphoean hills is obviously a mythical substance (though it reminds us of the ‘snowy lady’ of the argument to the canto, and makes that description come to mean both a woman with very pale skin, and a woman made of snow), but stanza 6 reminds us that the body is something that is substantially constructed, and constructed from substances that seem on the point of melting, losing their shape. And stanza 7 seems to make physical the conventions of blazon vocabulary. When the False Florimell appears in Book 4, we read about her similarity to the real Florimell, again in the language of construction: As guilefull Goldsmith that by secret skill, With golden foyle doth finely ouer spred Some baser metall, which commend he will Vnto the vulgar for good gold insted, He much more goodly glosse thereon doth shed, To hide his falshood, then if it were trew: So hard, this Idole was to be ared, That Florimell her selfe in all mens vew She seem’d to passe: so forged things do fairest shew.

(IV.v.15)

The description, with its overloading of gaudy materiality, recalls the tapestries in Malecasta’s palace, as well as the ‘painted forgery’ that Spenser describes the allegory as. At the tournament in Book 5 of the poem, the False Florimell melts: Th’enchaunted Damzell vanisht into nought: Her snowy substance melted as with heat, Ne of that goodly hew remayned ought, But th’emptie girdle, which about her wast was wrought. As when the daughter of Thaumantes faire, Hath in a watry cloud displayed wide Her goodly bow, which paints the liquid ayre; That all men wonder at her colours pride; All suddenly, ere one can looke aside, The glorious picture vanisheth away, Ne any token doth thereof abide:

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Beleaguered Spaces So did this Ladies goodly forme decay, And into nothing goe, ere one could it bewray.

(V.iii.24–25)

As is so typical in the poem, one is left slightly uncertain as to what, physically, is happening: is she vanishing into nothingness or melting like snow? The ‘snowy substance’ appears in the verse as it is being described disappearing, and the simile in stanza 25, despite its abundance of physical markers (‘watry [. . .] liquid’) seems in the end to be describing the experience of watching the disappearance (‘ere one can looke aside [. . .] ere one could it bewray’), rather than physically accounting for it. The Spenserian body is abundantly, superfluously material. The chronicle history in Book 2 talks of ‘what time th’eternall Lord in fleshly slime | Enwombed was’ (II.x.50.2–3): this strange way of describing the incarnation categorizes the body as pure substance. The description of Belphoebe’s conception proclaims its isolation from the physical body (and thus re-emphasizes the substantial nature of the common human body): Her berth was of the wombe of Morning dew, And her conception of the ioyous Prime, And all her whole creation did her shew Pure and vnspotted from all loathly crime, That is ingenerate in fleshly slime.

(III.vi.3.1–5)

And we read of the ‘congealed flesh’ (III.viii.25.1) of the man who attacks Florimell on the strand. But what so often accompanies the body in The Faerie Queene is a reminder of bodily disintegration, frequently returning to an image of a castle. Munera’s dismemberment in Book 5 Canto 2 (see pp. 121–26 below) is juxtaposed with the rasing of her castle. Orgoglio, another body of pure substance, ‘this monstrous masse of earthly slyme’ (I.vii.9.8), is brought down ‘as a Castle reared high and round’. Undermined, he collapses under his own weight: ‘At last downe falles, and with her heaped hight | Her hastie ruine does more heauie make’ (I.viii.23.1, 5–6). We cannot argue, as many critics have done, that Spenser is showing a transcendence of the body’s material in Alma’s castle and elsewhere. Just as Spenserian allegory is so frequently assumed to rely on moving beyond the material, both Spenser’s philosophical beliefs and his poetry are felt to rely on the idea of a movement towards a perfect body, whether depicted or not. As I have suggested, I feel that we actually see either a primary or at least compensating movement away from bodily perfection. For David Lee Miller, the ‘body’, partly a religious myth and partly the ‘notion of the monarch as incarnating an ideal and unchanging political body’, is continually deferred throughout the poem.58 Norman Farmer writes that ‘after Guyon [. . .] arrives 58

David Lee Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 ‘Faerie Queene’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 4.

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Fortifications and the Body with Arthur at the House of Alma, Spenser shifts his diction (and indeed his basic metaphor) away from flesh-that-decays to a “body” that commands admiration and respect. This new body is clearly equivalent to St Paul’s soma, God’s most “faire and excellent” work’.59 Kenneth Borris, despite granting that ‘Spenser’s often sensual verse revels in the body’s wonder, beauty, and erotic potential’, also uses St Paul to speak about bodily perfection and the subjugation of the flesh: ‘Caelia’s and Alma’s households both express somatic edification whereby the body itself becomes divinely consecrated, [. . .] From the standpoints of both Spenser’s Holiness and Temperance, the spirit should subdue the flesh, thus revivifying fallen human nature through grace and somewhat sanctifying the body itself’.60 Borris also deals with the scene in Caelia’s house where Redcrosse’s ‘superfluous flesh’ is plucked out by Amendment, ‘that soone in him was lefte no one corrupted iott’ (I.x.26.6–9). Borris writes that ‘Redcross’s revival also has an anagogical sense that anticipates ultimate repletion of the body with the spirit, and transcendence of the deathliness focussed in Lucifera’s household’,61 and there certainly is a sense of purgation. But it returns to a scene of self-consumption: his torment often was so great, That like a Lyon he would cry and rore, And rend his flesh, and his owne synewes eat.

(I.x.28.1–3)

Not only does the impossibility of this image focus our attention on the physicality of the body: it also, in being described, allows the body to appear as ‘flesh’, ‘synewes’, and bodily action as physical consumption. And the question of divine work and workmanship raised by these bodies takes us back to the Irish fortifications mentioned earlier in this chapter. With reference to the Munster fortifications, the Privy Council wrote to Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam on 25 January 1590, to inform him that the Queen, who ‘hathe thought yt nowe fytt that those fortificacions should be gone in hande with all diligence’, advised him that the work ‘will require also some tyme and help of manie men’s labours’.62 The communication that passed between Ireland and England in the subsequent months frequently returned to this subject, in particular emphasizing that more workers were needed to build the city defences. Thomas Norreys wrote to Francis Walsingham on 21 February 1590, saying that the Privy Council had ordered him to address ‘the Burgers of the severall Citties and the countrey men neer adioyninge to perswade thier 59

60 61 62

Norman K. Farmer, Jr., ‘The World’s New Body: Spenser’s Faerie Queene Book II, St Paul’s Epistles and Reformation England’, in Renaissance Culture in Context: Theory and Practice, ed. Jean R. Brink and William F. Gentrup (Aldershot: Scolar, 1993), pp. 75–85 (p. 81). Kenneth Borris, ‘Flesh, Spirit, and the Glorified Body: Spenser’s Anthropomorphic Houses of Pride, Holiness, and Temperance’, Spenser Studies 15 (2001), 17–52 (pp. 22, 19). Borris, ‘Flesh, Spirit, and the Glorified Body’, p. 31. APC, 1589–90, pp. 325–26.

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Beleaguered Spaces willinge assistance to the performinge of thes woorkes’. He reported to Walsingham on his success: The townes men of waterforde (to whome only I have as yet motioned the matter) I doe finde very willinge to give every daye a hundred and Fiftie laborers and more yf necessitie shall require yt, I hope the other Citties wilbe induced by thier ensamples, and as for the countrey I doubte not but they shall yealde what thier abillities with conveniency maye affoorde.63

With Edmund Yorke, he informed the Privy Council that ‘owte of the countrey wee hope to procure three skore’, and asked them to send ‘owte of Englande three hundred pioners for this Citty and the rest hereafter to be viewed with necessary tooles and instrumentes’.64 A month later, however, he wrote again to Walsingham in frustration at the incompetence of the men who had been levied locally, and again asked him to send English pioneers to work on the fortifications: The help which the Citties, and countreys doe yealde is a thinge rather in shew then to any good purpose for the men beynge very weake and yt may be suspected vnwillinge of this labour, wilbe able to compasse no greate matter, and allthoughe ther be had in the countie of Wexforde (as yt seemethe Sir Ihon Perrot hathe informed) better laborers then this countrey is able ordynarily to yealde, yet not beynge inured with thes manner of woorkes, they will hardly be broughte to carry them in forme or in substance as they shalbe directed, but yf yt might stande with your honnours likinge that some englishe pioners wer sent over to mingle with them yt woulde surely advance the matters very muche.65

Yorke’s reservations and entreaties demonstrate how the Irish fortifications were seen as requiring a special degree of work, and also that it was initially the inhabitants of Ireland themselves who were asked to take responsibility for this. Nicholas Lumbarde was possibly exaggerating (or even misspelling the figure) when he asserted that ‘the cytezeynes hath yeoven by goode account 10000 mennes wurke to helpe that wurke’, but even one thousand men would have been a large majority of the male population of the city; he may also be referring to days worked.66 However, it is clear that labourers were being enlisted from a number of sources. Edmund Yorke wrote to Burghley on 27 May that ‘my Lord of ormount hathe geuen her Maiestie 200: mens Labours for a monthe. which begyn vppon monday next’.67 If these figures are read with one eye on the size of the towns involved, the magnitude of the labour is obvious. Anthony Sheehan estimates the population of Waterford at the end 63 64 65 66 67

TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/150/62. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/150/63. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/151/29. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/155/22. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/152/47.

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Fortifications and the Body of the sixteenth century at approximately 2400.68 Of these, one might wonder whether the large merchant community would have been asked to contribute to the work;69 the fact that labour had to be enlisted from outside the town, however, suggests that a majority of the likely able-bodied men in Waterford were enlisted to work on the fortifications. Spenser does not depict the construction of Alma’s castle, but he speaks about its ‘workemanship’, and shows that it also depends on a form of communal work. In their journey through the house, what Guyon and Arthur see are not just architectural features that correspond to parts of the human body, but people working inside them. This work, performed in each part of the castle, constitutes its defensive function. Furthermore, the defensive role of many of these stations – portcullis, watchman and so on – is a duty not to attack invaders, but to be vigilant and deny them admission. Their task of defending the castle is seen to be continuous, against an enemy that is unrelenting. The mouth – ‘when it locked, none might thorough pas’ (II.ix.23.7) – and the eyes – ‘set in watches stead’ (II.ix.46.3) – for example, have a metonymic relation to the body, for their function is no different from that of the temperate individual as a whole. Other parts of the poem speak of the role of bodily parts, frequently the eyes, in repelling unwelcome advances; the ‘liuing lamps’ of Belphoebe’s eyes (II.iii.23.1), for example, have the power to hold off Cupid’s assaults: ‘In them the blinded god his lustfull fyre | To kindle oft assayd, but had no might’ (II.iii.23.6–7). The manning of the fortifications in Waterford, Cork and Limerick was a matter that produced as much correspondence as their construction. When Norreys, Yorke, and their colleagues wrote back to England, they suggested that the two aims could be satisfied by sending a particular group of soldiers, who could defend the fortifications after having constructed them. Again, though, the labour was seen as an extensive one; the numbers of men required were as high as those called for in the construction of the defences. Edmund Yorke suggested that ‘if you send but .2. or 300. men. If they wer but leuied as pioners they will finishe the workes: and Euery day 25: shalbe trayned, and houlde gardes. So as hir Maiestie shall haue the Workes spedely ended without charge, and yett so many men to defend the plases.’70 Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam advised the Privy Council in February 1590 about ‘the .600. soldiours which 68

69

70

Anthony Sheehan, ‘Irish Towns in a Period of Change, 1558–1625’, in Natives and Newcomers: Essays on the Making of Irish Colonial Society 1534–1641, ed. Ciaran Brady and Raymond Gillespie (Dublin: Irish Academical Press, 1986), pp. 93–119 (p. 97). See Julian Walton, ‘The Merchant Community of Waterford in the 16th and 17th Centuries’, in Cities and Merchants: French and Irish Perspectives on Urban Development, 1500–1900, ed. P. Butel and L. M. Cullen (Dublin: Trinity College Dublin, 1986), pp. 183–92; Donald Woodward, ‘Irish Sea Trades and Shipping from the Later Middle Ages to c. 1660’, in The Irish Sea: Aspects of Maritime History, ed. Michael McCaughan and John Appleby (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1989), pp. 35–44. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/150/66.

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Beleaguered Spaces your Lordships by your .2. first lettres did will should be leavyed here, to be added to the .400. that are to imbarque at Bristoll, for the guard of waterford & the partes adiacent’. He wrote that Walter Ralegh and Richard Grenville had undertaken to raise 200 men in Munster, but warned that ‘for the other .400. besides that it wilbe hard to fynde here presently so manie bodies, Considering the action in Connaght’.71 The various fortifications and defences of the Castle of Alma are not simply a boundary which Maleger is attempting to breach; they form a distinct space, filled by figures who, in defending the castle, perform the virtuous function for which the building as a whole is responsible. The existence of this space, and the work that goes on in it, is all the more apparent when the episode is compared with an earlier instance of the image of the siege of the virtuous castle. The Castle of Perseverance was performed over a hundred years before The Faerie Queene was written. As Clifford Davidson has noted, the play participates in a long and extensive iconographic tradition describing and allegorizing the besieged castle:72 a tradition, reaching back to Prudentius’s Psychomachia, which incorporates and mingles both sacred imagery and secular allegories of the castle of love. The tradition is expressed in allegorical texts, and also finds form in a range of dramatic genres, including street pageantry and royal entries. It was an important iconographical trope in medieval art,73 and appears in early Christian exegetic texts and Old English religious allegories of the soul.74 The space of performance in The Castle of Perseverance, with the castle at the centre of the arena and the centre of attention, is specifically and extensively imagined.75 It is also a play into which this space is written, with frequent deictic references to ‘yene castel’ (line 1772),76 ‘yone castel’ (line 1762), ‘þis castel town’ (line 2015). The assault on the castle by the vices outside it is also an assault on the man within, and, as the vices align themselves against their 71 72

73 74 75

76

TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/150/47. Clifford Davidson, Visualizing the Moral Life: Medieval Iconography and the Macro Morality Plays (New York: AMS Press, 1989); for a survey of the history of the image, see Roberta D. Cornelius, The Figurative Castle: A Study in the Mediæval Allegory of the Edifice with Especial Reference to Religious Writings (Pennsylvania: Bryn Mawr, 1930); see also Merle Fifield, ‘The Assault on the Castle of Perseverance: The Tradition and the Figure’, Ball State University Forum 16.4 (Autumn 1975), 16–26. See Roger Sherman Loomis, ‘The Allegorical Siege in the Art of the Middle Ages’, American Journal of Archaeology, 2nd series 23 (1919), 255–69. See James F. Doubleday, ‘The Allegory of the Soul as Fortress in Old English Poetry’, Anglia 88 (1970), 503–8. See Richard Southern, The Medieval Theatre in the Round: A Study of the Staging of ‘The Castle of Perseverance’ and Related Matters (London: Faber and Faber, 1957). However, Davidson, Visualizing the Moral Life, p. 3, suggests that Southern’s conjectures may be over-elaborate. The Macro Plays: ‘The Castle of Perseverance’, ‘Wisdom’, ‘Mankind’, ed. Mark Eccles, Early English Text Society 262 (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). Line references are given in the text.

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Fortifications and the Body corresponding virtues with the characteristically ripe language of medieval stage villainy – ‘Lo, Chastyte, þou fowle skowte!’ (line 2288) – it becomes an attack on his sustenance and preservation. But, unlike the deep space of the fortifications in the Castle of Alma, the defences of this castle act only as a shelter for the man; it is the ‘Castel of Vertu and of Goodnesse’ (line 2019) because it shelters him alongside the personifications of these virtues, rather than embodying those qualities itself. The seven virtues are quite separate from the walls that protect them, and the walls of the Castle of Perseverance do not open out the architectural space, filled with representatives of virtue, which is apparent in the episode of the Castle of Alma. As Davidson notes, The Castle of Perseverance presents a view of human life ‘as a series of binary moral decisions which ultimately will have the effect of determining one’s everlasting state’.77 Virtues and vices, Bonus Angelus and Malus Angelus, salvation and perdition are continually set against each other. This series of direct oppositions is also represented by a binary spatial arrangement, contrasting the space within the castle with that outside it, as the representative of humankind is (rather passively) pulled in and out by the respective moral forces: ‘Þe Goode holdyth hym inne, þe Badde wold brynge hym owte’ (line 78). Unlike the description of the Castle of Alma, the binary contrast here leaves no place for an in-between space; moreover, the fight for control of the castle here occurs outside it, and not within the fortifications. The walls are merely a boundary, a point of crossing, and apparently occupy no space at all. Spenser seems to alter this image of the castle under siege, which we might identify in principally literary sources, by adding the idea that a castle wall possesses a discernibly deep bank of fortification. Such an idea is a prominent part of many contemporary handbooks of fortification. In the Discours of Marcus Aurelius de Pasino, written in 1579, the structure of the ideal fortification is shown in a cross-sectional diagram,78 the depth of which is taken as an important measurement of the structure. De Pasino’s text persistently refers to the spaces that are depicted in this drawing of the defensive structure, and he comments on the space that they measure out. In his description of the construction, for example, he mentions ‘dix ou douze pieds, lequel espace est marqué par C’ [ten or twelve feet, which space is marked with the letter C].79 The further implication, when the distances are measured out in numbers of paces and feet, seems to be that this is a space which, in both its construction and its function, is occupied by soldiers:

77 78

79

Davidson, Visualizing the Moral Life, p. 56. M. Aurelius de Pasino, Discours sur plusieurs poincts de l’architecture de guerre, concernants les fortifications tant anciennes que modernes (Anvers, 1579), p. 68. Almost exactly the same diagram appears in William Garrard, The Arte of Warre (London, 1591), p. 323, suggesting the influence of continental theories in contemporary England. De Pasino, Discours, p. 67.

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Beleaguered Spaces Le petit espace ou allée qui sera au pied de la contregarde, & à laquelle i’ay ci-deuant donné quatre pieds de largeur, seruira, à fin qu’on aye moyen de mettre en ce lieu plusieurs soldats qui puissent aller & venir tant au deuant des bouleuerts que deuant les courtines. [The small space or alleyway which will be at the foot of the contregarde, to which I have here given four feet in width, will be used so that one might have the means to put many soldiers in this place, who could come and go in front of both the battlements and the curtain-walls.]80

In the drawings of these fortifications that appear in other textbooks, the presence of human figures within the defensive structures – behind parapets, inside trenches – is often prominent, as in an example from Errard de Bar-le-Duc [Plate 4]. Disproportionately sized soldiers are also depicted at work in the bastions of fortified cities in Braun and Hogenberg’s encyclopaedic Civitates Orbis Terrarum. As in the Castle of Alma, the fortifications not only provide a structure which defends the castle in itself, but mark out a space in which soldiers, who are shown firing guns, arming themselves, giving or receiving orders, can enact that defence. Although, taken together in the allegory of the canto, the defenders of Alma’s castle symbolize the behaviour of the temperate person, and although the tour that Guyon and Arthur make is more or less a complete circuit of the human body, Alma’s position in the house is not rendered superfluous. She is described not merely as ‘the Ladie [. . .] which there did dwell’ (II.ix.17.6), but as the governor of the house, in particular as Guyon and Arthur inspect the work of Phantastes, Anamnestes, and Eumnestes: ‘These three in these three rowmes did sondry dwell, | And counselled faire Alma, how to gouerne well’ (II.ix.48.8–9). The attention that was given to the governors of Irish fortifications corresponds to the importance that candidates for such a post seemed to attach to it.81 Edmund Yorke was keen that his services in constructing the defences should be rewarded with the captainship of the soldiers who were assigned to guard them; he wrote several letters to this effect to the Privy Council, and was eventually rewarded with a position in the garrison. Just as the temperance allegorized in the Castle of Alma depends upon Alma’s status as governor of the house, the valour of the defences built in Ireland is seen as depending upon a good commander. Having analysed one of Spenser’s fictional castles in relation to the development of fortifications in Europe and in Ireland at the end of the sixteenth century, I want now to suggest that The Faerie Queene might be responding to English projects for dealing with, building, and demolishing castles across 80 81

De Pasino, Discours, p. 74. See a note of the ‘warders’ allocated to various forts and castles in Ulster, Munster and Connaught, TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/129/38.

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Fortifications and the Body

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Plate 4: J. Errard de Bar-le-Duc, La fortification redvicte en art (Paris, 1594; repr. Frankfurt a. M., 1604), image between pp. 2–3

Ireland. Although the poem explicitly describes no such project, nor indeed the construction of any one castle, I shall argue that it does respond to the ideological terms in which such a scheme might have been considered. In the next chapter I shall discuss the strategic and spatial implications of garrison warfare, and how The Faerie Queene and the View relate to them, but here I shall look at these writings in the context of this policy of building, and demolishing, castles. The castles that appear in Book 6 of The Faerie Queene, and their owners, have been the subjects of study in Charles Ross’s book, The Custom of the Castle. Ross suggests that in a number of medieval and early modern texts (for example those of Malory, Ariosto and Boiardo), the arrival of a knight at a strange castle constitutes a narratological crux; the narrative shows the knight having to confront or experience unusual customs, and analyses his responses. In his discussion of The Faerie Queene, Ross chooses to concentrate on the final book of the poem, and isolates the episodes of Calidore’s entry to Briana’s castle, and the confrontations of Calepine and Prince Arthur with Turpine. In each of these cases, he identifies a pattern of confrontation followed by compromise; the knights are either unable to force the inhabitants of the castle to change their customs, or are inclined to allow them to remain in some capacity. Calidore’s treatment of Crudor, for example, takes the form of a lesson in civility rather than an enforced change in his manners, and Ross suggests that the reader is encouraged to wonder ‘whether 121

Beleaguered Spaces the new custom has indeed become customary, or whether Crudor’s behavior may revert in an instant’.82 Ross is certainly correct to point out that these episodes in Book 6 show a form of compromise, where foreign ways of conduct are allowed to continue, or at least where there is little success in genuinely reforming them. However, he then argues that this part of the poem shows Spenser’s efforts to accommodate himself to the need for such compromise, an accommodation that he was forced to make in his career in Ireland: The result was a keen awareness of the difficulty of planning, of allowing for delays, disappointments, and competition. This activity gave Spenser a felt need for modes of conduct that would be both widely applicable and flexible.83

The suggestion that Spenser’s reaction to such opposition would be so tolerant, as I shall argue, is an outright misrepresentation of his opinion. It is also an argument that takes too little heed of the historical contexts that I have discussed above. Ross seems to be trying to transpose an effect of literary genre to Irish history; as well as choosing to disregard evidence in other books of the poem that would complicate his argument, he obscures the historically specific critique that Book 6 offers. Together, the fifth and sixth books of the poem imply a coherent argument about the scheme of fortification in Ireland. The first encounter with a castle in Book 5 establishes a contrast with the first such scene in Book 6. Like Briana, Munera, the Sarazin’s daughter, uses her custody of her castle to waylay passing knights and to demand a toll, although in her case this is financial, a ‘passage-penny’ (V.ii.6.4) rather than the ‘beards of Knights and locks of Ladies lynd’ (VI.i.15.5) that Briana confiscates. Talus and Artegall attack Munera’s castle, and despite her attempts to defend herself, she is captured by the iron man: Her selfe then tooke he by the sclender wast, In vaine loud crying, and into the flood Ouer the Castle wall adowne her cast, And there her drowned in the durty mud: But the streame washt away her guilty blood. Thereafter all that mucky pelfe he tooke, The spoile of peoples euill gotten good, The which her sire had scrap’t by hooke and crooke, And burning all to ashes, powr’d it downe the brooke. And lastly all that Castle quite he raced, Euen from the sole of his foundation, And all the hewen stones thereof defaced,

82 83

Charles Ross, The Custom of the Castle: From Malory to Macbeth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 89. Ross, The Custom of the Castle, p. 97.

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Fortifications and the Body That there mote be no hope of reparation, Nor memory thereof to any nation.

(V.ii.27–28)

The passage describes an act of total destruction that admits no possibility either of compromise or of restitution. That it is also the ‘memory’ of the castle that Talus succeeds in defacing suggests an aspiration to destroy the castle in such a way that its history would end for ever. Part of the function of Alma’s castle, by contrast, is to defend and preserve two books of historical memory, the histories of Britain and of Faeryland.84 Talus’s action, it is suggested, is also of national import as much as it is a matter of punishing an individual offender. It is by reading these lines in the context of English military activities in Ireland in the 1580s, and in particular how English military captains chose to deal with Irish castles, that we can see how such acts of destruction could be intended to contribute to a national project. Richard Bingham, President of Connacht, for example, wrote to Burghley in May 1586, to describe how he had destroyed a number of castles belonging to his enemies: I have latelye surprised and rased a Castell off Mahoune Obryens in Thomond, and put him self and his men to the swerde, being the worst men (when they lyved) in all Thomond, and he him self the moste daungerows practiser with forreyne enymyes, in all this land. The Castell was called Clonowan, and was kept by them against her Maiestie. I have also rased three other strong castells in the Countye off Maio. two off the which weare kept against her highnesse by the Burkes of those partes. And I have cawsed three of the saide Burkes to be executed, which weare men of greate accoumpt emong the bad affected. They are in myne opinion the best dispatched men that weare hanged in those partes theise manye yeares. At the seidge off Castell ne Callye in the Countye of Maio I had not so good successe as at the other in Thomond. For the traytours escaped owt off yt. But synce that tyme they have submitted them selves and craued pardone. Which (that all thinges maye be caried in that peacehable cowrs, that her Maiestie, and your Lordship expecteth) is graunted them.85

Bingham clearly sees the rasing of the castles as part of the same campaign as the elimination of the ‘enymyes’, and also acts as though that the castle itself is a manifestation of their treacherous activities, ‘kept by them against her Maiestie’.

84

85

We could compare this historiographical concern with the depiction of the fortifications of London, in particular of the Tower of London, in John Stow’s Svrvay of London (1599). Stow’s method of describing the etiology, and etymology, of these defences incorporates into them the idea of a continuous resistance against the enemy: the Tower of London, in its role as ‘generall conseruer of the most auncient Recordes of the kinges Courtes of iustice’ (fol. D7v), functions as a place of historiographical memory, and thus can be seen as an image of the defence of the realm as a whole. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/124/58.

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Beleaguered Spaces The attack that Talus launches on Munera’s castle also alludes to the new weapons that English soldiers were able to deploy in Ireland: Eftsoones his Page drew to the Castle gate, And with his iron flale at it let flie, That all the warders it did sore amate, The which erewhile spake so reprochfully, And made them stoupe, that looked earst so hie. Yet still he bet, and bounst vppon the dore, And thundred strokes thereon so hideouslie, That all the peece he shaked from the flore, And filled all the house with feare and great vprore.

(V.ii.21)

Especially since Talus’s flail, when he uses it against the Amazons, is described as a ‘strange weapon, neuer wont in warre’ (V.iv.44.2), it suggests, as John Daly points out, an allusion to the firearms with which the English army was beginning to equip itself.86 Although G. A. Hayes-McCoy has shown that guns were being used in Ireland early in the sixteenth century, they were difficult to carry across a country with undeveloped networks of roads, and so did not render Irish castles immediately obsolete.87 Daly suggests that the siege of Smerwick might have been a place where Spenser could have seen artillery deployed against a castle, but Richard Bingham’s report from the field demonstrates that such deployment was widely used in Ireland as a whole. Talus’s attack not only affirms the value of a militant policy in dealing with the inhabitants of castles, but does so by reversing the literary trope of the besieged castle. One aspect of this trope that is altered is the psychomachia, which I showed being adapted in the description of Alma’s castle; in this episode, it is the representative of justice that attempts to break into the castle, to assault an immoral character within. In an attempt to distract Talus from his task, Munera causde great sackes with endlesse riches fraught, Vnto the battilment to be vpbrought, And powred forth ouer the Castle wall, That she might win some time, though dearly bought.

(V.ii.23.4–7)

But this does not induce him to stop, and he continues with his destruction of the castle: ‘he was nothing mou’d, nor tempted therewithall’ (V.ii.23.9). Britomart’s behaviour in Dolon’s house, later in this book of the poem, also argues against Ross’s liberal interpretation of the castle scenes in Book 6. Much more than defending herself when confronted, Britomart is shown ‘with full intent t’auenge that villany’ (V.vi.35.4), and scours the house for its inhabitants, intent, as it becomes clear, on killing them: ‘comming down to 86 87

John P. Daly, ‘ “Talus” in Spenser’s Faerie Queene’, NQ 205 (1960), 49. G. A. Hayes-McCoy, ‘The Early History of Guns in Ireland’, JGAHS 18 (1938–39), 43–65. On the co-existence of guns and early castles, see footnote 13 above.

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Fortifications and the Body seeke them, where they wond, | [. . .] | Each rowme she sought’ (V.vi.35.6–8). Just as Richard Bingham suggests in his report to Burghley, Britomart’s actions imply a belief that an attack on a castle of traitors requires the relentless execution of all of those enemies; it is that relentlessness that Britomart proceeds to show: She stayd not to aduise which way to take; But putting spurres vnto her fiery beast, Thorough the midst of them she way did make. The one of them, which most her wrath increast, Vppon her speare she bore before her breast, Till to the Bridges further end she past, Where falling downe, his challenge he releast: The other ouer side the Bridge she cast Into the riuer, where he drunke his deadly last.

(V.vi.39)

Britomart’s act is based precisely on a refusal to countenance the behaviour of Dolon’s sons, and on an anger that exercises itself indiscriminately: ‘She stayd not to aduise’. In contrast, when Calidore meets Briana in her castle, he is stayed: the military actions that he had begun against her men are brought to a halt: With that the rest, the which the Castle kept, About him flockt, and hard at him did lay; But he them all from him full lightly swept, As doth a Steare, in heat of sommers day, With his long taile the bryzes brush away. Thence passing forth, into the hall he came, Where of the Lady selfe in sad dismay He was ymett, who with vncomely shame Gan him salute, and fowle vpbrayd with faulty blame.

(VI.i.24)

Calidore’s curtailed action cannot be read apart from the parallel provided by the conduct of Talus and Britomart, nor apart from the context that action like Bingham’s gives. Charles Ross writes that the purpose of the scene is ‘not to promote Calidor or condemn Crudor and Briana, let alone to propose a blueprint for land appropriation or marriage settlements, but to explore social customs as a scene of contested values’.88 However, one can read the ambiguous consequences of Calidore’s inaction – consequences that Ross examines very thoroughly – against the actions of Book 5, as a failed attempt to continue an earlier policy. In this regard, the final books of The Faerie Queene are part of a reaction against what was seen as a policy of compromise with the Irish. The surveyor Francis Jobson wrote of Ulster that ‘the manifold miseries which vpon such truces and peacemakinges that haue hapned / were 88

Ross, The Custom of the Castle, p. 89.

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Beleaguered Spaces all to long to discourse / by proof they haue bene and daylie are both knowen and felt’.89 Not only does Calidore fail, in the terms of the militant policy of Book 5, to extinguish the root of Briana’s misdemeanours, he also declines the opportunity to take over command of the castle, or to pass the command to another of Gloriana’s servants. Although Briana voluntarily hands over her castle to him, he immediately gives it to one of her victims in return: But Calidore himselfe would not retaine Nor land nor fee, for hyre of his good deede, But gaue them streight vnto that Squire againe, Whom from her Seneschall he lately freed, And to his damzell as their rightfull meed, For recompence of all their former wrong.

(VI.i.47.1–6)

Such assumption of Irish property did not need to come by military conquest. Warham Sentleger wrote to Burghley in February 1589 that the daughter of the Earl of Clancartie had eloped without permission from Cork. This had broken an agreement with Elizabeth, who was therefore entitled to assume possession of a local castle: Her highnes by the forfeyture of that bande, and other bandes, that he haith forfeycted vnto her maiestie, maie take into her handes a Castell, and landes of greate ymportaunce called Castell Lowgh [. . .]. It is the strongeste Scytuacion of a Castell that is in Irelande, a thinge of that force as a lytle fortyfycacion woulde make yt Imprignable/ And therfore (not offendinge in this my wryteinge) a matter not to be forstowde, but her highnes to enter thereon, which iustlie she maie doe, havinge thadvantage she haith./ The takeinge of it to her maiesties vse, will be a greate furtheringe of her servyce in that Contrie, besides the preventinge of the daunger that maie ensue, yf forraine enemyes sholde possesse the same.90

The financial and strategic benefits that Sentleger associates with possession of the castle suggest that Calidore’s donation of the castle should be interpreted as an example of ill judgement. Stephen Greenblatt argues in his essay, ‘To Fashion a Gentleman’, that the destructive acts performed by Guyon in the Bower of Bliss can be read in terms of a process of self-definition (or self-fashioning, in the terms of Greenblatt’s book and essay). He relates the scene in The Faerie Queene to the destruction carried out by European soldiers in America, and by English troops in Ireland: The violence of the destruction was regenerative; they found in it a sense of identity, discipline, and holy faith. In tearing down what both appealed to them and

89 90

TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/202/83/4. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/141/30.

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Fortifications and the Body sickened them, they strengthened their power to resist their dangerous longings, to repress antisocial impulses, to conquer the powerful desire for release.91

Like Greenblatt, I look to Ireland to explain the violent, destructive acts of Talus at the castle of Munera. But whereas Greenblatt is describing a psychological process, with the self defining itself in an attack on a constructed Other, I am arguing that Talus represents an aspect of English policy relating to the destruction and production of castles in Ireland. The corresponding scenes in Book 6 of the poem, however, record how the strategy is not only the victim of compromise, but also yet to be completed. While the poem describes the destruction of Irish castles and the conditions under which new castles should be organized – conditions which are figured in the Castle of Alma – the very construction of these castles is absent from the poem. If the examples set by Artegall, Talus, and Britomart against the inhabitants of enemy castles in Book 5 are betrayed in Book 6, they also fail to be perfected by the construction of new fortifications. Just as there was a gap between the desire that new garrisons be built in Ireland, and the paucity of work done to achieve this goal (see p. 135 below), The Faerie Queene shows no such scheme being carried out. In the View, the ideas for the construction of new garrisons can be illustrated by examples from the distant past. Maryborough and Philipstown were built as new forts in the plantation of Leix and Offaly, and according to Spenser they had now achieved a level of civic community that new ‘garrisons’ will attain: The safetie and assurance which they shall worke vnto them will allsoe drawe thither store of people and trade as I haue sene ensampled at mariburgh and Philipstowne in Leinster wheare by Reasone of those two fortes thoughe theare weare but smalle wardes lefte in them theare are two good townes nowe growen which are the greatest staie of bothe those ij Counties. (View, pp. 183–84)

These plantations are imagined in the View as fortified spaces that also succeed in providing a way for English families and officials to occupy the country. In my next chapter, I shall analyse these spatial ideas of defence and occupation as they influence Spenser’s writings.

91

Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 183.

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Chapter 6

DEFENDED SPACES, FAST SPACES, PROPER SPACES

I

N MY PREVIOUS chapter I investigated the material (and ideological) implications of the construction and destruction of fortified buildings at the end of the sixteenth century, and also looked at some projects for building such fortifications. In doing so, I situated The Faerie Queene in a context that was both European and specifically Irish, and also teased out the implications of the process by which this small defended space could be made to stand allegorically for the body, and the self. I now want to examine the relation between the production of these very particular, individual spaces, and the ideas and strategies that were developed for the defence of larger areas in Ireland. As well as increasing the scope of my context, because of the wider spaces involved, this will also alter the range of my analysis of the poem. For I suggested in the previous chapter that Books 5 and 6 of The Faerie Queene could be read – through an analysis of the instances when they depict fortifications and castles, and the knights’ adventures in and around them – in relation to an account of an ideal project and the failure and compromise of the way that it was implemented. I now want to consider whether, by examining a dialectical relationship between particular defended buildings and the defence of larger spaces, a reading of the poem can be made that suggests a coherence between various separate episodes. I shall suggest that Spenser’s texts can be read as part of a contemporary discourse relating to military strategy and Irish planter mentality, about the occupation of places and space. There is a brief exchange between the two speakers in the View, which relates the fortifying of particular cities to the defence of Ireland as a whole. ‘Let me [. . .] aske youe the reasone,’ says Eudoxus, as Irenius describes his scheme for disposing English soldiers across the country, ‘whie in those Citties of mounster namelye Waterforde and Corke ye rather placed Garrissons then in all thothers in Irelande.’ To which, Irenius replies, ‘I will tell youe those two Citties aboue all the reste doe offer an Ingate to the Spanniarde moste fittlye’ (View, p. 194). I showed in my previous chapter that the cities of Munster, in particular Waterford, were given special attention in the strengthening of their 128

Defended Spaces defensive walls; Irenius here proposes that they be further strengthened by the presence of garrisons of men. The English in Ireland in the 1580s and 1590s were alert to the danger that the Spanish might choose to move through Ireland, if they were ever to mount an invasion of England. There was held to be evidence, furthermore, that many Irish lords, among them Turlough Luineach O’Neill, Desmond, and James Fitzmaurice, had taken part in negotiations with the Spanish crown in preparation for just such an attack.1 Groups of Spanish troops were indeed occasionally present in Ireland in the sixteenth century, and occasionally fought against the English soldiers there; for example, at the siege of Smerwick in 1580.2 The attack of the Spanish Armada in 1588 also caused profound anxiety among English officials in Ireland, and was the occasion for the readying of English troops there. Thomas Norreys, Vice-President of Munster, informed Francis Walsingham on 1 August 1588 (in a letter written by Spenser in his secretarial capacity) of ‘the present good quiett of this Province, in which yt is not vnlikely to continew, yf forreyne invasion doe not occasion the chaunge; which yf any should happen, litle stay (god wote) can here bee hoped for, and lesse meanes of defence’.3 After the battle between the English and Spanish navies, most of the Spanish sailors whose ships sank and who were washed onto Irish coasts were executed on English orders.4 The attempted Spanish invasion of England is figured in The Faerie Queene, in the character of the Souldan, and in his battle with Prince Arthur.5 It is in this context that I want to consider Irenius’s notion of these cities in southern Ireland as ‘ingates’. What concerns Irenius is not just that a general Spanish threat should be defended against, but that the safety of particular cities should be accorded a special place in the defence of the country. This concern seems to go beyond acknowledging the strategic importance of cities, castles, or fortifications, which would be valid in any military 1

2

3 4 5

John J. Silke, Kinsale: The Spanish Intervention in Ireland at the End of the Elizabethan Wars (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1970) documents the events leading to the Spanish occupation of the port of Kinsale in 1601, and the battle there in 1602. For a general discussion of Spanish involvement in Ireland, see also the chapter, ‘Españoles é irlandeses’, in Martín Hume, Españoles é Ingleses en el Siglo XVI (Madrid: Victoriano Suárez, 1903), pp. 235–69. See Alfred O’Rahilly, ‘The Massacre at Smerwick (1580)’, JCHAS, 2nd series 42 (1937), 1–15, 65–83. The battle is described in a letter from Lord Grey to Queen Elizabeth, TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/78/29, in which the extent of the Spanish involvement at Smerwick is described and reviled. The battle is also an occasion when the English, and perhaps Spenser himself if he was present with Grey, could have observed continental practices of fortification, in the angle-bastioned Golden Fort, built by Spanish and Italian architects. See Frederick M. Jones, ‘The Plan of the Golden Fort at Smerwick, 1580’, Irish Sword 2 (1954–56), 41–42. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/135/66. José Antonio De Yturriaga, ‘Attitudes in Ireland towards the Survivors of the Spanish Armada’, Irish Sword 17 (1987–90), 244–54. For an examination of the iconographic depth of this identification, see Jane Aptekar, Icons of Justice: Iconography & Thematic Imagery in Book V of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 82–83.

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Beleaguered Spaces campaign.6 Joanne Woolway-Grenfell has pointed out the attention that was accorded to the defence of towns in Elizabethan Ireland. She argues that such places were accorded a ‘significance’ which arose from the anxiety about Irish attacks on English civility and from the perception that English garrisons could defend a large area of surrounding country. She sees this significance, for example, in maps of Irish cities which accord great importance, and allocate a disproportionate space and distorted scale, to the walls and defences.7 I will expand Woolway-Grenfell’s argument in this chapter, by asking how this significance is related to a contemporary way of analysing Irish space, and to the vigilance that was paid to that space. In the first place, I shall argue that the perception of threats to Irish towns – which was indeed an extremely significant fear – is similar to, and in many cases seen as leading consequentially to, the perception of threats to Ireland as a whole, or to areas of it. Secondly, I shall suggest that the strategies and ideas proposed to allow English soldiers to defend Ireland are in many cases based on an analysis of different ways of occupying the country. This anxiety about occupation is central to the View and also influences a number of episodes in The Faerie Queene. The connection that was perceived between the defence of individual towns in Munster and the defence of the entire country was also applied to towns in other parts of Ireland. In the case of a document in the National Archives, London, entitled in its endorsement ‘A declaracion of the importance and needfull vse of the towne of Knockfergus’, it is Ulster that is seen as being under threat from attacks, directed at specific points.8 Knockfergus is a name 6

7

8

That both English and Irish military leaders recognized castles as important points in a defensive scheme can be seen, for example, in TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/85/5 (Grey to Queen Elizabeth, 10 August 1581). Grey tells Elizabeth that he has made a journey into the north of the country. ‘The order & purpose of my expedition was this; Liffer is a Riuer, that parteth Tyrone & Tirconell: vpon yt are twoo castelles, the one called the Liffer the other Strabane; these Castelles are the onely keyes of Odonnelles countrey towardes Tirloghs: Sir Nicholas Malbey I directed with fowre Companies that he had in Connagh and his horssmen to ioyne that way with Odonell & so drawe downe to the Liffer. My self with eight Companies of Foot. & 300 Horss. to marche by the black water [. . .]: the purpose was to haue taken these Castelles & deliuered the one into Odonelles handes, namely the Liffer, & into Strabane to haue putt an English warde; in case Tirlogh came not vnto me to the black water.’ Grey recognizes that Turlough’s castles are capable of functioning as parts of a scheme which would allow him to defend a large area of Ireland. Turlough, however, anticipates Grey’s plans and destroys his own buildings, in order to prevent him taking possession of them: ‘On my way now at Dundalk lettres from Tirlogh mett mee that he would meete me, as I had appointed him, & that he had vpon my warning surceassed from further invading of Odonell; marry that he merueiled why I should make such præparation as he heard of to take his Castelles, which to præuent he signified that he had broken & in maner razed, as indeed he had.’ Joanne Woolway-Grenfell, ‘Significant Spaces in Edmund Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 4.2 (September 1998), 6:1–21 . TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/170/21. The document is conjecturally dated in CSPI to June 1593.

130

Defended Spaces for the town now known as Carrickfergus, near to Belfast on the north-east coast of Ireland. The writer of the ‘Declaracion’ warns that attacks against the town are to be expected not only from Spain – the document speaks of the need for ‘the readie aunsweringe of any forreine invasion which maye be intended in that partes’ – but also from the inhabitants of the Scottish islands, who are capable of landing on the north coast of the country in considerable numbers and carrying out quick raids on property and livestock: They will [. . .] come over in a nighte a thousande or many more sometymes into this Northeaste parte nexte vnto them, and take their pleasure vpon the whole Countrey, drivinge away the cattle, ransakinge the howses of such thinges and stoare as so poore people haue.9

The raids take place along the north coast of Ireland, and they are to be defended, in the opinion of the writer of the report, by the fortification of a town in the area; the writer considers the value of fortifying either Knockfergus or Newry. Again, though, the value accorded in this document to the fortified town seems to exceed the strategic benefits of having a securely defended store of food, garrison, arsenal, and so on. Despite the recognition that the raids and attacks are occurring across a wide area, Knockfergus is represented as ‘the firste frontier of any Englishe or civill inhabitacion’, the point through which any incursion onto English territory will come; it is made to stand, metonymically, for the border of English lands. The town of Knockfergus is seen as the frontier not only against attacks from overseas, from Scotland and Spain; the document also reports on the attacks that come from groups of men within Ireland: Besides that the Irishrie of this parte, are of themselues more inclined to all incivillitie, then any others of the whole realme, and vpon eny particuler motion of theire owne that any of them hathe to hurte his neighboure draweth furthwith theis Ilanders, to serue his tourne, in murderinge, spoylinge, burninge, and wastinge the Countrey.10

In the same way that the fortification of Knockfergus is seen as barring Spanish attacks on the country, as though the attacks would move through the town itself like an ‘ingate’, it is anticipated that it will contribute to defending against attacks and raids that occur across the whole region. Furthermore, the writer of the ‘Declaracion’ suggests that the two sets of attacks are equivalent, and to be defended against in the same way, by shoring up the town:

9 10

TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/170/21. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/170/21. See also TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/83/6, a letter of 12 May 1581 from Grey to Walsingham, addressed by Spenser, warning that Turlough Luineach – among other misdemeanours which were thought to cast doubt on his resolve to maintain peace – had taken Clandeboy and ‘prayed the towne of Knockfergus’.

131

Beleaguered Spaces It wilbe founde vpon any troubles that maye falle owt in the Northe partes of that realme, either by the private rebellions of the naturall Irishe people of those Countreys, or by the insolencie of the Scottishe Ilanders, or otherwise by any forraine invasion which maye be intended into those partes, either by the Scotte as an instrument, or by the Spaniarde as chief actor, that the towne of Knockfergus is a place of very speciall importance for the advantage of her maiesties service.

The ‘Declaracion’ has to be read not as an isolated appeal, but in the context of a great amount of strategic advice sent in letters from English servants in Ireland to their government in London. It permits the reader of the View to begin to understand that Spenser’s description of the cities of Munster as ‘ingates’ to foreign military action resonates with other contemporary accounts of military strategy. It also provides a starting point for analysing the connection – in the mentality of the English in Ireland – between attacks by foreign troops and raids by groups of Irish within the country. The two fears, or the fears of the two types of attack, are analogous, in that they are both seen as moving through these ‘ingates’. But Spenser and the writer of the ‘Declaracion’ are also aware that the two attacks could also be connected by potential political alliances. The author of the ‘Declaracion’ says that Sir William Stanley has expressed an opinion to him that a Spanish commander might employ the Irish and Scottish soldiers in his own service, making use not only of their fighting skills but also of their discontent: ‘he might haue very able and valiaunte men as many as he woulde to serue the tourne’. This acknowledgement of the relationship between attacks on Ireland from within and outside the country allows us to make a more integrated interpretation of the geographical construction of the narrative of Book 5 of The Faerie Queene. This book describes a number of episodes, many of them battles or fights, which seem to refer allegorically to military threats upon different parts of Britain or western Europe, such as Ireland and the Low Countries. I have discussed above the idea of English servants, expressed for example in the View and in the document on Knockfergus, that explicitly links the defence of Ireland against Spain with the defence of large cities and smaller settlements against attacks by bands of Irish.11 I further propose that we may read the defence of national frontiers that is presented allegorically in the battle between Arthur and the Souldan as similarly connected to the raids of 11

See BL, Sloane MS 1742, fols 10v–11r, where the threats from ‘forrayne enimyes’ and ‘cyvill enimyes’ are listed together: ‘Firste for forrayne enimyes: Mounstar is not muche subiecte vnto them, because it is naturallie guarded either with Rockes woodes or boggs, soe that it doth not easilie afforde anye conveyaunce to Ordynance or other Carriages, excepte it be thorough some certeine narrowe passages which maye easilie be defended./ [. . .] Secondlie for cyvill enimyes, they (beinge harbored in the woodes & mounteynes) doe manie tymes assayle and offer muche violence to the Inhabitauntes, either by murtheringe their persons, or ells by fyering their goodes.’

132

Defended Spaces Malengin and the Brigants in Book 6 upon the inhabitants of the world of the poem The Brigants, who abduct Pastorella and murder Melibœ, are introduced in Book 6 as a tribe whose country borders on that of the shepherds, and who live off the proceeds of forays across this border: A lawlesse people, Brigants hight of yore, That neuer vsde to liue by plough nor spade, But fed on spoile and booty, which they made Vpon their neighbours, which did nigh them border, The dwelling of these shepheards did inuade, And spoyld their houses, and them selues did murder; And droue away their flocks, with other much disorder.

(VI.x.39.3–9)

Helen Cooper reads the attacks of the Brigants in terms of pressures on the pastoral mode; the ‘war and violence’ that they bring is a ‘perversion of pastoral peace and content’.12 Spenser’s manipulation of these generic conventions seems to be influenced by historical conditions in Ireland at the time. Although William Oram notes ‘the episode has its literary roots in the melodramatic action of Greek romance’, he grants that ‘the motif of brigands living at the edge of civilized society [. . .] may owe something to Spenser’s concern with the bands of Irish outlaw rebels mentioned in the View’.13 In that they make their livelihood by raiding into neighbouring territory, the Brigants do seem to behave like the bands of Irish denoted by the English occupiers as rebels. ‘Preys’ were frequently carried out on the crops and livestock of neighbouring families; thus Hugh Magennis could make the following complaint to Lord Grey in August 1580: some of Terlagh Lennagh his men toke from me by pray iiijC kyne iijxx mares ijC swyne iijC shepe & killed xvj of my poore followeres and also [. . .] within this iij wekes past the said malefactoures came vnto the borderes of my Countrey with Certein laboreres & hookes & Cutt all the greene corne that they fownd there.14

Heather Dubrow, indeed, treats the idea of borders and frontiers as thematic in this episode. She reads the story of the Brigants as ‘a narrative of boundaries and borders’, in which thievery is understood as the fearful incursion of an outsider, ‘and the feared results include corruption and contamination, notably the blurring of epistemological categories’.15 Although Dubrow does 12 13 14 15

Helen Cooper, Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance (Ipswich: Brewer; Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), p. 165. William A. Oram, ‘Brigands’, in Spenser Encyclopedia, pp. 112–13 (p. 112). TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/75/75. This letter is a copy in Spenser’s hand. Heather Dubrow, ‘ “A Doubtfull Sense of Things”: Thievery in The Faerie Queene 6.10 and 6.11’, in Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age, ed. Patrick Cheney and Lauren Silberman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), pp. 204–16 (pp. 204–5).

133

Beleaguered Spaces contextualize the episode within a discussion of thievery in sixteenth-century England, what we could add to her account is that the very drawing up of boundaries is itself implicated in the way in which the Irish rebels are defined and acted against.16 Moreover, given the prominence which accounts of raids and preys have in correspondence out of Ireland in the late sixteenth century, an historical contextualization of the Brigants ought to include this Irish background. The danger of sporadic raids which the Brigants present to the shepherds is similar to that which Spenser claims is threatened by the Irish rebels. In the View, Irenius charcterizes the rebels as ‘a flyinge enemye’, hidinge him self in woodes and bogges from whence he will not drawe forthe but into some streighte passage or perilous forde wheare he knowes the Armie muste nedes passe theare will he lye in awayte. (View, p. 151)

Irenius also proposes strategies for controlling this mobility. ‘To seke him out that still flittethe [. . .] weare vaine and botelesse,’ he goes on, ‘I woulde devide my men in garrison vppon his Country in suche places as I shoulde thinke mighte moste annoye him’ (p. 151). Spenser’s account, later in the View, of the prominent rebel Feagh MacHugh and the methods that might be used to arrest him, makes reference to such a scheme. Spenser would have had knowledge of Feagh as early as August 1580, when Grey was defeated by Irish troops at Glenmalure, but the View speaks of the threat that he was considered to present in the 1590s. Spenser describes how Feagh’s father, Hugh MacShane, took advantage of the ‘strengthe and greate fastenes of Glan malour’ and ‘drewe vnto him manye theves and Outlawes which fledd vnto the succour of that glenne as to a Sanctuarye’ (pp. 171–72). Feagh’s supporters similarly ‘all flocke vnto him, and drawe vnto his Countrye as to a stronge houlde [. . .]. And from thence they doe at theire pleasures breake out into all the borders adioyninge’ (p. 173). Irenius alludes to the efforts of the Lord Deputy, Sir William Russell, to bring Feagh to account, and then writes that he should be restrained ‘by plantinge of garrisons aboute him’, the locations of which he then specifies. The garrisons, Irenius hopes, will assist in the capture of Feagh by preventing him from moving around his strongholds, and by being ‘allwaies readye to intercept his goinge or Comminge’; they will ‘shutt him out of his greate glenne’, ‘Cutt him from the Cavanaghes’, and ‘kepe him from breakinge into the Countye of kildare’ (pp. 173–74).17 Much of the second part 16

17

See, as a contrast, the suggestion of Julia Reinhard Lupton, ‘Home-Making in Ireland: Virgil’s Eclogue I and Book VI of The Faerie Queene’, Spenser Studies 8 (1990), 119–45, that the ‘borders, inscribed by the home-making activities of law, surveying and enclosure, tend to displace inhabitants in the act of demarcation’ (p. 132). Russell’s campaign against Feagh is recorded in his journal, which is catalogued in CCP, 1589–1600, pp. 220–60. On 16 January 1594/5, ‘My Lord took a hunting journey to Ballenecar, and drove Feogh McHugh out of his house into the Glinnes, and placed a garrison there of

134

Defended Spaces of the View, indeed, is taken up with a plan for building a series of garrisons across Ireland. Ciaran Brady points out that although the plan was never realized, and indeed was pursued only occasionally by English administrations, it ‘acquired something of an orthodoxy of aspiration’ in the later years of the sixteenth century.18 The scheme is based not only on the belief that it will permit a ‘rigorous policing over all of the native lordships’, as Brady argues, but on a belief that individual Irish rebels, and their bands, can be restricted in the way that they move across and inhabit the country.19 Evidence for the orthodoxy of this scheme is provided by a letter from Lord Grey to the Privy Council of 6 November 1581 (addressed though not written by Spenser). Grey reports that he has asked Sir George Bouchier and the other Munster captains ‘what kind of warre might soonest ouerthrow the rebellion, ether continuall Iourneys of the gouernour, or garrison warre: [. . .] they concluded vppon garrison warre as indeade in all probability there is none other way to bring the rebellion to a shorte issue’.20 There follows an analysis of the most beneficial locations for these garrisons. In the third section of the Brief Note of Ireland, ‘Certain Points to be Considered’, attributed with some uncertainty to Spenser, it is asserted that a garrison war must be preceded by the use of military force and also, just as the View proposes, by inflicting famine on the Irish: The laying of garrisons will make but a protractiue warr vnles the Queene do first make hir selfe mistris of the feild whereunto there is necessarie a competent force of Horse/ All that the garrisons can doe is but to take prayes, but if the enemie were once broken he must be forced to scatter and then the garrisons shoulde haue good meanes of seruice vpon the broken partes.21

18

19

20 21

Captain Street’s company.’ (p. 225) Feagh was eventually cornered in a cave on 8 May 1597 and executed on the spot (p. 259). Ciaran Brady, ‘The Captains’ Games: Army and Society in Elizabethan Ireland’, in A Military History of Ireland, ed. Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 136–59 (p. 141). Compare also the insistence of the writer of a list of recommendations entitled ‘Certen Ordinances to be obserued during the Warres of Ireland’, sent to England in the early seventeenth century, that ‘all such as haue Castles vpon the borders be compelled to dwell vpon them’. These castles, the writer argues, ought to impede Irish movements across the country; uninhabited, they do no such service. ‘The letting of them to husbandmen & fearmers who maintaigned nether horsse nor foote for her Maiesties service, doth give Free passage to the Enemie which wasteth all at his pleasure, fynding noe resistance/ Wheras in tymes past the gentlemen dwelling vpon their owne castles & ioyned together, were able to saue themselues, and to expell the Enemye that should invade the border.’ Cambridge University Library Manuscript Kk.1.15. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/86/51. The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al., 11 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932–57), X: Spenser’s Prose Works, ed. Rudolf Gottfried (1949), p. 245.

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Beleaguered Spaces The piece is thought to be roughly contemporary with, or slightly later than the View; the rebellion erupting at the end of the 1590s would explain its urgency, and also its implication that a garrison war, by itself, would be an incomplete strategy.22 A similar plan for establishing a series of garrisons in Ulster, and a claim that they would assist in the defeat of the Irish by restricting their customary movements, was made by the surveyor Francis Jobson. In the introduction to his scheme, Jobson claims that the Irish depend on their ‘great hoardes’ of cattle and livestock, ‘which so long as they may haue scoape to raunge vp and downe in, to pasture and feede/ they both can/ and will euer at their pleasures (without regarde of God/ Prince/ or humanitie) rebell and make hauock’. ‘To end all which,’ he writes, and to plant loyall and true subiectes in that place/ there would be levied and sent into that province an Armye of chosen men to the number of 11000. which said number should be planted in eight seuerall places/ of that province as in the plott set downe hereafter is marked with streamers/ which places in the said plott demonstrateth in the said province the greatest passages and streightes that the rebell entreth in and by into other seuerall diuisions and partes of the countrie which places beinge fortefyed/ and certen numbers of men/ there planted/ will restrayne the egresse and regresse of the rebellious rout/ who by this meanes beeing hyndered of their incursions/ famyne in short tyme will ioyne in fight with them.23

Jobson’s belief that the Irish soldiers will be defeated by starvation recalls the notorious passage in the View on that subject. Jobson’s treatise, although much the shorter, might also bear comparison with Spenser’s in its use of a map to illustrate the disposal of English garrisons.24 Whereas the View uses a map only within the narrative, however, Jobson, who had worked for several years in Ireland as a surveyor and cartographer, produces a real map to accompany his writing. Jobson’s map shows a conception of Ulster as though occupied conclusively by English forces and garrisons, and displays English flags prominently at points where the garrisons will be situated. The cartographic visualization – which many of the critics who have commented on the map in the View have seen as instrumental in its imposition of power over the Irish – illustrates a fundamental re-occupation of the country. So far I have been describing an English military strategy from late sixteenthcentury Ireland, expressed for example in the View and in Francis Jobson’s treatise on Ulster, which proposes that the country should be occupied, 22 23 24

On the dating of the Brief Note, see Ciaran Brady, ‘A Brief Note of Ireland’, in Spenser Encyclopedia, pp. 111–12. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/202/4/83. On the map in the View, see Chapter 2, fn. 17.

136

Defended Spaces through the placing of garrisons, in such a way that will limit the mobility of the ‘flying enemie’. I now want to argue that concurrent with this strategy is a concern among the English that Irish rebels are able to make themselves safe by using secure places in the country, often in locations such as mountains, caves, or woods. Although English sources frequently record the removal of Irish from such strongholds, and although indeed The Faerie Queene represents a number of such battles, the worry seems to subsist that these ‘fastnesses’ will be too difficult to eradicate, and moreover that the Irish ability to make use of them represents a way of occupying the country that the English will never be able to prevent, or indeed to emulate. Such are the natural strongholds that are occupied by Maleger’s men, who attack Guyon and Arthur outside the Castle of Alma. These soldiers emerge from hiding places in the ground outside Alma’s castle: Loe with outragious cry A thousand villeins round about them swarmd Out of the rockes and caues adioyning nye, Vile caitiue wretches, ragged, rude, deformd, All threatning death, all in straunge manner armd.

(II.ix.13.1–5)

The fact that Spenser describes the emergence of these men through a simile that refers to an Irish place – ‘As when a swarme of Gnats at euentide | Out of the fennes of Allan do arise’ (II.ix.16.1–2) – suggests that he may have an Irish context in mind.25 The Brigants, whom I discussed above, also occupy a cave, which is both secure and disguised, and to which they take Pastorella: Their dwelling in a little Island was, Couered with shrubby woods, in which no way Appeard for people in nor out to pas, Nor any footing fynde for ouergrowen gras. For vnderneath the ground their way was made, Through hollow caues, that no man mote discouer For the thicke shrubs, which did them alwaies shade From view of liuing wight, and couered ouer: But darkenesse dred and daily night did houer Through all the inner parts, wherein they dwelt. Ne lightned was with window, nor with louer, But with continuall candlelight, which delt A doubtfull sense of things, not so well seene, as felt.

(VI.x.41–42)

In a recent study of this cave, Thomas Herron has pointed out that the evidence for identifying the Brigants, per se, as representing the Irish is

25

The image of ‘ragged’, ‘rude’ soldiers, armed in ‘straunge’ clothing may also be intended to suggest the Irish; see fn. 35.

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Beleaguered Spaces limited.26 Herron continues, however, by citing references to souterrains (underground habitations), in order to argue further that ‘Spenser’s description of the Brigants’ hiding place resembles souterrains, a feature common in the Irish landscape and much in use in Spenser’s day’.27 There is no doubt, indeed, that such similarities can be found in certain cases, and moreover that they are easier to identify when the physical place has been recorded in contemporary sources, as in Richard Bartlett’s picture of an attack on a crannog in Lough Roughan by Lord Mountjoy’s forces.28 Not only did the English military occupation need to account for the persistence of Irish strongholds in the country; it was also realized that an enemy that ‘still flitteth’, in Irenius’s phrase, could easily make use of these places. This is the fear expressed by Lord Grey, when he wrote to Queen Elizabeth on 10 August 1581 (in a letter addressed by Spenser) about the increasingly rebellious state of Leinster. ‘Those rebelles of the mountaines’, Grey wrote, ‘are daily assisted by the Cauenaughes of the county of Wexford, whose woodes and fast places, so ioine, and are mixed, one with an other, as yt is harde to containe them from parte taking with the rest.’ This protest expresses the frustration, also observed in the View and elsewhere, that the movement of the Irish rebels, the ‘flying enemie’, has to be contained. But it also provides evidence that they were seen as utilizing ‘fast places’, such as forests, in which to hide safely. The number of such places in Ireland allows the Irish to move around safely in a way that would not be possible for the English. Grey believes that this allows the Irish to render ineffectual a system of garrisons in Leinster, governed by a ‘lieftennaunte of your fortes, by whome till of late yeares, those people, weare with force helde in obedience’.29 English inattention to places held fast by the Irish was subsequently claimed, after the Nine Years’ War, to have been a reason why the island had taken so long to subdue. Sir John Davies writes in his Discoverie of the True Causes why Ireland was Never Entirely Subdued (1612) that ‘the first Aduenturers intending to make a full Conquest of the Irish, were deceiued in the choyse of the Fittest places for their plantation’: 26 27 28 29

Thomas Herron, ‘Irish Den of Thieves: Souterrains (and a Crannog?) in Books V and VI of Spenser’s Faerie Queene’, Spenser Studies 14 (2000), 303–17. Herron, ‘Irish Den of Thieves’, p. 304. G. A. Hayes-McCoy, Ulster and Other Irish Maps c. 1600 (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1964), pp. 8–10. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/85/6. In an earlier letter (addressed though not written by Spenser) reporting on his campaign against the Cavanaghs in May and June of 1581, Grey told the Privy Council that he ‘did set forwarde from Dublin [. . .] with purpose to seuer the Cavenaughes, and the Birnes, and to searche theire fastenes, and to plante in places of most comoditye, for theire annoyance other garrisons, that should offende the Birnes more neerely, then those whiche weare before planted vppon the Sea’. While the garrisons were being built, says Grey, he ‘searched all the mounteines, and fastnes adioyning’: the rebels showed themselves, he claims, only in these natural strongholds, ‘vppon the Toppes of the clife, and in the edges of theire strongest woodes’. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/83/45.

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Defended Spaces For they sate downe, and erected their Castles and Habitations in the Plaines & open Countries; wher they found most fruitfull and profitable Lands, and turned the Irish into the Woods & Mountains: Which, as they were proper places for Out-Lawes and Theeues, so were they their Naturall Castles and Fortifications; thither they draue their preyes and stealths; there they lurkt, and lay in waite to doe mischiefe. These fast-places they kept vnknowne, by making the wayes and Entries thereunto impassable [. . .] But they discouered the weaknes of the English dwelling in the open plaines; and thereupon made their sallies and retraites with great aduantage. Whereas, on the other side, if the English had builded their Castles and Towns in those places of fastnesse, and had driuen the Irish into the Plaines and open Countries, where they might haue had an eye and obseruation vpon them, the Irish had beene easily kept in Order, and in short time reclaimed from their wildnesse.30

Here, and elsewhere, Davies makes use of the familiar criticism of the pastoralism that moved Irish cow-herds from place to place.31 He also clearly alleges, though, that the Irish obtained an advantage from being able to situate their defences and habitations in certain places. The idea of ‘proper place’ raised by Davies provides us with the opportunity to think of a space that is both strategically correct, and possessed. What made the Irish difficult to root out was their ability to maintain such ‘proper’ places, even in the midst of an area held, on the whole, by the English.32 Although the passage suggests that the English failure to ‘[have] an eye and obseruation’ on the Irish was a strategic weakness, it is not arguing that visibility and invisibility were the essence of English failure to exert their power. Rather, Davies is suggesting, the Irish could have been kept in sight by the English, and thus out of mischief, only if they had been denied access to the parts of the country from which they could defend themselves. Davies is not lamenting the English difficulty in

30

31

32

John Davies, A Discoverie of the True Causes why Ireland was Never Entirely Subdued, nor Brought under Obedience of the Crowne of England, untill the Beginning of his Maiesties Happie Raigne (London, 1612), pp. 160–61. On Davies, see James P. Myers, Jr., ‘Early English Colonial Experiences in Ireland: Captain Thomas Lee and Sir John Davies’, Éire-Ireland 23.1 (Spring 1988), 8–21. This passage is also mentioned in the context of Irish rootlessness, and in connection with the debate on masterless men, in Michael Neill, ‘Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language, and the Optic of Power in Shakespeare’s Histories’, Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994), 1–32 (p. 12). Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 16–40, demonstrates also the symbolic importance of planting (of gardens and smallholdings as well as planters) in English colonial acquisitions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. According to John Dymmok, A Treatice of Ireland, ed. Richard Butler (Dublin: Irish Archaeological Society, 1842), the Irish system of land use failed to ‘plant’ people on the land in the correct way: it ‘breadeth [. . .] a generall weakenes, for want of inhabiting and plantynge the people in places certain, beinge of themselves geven to a wanderinge and idle lyfe’ (p. 5). On late sixteenth-century conceptions of Irish idleness, see Chapter 9.

139

Beleaguered Spaces mapping, or visualizing the Irish, but rather their naïvety in allowing the Irish to make use of physical aspects of the country that were advantageous to them, allowing them to convert topographical features into ‘Naturall Castles and Fortifications’. Michel de Certeau’s analysis, in Arts de faire, of the idea of ‘proper spaces’, might encourage us to read Davies’s text on the Elizabethan presence in Ireland, and the earlier writings of Spenser and his contemporaries, in this way. De Certeau’s division of actions into tactics and strategies, which I discussed in Chapter 1, makes use of this denomination: J’appelle ‘stratégie’ le calcul des rapports de forces qui devient possible à partir du moment où un sujet de vouloir et de pouvoir est isolable d’un ‘environnement’. Elle postule un lieu susceptible d’être circonscrit comme un propre et donc de servir de base à une gestion de ses relations avec une extériorité distincte. La rationalité politique, économique ou scientifique s’est construite sur ce modèle stratégique. J’appelle au contraire ‘tactique’ un calcul qui ne peut pas compter sur un propre, ni donc sur une frontière qui distingue l’autre comme une totalité visible. La tactique n’a pour lieu que celui de l’autre.33 [I call a ‘strategy’ the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power can be isolated from an ‘environment’. A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it. Political, economic, and scientific rationality has been constructed on this scientific model. I call a ‘tactic’, on the other hand, a calculus which cannot count on a ‘proper’, nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality. The place of a tactic belongs to the other.]

De Certeau’s idea of a ‘lieu propre’ – and the double meaning of that adjective – allows us to think of a connection between the ideas of property and propriety, between a place that is possessed and occupied, and a place that is appropriate for oneself. Those whom De Certeau defines as acting tactically are always occupying a place which is proper to someone else. De Certeau also draws attention to the act of drawing imaginary boundaries between oneself and the other: this is an action which not only enables one to demarcate a ‘proper’ place for oneself, but also is a privilege held by those who are acting out of a ‘proper’ domain. The English idea that Irish bands and Spanish forces are preparing to cross into English land, and that cities like Waterford should be protected as ‘ingates’, involves a similar assertion of the frontiers that define propriety and properness. In The Faerie Queene, the battle between Malengin, Arthur and Artegall 33

Michel de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien 1: Arts de faire, rev. edn (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), p. xlvi.

140

Defended Spaces permits an examination of these two spatial terms, ‘fast’ and ‘proper’. The damsel Samient, who is accompanying Artegall and Prince Arthur to Mercilla’s court, tells them of ‘a wicked villaine, bold and stout, | Which wonned in a rocke not farre away’ (V.ix.4.6–7): Thereto both his owne wylie wit, (she sayd) And eke the fastnesse of his dwelling place, Both vnassaylable, gaue him great ayde: So light of hand, and nymble of his pace, So smooth of tongue, and subtile in his tale, That could deceiue one looking in his face; Therefore by name Malengin they him call, Well knowen by his feates, and famous ouer all. Through these his slights he many doth confound, And eke the rocke, in which he wonts to dwell, Is wondrous strong, and hewen farre vnder ground A dreadfull depth, how deepe no man can tell; But some doe say, it goeth downe to hell. And all within, it full of wyndings is, And hidden wayes, that scarse an hound by smell Can follow out those false footsteps of his, Ne none can backe returne, that once are gone amis.

(V.ix.5–6)

Malengin’s appearance, as is often noted, with his ‘long curld locks, that downe his shoulders shagged, | And on his backe an vncouth vestiment | Made of straunge stuffe’ (V.ix.10.6–8), is similar to that of Irish soldiers.34 Spenser, indeed, writes in the View, in his discussion of the Irish adoption of Scythian customs, of ‘the wearinge of mantells and longe glibbes which is a thicke Curled bushe of haire hanginge downe over theire eyes and monstrouslye disguisinge them’ (View, p. 99).35 Further aspects of his description fit into other symbolic and iconographic traditions, nevertheless, and Spenser’s facility in overlaying a number of references in this way might frustrate an attempt merely to identify Malengin specifically with an aspect of Irish

34

35

Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) notes the critical commonplace of identifying Malengin as ‘specifically Irish’ (p. 161). Compare the pictures of Irish men and soldiers in H. F. McClintock, ‘Some Hitherto Unpublished Pictures of Sixteenth-Century Irish People, and the Costumes Appearing in Them’, JRSAI 83 (1953), 150–55; also the drawing in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, entitled ‘Dravn after the Qvicke’ and reproduced, for example, in Don-John Dugas, ‘Elizabethan Appropriation of Irish Culture: Spenser’s Theory vs. Lee’s Practice’, Mosaic 32.3 (September 1999), 1–20 (p. 9), and the woodcuts in John Derricke, The Image of Irelande. That this clothing and appearance was seen as permitting Irish disobedience and rebellion is shown at length in William Herbert’s ‘note of sutch reasons as mooued mea, toe putt the statute In execution agaynst Irish habites’, TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/144/57(II).

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Beleaguered Spaces appearance.36 However, the reference to the ‘fastnesse of his dwelling place’ might provide another way of reading the way in which the Irish context enters the poem, and another instance of its transformation by specifically Irish concerns. Malengin’s ‘fastnesse’ is similar to the Irish hiding places, not so much in its physical description, even though the mountains were recognized as likely places for such hideouts, but in the anxiety aroused by the place, and the circumstances in which he tries to ambush travellers and passers-by. Like the Irish in Davies’s account, Malengin uses his fastness as a base for thieving a nearby inhabited area: he ‘robbed all the countrie there about, | And brought the pillage home, whence none could get it out’ (V.ix.4.8–9). Talus’s victory over Malengin comes apparently without danger, and is concluded with one of the acts of utter destructiveness which abound in Book 5 of The Faerie Queene, as Talus disembowels Malengin and breaks his bones ‘as small as sandy grayle’ (V.ix.19.4).37 William Oram claims that the episode is ‘a fantasy of easy victory’, created by Spenser’s ‘frustration’ at the difficulty of bringing battles and conflicts to an end, a difficulty that Oram argues may be located in Ireland, and that is represented in such stalemates as Timias’s battle with the foresters (FQ, III.v).38 Joan Fitzpatrick has argued that Spenser indeed represents the very land and nature itself colluding in Talus’s victory over Malengin, ‘absorbing the dust of Malengin’s malevolent body in order to leave little trace of him behind’.39 For Fitzpatrick, the conclusiveness of the episode is to be measured in the bodily destruction meted out to the villain: ‘When Spenser wants to suggest that malevolent figures remain a threat, he allows them to remain bodily intact’.40 The fantasy of this episode also entails that Artegall, Arthur, and in particular Talus are capable of occupying and accustoming themselves to the fast place previously dwelt in by Malengin. Talus chases him through the rocks like a hound closing down its quarry: He him pursewd, where euer that he went, Both ouer rockes, and hilles, and euery place, Where so he fled, he followd him apace. 36

37

38 39

40

(V.ix.16.3–5)

On the identification of Malengin with the Jesuits, see Elizabeth Heale, ‘Spenser’s Malengine, Missionary Priests, and the Means of Justice’, RES, n.s. 41 (1990), 171–84; John D. Staines, ‘Elizabeth, Mercilla, and the Rhetoric of Propaganda in Spenser’s Faerie Queene’, JMEMS 31 (2001), 283–312 (pp. 286–88). On the iconographic basis of Malengin’s identification as Guile, see Aptekar, Icons of Justice, pp. 129–31. On Talus’s destructiveness, see Chapter 5, and also Christopher Highley, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 23 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 120–23. William A. Oram, ‘Spenserian Paralysis’, SEL 41 (2001), 49–70 (p. 64). Joan Fitzpatrick, ‘Spenser and Land: Political Conflict Resolved in Physical Topography’, Ben Jonson Journal 7 (2000), 365–77 (p. 368). Andrew Hadfield also notes that Malengin is ‘reabsorbed into the landscape when eaten by beasts and fowl’, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience, p. 163. Fitzpatrick, ‘Spenser and Land’, p. 369.

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Defended Spaces Strategically, this chase is permitted by Arthur’s guarding of the entrance to Malengin’s cave: ‘the Prince there kept the entrance still’ (V.ix.15.2). Malengin’s movement in and out of the ‘fastnesse of his dwelling place’ is restricted, and unable to return to the cave that would have protected him, he is trapped and murdered. For Andrew Hadfield, though, the fact that Spenser needs to portray such a ‘fantasy of easy victory’, in Oram’s words, and the part which he also sees the natural world as playing in the victory, emphasizes the difficulty which the capture of such troublesome characters was felt, in life, to cause. ‘The natural process’, Hadfield writes, ‘mocks the failure of the human imposition of law; the implication is that Malengin [. . .] has been destroyed only for his legacy to become even more ghostly and terrifying as it becomes part of the very landscape.’41 Another deliberately worrying implication of the incident, I think, is that Arthur, Artegall, and Talus pass away from the incident without destroying Malengin’s cave. The fantasy of utter destruction, which is enacted here, as it is frequently in Book 5 of the poem, does not extend to destroying the ‘fastnesse’ which enables Malengin to engage in plunders and attacks. And so, just as the movements of rebels between areas in Ireland did indeed frustrate English attempts to confine and attack them, Talus’s failure to destroy the cave along with Malengin leaves open the possibility that it could be occupied, and used for the same nefarious purposes, by other malefactors. Although the narrative of this canto proceeds immediately to Mercilla’s palace, thus suggesting that the episode is neatly closed, a reading that attends to the context of such ‘fast’ spaces in Ireland might recognize that the cave – the fastness – remains intact even after the death of Malengin. The narrative perhaps implies that the threat, which has been offered by the cave and its inhabitant, remains. The poem’s narratological facility for closing off fictional spaces contrasts with the difficulty which Grey had (and which he expresses, for example, in his letter of 10 August 1581) in confining the Irish rebels and isolating them from the strongholds that they were able to make use of. Malengin’s appearance in the narrative is almost incidental – the knights encounter him while making a journey elsewhere – but providential, in that the encounter enables them to dispatch a villain who has been troubling the local area. The narrative allows the typical account of raiding to be reversed, as the knights and Talus actually venture into Malengin’s place, deprive him of his shelter and kill him. I suggest, though, that the episode still implies the fear that equivalent military operations in Ireland might be time-consuming or impossible. Both sides of the English ideology – the plan to settle garrisons in Ireland, thereby depriving Irish rebels of their proper places and their opportunity to move at will around the country, and the English fear that Irish fastnesses 41

Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience, p. 163.

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Beleaguered Spaces permitted them to evade this method – were supported by English ideas of the occupation of space.42 This connection, and equivalence, meant that the problem and its solution could have very similar terms, and occur in the same places. Warham Sentleger, Provost Marshall of Munster, wrote in 1582 that the only way to subdue the traitors in that province was ‘setlinge downe of menne in their woodes. Which bee their Fortresses.’ The Irish rebels had been able to settle in places that provide them with a strategic advantage, and for Sentleger, the solution is that they be deprived of their proper place: ‘For beeinge beaten out of their Woodes, they are not able to holde vppe their heddes’. He repeats the advice that the English garrisons are to be settled down in the very same places that provided advantage to the Irish: not only must the Irish rebellions be quieted, in his view, by allowing the English proper places of their own, but this occupation must also deprive the Irish of their place: And if it bee said to your honour, that Soldiores shall not bee able to live in their woods, beleeue it not, for they may aswell setle them selues and live in the woods, as in other places. and Chieflie consideringe everie garizon so setled as they may well be victuelled, by water, if by land it bee dificult to be donne: It is setled garrisons that must make an ende of this Workes, and not runing Iourneys, for that weareth out menne, and to no purpose of service, till they bee beaten out of their Woodes.43

Similarly, the writer of the manuscript entitled ‘A Booke of Questions and Answars Concerning the Warrs or Rebellions of the Kingdome of Irelande’ argues that the different ways with which the English and Irish have occupied the country has meant that it is ‘Inhabited to the defendants, and waste to the assailants’. ‘They driue from place to place,’ he writes, ‘and kepe [their cattle] in the strongest partes of ther Country, according to the nature of the place, tyme and ther best opertunity.’ The writer implies that it is suitable for the Irish, barbarous as they are, to change ‘the ciuell habitation to a barbarous kinde’, as is the case in any country in the state of civil war.44 However, he also contrasts the ways in which the English and Irish have managed to inhabit the country. The rebels of Leinster, for instance, ‘do hide themselues in the day tymes in the mountaines, and glenes, woods & bogs of the prouince’, and like Malengin or the Brigands of Book 6 of The Faerie Queene, he claims that they move at night into areas inhabited by ‘peacable subiects’: whome they do constraine not onely to giue them victuall, for the tyme they are in ther houses, but for to prouide meat for them to cary into the woodes with 42

43 44

The connection between these aspects is noted by Andrew Zurcher, ‘Legal Diction and the Law in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2001), p. 189. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/91/41. ‘A Booke of Questions and Answars Concerning the Warrs or Rebellions of the Kingdome of Irelande’, ed. Hiram Morgan, Analecta Hibernica 36 (1995), 79–132 (p. 96).

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Defended Spaces them, and drawe themselues together at no tyme, but when they haue laide some plott to do mischeefe, as to kill, pray or burn any of the peaceable people in the Queenes Maiesties peace and obedience, for these men nether plowe nor sowe, reape nor mowe, nor keepe draughts or Cattell, or make any defensiue warr, but offensiue theeuing.45

The two different ways of imagining the Irish rebels in spatial terms are again overlaid. On the one hand, the relation between them and the ‘peaceable’ part of the country is clearly binary, and separated by a tangible frontier, across which the thieves cross in the night on their raids. Michel de Certeau reminds us that the ability to construct these demarcations is the privilege, and indeed the condition, of occupying a space that is proper to oneself. On the other hand, however, the passage raises the possibility of the contrary spatial interpretation: that it is the Irish, not the English, to whom the country is ‘proper’. Like Warham Sentleger, once again, and like Spenser, Jobson, and the authors of many such treatises of the late sixteenth century, the writer of the ‘Booke of Questions and Answars’ argues that the correct strategy against the rebels is the setting up of garrisons: ‘Garrisons placed in the very necks of the Rebells doth dant them, and makes euery man to seeke means how he may make his owne peace’. It will be the permanent proximity of English soldiers, rather than the restriction of their customary movements, that will allow this scheme to defeat the Irish: ‘They will so quake at ther sitting downe so neare them, that they will think that euery voice, sounde, or noise, that rumbles in the aire, is the force or the troopes of some one garrison or other’.46 One might say similarly, though, that the author of the treatise believes that the English can achieve military success only by a process of reappropriating the proper space of the Irish to the English, and thus making the Irish unable to occupy their customary place. The defeat of Irish insurrection was thus taken as depending upon a new way of occupying the country, and not principally, as much recent criticism has claimed, of perceiving or surveying it. New towns in sixteenth-century Ireland were also understood as part of this strategy of occupation. Within his discussion in the View of the placement of garrisons in Ireland, Irenius asserts: moreouer at euerye of these fortes I woulde haue the seate of a Towne layed forthe and encompassed, in the which I would wishe that theare should inhabitantes of all sortes as merchantes Artificers and husbandmen placed to whom theare shoulde Charters and franchises be graunted to incorporate them the which as it wilbe no matter of difficultye to drawe out of Englande persons which woulde verye gladlie be so placed so woulde it in shorte space turne those partes to great Comoditye and bringe er longe to her maiestie muche proffitte for 45 46

‘A Booke of Questions and Answars’, p. 98. ‘A Booke of Questions and Answars’, p. 100.

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Beleaguered Spaces those places are so fit for trade and traffick, havinge moste Conveniente outgates by ryvers to the sea and ingates to the richeste partes of the lande that they woulde sone be enriched and mightelye enlarged, for the verye seatinge of the garrisons by them besides the safetie and assurance which they shall worke vnto them will allsoe drawe thither store of people and trade as I haue sene ensampled at mariburgh and Philipstowne in Leinster. (pp. 183–84)

Writing about the plantations in Leix and Offaly, which predated that in Munster and which led to the erection of the new towns of Mariborough and Philipstown, R. Dunlop emphasizes that they were built in a landscape of ‘woods and bogs, whence [the O’Mores and O’Conors] issued from time to time spreading disorder and desolation to the very borders of the Pale’.47 The scheme of this plantation aimed to convert the country around the Pale from that which was hospitable to the Irish clans to that which would favour the English. The construction of garrison towns, even though they remained little more than garrisons until the seventeenth century, was intended also to transform the way in which the English and Irish would be able to occupy their respective places.48 The mentality of the plantations in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland allows us to investigate the connection between population and English strategy; I want to conclude by examining the ideological attitude among the planters about the occupation of their lands. The Undertakers in the Munster plantation were subject, from the 1580s, to demands that they account for the peopling of their lands with English tenants. Early in 1589, each Undertaker in the Munster plantation was instructed to answer twelve ‘articles’, in order to allow the English government to consolidate their records about the progress of the plantation.49 Some of the questions asked the planters to confirm such details as who they were, and how much land they held, and others asked them to certify how many English tenants they had installed upon their land, and how many Irish were present there. The declarations that the planters were forced to make as part of these articles turned on the ideological importance, as I have discussed above, of who was occupying Irish land and how they were doing so. Jesse Smythes was Chief Justice of

47 48

49

R. Dunlop, ‘The Plantation of Leix and Offaly’, English Historical Review 6 (1891), 61–96 (p. 69). On the various plantations in sixteenth-century Ireland as promoting urban growth, see R. A. Butlin, ‘Urban Genesis in Ireland, 1556–1641’, in Liverpool Essays in Geography: A Jubilee Collection, ed. Robert W. Steel and Richard Lawton (London: Longmans, 1967), pp. 211–26 (pp. 213–19). See also Anthony Sheehan, ‘Irish Towns in a Period of Change, 1558–1625’, in Natives and Newcomers: Essays on the Making of Irish Colonial Society 1534–1641, ed. Ciaran Brady and Raymond Gillespie (Dublin: Irish Academical Press, 1986), pp. 93–119. See Michael MacCarthy-Morrogh, The Munster Plantation: English Migration to Southern Ireland 1583–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 109–10; Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 145–46.

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Defended Spaces Munster and one such Undertaker; he certified to London that ‘he knoweth noe meere Yrish theare or theareaboutes and sayeth he would rather sett fyre in the neast then such byrdes should rust in any land of his’.50 Spenser, too, as part of the process of his acquisition of lands around Kilcolman, made such a declaration, claiming that ‘sondry honest persons in England have promised to comme ouer to inhabit his land’.51 The occupation of land with English tenants was accompanied by a fear that the Irish would attempt to prevent this occupation, and a declaration that this would be prevented. Conversely, the failure to provide sufficient English tenants to inhabit their lands was a frequent complaint against those involved in the plantation of Ireland. The author of British Library Sloane MS 1742 asserts that if the Lordes did dulie performe their Lettres patentes, and plante their Landes accordinglie with Englishe tennantes (whereas nowe moste of them either still lye voide, or ells are manured by the Irishe) the countrey woulde in shorte space be farre more safe, because more stronge, and alsoe more commodious because more populous, for the prosperous estate of a common wealth consisteth in the multitude of Subiectes.52

English occupants of Ireland feared that the native Irish – who in many cases were seen as, in effect, squatting on their land – were preparing to re-occupy their country. They were also frustrated that the law in Ireland effectively offered many channels for Irish to contest and deny English rights to occupy their land.53 This ideological anxiety, then, emerges as a consequence of the spatial and geographical pattern of English expansion in Ireland, an assertion by those preparing to occupy Irish land, and those in England who are failing to occupy it as they have been required. It is also, in itself, an anxiety about how spaces should be occupied, and a fear that a failure to occupy the space that has been taken away from the Irish is risking English possession of it. The texts which describe English military strategy demand that the Irish can be deprived of their proper space, and that English servants in Ireland can occupy that space effectively. The Faerie Queene, in episodes such as that depicting the capture and execution of Malengin, represents such a strategy in a way that suggests that it can proceed without setback. This expectation, though, exists alongside the fear that the ability of the Irish rebels to create and make use of fast spaces will make them impossible to defeat, and that the English will be unable to occupy the country in the same way that they do. Later in this book, in Chapter 8, I will investigate one of these spaces, the forest, in detail and show how 50 51 52 53

TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/144/69. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/144/70. BL, Sloane MS 1742, fol. 10r. Anthony J. Sheehan, ‘Official Reaction to Native Land Claims in the Plantation of Munster’, Irish Historical Studies 23 (1982–83), 297–318.

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Beleaguered Spaces military ideologies and strategies intersect, in The Faerie Queene and the View, with ideologies related to the commercial motives for deforestation. In the following chapter, though, I stay with castles, and discuss Spenser’s home at Kilcolman.

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Chapter 7

THE STONES OF KILCOLMAN: SPENSERIAN BIOGRAPHY, THE RUIN, AND THE MATERIAL FRAGMENT

All that in this world is great or gaie, Doth as a vapour vanish, and decaie. Edmund Spenser, ‘The Ruines of Time’, lines 55–56

I

N A SELF-CONFESSEDLY whimsical footnote in their book, Ireland: Its Scenery, Character, &c. (1841), beneath a passage describing Spenser’s former residence at Kilcolman Castle and the lands around it, Mr and Mrs Samuel Carter Hall write that they were once riding in a carriage between Dunbrody and Wexford, in which they ‘had been [. . .] speculating on the possibility of some happy chance enabling us to enrich the world by finding these “lost books” in some sequestered nook’. These lost books, they explain, are the concluding six books of The Faerie Queene, believed to have been destroyed in the fire that consumed Kilcolman in 1598, but also rumoured, or so they say, to have survived, and indeed to have passed recently through the hands of one Captain Garrett Nagle. The driver of the carriage, overhearing their discussion, makes a remark that seems straight out of the jokebook about the rustic bumpkin. ‘ “I know the man that has ’em” ’, he says. ‘We eagerly asked, “Who? where?” “Oh bedad, sir, I know the man that has ’em; he lives at Ballyhack, and has thim and the pinny magazine – both” ’.1 The joke is not just on the Irish driver, of course; it exposes a certain absurd optimism in the Halls’ dream of recovering the lost manuscript of The Faerie Queene, as well as the lost six books of the second half of the poem. And in doing so, it establishes an analogy between these lost papers and the physical place, also now destroyed, where they were perhaps in part written and possibly lost to the flames, as well as demonstrating the strength of the myth locating the writing of The Faerie

1

Mr and Mrs S. C. Hall, Ireland: Its Scenery, Character, &c., 3 vols (1841), I, pp. 93–94.

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Beleaguered Spaces Queene in Kilcolman, and suggesting that the poem in its complete form is irrecoverable. The history of the various accounts of the ruins of Kilcolman Castle is also a history of the reception and interpretation of Spenser’s works, and of how his material circumstances have been given a place within that interpretative history. My task in this chapter is not to reveal the material truth behind Spenser’s life, to illuminate his works with contextual evidence from his physical surroundings, but rather to trace the various ways in which the material realities of Kilcolman – as they were in the 1580s and 90s, or as they have stood since then – have been made part of literary criticism and history. In doing so, I will continue to suggest that the material is not, and should not be taken as, a stable category in literary interpretation or literary history. The history of Spenser criticism, and the changes in it, run alongside the continuous decay of the castle. Writers on Kilcolman are not just describing something that is always in the process of decay: they, and those who read them, are also always in the process of moving away from Spenser. In Chapter 1, I argued for the relevance to the study of Spenserian allegory of Walter Benjamin’s assertion that ‘Allegorien sind im Reiche der Gedanken was Ruinen im Reiche der Dinge’ [Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things].2 This chapter will dwell on the very process of falling into ruin, itself a process and a metaphor that concerns Benjamin in both his Origin of German Tragic Drama and ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. The accounts of the ruins of Kilcolman Castle bring to our attention the connections between the material decay of Spenser’s residence and the varying status, as we move away from the composition of The Faerie Queene, that the material has come to have in Spenserian interpretation. The authors of several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts of the history, topography, and antiquities of Ireland – such as the aforementioned book by Mr and Mrs Hall – describe visits that they have made, in the course of their journeys through the country, to the ruins of Kilcolman and the countryside around it. It is customary, as they do so, for them to recall Spenser’s poetry, and also to see the poetry as in some way describing the castle and country. The Halls, for example, tell us that this part of County Cork is described in The Faerie Queene. ‘Buttevant and its neighbourhood’, they write, ‘have been rendered classic by the pen of the immortal poet; for Spenser not only resided at Kilcolman [. . .] but here he composed his Fairy Queen, and made the surrounding objects themes of his undying song.’ They go on to list ‘several objects to which Spenser has especially referred’, such as the rivers Molanna and Faunchin, and say that ‘we are justified in concluding that the country around him excited his imagination, influenced his muse, and gave

2

Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1963), p. 197.

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Kilcolman: Spenserian Biography being to many of his most sublime or beautiful descriptions of scenery’.3 Other writers from the period similarly suggest that the castle and countryside itself were a direct inspiration for Spenser’s works. Nathaniel Willis and Joseph Stirling Coyne write in The Scenery and Antiquities of Ireland (1842) that ‘throughout his poems we find numerous allusions to the scenery in the neighbourhood of Kilcolman and of Castletown Roche, where he possessed another small estate’.4 And slightly differently, Richard Lovett writes in Irish Pictures (1888) that ‘it was here that Spenser learned some of the deepest lessons of life. Driven into himself by the uncongenial nature of his surroundings, compelled to practise self-denial, he entered into fuller communion with the natural beauties around him.’5 These writers often seize upon small details in the poem to locate it in the Irish landscape: Coyne and Willis, like many others, refer to the description in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe of ‘the green alders by the Mulla’s shore’, and they mention short passages from Book 6 and the Mutabilitie Cantos of The Faerie Queene. They see Kilcolman and its environs as the direct sensory inspirations of Spenser’s poetry, and suggest that the poetry gives empirical record of the experience of that place, whatever that experience is. The experience that many of these writers have upon seeing Kilcolman, nevertheless, is disappointment, often accompanied by an awareness of how grand and great the castle once was, even in the days before it was occupied by Spenser. On visiting the castle, they typically remark on the bleakness of the scene (as with Lovett’s comment about the ‘uncongenial [. . .] surroundings’), and also say that it is not as courtly as it once was, or as the poetry that they believe it has inspired. The most melancholic expression of this sentiment comes from Willis and Coyne, who write: I confess that I could not view the ruins of this noble castle, within whose deserted walls the proud Desmonds once held sway, and which more recently had been the dwelling-place of one of England’s most accomplished poets, without a feeling of deep sadness. The desolate pile, resting in lonely grandeur on the banks of the ‘Mulla fair and bright’, seemed brooding over its vanished greatness, while the poet’s favourite stream murmured sadly as it rolled along.6

Similarly, in The Ancient and Present State of the County and City of Cork (1750), Charles Smith describes ‘the residence of the immortal Spenser, where he composed his divine poem the Fairy Queen. [. . .] a most pleasant and romantic situation; from whence, no doubt, Spenser drew several parts of the scenery of his poem’. But his account ends, likewise, in disappointment at the 3 4 5 6

Hall and Hall, Ireland, I, pp. 92–94. N. P. Willis and J. Stirling Coyne, The Scenery and Antiquities of Ireland, 2 vols (London: Virtue, 1842), II, p. 124. Richard Lovett, Irish Pictures (London: Religious Tract Society, 1888), p. 100. Willis and Coyne, The Scenery and Antiquities of Ireland, II, p. 124.

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Beleaguered Spaces way in which the castle has been forsaken, and that it no longer provides a physical memorial for the man who once lived there. ‘Pity it is,’ he writes, ‘that some friendly stone, which might be placed at a small expense in the ruin of the castle, does not point out its once immortal inhabitant.’7 William Chetwood and Philip Luckombe’s Tour Through Ireland (1748) does not describe Kilcolman Castle as ruined, rather as ‘commodiously seated under a Hill’, although Smith’s remark in 1750 that the castle’s ruins are level with the ground suggests that it might have been in some state of disrepair when Chetwood and Luckombe visited it – unless it was destroyed during the two years after 1748, or, of course, if one or other of the accounts is dishonest or incomplete. Chetwood and Luckombe mention Kilcolman twice in their epistolary account of their tour. On the first occasion they speak of the View, and mention Spenser’s acquaintance with Philip Sidney, but at the start of their subsequent letter, they write that, having been forced by nightfall to cut short their first visit, they go back, ‘resolved to breathe in the same Place’, and ‘in my Imagination, trace the Footsteps of that celebrated Bard’.8 The journey is also imaginary, insofar as it involves contemplating the countryside around the house, which they see as the same country that Spenser himself once looked at: ‘I say, my good Lord, when we arrived at the House, my Mind was filled with an awful Pleasure: That Mountain, this River, those Fields and Meadows, and that Town and Bridge of Mallow, were once familiar to his Sight, and seemed dignified to mine’. Like Smith, and like Willis and Coyne, they quote Spenser’s lines about ‘the green alders by the Mulla’s shore’, in which they write that the hill and the river next to Kilcolman ‘will live for ever’.9 And when they go on to write that ‘at this Place our Poet met with a Lady of a more tender Heart than the inexorable ROSALINDA, his northern English cruel Beauty: [. . .] as your Lordship may find by the happy Husband’s Epithalamium’,10 they make Kilcolman the place at which allegorical and biographical identities come together (and their visit to the castle provides the occasion for performing such a critical act). Kilcolman acts metonymically for all of Spenser’s Irish experiences; it becomes the source of all his poetry, and the place of everything that inspired it. Even though Chetwood and Luckombe do not mention the decay of the castle, they, like the other writers cited here, use their visit as the occasion for a discussion of the empirical background to Spenser’s poetry, and the fate of that poetry. They also show distress for the effect of the passage of time on Spenser’s heritage, lamenting that Kilcolman has passed out of the hands of the family through the ‘Imprudence (and 7 8 9 10

Charles Smith, The Ancient and Present State of the County and City of Cork, 2 vols (1750), I, pp. 340–42. W. R. Chetwood and P. Luckombe, A Tour through Ireland in Several Entertaining Letters (London, 1748), p. 119. Chetwood and Luckombe, A Tour Through Ireland, p. 120. Chetwood and Luckombe, A Tour Through Ireland, p. 121.

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Kilcolman: Spenserian Biography perhaps Riot)’ of Spenser’s grandson, and that ‘what had been acquired by the Wit of the Ancestor, should be lost by the Folly of the Descendant’.11 Again, the house and the poem, and Spenser’s literary status – all equally products of the ‘Wit of the Ancestor’ – are overlaid, and so, although they speak of the permanence of Spenser’s verse, Chetwood and Luckombe may seem to look forward to its decline, alongside the demise of Spenser’s material heritage. All of these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers see a relation between this empirical experience of seeing the place where Spenser lived, and which was supposed to have influenced him while he was writing The Faerie Queene, and their own memory of that poem.12 With the exception of Chetwood and Luckombe, they express a surprise that the empirical and the poetical are disjointed, that Kilcolman, its former glory now lost, does not provide the experience that the poem seems to promise that it will. The View also describes the ruins left in the Irish landscape at the end of the sixteenth century. Irenius is asked by Eudoxus, in the course of their discussion about Tyrone and the O’Neills, to tell him about Feagh MacHugh; Irenius begins his reply with a speech about the Birnes and the Tooles, who have recently been ‘imboldened’ by Feagh’s ‘boldnes and late good successe’, and now ‘threaten perill even to Dublin’. They were originally families, says Irenius, who occupied the rough lands in the country with castles that now stand in ruins: yet it semethe that in some places of the same they did put foote and fortified with sundrie Castells of which the ruines doe theare onelye now remaine. (p. 171)

The ruins provide a reminder of the past, and like the names of these rebel families (‘for Brin in the Brittish language signifieth wooddy, and Toole hilly, which names it seemes they tooke of the countryes which they inhabited, which is all very mountainous and woody’) they are also used to mark out a territory proper to them. And as Irenius’s remark reminds us, with hindsight, 11

12

According to Pauline Henley, Spenser in Ireland (New York: Russell & Russell, 1928), Kilcolman and its lands were confiscated in 1654 on the grounds of the Catholicism of William Spenser, the grandson of Edmund Spenser then in control of the property (pp. 205–7). With the aid of letters of support written by Cromwell in 1657, William Spenser was awarded lands in Connaught, and then recovered the Kilcolman lands, but he died in 1713, in debt and with the lands mortgaged, and by 1738 Kilcolman had once again passed out of the hands of Edmund Spenser’s direct descendants (Henley, Spenser in Ireland, pp. 210–11). For an appendix containing the documents relevant to this period in the history of Kilcolman, see The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Edmund Spenser, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 9 vols (privately published, 1882–84), I. 555–71. See also, by way of a modern comparison, Rigby Graham’s pamphlet on Kilcolman, which alleges that Spenser ‘knew that life at court could never have suited him again and he grew to love Kilcolman and the beauty and wildness of the place found its way into his poetry’. Rigby Graham, Edmund Spenser’s Kilcolman (n. p.: Brewhouse Press, 1975), p. 15.

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Beleaguered Spaces Ireland’s medieval and early modern history was one of successive despoilings, in which the houses of English servants like Spenser were no safer than those of the families who came before them. It also reminds us that the ruins in Ireland were subject to English military strategy at the end of the sixteenth century; the English planned a systematic razing and re-occupation of Irish castles and the re-fortification of English strongholds (see Chapters 5 and 6 above). It was hoped that the re-occupation of Irish buildings, as Irenius argues later in the View when he talks about the reformations that need to be carried out in Ireland, would reform the institutions that they had once contained: Nexte Care in religion is to be builde vpp and repaire all the Ruined Churches wheareof the moste parte lie even within the grounde, and some that haue bene latelye repaired are so vnhansomelye patched and thatched that men doe even shvn the places of the vncomelines theareof. Therefore I woulde wishe that theare weare order taken to haue them builte in some better forme accordinge to the Churches of Englande. (p. 223)

Irenius is anxious that the ruins of Irish institutions and houses, so connected with the Catholic Church and rebel families, should be converted to good use. But elsewhere in the View, as Bart van Es argues, he shows an antiquarian interest in the ruins of the lost practices, buildings and speech of the Irish, Ireland’s ‘moniments’ as he calls them.13 Margaret Aston has argued that there was an acute cultural interest in ruins in late sixteenth-century England, which found its way into the poetic trope of the ruin, in Shakespeare’s ‘bare ruined choirs’ and so on.14 Aston claims that in many respects this derived from the dissolution and despoliation of the monasteries, the ruins of which, common in the English landscape from that time, came to be a focus for the regret and anger of many Protestant writers at the excesses of the Reformation iconoclasts. In the View, interest in the monuments of the Irish past is even more ambiguous, and thus the concern with the use to which they were put was all the keener.15 An anxiety about what the ruins have come from, and what they continue to represent, is combined with a markedly antiquarian approach to them; but as van Es points out, it is an antiquarianism unlike that, for example, of Camden, which attempts not just to uncover evidence of the orderly Roman past of Britain but to move on from it, to proceed towards conquest of that which is disordered.

13 14

15

Bart van Es, Spenser’s Forms of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 78–111. Margaret Aston, ‘English Ruins and English History: The Dissolution and the Sense of the Past’, JWCI 36 (1973), 231–55. On the ambivalence about religious objects and iconoclasm in The Faerie Queene, see H. L. Weatherby, ‘Holy Things’, ELR 29 (1999), 422–42. See Judith H. Anderson, ‘The Antiquities of Fairyland and Ireland’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 86 (1987), 199–214; Maryclaire Moroney, ‘Spenser’s Dissolution: Monasticism and Ruins in The Faerie Queene and The View of the Present State of Ireland’, Spenser Studies 12 (1998), 105–32.

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Kilcolman: Spenserian Biography One of the old Irish castles that was re-occupied as part of the re-allocation of land and property to English planters in the sixteenth century was Kilcolman. Kilcolman was built by the Earls of Desmond in the Middle Ages, at a site at which there is some reason to believe there could have been human settlement and building since the Iron Age.16 After the confiscation of the Desmond estates in the early 1580s, it passed (already apparently in some state of ruin) into English hands:17 first to Andrew Reade, in 1586, and then very shortly afterwards to Spenser.18 It was almost certainly of a kind of tower house and bawn (i.e. outer enclosure) very typical in medieval Ireland, and, in the state in which Spenser occupied it, apparently included further outbuildings constructed in the sixteenth century.19 The castle was attacked and burnt in the uprising of 1598, a fight in which there is record of an Irishman being killed.20 Spenser returned to England, perhaps (as in the account given by Mr and Mrs Hall) leaving his manuscripts in the ruins, shortly after which he died. Spenser’s son Sylvanus reoccupied the castle in the early seventeenth century, but there was another fire early in the seventeenth century, and within thirty-five years the lands had passed out of the hands of Spenser’s descendants.21 The castle became unoccupied (although, as D. Newman Johnson reminds us in The Spenser Encyclopedia, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact date when this happened), and for over two hundred years it fell into decay and neglect. But the post-Spenserian ruin of Kilcolman came, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to have an import beyond its place in sixteenth-century Irish history. As the ruins gained iconic status through their association with Spenser, they came to be privileged in themselves, as ruins, fragments from the past. This occurs in part through the use, within the accounts discussed above, of illustrations of the ruin, such as William Henry Bartlett’s drawings for Willis and Coyne [Plate 5]. The reader encounters the ruin alongside the passage, which thus juxtaposes sections of the poems with the picture of the fallen castle: so that the poetry, which apparently records a Spenserian experience of the castle and the lands around it – an experience that can be recovered by reading the poetry – is accompanied with a symbol of their decay. The ruins

16

17 18 19 20 21

On the pre-Spenserian history of Kilcolman (as well as a summary of the broader history and archaeological status of the site), see the comprehensive article by D. Newman Johnson, ‘Kilcolman Castle’, in Spenser Encyclopedia, pp. 417–22. On the partly ruined state in which Kilcolman passed to Spenser, see Ray Heffner, ‘Spenser’s View of Ireland: Some Observations’, Modern Language Quarterly 3 (1942), 507–15 (p. 508). For a fuller account, see Ray Heffner, ‘Spenser’s Acquisition of Kilcolman’, MLN 46 (1931), 493–98. See Eric Klingelhöfer, ‘Castle of the Faerie Queene’, Archaeology 52.2 (March/April 1999), 48–52 (p. 52). See Henley, Spenser in Ireland, p. 158. On this period in Kilcolman’s history, see fn. 11.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

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Plate 5: N. P. Willis and J. S. Coyne, The Scenery and Antiquities of Ireland, 2 vols (1842), vol. 2, image facing p. 122

Beleaguered Spaces

Kilcolman: Spenserian Biography are made picturesque, very typical in nineteenth-century poetry,22 but also prefiguring the history of Kilcolman itself, which in the 1850s was substantially improved, in order to stand as a ruin, by the Harold Barry family, then the owners of the Kilcolman estate. And all this leads on to a second point. In these accounts of Kilcolman, the castle comes to be paralleled with The Faerie Queene in a way that goes beyond the suggestion that the poem was inspired by the castle and its surroundings, and that it includes descriptive passages that testify to this inspiration. The claim that parts of the poem were written inside the castle would be perhaps unobjectionable, even though the fact that both Colin Clouts Come Home Again and the Letter to Ralegh in the 1590 Faerie Queene are addressed from Kilcolman doesn’t necessarily prove that either was actually written there, and although large sections of The Faerie Queene (admittedly, not those passages from the 1596 text quoted in these works) must have been written before Spenser moved in. But in this very pervasive myth, something more than this is being said: Kilcolman becomes the seat of Spenser’s imagination, the place of the creation of his great epic poem.23 It comes to stand for the influence that Ireland as a whole had on his writing. Furthermore, the suggestion, impossible to substantiate, that the final six books of The Faerie Queene were lost in the fire at Kilcolman implies that both were ruined at the same time. The incompleteness of the poem, then, its own fragmentary status, comes at this point in its reception history to be mirrored in the scattered stones of Kilcolman.24 The loss to the world of Kilcolman is seen as an image of our loss of Spenser himself. These accounts of Kilcolman imply that it is a relic of a past to which one cannot return, and to which one would probably not want to. ‘The arrangements for the comfort of the occupant’, writes Lovett, ‘seem to have been so necessarily imperfect that the visitor does not feel much desire for a return of those “good old times”, at any rate if this should involve a return to such residences as the poet’s home.’25 Visiting 22

23

24

25

On the wider history of the ruin poem, see Laurence Goldstein, Ruins and Empire: The Evolution of a Theme in Augustan and Romantic Literature (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977); Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). The importance of Kilcolman as the location of Spenser’s imaginative triumph is emphasized even in non-topographical accounts of the nineteenth century. For example, ‘It was in Kilcolman Castle, amid such scenes, that the first English poem of modern times – the first creation of English imaginative power since Chaucer, and, like Chaucer, so thoroughly and characteristically English – was written.’ J. C., ‘Biographical Sketches of Persons Remarkable in Local History: X. Edmund Spenser’, JCHAS 3 (1894), 89–100 (p. 92). The unfinished quality of the poem has certainly also preoccupied critics and writers of the modern and early modern ages: see Jonathan Goldberg, Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), as well as continuations such as Ralph Knevett’s Supplement, Cambridge University Library Manuscript, Ee.3.53, on which see Andrew Lavender, ‘An Edition of Ralph Knevett’s Supplement of the Faery Queene (1635)’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, New York University, 1955). Lovett, Irish Pictures, p. 99.

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Beleaguered Spaces the ruins does not allow these tourists an access to the reality of sixteenthcentury life; while it prompts them to recall Spenser’s poetry, it actually emphasizes their distance from The Faerie Queene and its world. The poem comes to appear as being from an irrecoverable and abandoned age. And with this distancing from the ruins, the acknowledgement that they come from a past that is for ever lost, comes the mournful recognition that Spenser himself has in some way been abandoned, or is in the process of so being. He was ‘once immortal’, in Smith’s words, with the implication that he no longer is, and the ‘vanished greatness’ that Coyne and Willis attribute to the castle also seems to be transferred to Spenser himself. Contemplation of the ruins of Kilcolman places Spenser in a distant (and ever more distant) past. Spenser himself was also closely interested in the physical decay embodied in the figure of the ruin, and his poems show him thinking about the relation between an approach to the past through its fragmentary relics and a recognition of the continued, and continually disintegrating, physicality of these fragments. In the ‘Ruines of Rome’, translations of Joachim du Bellay’s Antiquitez de Rome published in the Complaints volume (1591), he ostensibly contrasts the ruins of Roman edifices with the capacity of Rome’s literary works to survive; the poems dwell on the nature of these Latin works and their status as literary models. Therefore, as well as being representative of the passage of time, of the world’s vanity (like those depicted in Spenser’s poems for the Theatre for Worldlings), these images of ruins also show Spenser’s anxiety about his relationship with Du Bellay and the Roman poets he wants to imitate.26 The poems begin with an opposition between the works and the city that are dead and decaying, and their fame that will live on – and they go on to demonstrate, I would suggest, that this opposition is untenable. Just as they demonstrate an ambivalence towards the notion of Rome, and towards Roman authors as models and objects of admiration, they show the difficulty of dissociating the works from the dust and the ruins. The first poem addresses the ‘heavenly spirites, whose ashie cinders lie | Under deep ruines’, but claims that their ‘praise [. . .] shall never die | Through your faire verses, ne in ashes rest’ (lines 1–4), but later poems doubt the capacity of Rome’s reputation to survive – or, metaphorically, to survive contamination from the substance of the ashes – in this way. The seventh poem concedes that ‘though your frames do for a time make warre | Gainst time, yet time in time shall ruinate | Your workes and names, and your last reliques marre’ (lines 93–95).27 Both works and names will be ruined, the latter apparently consequent on the former in 26

27

See Margaret W. Ferguson, ‘ “The Afflatus of Ruin”: Meditations on Rome by Du Bellay, Spenser, and Stevens’, in Roman Images: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982, ed. Annabel Patterson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 23–50. See van Es, Spenser’s Forms of History, p. 30. Van Es points out the self-declaredly precarious state of the Complaints volume, as Ponsonbie claims in his letter ‘to the Gentle Reader’: it consists, he says, of a ‘fewe parcels’, which he had found ‘disperst abroad in sundrie hands’.

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Kilcolman: Spenserian Biography this hendiadys-like phrase, and both seem encompassed by the material and non-material senses of ‘reliques’. The first lines of this poem are suitably ambiguous: Ye sacred ruines, and ye tragick sights, Which onely doo the name of Rome retaine, Olde moniments, which of so famous sprights The honour yet in ashes do maintaine.

(lines 85–88)

Do the monuments maintain the honour of Rome’s spirits among the ashes, or within the ashes, as part of the ashes themselves? And there is a similar ambiguity in the final six lines of the fifth poem of the sequence: The corpes of Rome in ashes is entombed, And her great spirite rejoyned to the spirite Of this great masse, is in the same enwombed; But her brave writings, which her famous merite In spight of time, out of the dust doth reare, Doo make her Idole through the world appeare.

(lines 65–70)

Does this mean that the writings are dust themselves, or merely shrouded in dust? It is not just the ‘corpes’ of Rome, but also its ‘spirite’ that is connected to and ‘enwombed’ in the materiality of ‘this great masse’: again, a participle that preserves the ambiguity of the material status of that which is contained. ‘The Ruines of Time’, printed in the same volume, also asks us to think about the materiality of decay, and the difficulty of separating visions or literary works from the ruins of the place from which they came. The speaker in this poem, walking by the River Thames, ‘nigh where the goodly Verlame stood of yore’ (line 3), encounters a weeping woman, who, it emerges, is the personification or ‘th’auncient Genius of that Citie brent’ (line 19). The woman laments the destruction of the ancient city (along with that of Rome) and goes on to bewail the recent deaths in the Sidney family, and speaks more generally about loss and transience.28 But she does not distance herself from the ashes and ruins of Verulamium, and indeed makes clear that in some way she allegorizes them: ‘Though nought at all but ruines now I bee, | And lye in mine owne ashes, as ye see’ (lines 39–40). The process of allegorizing Verulamium has produced an ambiguously materialized figure. She appears as a ‘Woman’ with ‘yeolow locks’ (lines 9–10), but what she represents is something not only long ago decayed but actually a symbol of that decay. Spenser manages this ambiguity in part by having her hold a ‘broken rod’ (line 13), which seems to preserve her as an

28

See Millar MacLure, ‘Spenser and the Ruins of Time’, in A Theatre for Spenserians: Papers of the International Spenser Colloquium, Fredericton, New Brunswick, October 1969, ed. Judith M. Kennedy and James A. Reither (Manchester: University of Manchester Press; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), pp. 3–18.

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Beleaguered Spaces intact allegorical figure, while isolating and externalizing the quality of decay. And her disappearance at the end of her tale reminds us of her immaterial status: ‘Thus having ended all her piteous plaint, | With dolefull shrieks shee vanished away’ (lines 470–71). But her ambiguously allegorized materiality is something that throughout affects her account of Rome and Verulamium, as she simultaneously tries to describe them as crumbled, and to envision them as intact. It is a description that emphasizes their sheer materiality, as it tries to speak in spite of it. Rome is encumbered with itself: ‘With her own weight down pressed now shee lies, | And by her heaps her hugenesse testifies’ (lines 76–77), both dust itself and interred in dust. The subsequent two stanzas go on to describe Verulamium before its collapse: To tell the beawtie of my buildings fayre, Adornd with purest golde, and precious stone; To tell my riches, and endowments rare That by my foes are now all spent and gone: To tell my forces matchable to none, Were but lost labour, that few would beleeve, And with rehearsing would me more agreeve. High towers, faire temples, goodly theatres, Strong walles, rich porches, princelie pallaces, Large streetes, brave houses, sacred sepulchers, Sure gates, sweete gardens, stately galleries, Wrought with faire pillours, and fine imageries, All those (ô pitie) now are turnd to dust, And overgrowen with blacke oblivions rust.

(lines 85–98)

I have already noted the extensive use of the occultatio trope, apparently declining to describe a place and yet itemizing its physical attributes, in The Faerie Queene (and the ‘lost labour’ trope is also common there). What is also curious about this passage is that it is she herself, as an allegory of this lost city, whom Verulame is describing. So that while this poem is a lament for man’s transience, and his tendency to ‘build [. . .] bliss on hope of earthly thing’ (line 198), it is also spoken by a figure whose very allegorical status seems at once stable and in decay. The ruins of Kilcolman Castle have also been employed in contemporary Spenser criticism, but in a very different way from that in which they are regarded by the earlier writers mentioned in this chapter. The material fragments of Spenser’s house that are left to us have come to be used archaeologically, or quasi-archaeologically, a difference which seems illustrative of some of the aspects of modern literary historicist research. This may be illustrated by Eric Klingelhöfer’s recent work on the archaeology of Kilcolman. Since the mid-1990s, Klingelhöfer has dug a number of exploratory archaeological trenches (though not full excavations) at Kilcolman, as well as stripping away 160

Kilcolman: Spenserian Biography some of the ivy that had covered the ruins, and has excavated sections of a number of historical layers at the site.29 In his reports of these digs, Klingelhöfer provides some very welcome additions to our knowledge of Spenser’s life, and documents some undoubtedly intriguing finds, including fragments of plaster on the remains of a wall in the outbuildings, a clay pipe (though from the seventeenth, not sixteenth, century), and a tuning peg from a stringed instrument, possibly a lute. This work presently provides only limited possibilities for reconstructing the medieval or early modern appearance of Kilcolman Castle, or its architectural design, in part because much of the stone has been looted for building material since the castle’s ruin; but, without a doubt, the discoveries provide information of considerable use and fascination to the material historian of sixteenth-century Ireland, and importance to all Spenserian critics. Klingelhöfer’s interests in Kilcolman are, of course, very different from those of the literary critics of the present day and of the nineteenth-century writers with which I began. His interest is also in Kilcolman as a house of one of the colonial elite, rather than strictly the place where The Faerie Queene was composed. We do see in his work, as in that of these earlier writers, for example in an article on ‘The Castle of the Faerie Queene’, a relation between an empirical experience of the ruins of the castle, and reference to Spenser’s poetry. In this piece, though, Klingelhöfer mentions the Castle of Alma only in his introductory paragraph; he is not immediately inspired to write of The Faerie Queene by what he sees at Kilcolman, and only mentions the poem again when he describes the discovery of a lute peg on the site. What arouses his interest as an archaeologist, he writes, is his physical proximity to Spenser. ‘I first entered the castle’s ruins in 1990,’ he writes, ‘experiencing the thrill of walking back in time, climbing stone staircases and entering silent rooms to stand where Spenser had often stood, seeing from his windows views perhaps little changed in 400 years.’30 Archaeological excitement in the material fragment – an excitement that encourages a feeling that the past can be tangible, rather than signalling distance from Spenser and his time, as it did in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers discussed above – has superseded an attempt to recreate or recover the creative experiences of the poet. It may indeed be that Kilcolman has become a place that we can now consider only as an archaeological site. Indeed, recent literary scholarship that has referred to the castle, such as Thomas Herron’s article on the Malengin and 29

30

For a brief summary of the finds from one of these digs, see Michael Ponsford and Reg Jackson, ‘Post-Medieval Britain and Ireland in 1995’, Post-Medieval Archaeology 30 (1996), 245–320 (pp. 290–91). A fuller description of more of the discoveries at Kilcolman can be found in Eric Klingelhöfer, ‘Edmund Spenser at Kilcolman Castle: The Archaeological Evidence’, Post-Medieval Archaeology 39 (2005), 133–54, unfortunately published after this book had gone to press. I am extremely grateful to Professor Klingelhöfer for his communication on this subject. Klingelhöfer, ‘Castle of the Faerie Queene’, p. 50.

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Beleaguered Spaces Brigants episodes from The Faerie Queene, has concentrated to some extent on archaeological findings from the site.31 And in this respect, I would suggest perhaps not that Eric Klingelhöfer’s work is close to contemporary literary criticism, but rather that a substantial body of that contemporary literary work – namely the historicist approach that has been so influential in the last twenty or so years, and perhaps particularly the materialist criticism discussed in Chapter 1 above – is indebted, or analogous, to the architectural approach exemplified by Klingelhöfer’s research, using archaeological finds, and also an archaeological method.32 Like the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works discussed earlier in this chapter, it tries to locate the poem specifically in the landscape around Kilcolman, but unlike those earlier writers, the historicist and new materialist criticism is looking for specific material detail, rather than trying to recreate Spenserian experiences. It suggests that by gathering and presenting material evidence of the Ireland in which Spenser lived, evidence not immediately available to the casual observer, we will understand why Spenser chose to describe the world of The Faerie Queene in the way that he did. The Faerie Queene is no longer a fragmented work, our distance from which is measured out by a contemplation of Kilcolman’s ruins, and by a consideration of the landscape that Spenser might once have seen before his home was destroyed; it is seen as a record of a stable, coherent material history, now lost to us, but which we can reassemble by gathering up its fragments. The archaeological evidence that Herron’s article, for example, presents to us comes to demand attention in its own right; and insofar as it makes a contribution to the understanding of the material history of early modern Ireland, and encourages us to look for ways in which the material world touches upon the poem, it is extremely valuable. It asks not, what did Spenser see, how and where was he inspired, but rather, can we provide evidence to identify and understand the places and things that he once touched and once inhabited?33 31

32

33

Thomas Herron, ‘Irish Den of Thieves: Souterrains (and a Crannog?) in Books V and vi of Spenser’s Faerie Queene’, Spenser Studies 14 (2000), 303–17. Herron’s article reads the Malengin and Brigants episodes in the context of the presence of souterrains (subterranean tunnels sometimes used as hiding- and storage-places) and crannogs (island hideouts) in medieval and early modern Ireland. One such tunnel may have existed in the immediate proximity of Kilcolman. The article provides a commendably thorough account of this detail in the poem, and like me, Herron emphasizes the difficulty of making direct correspondences between the poem and the physical world of sixteenth-century Ireland (reminding us, for instance, that ‘the cave’s apparent size in the poem is potentially a problem’, p. 306). It is my view that this difficulty should perhaps destabilize historicist accounts of the poem to a greater extent than Herron allows, and I do not necessarily share his confidence that reading the poem within an Irish context can always ‘make [Spenser’s] local darkness more visible’ (p. 303), but I am very grateful indeed to him for his correspondence on this subject. For a study of the changing imaginative place of archaeology, reaching back beyond the eighteenth century, see Jennifer Wallace, Digging the Dirt: The Archaeological Imagination (London: Duckworth, 2004). Though note the imaginative connection in Elizabeth Healy, Literary Tour of Ireland (Dublin:

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Kilcolman: Spenserian Biography But we also need to be critical about how that connection between the world and the poem is being made, about the assumptions behind different critical means of making that connection: how do they treat the object in the real world, and what are they assuming about its status in the poem? In such work, and also for different reasons in Klingelhöfer’s archaeological research, Kilcolman no longer needs to conform to the poem; it is the book that is now dry, the material fragment that survives it. The question has become, what can we know about the way that Spenser lived? Can we still touch it? How can the Renaissance be made tangible? In the words of Stephen Greenblatt in his book with Catherine Gallagher, Practicing New Historicism, new historicism has always sought ‘the touch of the real in the way that in an earlier period people wanted the touch of the transcendent’.34 The new materialist use of the stones of Kilcolman seeks material evidence, touchstones, to establish a definitive context for Spenser’s literary works. The insertion of Kilcolman and Spenserian biography into thinking about Spenser has changed, perhaps into a method that stabilizes the contact that we as literary historians make with the past, as it excavates, anatomizes, and asks us to re-value the fragmentary remains of that past. But it may also mean that Spenser’s place and his material relics have become valuable only as ruins, things that are valued as lost and irrecoverable. Insofar as Kilcolman represents the touch of the real in contemporary Spenser studies, it may have come to represent the touch of death.

34

Wolfhound Press, 1995): ‘One wonders whether the ancestors of the whooper swans which gather there in winter came to grace His Lordship’s view four centuries ago’ (p. 30). Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 31. Greenblatt’s ‘real’ is equated to ‘elements of lived experience’ (p. 30), but it is also described in a peculiarly materialized way, and a way that seems to privilege, per se, the contact of decayed or decaying material fragments. ‘We wanted to find in the past real bodies and living voices, and if we knew that we could not find these – the bodies having long moldered away and the voices fallen silent – we could at least seize upon those traces that seemed to be close to actual experience’ (p. 30). See also Stephen Greenblatt, ‘The Touch of the Real’, Representations 59 (Summer 1997), 14–29, a large part of which is reproduced in Practicing New Historicism. Although this article contains the quotes cited above, and speaks more explicitly of the new historicist context as a ‘fragment’, something discovered like a ‘note in [a] bottle’ (p. 22) – Greenblatt uses as an example a short deposition from the Castle of York – it also reminds us of the textual, unstable nature of these sources: ‘the real, as we perceive and respond to it, is not securely prior to language, nor is it the stable, prosaic, solid foundation upon which the imagination builds its airy castles’ (p. 27).

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IV The Physical and Allegorized Landscape

Chapter 8

DEFORESTATION AND THE SPENSERIAN WOOD

Imagine a forest A real forest. W. S. Graham, ‘Imagine a Forest’

T

HIS CHAPTER concentrates for the most part upon the forests of Ireland in the 1580s and 1590s, but it begins five thousand miles and three hundred years away, on the island of Mauritius at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1883, Sir John Pope Hennessy arrived as the new governor of Mauritius, towards the end of a long career in the Colonial Service that had seen him sent to outposts in the Caribbean, Africa and East Asia. Several of these postings had ended in a degree of disgrace and confusion; Pope Hennessy’s desire to reform colonial laws and his inclination to favour native populations as highly as English planters had earned him the animosity of a number of colonial councils, and had led to outbreaks of rioting in many of the colonies.1 Pope Hennessy conforms very well to our perhaps peculiar image of the benevolent Victorian colonialist. After only a year as governor of Mauritius, he could boast that he had reformed a brutal prison system, made great improvements to sanitation, brought an end to systems of racial segregation that had forbidden Mauritians from taking part in their own government, and had also altered Mauritian forestry law in a number of important ways.2 He had reformed the policy of imposing severe penalties on natives for destroying trees, which in practice had meant that they were imprisoned for so little as taking dead twigs from the forest floor to use as toothpicks. He had persuaded the other colonial officials in Mauritius to ask England for financial support to

1 2

For further biographical information on Sir John Pope Hennessy, see the Dictionary of National Biography. These claims are made in Pope Hennessy’s speech to the Council of Government, on closing the legislative session for 1883–84. TNA (PRO), Colonial Office, CO 167/611, despatch 110.

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The Landscape protect the primeval forests of the island.3 And he absolved the Mauritian natives of blame for the destruction that had been done to this ancient forest. ‘The real cause of the destruction of the forests,’ he announced in a speech at the end of his first year as governor, ‘is to be found in the neglect for many years past to carry out the provisions of the old French laws, – neglect shown in the sale, year after year, of thousands of acres of crown forests and forest reserves to capitalists who made large fortunes by cutting down timber that it was highly impolitic, and, in some cases, absolutely illegal to allow them to cut down.’ Mentioning a surveyor from South Africa who had been fined for having chopped down over 7000 trees, Pope Hennessy claimed that ‘[this] gentleman in the course of a few weeks inflicted far greater destruction on the forests of Mauritius than all the hundreds of Indians that I found had been imprisoned’.4 This history is more than just a diverting analogy to a discussion of Spenser. Pope Hennessy was of Irish descent, a politician whose passionate advocacy of Irish home rule reflected many of his convictions about the governance of colonial stations. He publicly drew explicit parallels between the colonial status of Ireland and Mauritius, announcing at an official dinner that ‘the Mauritians, like the Irish, had felt the heavy hand of the English’.5 He had also written, in 1883, the very year in which he travelled from England to take up his post in Mauritius, a book entitled Sir Walter Ralegh in Ireland. Pope Hennessy’s final verdict on Ralegh is surprisingly forgiving, but it resonates with his own attempts to improve the countries where he worked as a colonial governor. Despite Ralegh’s use of the ‘odious crime of assassination’, he writes, there is much that may be forgiven, partly because the ‘cruelty that is repayd with cruelty’ was the general fashion of the day, partly because of the earnest efforts he made to develope [sic] the industrial resources of the country, and no doubt because of the sympathy evoked by the literary and romantic side of his character, as well as the natural indignation one feels at his unjust end.6 3

4

5

6

Several instances of this ongoing debate are recorded in the Colonial Office papers of Mauritius, dating from 1883–84. See TNA (PRO), Colonial Office, CO 167/608, despatches 120 and 162; TNA (PRO), Colonial Office, CO 167/611, despatch 1; TNA (PRO), Colonial Office, CO 167/612, despatch 133. TNA (PRO), Colonial Office, CO 167/611, despatch 110. The ‘old French laws’ may be the conservation policies and regulations introduced by Pierre Poivre, commissaire-general of Mauritius from 1767. For an account of Poivre’s ideas and policies, which places them in a context of both colonial deforestation and an increasingly environmentally-conscious attitude to the governance of island colonies, see Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 184–222. This episode is recorded in the memoirs of Pope Hennessy’s grandson: James Pope-Hennessy, Verandah: Some Episodes in the Crown Colonies 1867–1889 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964), p. 258. John Pope Hennessy, Sir Walter Ralegh in Ireland (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co., 1883), pp. 146–47.

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The Spenserian Wood An aspect of the ‘literary and romantic side’ of Ralegh’s character, one is given to understand, is the part which his Irish neighbour Edmund Spenser plays in this sometimes fanciful history. Pope Hennessy imagines Ralegh ‘wandering with Lord Grey’s Secretary beneath “the green alders by the Mulla’s shore” or sitting in the deep embrasured window of the Warden’s house reading the manuscript of his brother poet’.7 Despite this qualified praise, Ralegh and the administration that he represented come in for criticism for their rapacious policy of deforestation in Ireland. ‘In addition to the women and children,’ Pope Hennessy writes, ‘there were other helpless and innocent objects to be rooted out as enemies to Queen Elizabeth; and, as to these, no man cut down and destroyed more than Ralegh.’8 The English policy, he writes, ‘left its marks on the country’, not least in its destruction of the ‘venerable groves’,9 the ancient forests that were depleted by foreign prospectors, as they were in Mauritius. He speaks of the Irish, before the arrival of the English, as custodians of the ancient forests: ‘The natives, at a time when little was known elsewhere of the advantages of tree-planting, fostered the art, and especially surrounded the numerous abbeys, the seats of religion and learning, with groves’.10 This account is to a significant degree reliant on myth, or sentiment at least, but it clearly suggests that Pope Hennessy’s explanation of Irish history is heavily influenced by his own priorities in Mauritius, or even that his view of the Mauritian forests is influenced by his reading and interpretation of Irish history. It also shows more generally that the subject of Irish deforestation, which most critics have taken as an entirely positivist problem of checking the number of trees that were removed at any one time, can actually be re-interpreted in the light of subsequent political interests. Re-examining the process of deforestation in the light of twentieth-century theories of the production of space allows us again to review this historical moment, and thus to reconsider the allegorical figure of the forest. The forests described in many parts of The Faerie Queene, which have seemed to many critics to be little more than a symbolic backdrop to the events that take place in the poem, are actually subject to the same fluctuating material attention that I have seen in other parts of the poem; they are also important in the View, as well as more broadly in late sixteenth-century Ireland. Because Spenser makes extensive use of the forests of classical and early modern poems as source material, the episodes that take place in Spenserian forests often come with expectations, based on literary precedent and tradition, of how they will unfold.11 In this chapter, however, I want to examine the 7 8 9 10 11

Pope Hennessy, Sir Walter Ralegh in Ireland, p. 114. Pope Hennessy, Sir Walter Ralegh in Ireland, p. 75. Pope Hennessy, Sir Walter Ralegh in Ireland, pp. 76–77. Pope Hennessy, Sir Walter Ralegh in Ireland, p. 78. See, for instance, on the Ovidian tradition, Charles Paul Segal, Landscape in Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’: A Study in the Transformations of a Literary Symbol, Hermes: Zeitschrift für klassische

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The Landscape points in The Faerie Queene where these forests seem to gain material weight, and become not simply static symbols from an exclusively literary vocabulary, neutral backdrops, or parts of a dual structure of wilderness and civility, but also spaces that are produced, destroyed, or maintained by human intervention. I shall be doing so with special emphasis on the active destruction of forests, or at least the schemes devised for the widespread deforestation of Ireland in the 1580s. The subsequent interpretations that scholars from various fields have made of this process are – no less than the plans for the process of deforestation – a matter of ideological contention. They allow us to ask how far we should attend to literary descriptions of the natural world and our treatment of it and relation to it, beyond their status as mere background to man’s affairs, and whether our attention to these landscapes can, or should, result in a consciousness of the natural world, or historical critique of our part in it. Underlying many of the literary interpretations of Spenserian forests is an emphasis on the gloss of the fourth-century commentator Servius, on the word ‘silva’ in Aeneid, 1.314.12 Servius claims that the forest stands for ‘the disorder of the elements (of matter), from which all things are produced’ (‘elementorum congeriem, unde cuncta procreantur’); his analogy with the Greek ‘hyle’ emphasizes the neo-Platonic implications of this primeval matter.13 Servius’s commentary on the ‘silva’ was taken up by other commentators such as Badius and Landino, and in Thomas Cooper’s Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae (1565), for example, where ‘sylua’ is translated not only as ‘a woodde’ but also as ‘store of mattier [sic] digested together’.14 Critics such as Corinne Saunders, William Nelson, and James Nohrnberg have therefore placed Servius’s gloss at the centre of their accounts

12

13

14

Philologie, 23 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1969). In part, Segal accounts for the forests in the Metamorphoses as prefiguring this tradition, ‘the ancestors of the dangerous wild wood of later literature’ (p. 15). ‘Quam Graeci
λην vocant poetae nominant silvam, id est elementorum congeriem, unde cuncta procreantur’ [That which the Greeks call ‘hyle’, the poets call ‘sylva’, a wood; that is the chaos of elements, from which all things are produced]. Servii Grammatici qui Feruntur in Vergilii Carmina Comentarii, ed. Georg Thilo and Hermann Hagen, 3 vols (Leipzig: Teubner, 1881–87), I, p. 114. Another literary tradition deriving from this translation of ‘silva’, and dating back to Statius’s Silvae, is the ‘silva’ as a miscellany of sometimes rough and often occasional poems. See Alastair Fowler, ‘The Silva Tradition in Jonson’s The Forrest’, in Poetic Traditions of the English Renaissance, ed. Maynard Mack and George deForest Lord (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 163–80. Thomas Cooper, Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae (London, 1565), fol. 6E3v. The definition of ‘sylua’ in Thomas Elyot’s Bibliotheca Eliotæ (London, 1542) provides a similar double meaning, although the second definition that it gives appears to be more metaphorical than Platonic: it defines a ‘sylua’ as ‘a woode or place ouergrowen with woodes, also any matter hastely wrytten without study’ (fol. 2K6r).

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The Spenserian Wood of the forests in The Faerie Queene.15 Saunders, indeed, goes so far as to say that Servius’s gloss negates interpretations that search for real forests in literary forests: ‘that Spenser’s forests function according to such interpretations of the silva, rather than as literal landscapes, is exemplified by the events of Book I’.16 It is worth noting at this stage that she chooses the Forest of Errour at the beginning of the first book of the poem to provide evidence for her proposal; it is by looking at other forests in the poem that this interpretation can be disturbed. A second gloss of Servius on a different clause in the Aeneid, ‘tenent media omnia silvae’ [in all the middle space lie woods] (6.131),17 has produced a second, related line of allegorization, in which forests are felt to stand as a ‘metaphor for the snares of the world’.18 And as in the case of the allegory of the forest as primeval matter, this interpretation, which allegorizes the forest as the vicissitudes and deceptions of the worldly life, recurs throughout the Renaissance, in the mythography of Comes and in images such as Dante’s ‘selva oscura’ [dark wood] and the lover of Petrarch’s Rima 54: ‘ “Ahi quanti passi per la selva perdi!” ’ [“Ah, how many steps you are wasting through the wood!”].19 Sir John Harington seems aware of the tradition of this interpretation, which clearly passes through its adaptation in new literary texts. In his notes to Canto IV of his translation of Orlando Furioso, he compares the woods around Atlante’s castle to the ‘darkesome wood’ of Dante’s Inferno and also ‘the wandring wood of which the dolefull Petrarke complaines so often in those his sweet mourning sonnets, in which he seemes to haue comprehended 15

16 17

18

19

Servius is called upon in Corinne J. Saunders, The Forest of Medieval Romance: Avernus, Broceliande, Arden (Cambridge: Brewer, 1993), pp. 189–90; Saunders writes that Servius’ commentary promotes an ‘allegorical concept of the wood as the wilderness of the passions’ (p. 189). See also William Nelson, The Poetry of Edmund Spenser: A Study (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp. 158–65; James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 138; John Erskine Hankins, Source and Meaning in Spenser’s Allegory: A Study of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 63–67. Saunders, The Forest of Medieval Romance, p. 191. ‘TENENT MEDIA OMNIA SILVAE causam reddit cur non facilis sit animarum regressus, quia omnia polluta et inquinata sunt: nam per silvas tenebras et lustra significat, in quibus feritas et libido dominantur’ [TENENT MEDIA OMNIA SILVAE gives the reason why a return to souls is not easy, because all things are polluted and filthy: because through forests he signifies the dark and wild places in which wildness and desire rule]. Servii Grammatici, II, p. 28. Saunders, The Forest of Medieval Romance, p. 191. See also Nelson, The Poetry of Edmund Spenser, p. 164; John M. Steadman, ‘Spenser’s Errour and the Renaissance Allegorical Tradition’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 62 (1961), 22–38 (pp. 34–37). Related to this is the Christian tradition of the wood as ‘the primal source of error’: see Patrick Cullen, Infernal Triad: The Flesh, The World, and the Devil in Spenser and Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 25. Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The ‘Rime sparse’ and Other Lyrics, trans. and ed. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 133. On this Italian tradition, see Nohrnberg, Analogy of ‘The Faerie Queene’, pp. 137–38.

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The Landscape all the passions that all men of that humour haue felt’.20 John Erskine Hankins also suggests that Servius’ gloss on Aeneid (6.295), referring to the ‘error of the woods’ (‘errorem sylvarum’),21 might have suggested the monster Errour living in Spenser’s deceptive wood: ‘This is the wandring wood, this Errours den’ (I.i.13.6).22 Harington’s use of the same phrase may suggest that he is alluding directly to Spenser, or otherwise that he is translating the same sources similarly. The above interpretations, dependent upon the Vergilian glosses of Servius, use the forest as an allegorized philosophical figure. It is also clear that the Spenserian forest is amenable to other types of allegorical description. Henry Peacham’s emblem for ‘Silvius’ in his Minerva Britanna, ‘Nulli penetrabilis’, includes a picture of a forest and an accompanying description in which the line ‘Not peirceable, to power of any starre’, refers directly to The Faerie Queene.23 Again, though, the Spenserian forest that Peacham quotes from is the ‘wandring wood’ that both Spenser and Harington describe: Whose loftie trees yclad with sommers pride, Did spred so broad, that heauens light did hide, Not perceable with power of any starr.

(I.i.7.4–6)

Anne Barton rightly claims that Peacham’s image is a metaphor of ‘a psychological place, the emblem of a mind that prudently hides its thought in darkness’.24 It is a type of metaphor that is often applied to literary representations of forests,25 and does indeed find resonance in Spenser’s allegorical use of the forest, in the first canto of Book 1, as a place of wandering and ‘Errour’. Nonetheless, I want to argue that Spenser’s accounts of forests make use of more than this type of metaphor, which attributes a single meaning to the forest, and

20 21 22 23

24 25

John Harington, Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse (London, 1591), p. 30. Servii Grammatici, II, p. 53. See Hankins, Source and Meaning, pp. 67–68. Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna; or, A Garden of Heroical Devises (London, 1612), p. 182. As Ernst Th. Sehrt suggests in ‘Der Wald des Irrtums: Zur allegorischen Funktion von Spensers Faerie Queene I, 7–9’, Anglia 86 (1968), 463–91, many aspects of Spenser’s wood, particularly the catalogue of trees, can be regarded in relation to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English emblem books. Anne Barton, ‘The Wild Man in the Forest’, Comparative Criticism 18 (1996), 21–54 (p. 25). Compare the psychologized version of symbolic landscapes in Segal, Landscape in Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’, where the symbolic aspects of Ovidian landscape are said to lie in their ‘[correspondence] to an inner landscape, a realm where normally repressed impulses are made visible and possible’ (p. 12). Compare also Paul Piehler, The Visionary Landscape: A Study in Medieval Allegory (London: Arnold, 1971), especially Chapters 5 and 6 (pp. 69–110). Piehler’s study of landscape symbolism deals with medieval allegorical narratives, but he makes frequent reference to Servius. He sees the allegorical landscapes of these narratives in explicitly psychological terms, suggesting that they are underscored by ‘the basic psychic polarity of city and wilderness which naturally arises out of man’s experience of his environment’ (p. 73).

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The Spenserian Wood moreover reduces its materiality by accounting only for what it is said, allegorically, to represent. There also exists a preconception that the forest in The Faerie Queene can be understood as an ever-present and changeless background, a backdrop to other events. As Paul Piehler writes, ‘in the complex inner geography of The Faerie Queene, the predominant landscape is the forest. All adventures take place if not in the actual woods then in places [. . .] which are felt as little more than breaks in the forest continuum.’26 Piehler is correct to stress the frequency of scenes that take place in woodland, but his relegation of forests to an ‘inner’ space suggests that they are ideologically and historically neutral, and ignores the specific types of attention to which they were subject at the time when Spenser was writing; describing them as a continuum, furthermore, might disregard the ways (as I discussed in Chapters 1 and 2) in which the material aspects of the poem’s narrative do fluctuate. Such an approach to the forest distracts us from attending to the different significances and meanings that may be attached to it at different points in the poem.27 Anne Barton describes The Faerie Queene as ‘a poem whose entire world consists of one vast, dangerous and complexly allegorized forest’, implying that the significance of the forest is at least similarly allegorical throughout.28 As in other chapters, my aim here is to ask whether the quality of material reference in the narrative does indeed fluctuate, to examine the conditions which allow those allegories to be constructed in such a way, and to explore the ideological consequences of the construction of such allegorical spaces. The Forest of Errour, in the very first canto of the poem, has been prominently understood through its literary relation with other texts, and indeed it

26 27

28

Paul Piehler, ‘Woods’, in Spenser Encyclopedia, p. 733. The precise sixteenth-century lexical differences between words such as ‘forest’, ‘wood’ and ‘chase’ rarely seem to influence Spenser’s use of these words. In late sixteenth-century usage, the word ‘forest’ has a legal as well as topographical meaning. John Manwood, A Treatise and Discourse of the Lawes of the Forrest (London, 1598) defines a forest as ‘a certen Territorie of wooddy grounds & fruitfull pastures, priuiledged for wild beasts and foules of, Forrest, Chase, and Warren, to rest and abide in, in the safe protection of the King, for his princely delight and pleasure’ (fol. 1r). A forest is subject to forest law rather than civil law, and has specifically designated officials to protect it. It also differs from a chase or a warren according to the different animals found in each. ‘Wood’ and ‘covert’, however, are both topographical descriptions. For Manwood, coverts are the more densely wooded areas, ‘thickets and ful of trees’ (fol. 41r), and indeed, Spenser frequently uses the word ‘couert’ – often in conjunction with words such as ‘glade’ or ‘bowre’ – to denote a very sheltered area where either a knight goes to rest or an unpleasant creature or individual lies hidden, such as the ‘couert nigh at hand’ (I.i.7.1) where Redcrosse and Una encounter Errour. The words ‘forest’ and ‘wood’, however, are often used interchangeably in The Faerie Queene, even when Spenser is describing the presence within them of regal characters such as Diana or Belphoebe, and are even juxtaposed, as in variations on the formulation ‘woods and forests’ (see III.vi.16.4; VI.iv.24.8; VII.vi.38.8). Barton, ‘Wild Man in the Forest’, p. 26.

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The Landscape has a number of literary precedents.29 Many parallels are attributed, in particular, to the catalogue of trees in this episode: Much can they prayse the trees so straight and hy, The sayling Pine, the Cedar proud and tall, The vine-propp Elme, the Poplar neuer dry, The builder Oake, sole king of forrests all, The Aspine good for staues, the Cypresse funerall. The Laurell, meed of mightie Conquerours And Poets sage, the Firre that weepeth still, The Willow worne of forlorne Paramours, The Eugh obedient to the benders will, The Birch for shaftes, the Sallow for the mill, The Mirrhe sweete bleeding in the bitter wound, The warlike Beech, the Ash for nothing ill, The fruitfull Oliue, and the Plantane round, The caruer Holme, the Maple seeldom inward sound. (I.i.8–9)

In a corresponding passage, Virgil lists the ‘picaea’, ‘ilex’, ‘fraxineae trabes’ and ‘robur’ which Aeneas and his men cut from the ‘antiquam silvam’ on the command of the Sybil (Aeneid, 6.179–82).30 Ovid also presents a catalogue (Metamorphoses, 10.90–105), at greater length than Virgil, which Spenser seems to be more reliant upon for his passage, as does Chaucer in the Parliament of Fowls (lines 176–82): The byldere ok, and ek the hardy asshe; The piler elm, the cofre unto carayne; The boxtre pipere, holm to whippes lashe; The saylynge fyr; the cipresse, dethe to playne; The shetere ew; the asp for shaftes pleyne;

29

30

As well as the classical precedents listed below, a number of Irish poems include catalogues of trees. For a catalogue in the twelfth-century poem The Frenzy of Sweeney, see The Faber Book of Irish Verse, ed. John Montague (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), pp. 84–85. Prominently myth-centred accounts of an ancient Welsh poem, ‘The Battle of the Trees’, which also contains a catalogue of trees, of sorts, and an apparently Druidic ‘Tree-Alphabet’ are to be found in Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, rev. edn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), pp. 27–48, 165–204. See also Thomas Herron, ‘ “Goodly Woods: Irish Forests, Georgic Trees in Books 1 and 4 of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene’, Quidditas: Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 19 (1998), 97–122. Herron mentions this Virgilian parallel, and suggests that the poem as a whole manifests a ‘georgic spirit’, ‘an ethos of empire-building heroic labor with its roots in the Irish soil. [. . .] [His] craft, in georgic fashion, was analogous to the mercantile ordering and exploitation of the Irish countryside’ (p. 99). I find Herron’s argument in this article very sympathetic, even if, as will become clear, I find Spenser’s approach to the Irish deforestation less clearly positive.

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The Spenserian Wood The olyve of pes, and eke the dronke vyne; The victor palm, the laurer to devyne.31

So clearly does Spenser’s scene rely on these literary precedents, that Donald Cheney reads it as ‘not merely [. . .] establishing Spenser’s position in the English tradition’, but also commenting self-reflexively upon that tradition and on the ‘naïve and disjunctive reading of nature’ passed down in it. Cheney claims that by providing evidence of man’s ‘confident moral dissection of his universe’, the catalogue of trees is intended to expose ‘a narrow preoccupation with the things of this world’.32 He argues further that the shelter which this forest deceptively appears to offer to Redcrosse and Una – ‘Faire harbour that them seemes, so in they entred ar’ (I.i.7.9) – works as part of the poem’s discussion of ‘the hazards of natural settings, and of physical appearances in general’. But while this interpretation does indeed resonate with many incidents in the first book of the poem that discuss the misleading quality of appearances, it tends to convert the physical space of the forest into an ahistorical point. The physical space of the Irish forests, and their history, intrudes more upon the poem as it proceeds. Space does not permit me to discuss all of the forests in which important scenes of the poem take place.33 Indeed, the extent to which these forest settings are the sites of ideological pressure varies from episode to episode: in some incidents the forest does seem little more than a background, and in others, it is based predominantly on literary tropes and traditions. In order to examine the attention that Spenser and his contemporaries pay to forests, however, and to suggest that by the end of The Faerie Queene the very literary construction of the image of the forest has assumed far more prominent political and historical implications, I want to look at the story of Diana and Faunus which provides an interlude in the poem’s concluding Cantos of Mutabilitie. Michael Holahan has shown that the Mutabilitie Cantos rely on Ovid, both thematically and stylistically, as well as in their condensations of the myths of

31 32 33

The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 387. Donald Cheney, Spenser’s Image of Nature: Wild Man and Shepherd in ‘The Faerie Queene’, Yale Studies in English 161 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), pp. 24–27. The following is not an exhaustive list, but does show how frequently such episodes take place. The Forest of Errour (I.i); Una and the ‘saluage nation’ (I.vi); Braggadocchio confronts Belphoebe (II.iii); Guyon and Britomart catch sight of the fleeing Florimell (III.i); Timias battles with the foresters and first encounters Belphoebe (III.v); the Garden of Adonis (III.vi); the witch’s cabin (III.vii); Hellenore goes to the satyrs (III.x); Scudamour fights with Britomart (IV.vi); Amoret is abducted by the savage man, Lust (IV.vii); Timias is redeemed before Belphoebe (IV.viii); Calepine is rescued from Turpine by a wild man, and saves the child of Sir Bruin from a bear (VI.iv); the wild man tends to Matilda (VI.v); Faunus and Diana (VII.vi); the trial of Mutabilitie (VII.vii). Equally, many episodes occur within sight of a ‘forest nye’, or a ‘forest-side’; see, for instance, II.i.35.5, II.ix.14.8–9.

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The Landscape Phaethon, Callisto, Actaeon and Arethusa.34 But the story of Diana and Faunus is also affected by the implications of the place in Ireland where it occurs, and by the description of the Irish forests preceding it in the poem. The story intersects with the narrative of Mutabilitie’s rebellion against Jove at a specific place in Ireland, Arlo Hill, where Nature’s trial of Mutabilitie is to take place.35 Spenser begins by denying that Arlo is a suitable epic subject, but then suddenly, and at some length, begins to speak about it: And, were it not ill fitting for this file, To sing of hilles and woods, mongst warres and Knights, I would abate the sternenesse of my stile, Mongst these sterne stounds to mingle soft delights; (Beeing of old the best and fairest Hill That was in all this holy-Islands hights) Was made the most vnpleasant, and most ill. Meane while, ô Clio, lend Calliope thy quill. Whylome, when IRELAND florished in fame Of wealths and goodnesse, far aboue the rest Of all that beare the British Islands name, The Gods then vs’d (for pleasure and for rest) Oft to resort there-to, when seem’d them best: But none of all there-in more pleasure found, Then Cynthia; that is soueraine Queene profest Of woods and forrests, which therein abound, Sprinkled with wholsom waters, more then most on ground. (VII.vi.37–38)

‘Arlo’ is an Anglicized version of the name of the glen of Aherlow, situated below the mountain of Galtymore, the highest peak in the Galtee Mountains. It is also called ‘Harlow’ by English writers, and appears also as ‘Aharlow’, ‘Arloo’, or as other similar spellings, in late sixteenth-century English correspondence. The Galtee mountains, and the adjacent Ballyhoura range, run from a point just north of Kilcolman Castle, and extend about thirty miles in an easterly direction.36 Arlo Hill, then, is near to the land which Spenser possessed in Ireland (it is approximately twenty miles from Kilcolman, and apparently visible from it), although not part of it: it is listed as part of the land awarded to Sir Edward Phyton in 1589/90.37 ‘Arlo Wood’ is also depicted, among many other forests, on a late sixteenth-century ‘platt of Monster’.38 34 35 36 37 38

Michael Holahan, ‘Iamque opus exegi: Ovid’s Changes and Spenser’s Brief Epic of Mutability’, ELR 6 (1976), 244–70. For an account of Mutabilitie’s trial that places it in that context, see Patricia Coughlan, ‘The Local Context of Mutabilitie’s Plea’, Irish University Review 26 (1996), 320–41. See William Keach, ‘Arlo Hill’, in Spenser Encyclopedia, p. 60. CSPI, 1588–92, p. 132. TNA (PRO), MPF 74. The map also shows the woods of ‘glangaruf’, ‘glanRought’, ‘Leanmore’,

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The Spenserian Wood In the years after Spenser arrived in Ireland, Arlo enjoyed a reputation that associated it with thieves and rebels.39 References to Arlo are notably frequent in despatches to England in the early years of the 1580s.40 John Norreys, for example, wrote to Burghley on 20 November 1584 that there was ‘now in Arloo one Bourk whoe [. . .] hath assembled vnto him of loose people, some xvj or xx swordes, with which he hath wrought some late spoyles about the border, whome I doubte not but to cutt of shortly’.41 This reference to Arlo is quite typical in the period, and it seems that Arlo was notorious as a hideout for Irish bands who were believed to be joining the Desmonds in rebellion. Warham Sentleger, for example, in November 1579, lists ‘Aharlaughe Woodes’ alongside the ‘greate Wood’, ‘Dromfinyne’, ‘Glanmoire’ and ‘Glanfriske’ as ‘chief fortresses’ of the rebels to which they can flee.42 That a postscript to Sentleger’s letter describes the capture and sacking of Youghal, a town just south of these forests, provides evidence of the activity of the Irish rebels in that area. On 28 July 1580, the Earl of Ormond informed Francis Walsingham that Piers Grace ‘dependeth vppon the traitour the Erle of Desmonde to whom he saieth he swore him self [. . .] and so kepeth still in Aharlo woddes and other places watchinge his tyme when he may doe som greate mischefe’.43 Two weeks later, Ormond told Walsingham that ‘my brother piers butler going a monday last to lay victuall into a castell which he kepeth for her maiesties sarvice in the borders of arlo was layed for by diuers of the traytors’.44 Spenser also refers to ‘fowle Arlo’ in his poem, ‘Astrophel’, where, along with ‘famous

39

40

41 42 43 44

‘Clenglas’, ‘glanflesky’, ‘Dromfynine’, and ‘Killhugy’. It bears annotations in Burghley’s hand, and is dated at approximately 1580 in R. Dunlop, ‘Sixteenth-Century Maps of Ireland’, English Historical Review 20 (1905), 309–37 (p. 323). Andrew Hadfield is surely right to suggest that Spenser’s question, ‘Who knows not Arlo Hill?’ (VII.vi.36), evokes a very local knowledge, although given the volume of correspondence about the Aherlo region, it is perhaps an exaggerated claim that ‘it seems unlikely that anyone outside Spenser’s immediate neighbours on the Munster Plantation [. . .] would have recognized the poet’s mythological sobriquet for Galtymore’. Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 171. The irregularities in the indexing of the separate Calendars of Irish State Papers, however, make it impossible to make any outright assertions about the relative frequency with which Arlo is mentioned. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/112/78. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/70/20. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/74/72. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/75/25. There are several other mentions of Arlo in this context in the Irish State Papers of this time. For example: On 29 August 1582, Henry Wallop and Edward Waterhouse told Burghley that ‘the rebell of Mounster hathe his cheif haunte, in the woodes of Arlowe, and omulrians countreye, bothe being not farre of, from Lymerick’, TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/94/110; On 24 February 1582/3, Geoffrey Fenton reported to Burghley on a skirmish in Arlo with the men of the Seneschall of Imokilly; TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/99/73.

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The Landscape Ardeyn’, it is mentioned as a forest that is ‘wide’ and ‘waste’ (lines 95–96), though not as much so as that which Astrophel enters. Forests are emphasized in the description of Ireland in the Mutabilitie cantos: Arlo is one of many forests, and Ireland seems beautiful because it is so thickly forested.45 The conclusion of the episode in the Mutabilitie cantos, however, seems to provide an explanation for the presence of the alleged rebels and outlaws in the forests around Arlo. One of Diana’s maidens, Molanna, conspires with Faunus to allow him to see Diana naked as she bathes in one of the Irish streams; Diana punishes her by changing her into a stream, before she herself, in a state of fury, leaves Ireland: Nath’lesse, Diana, full of indignation, Thence-forth abandond her delicious brooke; In whose sweet streame, before that bad occasion, So much delight to bathe her limbes she tooke: Ne onely her, but also quite forsooke All those faire forrests about Arlo hid, And all that Mountaine, which doth over-looke The richest champian that may else be rid, And the faire Shure, in which are thousand Salmons bred. Them all, and all that she so deare did way, Thence-forth she left; and parting from the place, There-on an heauy haplesse curse did lay, To weet, that Wolues, where she was wont to space, Should harbour’d be, and all those Woods deface, And Thieues should rob and spoile that Coast around. Since which, those Woods, and all that goodly Chase, Doth to this day with Wolues and Thieues abound: Which too-too true that lands in-dwellers since haue found. (VII.vi.54–55)

This account of Diana’s departure has an effect not only within the narrative of this story, which has often been taken as little more than a comic sub-plot to the trial of Mutabilitie, if one which counterpoints this main story in allegorical and tonal senses.46 It also provides an ideologically significant depiction of the Irish landscape, and makes use of the Faunus story as an etiological myth about the nature of this landscape. Against an appreciation of rich natural 45

46

Compare, in the pageant of the rivers accompanying the marriage of Thames and Medway, Spenser’s mention of ‘the pleasaunt Bandon crownd with many a wood’ (IV.xi.44.2). The River Bandon is in southern County Cork. For an introduction to the history of Irish woodlands, see Eileen McCracken, The Irish Woods since Tudor Times: Distribution and Exploitation (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1971). See, for example, Richard N. Ringler, ‘The Faunus Episode’, Modern Philology 63 (1965–66), 12–19. ‘I hope to show [. . .] not only that the episode does indeed have an allegorical purpose, and one which contributes usefully to the over-all meaning of the Cantos, but also that its tone is consonant with – even if contrasted to – that of the Cantos as a whole’ (p. 12).

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The Spenserian Wood resources is set a narrative of physical and moral decline. The contradictory aspect of this description also relates to the descriptions of Irish land in the View and other related texts: the forests, even after having become ‘most vnpleasant and most ill’ through Diana’s departure, are still ‘faire’, and the countryside is still the ‘richest [. . .] that may else be rid’. The story of Diana and Faunus not only locates a distorted account of the destruction of Irish forests in a place that is both real and mythological. It also locates it historically in relation to two events: the departure of Diana from Ireland and the arrival of the ‘in-dwellers’. Given that Spenser differentiates these ‘in-dwellers’ from the thieves who inhabit the Irish forests, it might be assumed that he is referring to the recent arrivals from England; if he is referring to his personal experience, then the ‘in-dwellers’ might be equated with the New English officials, or Munster planters. This differentiation between two types of inhabitation not only establishes the arrival of the English as a moment of historiographical significance; it also suggests that the ‘Wolues and Thieves’ are causing the state of Ireland to degenerate from the condition in which the English created it. Stanza 38, as Andrew Hadfield writes, ‘invokes a distant mythical time, [. . .] when Ireland was the centre of the universe and was sought out by the gods, rather than neglected by them’.47 But the allegorical parallel between Elizabeth and Diana also implies that English residence in Ireland pre-dates the Irish. What does Spenser mean by claiming that the wolves were left to ‘deface’ the forests? His use of the verb ‘deface’ in physical contexts elsewhere indicates an obliteration or destruction. Another prominent act of defacement in the poem is Guyon’s destruction of the Bower of Bliss: here the term is juxtaposed with other verbs of breaking down, felling, and burning: But all those pleasant bowres and Pallace braue, Guyon broke downe, with rigour pittilesse; Ne ought their goodly workmanship might saue Them from the tempest of his wrathfulnesse, But that their blisse he turn’d to balefulnesse: Their groues he feld, their gardins did deface, Their arbers spoyle, their Cabinets suppresse, Their banket houses burne, their buildings race, And of the fairest late, now made the fowlest place.

(II.xii.83)

Just as in the View, when Irenius tells Eudoxus of the ‘good Townes’ in Ireland which were ‘thoroughe that invndacion of the Irishe [. . .] vtterlye wasted and defaced’ (View, p. 226), defacement in this passage carries the sense of relentless physical destruction.48 When the word ‘deface’ is used in The Faerie 47 48

Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 194. See also, for example: Gormond will ‘holy Church with faithlesse handes deface’, an act that is

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The Landscape Queene in a non-physical, or metaphorical way, it can also signify an act of defaming,49 or, more generally, an action which obscures one’s view of a physical or moral quality.50 Since this line in the Mutabilitie cantos refers to a physical action, however, it seems that the narrator is claiming that the Irish forests are being destroyed. By attributing this defacement of the forests of south-west Ireland to wolves, the narrator implies that by eliminating them, the destruction can be stopped, just as action can be taken to prevent the thieves from thieving.51 There were wolves in Ireland in the sixteenth century, and there were calls for the manufacture of ‘engines’ and traps to capture and exterminate them.52 However, as Barbara Brumbaugh has shown, wolves were often used as an allegorical representation of Catholics and their supposedly pernicious influence.53 As has already been discussed in Chapter 6 above, the Irish rebels were to be prevented from occupying fastnesses in the forests, by chopping the forests down. The malefactors, who, in the terms of Spenser’s story, were permitted to infest the forests after the departure of Diana from Ireland, are to be eliminated by an act of defacement. Warham Sentleger, for example, in the letter quoted above, argues that a force of English soldiers should be employed to ‘Cut downe A greate parte of their Woodes and burne the same; and so quarter their Woodes into Convenient quantitie of Acres, Whereby they might bee ferrittid out of them’. And John Dymmok, in about 1600, wrote of the ‘great plenty of woode’ in Ireland, ‘except in Leinster, where for the great inconveniences finding them to be ready harboures for the Irish rebell, they

49

50

51

52

53

paralleled with his ‘sack[ing]’ and ‘rac[ing]’ of the cities and ‘bren[ing]’ of the grass, ‘that euen the wilde beast shall dy in starued den’ (III.iii.34); vice ‘did deface’ the ‘gentle plants’ of virtue (V.i.1); Talus ‘defaced’ Munera’s castle utterly, ‘that there mote be no hope of reparation’ (V.ii.28); the towers of Belge have been ‘defaced cleene’ (V.x.25.4). See, for example: ‘great pitty was to see | [Verdant, in the Bower of Bliss] his nobilitie so fowle deface’ (II.xii.79.3–4); Artegall says that Braggadocchio ‘others worth with leasings doest deface’ (V.iii.20.8). See, for example: ‘dreaded Night in brightest day hath place, | And can the children of fayre light deface’ (I.v.24.4–5); the Poet asks female readers that they ‘cruelty and hardnesse from you chace, | That all your other praises will deface’ (VI.viii.2). Contrast the destruction that Orlando visits on the forest in his madness, in Orlando Furioso, cantos 23–24. Though in itself no more fantastical a setting, Ariosto’s forest is not geographically located in the way that Spenser’s is, and Orlando’s fury is inspired by a very conventional literary trope: the pastoral lovers’ bower. See Lambeth Palace Library, Carew Papers, vol. 607, fol. 118v, where article 18 of the ‘Book of Information [. . .] for the reformation of the civil government of that realm’, written by Robert Legge for John Perrott (21 January 1584/5), asks that ‘for destruction of ravening and devouring wolves some order might be had [. . .], that the tenant endeavour himself to spoil and kill wolves with traps, snares, or such devices as he may devise’. See CCM 1575–88, p. 401. Barbara Brumbaugh, ‘ “Under the Pretty Tales of Wolves and Sheep”: Sidney’s Ambassadorial Table Talk and Protestant Hunting Dialogues’, Spenser Studies 14 (2000), 273–90.

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The Spenserian Wood have beene cutt downe’.54 Sentleger claims that the efficacy of this scheme is proved by ‘an vncle of myne, who had gouernment of Caterlaughe and laughlin, and coolde never banishe the Rebells, till hee had distroyed A wood thereaboutes, Since which tyme, the wood beeing Spoiled, it is as quiet traveilling, as in eny parte betweene Corcke and Dublin’.55 This deforestation is also called for by a number of commercial and military interests: the same trees that are chopped down to deprive the rebels of their shelter can be sold, exported, or put to use in wood-burning industries. Whereas the Forest of Errour contains perils with little relation to Irish policy of the 1580s, the belief that forests should be cut down, to deprive rebels of their shelter, comes to bear on the forests that are described in later books of The Faerie Queene. Timias’s encounter and fight with the three foresters in Book 3 may be taken as illustrating the fear that Irish forests were being used as hiding-places by rebels and thieves. The first of these men is chased by Timias, and only resolves to attack him when he is out of sight: ‘For soone as he was vanisht out of sight, | His coward courage gan emboldned bee’ (III.v.15.1–2). With his brothers, he resolves to gain revenge within the boundaries of the forest: Forthwith themselues with their sad instruments Of spoyle and murder they gan arme byliue, And with him foorth into the forrest went, To wreake the wrath, which he did earst reuiue In their sterne brests.

(III.v.16.1–5)

The foresters take advantage of the secret places within the forest to plan their revenge, and decide to ambush him at a ‘narrow’ place: 54 55

John Dymmok, A Treatice of Ireland, ed. Richard Butler (Dublin: Irish Archaeological Society, 1842), p. 6. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/70/20. See also a memorandum of 1601 in the Irish State Papers in the Public Record Office, entitled ‘A Discourse of Ireland’, which records the following: ‘The woods and bogs are a great hindrance to us and help to the rebels, who can, with a few men, kill many of ours in a wood through which they can pass only at certain paces [passes]. The rebels can then remain in the woods till they recruit their strength. In the bogs our old soldiers, who know them, can fight at no great loss, and can see the enemy’s strength; but in woods they may fall into an “ambushcado”. If the country is quieted by cutting off the principal rebels much good could be done to the bogs by our labour and by the Irish churls felling, dressing and burning the trees in heaps. This could be done whilst leaving sufficient timber for the use of the country, if a tree is left every twenty yards and the shrubs, &c., either stocked up at the first or continually cut up.’ Alongside this last proviso, though, a note has been added: ‘Many people think that it would have been well if Ireland had been turned into a seapool rather than to have so charged her Majesty. It would have been a better course to have burnt down all the woods, which would have saved her much.’ CSPI 1601–03, p. 253; also discussed in Valerie A. Hall, ‘Woodland Depletion in Ireland over the Last Millenium’, in Wood, Trees and Forests in Ireland: Proceedings of a Seminar Held on 22 and 23 February 1994, ed. Jon R. Pilcher and Seán Mac an tSaoir (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1995), pp. 23–33 (p. 24).

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The Landscape Within that wood there was a couert glade, Foreby a narrow foord, to them well knowne, Through which it was vneath for wight to wade.

(III.v.17.1–3)

They fulfil the fears raised in the View, where these places in the forests, difficult to pass, are identified as the points where the Irish thieves commit their robberies.56 Indeed, the character of a typical Irish man, as Irenius describes it in his condemnation of native customs, is said to suit the woods that he supposedly makes his home: he ‘lurketh in the thicke woods and straighte passages, waytinge for Advantages’ (View, pp. 100–1). In order to negate the advantages that Irish bands supposedly derive from the woods as hideouts, Irenius advises, in a scheme that recalls Sentleger’s, that the forests should be run through with broad pathways: firste I wishe that order weare taken for the Cuttinge downe and openinge of all places thoroughe wodes so that a wide waye of the space of C. yardes mighte be laide open in euerye of them for the safetie of trauellers whiche vse often in suche perillous places to be Robbed and somtimes murdered. (p. 224)

The Faerie Queene continually associates forests with wildness, disobedience and savagery, even if this is sometimes capable of reform: Una encounters the ‘saluage nation’ in the forest, Amoret is abducted by the giant, Lust, and Hellenore is discovered with the satyrs. The idea that the forest is a place of thieves and bandits is also a common trope in medieval as well as early modern literature.57 But this must be understood in the context of a type of narrative, describing the savage and dangerous Irish occupying a distinct forest-space, produced in English accounts of that country.

56

57

Timias’s story has very plausibly been related to Sir Walter Ralegh’s conduct during the Desmond rebellion. See James P. Bednarz, ‘Ralegh in Spenser’s Historical Allegory’, Spenser Studies 4 (1984), 49–70 (pp. 52–58). On Ralegh’s forest ambush by the Seneschal of Imokellie in 1581, see J. H. Adamson and H. F. Folland, The Shepherd of the Ocean: An Account of Sir Walter Ralegh and his Times (London: Bodley Head, 1969), pp. 68–69. The story also recalls that of Humphrey Macworth, one of the many soldiers in the English administration who are frequently mentioned in despatches for their efficient brutality, and who meet their end at the hands of the Irish families whom they make a career of pursuing. Like Timias, Macworth was waylaid by members of a vengeful family. In May 1582, Macworth was appointed, in the absence of John Zouche, to act as the governor of the O’Connors and O’Moores. Lord Grey and the Irish Council informed the Privy Council in London, on 15 May, that Macworth, ‘attended butt with twoo of his Servauntes, and by the waye at Rosbrye in the Countie of Kildare, mett with certen of th’occonnours’, and, having been asked to confer with them, was ‘surprised by them and carryed awaye prisoner towardes the woodes’ (TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/92/40). Less than two weeks later, Sir Nicholas Malby informed the Queen that Macworth had been murdered: ‘the losse is great, and so great, as for saruice against theim his like is not be hadd’. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/92/89. See Wilhelm Busse, ‘ “Im Wald, da sind die Räuber . . .,” ’ in Der Wald in Mittelalter und Renaissance, ed. Josef Semmler (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1991), pp. 113–29.

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The Spenserian Wood * The woods around Arlo were not only renowned for their association with thieves and rebels, an association which, as I have shown, led to proposals that these forests should be chopped down. These forests, many of which suddenly came into English possession after the death of the Earl of Desmond in 1583 and the confiscation of his lands, were also made part of a number of schemes for exploiting the natural resources that Ireland offered.58 The attempts by English entrepreneurs to establish industries in Ireland in the late sixteenth century were very often facilitated by the timber in Ireland that they could use as fuel for their iron forges and glass houses.59 The Acts of the Privy Council in 1591, for instance, record that: Robert Robins and William Carter, inhabitaunts of the countie of Kent, gentlemen, did as parteners undertake certaine iron workes in the countie of Waterford in the realme of Ireland, for the better performance whereof [they] did take of his Lordship and Deane and Chapter of Lushmoore a lease of certaine lands and woods neere to that place.60

In 1593, Thomas Norreys leased certain forests from Conogher O’Callaghan in County Cork, timber from which he was to use in ‘his Iron mylles’.61 The sixteenth century also saw the beginnings of an attempt to establish a sizeable export trade in timber from Ireland to England. Ada Kathleen Longfield shows that the export of timber from Ireland to England was so high in the sixteenth century that many Irish authorities voiced complaints that it was causing depredation there.62 Sir Walter Ralegh, for example, who had in earlier years profited from the export of pipestaves made from Irish timber to Spain and the Canary Islands, applied in 1593, when his Spanish trade was outlawed, for permission to export the staves to England instead. In this letter, Ralegh claims that the workers on his woods also provide a garrison of sorts, and that removing them from the country would deprive Ireland of a means of defence:

58

59 60 61

62

In a document of 1584, now in the Carew papers, discussing the natural resources (including forests) of certain lands in the south-west of the country, Arlo is mentioned also as a place where hawks’ nests, and also ‘the best mylstones’ are to be found. Lambeth Palace Library, Carew Manuscripts, vol. 627, no. 167. See also Michael MacCarthy-Morrogh, The Munster Plantation: English Migration to Southern Ireland 1583–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 224–25. APC, 1591, pp. 213–14. The Lismore Papers: Selections from the Private and Public (or State) Correspondence of Sir Richard Boyle, First and ‘Great’ Earl of Cork, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 2nd series, 5 vols (privately printed, 1887), I, pp. 4–7 (p. 5). Ada Kathleen Longfield, Anglo-Irish Trade in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1929), pp. 118–31. On the speed at which Irish forests were exhausted, see J. H. Andrews, ‘Notes on the Historical Geography of the Irish Iron Industry’, Irish Geography 3.3 (1956), 139–49.

183

The Landscape we must be forced to draw home a great number of able men from thence which are appointed to serue her Maiestie with their weapons vppon anie occasion, which will proue to be a great weakening of the Province of Munster.63

Another document of 1593, referring to Ralegh’s trade in pipestaves, also alleges that the cessation of the Irish timber industry will deprive the country of the strength afforded to it by the presence of the timbermen: Yf this trade of pipe staves hoggsheade bordes & Barrell bordes shalbe longe stayed or altogeather dismissed there wilbe more then twoe hundred Englishe withdrawne from thence which nowe live thereon & are thereby onle mayneteyned beside the vtter overthrowe of that signiory by the decayinge of the townes before specified and greate discoragemente of all the vndertakers or the moste parte of them in Munster.64

These arguments recall my analysis, in Chapter 6, of English claims that the defence of Ireland depended upon learning how to occupy and re-occupy it. Much of Ralegh’s exported timber, and that of the entrepreneurs who followed him in the seventeenth century, left Ireland through Youghal, a town which was frequently menaced by Irish bands believed to be hiding in the forests just to the north.65 Subsequently, in the early years of the seventeenth century, Robert Boyle managed to establish a number of iron works throughout Ireland.66 By the early years of the seventeenth century he had acquired woods in the region of Arlo, and also other woods in the south-west of the country.67 From the very early history of iron-making in the British Isles, charcoal was used as a fuel for smelting the iron ore and forging the iron; indeed, it was not until the eighteenth century that it was supplanted.68 The use of charcoal clearly necessitated a ready supply of wood, and from Anglo-Norman times it had been recognized that forests needed to be managed to prevent the wood from running out.69 The iron industry in this period was of such a small scale, however, and woods still so extensive, that even when legislation was implemented to forbid deforestation, charcoal burners were able to find enough 63 64 65 66

67 68 69

Hatfield House, Cecil Papers, vol. 22, no. 100. Hatfield House, Cecil Papers, vol. 24, no. 68. See A. R. Orme, ‘Youghal, County Cork: Growth, Decay, Resurgence’, Irish Geography 5.3 (1966), 121–49 (p. 131). The economic details of Boyle’s iron-making activities are covered in H. F. Kearney, ‘Richard Boyle, Ironmaster: A Footnote to Irish Economic History’, JRSAI 83 (1953), 156–62. On Boyle’s rise to wealth in Ireland, see also Terence O. Ranger, ‘Richard Boyle and the Making of an Irish Fortune, 1588–1614’, Irish Historical Studies 10 (1956–57), 257–97. Lismore Papers, 2nd series, I, pp. 17–18, 112–15. H. R. Schubert, History of the British Iron and Steel Industry from c. 450 BC to AD 1775 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), pp. 218–24. Efforts to regulate the destruction which iron works caused to royal forests in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are mentioned in Charles R. Young, The Royal Forests of Medieval England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979), pp. 110–11.

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The Spenserian Wood dead and windfallen wood to produce sufficient fuel for the ironworkers.70 As the number of furnaces and forges increased, however, they made increasing demands on the stocks of timber, and by the sixteenth century the cutting down of trees was legislated against in a series of statutes which made reference to the perilous extent of deforestation in England. A ‘bill for the preservation of woods’ was made in 1543 and restated in 1570.71 The statute declares a series of measures in response to the ‘great decay of timber and woods universally within this [. . .] realm of England’ and the ‘great and manifest likelihood of scarcity and lack as well of timber for building, making, repairing and maintaining of houses and ships, as also for fewel and fire-wood’. Facilities for the storage of timber were to be improved, and young coppice woods were to be protected, for example against animals, by enclosures (containing a quarter of all common woodlands) and other measures. An act of 1558 decreed that ‘any timber-tree or timber-trees of oak, beech or ash, or of any part thereof, of the breadth of one foot square at the stub’, growing within fourteen miles of the sea, or a number of major rivers, could not be ‘converted or employed to coal or other fuel for the making of iron’.72 An act of 1581 once again forbade the building of new iron-works or the use of timber for fuel near to the city of London, making exception for parts of the Weald of Surrey, Sussex and Kent.73 In 1585, another statute was put through Parliament which referred to specific parts of the country that were being affected by deforestation, which it blamed on the many iron works in the area: Whereas by the over great negligence or number of iron-works which have been and yet are in the weilds of the counties of Sussex, Surrey and Kent, it is thought that the great plenty of timber which hath grown in those parts hath been greatly decayed and spoiled, and will in short time be utterly consumed and wasted, if some convenient remedy therein be not timely provided.74

No new iron factories were to be built in the area, and the existing forges were to use only dead wood, not healthy timber. Was England suffering from a timber crisis in the late years of the sixteenth century? In his study of the history of the British coal industry, J. U. Nef provides a number of statements, and an analysis of the rising prices of firewood, to suggest that there was indeed a significant, and recognized, deforestation and diminution in the supply of timber.75 His claims are rehearsed and 70 71 72 73 74

75

Schubert, History of the British Iron and Steel Industry, pp. 87–88. 13 Eliz., c. 25; this statute upholds the statute 35 Hen. 8, c. 17. See also the statute of 1535, 27 Hen. 8, c. 7, against ‘abuses in the forests of Wales’. 1 Eliz., c. 15. 23 Eliz., c. 5. 27 Eliz., c. 19. ‘An act for the preservation of timber in the weilds of the counties of Sussex, Surrey and Kent, and for the amendment of highways decayed by carriages to and from iron-mills there’. J. U. Nef, The Rise of the British Coal Industry, 2 vols (London: Routledge, 1932), I, pp. 156–64.

185

The Landscape extended by Archibald and Nan L. Clow, who write that ‘by the time we come to the end of the sixteenth century, an alarming picture of timber famine is emerging’.76 The strength of their arguments is brought into question, however, by Michael W. Flinn. Flinn claims that, although demand for timber certainly did rise during the sixteenth century, this did not necessarily constitute a crisis, and asserts that ‘the occasional hysterical outbursts of contemporary pamphleteers, often defending vested interests, are not perhaps the most reliable guides’.77 G. Hammersley also argues that the complaints about deforestation were confined to small localities and motivated by the protection of self-interest. ‘The dilemma was hotly debated,’ he writes, ‘wherever it seemed to threaten and, because vital local interests were frequently involved, partisans tended to state their case in absolute terms’.78 Certainly, if there was a manifest concern about deforestation in late sixteenth-century England, it was not nationwide; the statutes suggest that problems occurred in local regions. The statutes should be viewed in the context of tentative attempts at forestry management which were made long before the sixteenth century, and also after it. The sudden occurrence of a number of printed books on forestry in English at the beginning of the seventeenth century – for example The Commons Complaint (1611) and Arthur Standish’s New Directions [. . .] for the Planting of Timber and Fire-wood (1613) – need not suggest that there was a paradigm shift in attitudes to forests, and that no care was taken before this date to preserve them.79 On the other hand, the 1585 statute, although speaking very specifically about the iron industry and its destruction of woodland, still permitted the owners of iron works to take wood from coppices

76 77

78

79

Archibald Clow and Nan L. Clow, ‘The Timber Famine and the Development of Technology’, Annals of Science 12 (1956), 85–102 (p. 88). Michael W. Flinn, ‘Timber and the Advance of Technology: A Reconsideration’, Annals of Science 15 (1959), 109–20 (p. 113). Much of my analysis of the statutes in this paragraph is indebted to Flinn’s thorough article. G. Hammersley, ‘The Crown Woods and their Exploitation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 30 (1957), 136–61 (p. 136). Although Hammersley shows in a later article, ‘The Charcoal Iron Industry and its Fuel, 1540–1750’, Economic History Review, 2nd series 26 (1973), 593–613, that the number of charcoal-fuelled blast furnaces in certain areas in England, particularly the Weald, was roughly as high in the 1590s as at any time in the subsequent 150 years, he argues that these factories would have placed only moderate, and very localized, pressure on the woodlands. A contemporary poetic account of English deforestation is to be found in the seventeenth song of Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612), which describes the damage done to the woodlands of the Weald in ‘these yron times’ by ironworking: ‘What should the Builder serve, supplies the Forgers turne; | When under publike good, base private gaine takes holde, | And we poore woefull Woods, to ruine lastly solde.’ The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. William Hebel, 5 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1933), IV, p. 339. Accounts of deforestation occur elsewhere in Poly-Olbion: see 2.477–80; 7.271–84; 13.19–24; 19.41–50; 22.1601–08; 23.131. See also Raphael Lyne, Ovid’s Changing Worlds: English ‘Metamorphoses’, 1567–1632 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 177.

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The Spenserian Wood which they owned: many of the ironmasters in the Weald at this time were also landowners, and so deforestation cannot have been completely curtailed. What we might further observe about these arguments is that they take as paramount an evaluation of the evidence of how many trees were actually cut down. Complaints about the deforestation that was allegedly taking place, in either England or Ireland, or proposals to cut down large areas of forest, are often assessed almost entirely on whether they are corroborated or disproved by empirical evidence. It is frequently argued, on these terms, that the period in which the most significant deforestation took place in Ireland was the early and mid seventeenth century.80 Michael Flinn, for example, doubts whether the deforestation before this date was significant at all.81 A similar argument arose over Robert Greenhalgh Albion’s claim that the shipbuilding needs of the English navy were a steady influence on woodlands from the seventeenth century: other historians have doubted whether this practice was indeed measurably detrimental.82 But this type of argument omits a proper evaluation of the ideological significance of these schemes and complaints, and of the literary works, like The Faerie Queene, in which they are refashioned.83 This process of iron and glass production depended on the production of very particular spatial conditions within which it could operate, and which also

80

81

82

83

See Raymond Gillespie, The Transformation of the Irish Economy 1550–1700, Studies in Irish Economic and Social History 6 (Dublin: Economic and Social History Society of Ireland, 1991), p. 34. Michael W. Flinn, ‘Consommation du bois et developpement siderurgique en Angleterre’, Actes du colloque sur la forêt: Besançon, 21–22 octobre 1966, Annales Littéraires de l’Université de Besançon 88 (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1967), pp. 107–27. Robert Greenhalgh Albion, Forests and Sea Power: The Timber Problem of the Royal Navy 1652–1862, Harvard Economic Studies 29 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926); the principally documentary account of Ronald L. Pollitt, ‘Wooden Walls: English Seapower and the World’s Forests’, Forest History 15.1 (April 1971), 6–15 backdates Albion’s analysis, as it were, into the sixteenth century. Oliver Rackham, Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape (London: Dent, 1976), however, claims that these documentary claims and fears are ‘hard to reconcile with more specific evidence’ (p. 99). A passage in Sir John Harington, A New Discovrse of a Stale Subiect, Called the Metamorphosis of Aiax (London, 1596) provides another example of the contemporary discourse linking the consumption of wood in iron- and glass-works, and the corresponding civilizing benefits. The irony of the passage, which addresses Hugh Plat’s scheme for artificial ‘colebals’, does not detract from the evidence that it gives of that discourse. ‘I would shew the excellent commodity of iron-milles (for if you speake against them your sute will be dashed straight.) I would proue how they reduce wild and sauage woods, to ciuill and frutefull pastures. I would alledge, they are good for maintenance of nauigation, in respect that euerie ship, what with his cast peeces, ankers, bolts and nailes, hath halfe as many tunne of iron as timber to it. I would say, it is a commoditie to the subiect, considering they sel it for twelve or fourteene pound the tunne, and when it came out of Spaine or Holland, it was sold but for eight pound. The like also I would say for glasse: and so concluding, that the woods must needes be spent vpon these two (as doubtlesse they will in a short time) then your devise for artificiall cole, of how homely stuffe soeuer you make it, will be both regarded and rewarded’ (pp. 103–4).

187

The Landscape affected the ideological forces and pressures that are contained in the writings of the time, including The Faerie Queene. I return at this point to the work of Henri Lefebvre. In a passage in his Production de l’espace, Lefebvre demonstrates that capitalist economies – and he is speaking largely about modern economies and societies – engage in ‘une production d’espace qui se poursuit par différence interne au mode de production’ [the production of space on the basis of a difference internal to the dominant mode of production].84 He argues that certain economic systems can divide the space that they occupy, and allocate different parts of that space to different aspects or features of that economic system: ‘Elle commence l’exportation des industries “polluantes” vers les pays mal développés: vers le Brésil en Amérique, l’Espagne en Europe, induisant ainsi des différences internes au mode de production’ [“Polluting” industries are beginning to be exported to less developed countries – to Brazil in the case of America, or to Spain in the European context. It is worth noting that such trends bring about differentiation within a given mode of production].85 Lefebvre claims that the capitalist systems of the late twentieth century work by transporting the more unpleasant, or more unstable, parts of their economies to countries which are less able to resist economic pressures. He is clearly not speaking about the situation of Ireland in the sixteenth century, whether it is understood as colony or unruly periphery, or indeed anything contemporary with it: his theories emerge in the context of global capitalism. It is my contention, however, that the schemes for transporting industries to Ireland in the late sixteenth century also make use of, in Lefebvre’s term, a differentiation of space. Just as Lefebvre shows that capitalist economies produce spatial systems whereby pollution is actually exported to less developed countries, these sixteenth-century schemes for Ireland were at least justified on the basis that an undesirable process of deforestation – as the necessary product of the iron industry – could be exported to Ireland. Ireland was increasingly seen as the place of considerable natural resources, the ‘richest champian’ of the Mutabilitie cantos, which could be used to relieve the deforestation of the English woods. The new English occupants of Ireland conducted a considerable process of mapping, surveying and examination of the lands confiscated from Irish rebels, in order to discover convenient forests and sources of iron ore, among other natural resources.86 These schemes and anxieties, however local or self-interested they might have been, were part of a spatially differentiated system which saw Ireland as a place to which the damaging effects of industry could be exported. The idea that the detrimental aspects of industry could be exported from England to Ireland is made explicit 84 85 86

Henri Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, 3rd edn (Paris: Anthropos, 1986), p. 71. Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, p. 71. On the use of other Irish resources, see M. D. O’Sullivan, ‘The Exploitation of the Mines of Ireland in the Sixteenth Century’, Studies 24 (1935), 442–52.

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The Spenserian Wood in the appeals of George Longe for permission to establish glass works in Ireland. Glass-making, like the manufacture of iron, is an industry that requires a constant supply of wood for fuel,87 and like the manufacture of iron, it is in the late sixteenth century that we find a series of patents and appeals for the setting up of factories in Ireland.88 In 1589, Longe sent two very similar petitions to Burghley. He claimed that after the voiding of the patent granted for glass-making in England to Dollyne and Cary, two merchants from the low countries, the industry was taken up by a number of men, who ‘having spent the woodes in one place doe dayly so contynue erecting newe workes in another place without check or controule’.89 He proposed, if given the patent, to leave only two out of fifteen glass factories in England, and to move the rest to Ireland: Therbye

The woodes in England wilbe preserved./ The superfluous woodes in Ireland wasted, then which in tyme of rebellion her maiestie hath no greater enemye theare./ The country wilbe much strengthened for euery glashouse wilbe so good as 20 men in garrison The country wilbe sonner brought to civilitye for many poore folke shalbe sett on worke./90

Longe explicitly overlaps the military and industrial motives for cutting down the Irish forests, and like Ralegh he adds that the workers whom he will take over to Ireland will serve as a standing garrison. In 1597, Longe made a similar appeal to Queen Elizabeth, apparently asking for a continuation in his patent. He repeats in very similar terms his earlier appeals about the benefits that will accrue from the cutting down of woods for glass works. Benefit will arise, he says, ‘To her Maiestie’, in that glass, ‘beeing mad in Ireland and transported hether, will yeild Custome, at the shipping, & dischardging to her Maiesties great proffitt’. It will bring benefit ‘To the Commune wealth’, because ‘the Timber & woodes in England shalbe preserued. & the superfluous woodes in Ireland to better vse imployed, being now a Contynuall harbour for Rebelles’, because ‘manye Iidle [sic] people wilbe sett on worke, to Cutt wood, burne ashe & dig & Carry sand, Claye &c.’,91 and because ‘much trade & ciuility will encrease in that rud Countrye, by 87

88 89 90 91

See D. W. Crossley, ‘The Performance of the Glass Industry in Sixteenth-Century England’, Economic History Review, 2nd series 25 (1972), 421–33 (pp. 430–32); Eleanor S. Godfrey, The Development of English Glassmaking 1560–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 47–50. See M. S. Dudley Westropp, Irish Glass: A History of Glass-Making in Ireland from the Sixteenth Century, rev. edn, ed. Mary Boydell (Dublin: Allen Figgis, 1978), pp. 20–24. On Cary (Jean Carré), see Godfrey, The Development of English Glassmaking, pp. 16–28. On George Longe, see Godfrey, The Development of English Glassmaking, pp. 52–53. BL, Landsdowne Manuscripts, vol. 59, no. 72; see also BL, Landsdowne Manuscripts, vol. 59, no. 75. On the slippage here from ‘poore folke’ to ‘Idle people’, compare Chapter 9.

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The Landscape inhabiting those great woodes, and by passing to, & fro, of shipps for, transportation of the glass’. ‘It shall not be preiudiciall,’ he concludes, ‘for England maye be served of better glass, then Can bee mad heere at so low price, or rather Cheaper. neyther in Ireland shall any tymber be wasted, thear being such mighty paces [sic] & vnder woodes, that vnpossible it is to spoile them, Contynually growing againe’. He adds that he has ‘kept tenn yeares in the end of Drumfenning woodes a glashouse’, and claims that it has caused no lasting damage to the woods, and has indeed had the effect of making the country safer: ‘Thear is no signe of wast, onely the wayes now passable in end of the Desmundes warres the seneshall lay in it, when 500 men durst not attempt to pass that waye’.92 Longe’s protestations are equivocal, even confused, on the matter of whether he expects the forests to be wasted, or defaced, by his activities. It is rare that any of these schemes make any suggestion that individual trees or areas of woodland ought to be left to provide a continuing resource, although such provisions are occasionally proposed. The contract denoting O’Callaghan’s lease of his woods in County Cork to Thomas Norreys asks that ‘no other person or persons’ be permitted ‘to spoyle waste or consume the same’, and that Norreys’s workers ‘make noe spoyle of any the Trees where Lykelyhoode of any hawckes might breed any yeare during thesayde yeares and tearme aforesayde’.93 As in the case of the English statutes against deforestation, though, this clause seems designed to manage the resources in order to protect an existing interest in the timber.94 Lord Grey and the Irish Council also noted the need for the preservation of Irish forests, in a memorandum (a copy of which we have in Spenser’s hand) to Queen Elizabeth which discussed the granting of custodiams for Irish lands to English soldiers and servants: yt agreeth both with auncient Custome here & with reason & most convenient for your Maiesties Commodity, that as soone as any land escheateth, yt should be presently Committed to the Custody of some person who should see the houses & woodes preserved.95

Grey’s proposal for the preservation of Irish forests and natural resources is made in order to favour English interests, just as the natural resources supposedly available in Ireland were used in order to encourage English investors and families to settle there. In his Brife Description of Ireland (1590), for example, Robert Payne speaks of the natural resources to be found in Ireland; among these is wood: 92 93 94

95

Hatfield House, Cecil Papers, vol. 37, no. 22. Lismore Papers, 2nd series, I, pp. 6–7. Compare BL, Additional MS 19869, a document written by Spenser himself, in which he declares that ‘I Edmund Spenser of kilcolman esquire doe giue vnto mac Henry the keeping of all the woodes which I haue in Ballyganim & of the rushes and brakes without making any spoyle thereof’. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/92/11(I).

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The Spenserian Wood There is much good timber in manye places, and of that streightnesse and so good to reaue, that a simple workeman with a Brake axe will cleaue a greate Oke to boardes of lesse then one ynche thicke [. . .]. Also there is great store of Lead Ore, & Wood sufficiente to mayntayne diuers Iron and lead workes (with good husbandrie) for euer.96

Payne’s book is presented as being written ‘vnto xxv. of his partners for whom he is vndertaker there’, and includes advice to reassure them that reports of the ‘great danger in trauelling the countrie’ are untrue: ‘Let not the reportes of those that haue spent all their owne and what they could by any meanes get from others in England, discourage you from Ireland’.97 The View demonstrates very clearly that Spenser was concerned with the status of Irish forests, both as hiding-places for Irish rebels and as exploitable sources of fuel and timber. In the View, Irenius speaks about the natural commodities that are to be found in Ireland, which he describes as ‘a most bewtifull and swete Countrie’. Ireland, he says, is ‘adorned with goodly woodes fitt for buildinge of howsses and shipps so comodiously as that if some princes in the worlde had them they they [sic] woulde sone hope to be Lordes of all the seas’ (p. 62).98 The View contrasts this potential commercial advantage to be extracted from the forests in a land which can potentially be ‘profitable to her maiestie’ (p. 197), with discussions of the advantage that the Irish obtain from them. Irenius places the prevalence of forest-dwelling thieves in Ireland within a historiographical frame: he says that ‘other Realmes [. . .] haue bene annoyed with like evills that Irelande now is’, and implies that Ireland stands at a historical state which other European countries, including England, passed through many centuries earlier: And firste in this our Realme of Englande it is manifest by reporte of the Cronicles and other ancient writers that it was greatlie infested with Robbers and outlawes which lurkinge in woodes and faste places vsed often to breake forthe into the hywaies and sometymes into smalle villages to Robb and spoile. (p. 201)99 96 97 98

99

Robert Payne, A Brife Description of Ireland (London, 1590), p. 6. Payne, A Brife Description, p. 2. On the modulation in this passage of ‘aesthetic appreciation of natural beauty [. . .], through plans for its commercial exploitation, into fantasies of world empire’, see Richard McCabe, ‘Edmund Spenser, Poet of Exile’, Proceedings of the British Academy 80 (1993), 73–103 (p. 83). McCabe is right to point out the ideological manoeuvre in Spenser’s passage, but in light of the passage’s proximity to Payne’s more obvious propaganda, he might be slightly overstating Spenser’s concern with the appreciation of natural beauty: explicit commercial concerns are, I would argue, paramount in this passage. On the historiographical parallel between England and Ireland, see Debora Shuger, ‘Irishmen, Aristocrats, and Other White Barbarians’, Renaissance Quarterly 50 (1997), 494–525. Irenius claims that the solution to this problem in England was a spatial division, which relates cartographic schemes to the imposition of government: ‘For Redresse wheareof it is written that kinge Alured, or Alfred [. . .] did devide the realme into shieres’ (p. 201).

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The Landscape What the View does not explicitly state is that it is also the exploitation of the woods as industrial resource, not just their use as hideout for thieves, which has a temporal frame in which England and Ireland occupy different stages. Deforestation, which has reached a level in England where it causes concern at least to some vested interests, is to be transported to Ireland. The Faerie Queene and the View differ not in their attitudes to forests, but in the openness with which they declare their ideological stances. Different episodes in The Faerie Queene that take place in the forest show different aspects of this ideology to different degrees: the fear, and the warnings, that Irish rebels were using forest paths as places of ambush, the desire to strengthen places by occupying them with English labourers and troops. The Faerie Queene does not present a clear statement of forest policy or propaganda, and indeed the episodes within the poem which take place within forests, patchwork-like, have differing historical and ideological force. It is in the Mutabilitie cantos, though, that this industrial relation, which produces a significant spatial relation between England and Ireland and which underpins much of English policy in Ireland in the late sixteenth century – policies of plantation, national defence, and deforestation – can be glimpsed. It is at this point in The Faerie Queene that Spenser juxtaposes an account of the richness of the Irish forests with protests about their dangers, and seems to refer to the deforestation that English investors were starting to carry out in Ireland, only – in a reversal of Sir John Pope Hennessy’s position – blaming it on the activity of Irish wolves and thieves. The description of the Forest of Errour, with which the poem begins, overlays a number of literary and philosophical tropes onto a familiar setting; in the Mutabilitie cantos, on the contrary, Spenser’s description of the forest is also a description – and an ideologically-loaded transformation – of the processes by which the forest, as material space, is produced, maintained, and destroyed. Like the View, the Mutabilitie cantos implicitly praise the beauty of the Irish country overwhelmingly in terms of commercial interest. That this ideology, these fears and these pressures are articulated, though never as one and not consistently, should make us reluctant to think of The Faerie Queene as uniformly covered with a single, undifferentiated forest. Spenser never in The Faerie Queene makes an explicit statement of the connection between these policies, nor does he even juxtapose them openly, as he does in the View. But there is clearly an ideological parity between these two works, even if The Faerie Queene never declares its ideological position so openly. By confining the discussion of deforestation in sixteenth-century Ireland exclusively to a positivist analysis of whether the empirical facts corroborate the various protestations and schemes, we ignore the fact that both the deforestation itself, and its various justifications or criticisms, are products of a wide ideological network. The description of the ‘in-dwellers’, and their defaced lands in the Mutabilitie cantos, implies that the industrial history of the Irish forests (and paradoxically the history of their destruction) begins with the 192

The Spenserian Wood English plantations of the 1580s. By beginning their accounts of the Irish forests before the English arrival, other historians can account for the pre-English Ireland, or at least the Ireland before the sixteenth-century plantations, as a time in which ancient forests were widespread and protected. Gerard Boate writes in his Irelands Naturall History (1652) that: In antient times, and as long as the land was in the full possession of the Irish themselves, all Ireland was very full of Woods on every side [. . .]. But the English having setled themselves in the land, did by degrees greatly diminish the Woods in all the places where they were masters, partly to deprive the Theeves and Rogues, who used to lurk in the Woods in great numbers, of their refuge and starting-holes, and partly to gain the greater scope of profitable lands.100

With fifty years’ hindsight, Boate delineates the English policy very clearly. His account of a wooded ancient Ireland may or may not be fanciful. But he does leave open the possibility of questions, the type of which Sir John Pope Hennessy asked in Mauritius, but which did not trouble the English contemporaries of Spenser, perhaps because the answers were self-evident to them. For whose benefit were the forests being cut down? Why did they choose to depict the forests as the kind of spaces that they did? And whose benefit, and the benefit of what, was being disregarded? A poem dating from approximately 1650 (and thus nearly contemporary with Boate’s study) records the sadness of ‘Sean O’Dwyer of the Glen’ at the deforestation carried out, as an editor of the poem believes, in the Glen of Arlo by the armies of Oliver Cromwell. The poem reveals the connection, disguised by statements such as Spenser’s, between these forests and an Irish way of life: Meadows in stream-cut valleys Have no vigor, no strength of men, No glass or cup is raised To health or happy life; My bare hills! loss of hedges From low field to mountain stacks Leaves the hare on thickets’ edges, A vagrant on the plain. What is this raid of strangers But long-drawn cutting and clearing? Sweet-whistled thrush and blackbird Without branches for their singing, An omen of coming troubles Burdened priest and people Adrift in empty harbors Of deep mountain glens.101

100 101

Gerard Boate, Irelands Naturall History (London, 1652), p. 119. Irish Poems: From Cromwell to the Famine, trans. and ed. Joan Keefe (Lewisburg: Bucknell

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The Landscape A voice like this, not contemporary to Spenser but only slightly later than him, and coming from a tradition of bardic and Gaelic poetry that he was so ambivalent about, might provide not only a different kind of attitude to the Irish deforestation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but a different poetic tradition, and different poetic response, from Spenser’s conversion of the Irish deforestation into georgic and aetiological myth. A study of the destruction of the Irish forests in the late sixteenth century, and of the writers who described or advocated it, of whom Spenser was among the most eloquent, allows us to examine the ideological basis of an example of the management or mismanagement of a natural resource. It also provides evidence of the way that such an attitude to natural resources, in military situations, can be accompanied by claims of propriety over landscape, claims which disregard the interests of other groups and individuals. And discussing Spenser in this context permits us a much sharper look at his allegory; it allows the forest to be both a romance trope and something that he is responding to historically, and allows us to see much clearly how the relation between these two responses shifts throughout the poem. In the following chapter, I remain in the landscape of The Faerie Queene: I will discuss it in relation to the ideologies and actions, many of them similarly destructive, directed at huts and hovels in sixteenth-century England and Ireland.

University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1977), pp. 35–36. I thank John Kerrigan for pointing me towards this poem: he has also pointed out to me that the trope of protest against deforestation occurs in a number of sixteenth-century Welsh poems, including ‘Coed Glyn Cynon’ [Glyn Cynon Wood] and ‘Coed Marchan’ [Marchan Wood]. Jane Grogan has directed my attention to another seventeenth-century Irish poem, ‘Cill Chais’, which speaks of the destruction of the woods: ‘Cad a dhéanfaimid feasta gan adhmad? | Tá deireadh na gcoillte ar lár’ [What will we do from now on without timber? | Now that the end has come to the forests].

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Chapter 9

THE HOUSES OF THE POOR

N

O SOONER does Florimell appear at the beginning of the third book of The Faerie Queene than she is chased out of sight again by a ‘griesly Foster’, and then immediately by Prince Arthur and Sir Guyon, who set off in pursuit behind her, and behind the man attacking her. When she manages at last to evade her pursuers and to stop to rest, she finds herself on a hillside, overlooking a valley, where she spots a thin column of smoke rising through the trees. Taking this as a ‘chearefull signe [. . .] | That in the same did wonne some liuing wight’ (III.vii.5.4–5), she makes her way in that direction: There in a gloomy hollow glen she found A little cottage, built of stickes and reedes In homely wize, and wald with sods around, In which a witch did dwell, in loathly weedes, And wilfull want, all carelesse of her needes, So choosing solitarie to abide, Far from all neighbours, that her diuelish deedes And hellish arts from people she might hide, And hurt far off vnknowne, whom euer she envide.

(III.vii.6)

The palaces of monarchs and nobles are not the only houses in The Faerie Queene. The hovel which Florimell discovers is an example of the poor dwellings which appear at many points in the poem, but much less frequently in writing about it. The description of the witch’s hut as ‘homely’ seems to denote humble poverty rather than comfortable and modest plainness, especially since she is discovered sitting straight on the ‘dustie ground’ (III.vii.7.5). It presents us with a type of building unlike the wealthier and more ostentatious homes in the poem, and also with a different type of interior space. Rather than a house containing several rooms with different functions, it is a mere single living space.1 It is located, moreover, in a separate and distinct space in 1

‘In old time the houses of the Britons were slightly set up with a few posts and many raddles, with stable and all offices under one roof, the like whereof almost is to be seen in the fenny

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The Landscape the landscape of the poem, a place in isolation from all other habitations. Indeed, the spatial relation of this house to other places, mentioned explicitly by Spenser (‘Far from all neighbours’) provides a further suggestion that at points The Faerie Queene does indeed depict a landscape of sorts, a world in which locations begin to join up. It is the task of this chapter to argue that these two spaces in the poem, the architectural space of the hovel and the topographical space within the landscape, are being described in relation to one another. The shape and the manner in which these houses are built, and the place where they are erected, are affected by the ways in which contemporary attitudes construe, and manipulate, the place which their owners occupy in society. These attitudes exert no less influence over the descriptions of the houses that find their way into The Faerie Queene. The cottages which were soundly constructed with white-plastered surfaces above timber frames, and many of which, thanks to their waterproofing and sturdy structures, still survive today, are not the houses that I am looking at here.2 I have in mind a different type of dwelling, very small and built from the flimsiest materials, frequently overnight.3 Professions such as charcoalmaking required temporary labour, and the men who worked in them built dwellings which were also temporary,4 and immediately destructible, by landowners as well as by the cottagers themselves.5 Joan Thirsk warns us rightly that there is often no easy distinction to be made between these houses and more permanent homes built in the period;6 we must still be aware, though, of

2

3

4

5

6

countries and northern parts unto this day, where for lack of wood they are enforced to continue this ancient manner of building.’ William Harrison, The Description of England, ed. Georges Edelen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), p. 195. A type of house described at length in Harry Batsford and Charles Fry, The English Cottage, 3rd edn (London: Batsford, 1950) and Sidney Oldall Addy, The Evolution of the English House (London: Sonnenschein; New York: Macmillan, 1898). G. E. Fussell, The English Rural Labourer: His Home, Furniture, Clothing & Food from Tudor to Victorian Times (London: Batchworth Press, 1949) writes that ‘at its smallest, [the Tudor cottage] contained one room, most probably 16ft by 13ft’ (p. 12). Many accounts of squatters’ hovels suggest something even smaller. In the early 1970s, though, there was still one example of such a hut, made from poles tied together with string, surviving near Newmarket. Margaret Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), p. 49. The photograph of a charcoal burner’s hut near Sheffield, taken by Addy (Addy, Evolution, p. 5) shows that similar constructions were still in use at the end of the nineteenth century. ‘Before this common was wholly enclosed, there were two little houses or cottages upon it near the south-west corner of the common [. . .]. Mr Osmary Hill (about the beginning of the Earl of Bridgewater’s time), took a lease of this common and enclosed it; he pulled down the cottages, and built a fair house upon it.’ Richard Gough, The History of Myddle, ed. Peter Razzell (Firle: Caliban Books, 1979), p. 62. The Agrarian History of England and Wales, ed. H. P. R. Finberg and Joan Thirsk, 8 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967–2000), IV: 1500–1640, ed. Joan Thirsk (1967), p. 761.

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The Houses of the Poor the range of buildings which were part of the early modern English landscape. The very few descriptions that we have of huts and hovels in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland also speak of a large class of extremely ramshackle, and often temporary and transient, dwellings.7 Captain Cuellar, a survivor from one of the ships of the Spanish Armada wrecked on the Irish coast, wrote to Spain in 1589 that the Irish peasants he had seen lived ‘like beasts’ in ‘huts made of straw’.8 As in England, these hovels most often consisted of one room, which would also house livestock.9 The fire in the centre of this room made it very smoky, and the dirtiness with which this was equated was an important aspect of English representations of these hovels.10 I shall return later to the Irish ‘booly’ houses, and the special importance that they had in the formation of ideologies about the place of the poor Irish. That so few of these houses have survived, and that they were often built at the time to serve as little more than provisional measures for the transitory and illiterate, means that we are provided with little evidence of them, either material or documentary, to study. As J. H. Bettey notes in an introduction to some of the few sources available, ‘there are very few references which give any details of these dwellings, of the materials used or of their size and method of construction’.11 This means that they are necessarily a blind-spot in architectural history; it is the task of this chapter not only to gather ways of analysing their appearances in the poem, but also to consider the ways in which contemporary criticism, as much as early modern society, has avoided looking at them. Deborah Cartmell argued in the Spenser Encyclopedia that there are ‘two major critical approaches’ to Spenser’s buildings. ‘The first is taken by

7

8

9 10

11

On this type of house in early modern Ireland, see Caoimhín Ó Danachair, ‘Representations of Houses on some Irish Maps of c. 1600’, in Studies in Folk Life: Essays in Honour of Iorwerth C. Peate, ed. Geraint Jenkins (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 91–103; Philip Robinson, ‘Vernacular Housing in Ulster in the Seventeenth Century’, Ulster Folklife 25 (1979), 1–28; Alan Gailey, ‘Changes in Irish Rural Housing, 1600–1900’, in Rural Ireland 1600–1900: Modernisation and Change, ed. Patrick O’Flanagan, Paul Ferguson, and Kevin Whelan (Cork: Cork University Press, 1987), pp. 86–103. Even in the nineteenth century, the poorest peasants who lived in the boggy areas of the country frequently constructed their houses partly underground, or cut into the sides of hills. See Caoimhín Ó Danachair, ‘Semi-Underground Habitations’, JGAHS 26 (1954–56), 75–80. A Letter Written on October 4, 1589, by Captain Cuellar of the Spanish Armada to His Majesty King Philip II, Recounting his Misadventures in Ireland and Elsewhere after the Wreck of his Ship, trans. by Henry Dwight Sedgwick, Jr. (London: Elkin Mathews; New York: Richmond, 1896), p. 69. See Caoimhín Ó Danachair, ‘The Combined Byre-and-Dwelling in Ireland’, Folk Life 2 (1964), 58–75. ‘Wee liue in Clenly houses, they in Cabinns or smoaky Cottages.’ The Irish Sections of Fynes Moryson’s Unpublished ‘Itinerary’, ed. Graham Kew (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1998), p. 51. J. H. Bettey, ‘Seventeenth-Century Squatters’ Dwellings: Some Documentary Evidence’, Vernacular Architecture 13 (1982), 28–30 (p. 28).

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The Landscape Coleridge who views the topography and, by implication, the buildings of The Faerie Queene as “mental” spaces, [. . .] and the second by Warton (1754), who identifies some of the buildings in Fairyland as actual places in Elizabethan London and its environs.’12 As long as the poem’s architectural descriptions are seen as significant only either in sustaining allegorical structures that lie beyond them,13 or in the resemblance that they bear to particular buildings in Elizabethan England,14 these unremarkable and largely undistinctive and indistinguishable hovels will also remain a blind-spot in Spenserian criticism. I shall return at the end of this chapter to subsequent criticism and analysis of these hovels, to argue that this writing shares with texts like The Faerie Queene a responsibility for the way in which hovels in the twenty-first century, as much as the sixteenth, are seen. This responsibility, I shall argue, is as much moral as it is academic. In the same decade as Spenser was writing the first three books of The Faerie Queene, these small houses became the subject of a new English law. A statute was passed through parliament in 1589, with the purpose of ‘the avoiding of the great inconveniences which are found by experience to grow by the erecting and building of great numbers and multitude of cottages, which are daily more and more encreased in many parts of this realm’. This statute made it illegal to construct any such building, which was defined in law as being without a sufficiently large plot of land: After the end of this session of parliament, no person shall within this realm of England make, build or erect, or cause to be made, builded or erected, any manner of cottage for habitation or dwelling, nor convert or ordain any building or housing made or hereafter to be made, to be used as a cottage for habitation or dwelling, unless the same person do assign and lay to the same cottage or building four acres of ground at the least.15

The central issue of the law as it was exercised seems to have been that a house 12 13

14

15

Deborah Cartmell, ‘Buildings’, in Spenser Encyclopedia, pp. 119–20 (p. 119). Despite its strengths, R. F. Hill, ‘Spenser’s Allegorical “Houses” ’, MLR 65 (1970), 721–33 shows the deficiencies of this approach when applied reductively. Hill moves from proposing to analyse the allegorical houses in the poem to a claim that, since the poem is allegorical and didactic, all of the houses must be read as allegorical instruction. ‘As the whole poem is an instruction all its “Houses” are so, and not merely those which occur in such cantos as have been described as “cantos of instruction and vision” ’ (p. 722). Huts and hovels are omitted from Hill’s discussion. Of the entrance to Mercilla’s palace, for example, the Variorum editor writes that ‘Spenser is here describing an entrance to Elizabeth’s (Mercilla’s) Court, most likely Hampton Court.’ The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al., 12 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1932–57), V: ‘The Faerie Queene’, Book V, ed. Ray Heffner (1936), p. 237. He goes on to provide references about various features of Hampton Court, including the hall, screens and a large portrait of the porter. 31 Eliz., c. 7.

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The Houses of the Poor of this kind could not be built to be lived in: the question of habitation was apparently of significant debate in separate King’s Bench cases in 1617 (The King against Phillips), 1628 (Day’s case), and 1682 (anonymous).16 The same statute also made it illegal for more than one family to live in one of these hovels, or for any ‘inmates’, that is subtenants or lodgers, to be housed there.17 It also accounted in specific terms for the fines which were to be levied in both cases. It allowed for exceptions to its rule, though, if the house in question did have more than four acres of land attached to it, if it had been constructed before March 1589, if it had been built to house ‘a poor, lame, sick, aged or impotent person’, or if the owner were engaged in one of a number of types of work, and needed a shelter nearby. Such professions might include work as a shepherd, as a park-keeper, a sailor or a labourer engaged in ‘making, furnishing or victualling of any ship or vessel used to serve on the sea’, and work on ‘any mineral works, coal mines, quarries or delfs of stone or slate, or in or about the making of brick, tile, lime or coals within this realm’. Even this final exception came with the strict proviso, though, that the cottage be within a close distance of the place where its owner worked: so as the same cottages or buildings be not above one mile distant from the place of the same mineral or other works, and shall be used only for the habitation and dwelling of the said workmen.18

Likewise, if the owner of the hut were working on a ship, his building had to be within one mile of the sea or a navigable river. The statute thus demanded that the cottage be close to a place of work, and that it be built and inhabited only by a person who engaged in permitted or licensed labour. Controlling the location of the houses was intended to entail a control over the behaviour of their inhabitants.19 16

17 18 19

For reports of these cases, see The Second Part of the Reports of Edward Bulstrode (London, 1688), p. 264; John Godbolt, Reports of Certain Cases Arising in the Severall Courts of Record at Westminster (London, 1652), p. 383; The Reports of Sir Peyton Ventris Kt., 2 vols (London, 1696), I, p. 107. The OED lists this statute as the first recorded instance of the word ‘inmate’. 31 Eliz., c. 7. A strong objection was made to this law by John Winthrop, one of the leaders of the expedition to Massachusetts, on the grounds of its attitudes to the poor. The objection occurs in a document of c. 1629 entitled ‘Reasons to be considered for iustifieinge the undertakeres of the intended Plantation in New England, & for incouraginge such whose hartes God shall move to ioyne wth them in it’. Winthrop writes, ‘This Land growes weary of her Inhabitants, soe as man, whoe is the most pretious of all creatures, is here more vile & base then the earth we treade upon, & of lesse prise among us then an horse or a sheepe: [. . .] all townes complaine of the burthen of theire poore, though we have taken up many unnessisarie yea unlawfull trades r to mainetaine them, & we use the authoritie of the Law to hinder the increase of o people, as by urginge the Statute against Cottages, & inmates, & thus it is come to passe, that children, servants & neighboures, especially if they be poore, are compted the greatest burthens, wch if thinges weare right would be the cheifest earthly blessinges.’ Robert C. Winthrop, Life and

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The Landscape What was the purpose of this statute? Modern responses have frequently seen it as an expression of governmental benevolence and charity. G. E. Fussell writes that the statute was created ‘with the idea of enabling men to be self dependent, [. . .] to make the cottagers at least partly free from complete dependence upon wages, and to prevent excessive overcrowding’. ‘Unfortunately,’ he writes, ‘this excellent measure was impossible to enforce.’20 Joan Thirsk, in a chapter on enclosure in the Agrarian History of England and Wales, also writes that the statute was intended as a means of relieving poverty, by preventing the destitute from settling in houses which could afford them little support. The hovels, she writes, often [. . .] lacked any land, and became a desperate refuge for paupers who had little hope of supporting themselves and who made heavy demands on the charity of the rest of the community. The new legislation, therefore, was designed to preserve the principle that all countrymen should have some land for their essential support.21

Indeed, although the process of enclosing common land proceeded comparatively slowly in the sixteenth century, it did continue to cause a high level of homelessness, and was kept under keen vigilance by parliament. The engrossment of the land belonging to smaller farms also created a high number of cottages which had insufficient land to earn an independent living. Perhaps, though, we can move beyond the conjectural imputing of motives to the law-makers, and to analyse the process by which the law came into being, and the way its ideas entered the culture and thought of the late sixteenth century. The bill was initially approved by the House of Lords without remark, and was sent to the Commons on 15 March 1589. On 17 March, the Commons were sent a notice that the bill, and others, ‘may with all convenient speed be considered of and expedited, especially for that it is very like that this Parliament draweth near unto an end’,22 but three days later it was sent back to the Lords with requests for amendments. Simonds D’Ewes, describing the passage

20 21

22

Letters of John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts-Bay Company at their Emigration to New England, 1630, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1869), I, p. 309. Fussell, English Rural Labourer, p. 4. Joan Thirsk, The Agrarian History of England and Wales, IV, p. 228. Thirsk also discusses the succession of laws introduced in an attempt to control enclosure. A discussion of the Tudor statutes is to be found in Maurice Beresford, ‘Habitation versus Improvement: The Debate on Enclosure by Agreement’, in Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England, in Honour of R. H. Tawney, ed. F. J. Fisher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), pp. 40–69. For a discussion of the slow rate of enclosure in the period, but its comparative importance, see J. R. Wordie, ‘The Chronology of English Enclosure, 1500–1914’, Economic History Review, 2nd series 36 (1983), 483–505 (p. 494). Simonds D’Ewes, A Compleat Journal of the Notes, Speeches and Debates, both of the House of Lords and House of Commons throughout the Whole Reign of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1693), p. 447.

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The Houses of the Poor of the bill does not reveal what these requests were, but it is possible, tentatively, to infer what they may have been, because on that same day, 20 March, the Lords returned to the Commons with a response which D’Ewes does record: their Lordships after some long and effectual Arguments used by them for maintenance of all the parts of the said Bill in sort as the same Bill now is, without any great cause or necessity of such amendments as this House doth require in the same; Their Lordships nevertheless were pleased to gratifie the House in yielding to assent unto their request of the same amendments; wishing withal that this House in the same their amendments would have consideration of such Cottages as might happen to be erected for the burning of Lime or making of Brick, during the time only of such burning of Lime or making of Tyles and Bricks.23

This permits us at least to identify that part of the bill (or of the Commons’ additions to it) which most concerned the Lords. The proviso, ‘during the time only of such burning of Lime or making of Tyles and Bricks’, is a limitation of the time when a working man is permitted to inhabit a cottage which he has built to allow him to work. If he is working only for part of the year, perhaps in a job which depends upon the season, he is not permitted to live in the house during those periods when he is not using it for his work. Consequently, we can begin to speculate about why the statute was seen as important, and what it was seen as preventing. The one point in the law which slowed down its passage through parliament was that which inquired whether a labourer was actually at work at any particular time. Nor, it should be said, was there an obvious contrast between the attitudes of the Commons and Lords; on 21 March, the amendments proposed by the Lords were approved in the Commons and returned to the Lords, where they were finally read and approved. In his Institutes of the Lawes of England (1642), a book of commentaries about the laws of the day, the lawyer Edward Coke devotes five pages to the 1589 statute. His purpose, as he prints and glosses each aspect of the statute in turn, is largely to dispel the difficulties of legal language. He concludes, though, with a passage which explains why he regards the statute as needful: The inconveniences that grow by unlawfull Cottages, and Inmates in Cottages against this statute, as appeare by the Preamble, are great, being nests to hatch idlenesse, the mother of pickings, theeveries, stealing of wood, &c. tending also to the prejudice of lawfull Commoners; for that new erected Cottages within the memory of man, though they have foure acres of ground, or more laid to them, according to this Act, ought not to common in the wastes of the Lord; but the greatest inconvenience of all is, the ill breeding and educating of youth.24

23 24

D’Ewes, Compleat Journal, p. 450. Edward Coke, The Second Part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England (London, 1642), p. 740.

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The Landscape As well as explaining his support for the law, Coke calls for it to be implemented in the courts with more rigour, in language that would be repeated four hundred years later in analysis of the law. The above ‘inconveniences may be easily helped and remedied by the provisions of this excellent law,’ he continues, ‘if Lords of Leets and their stewards would looke to the execution of this Act, which we hold the readiest meanes.’ The passage with which Coke concludes is not only a text where the legality or illegality of dwelling in a hovel is specified. When he describes the space inside the houses, the ‘nests to hatch idlenesse’, he is also – crucially – silent about the work which the 1589 statute expected their inhabitants to undertake. Coke’s portrayal of these people as falling into squalor and crime through their own laziness is an act of silence at the centre of his ideology, that the poor living in these places should be forced to engage in certain kinds of work. The ideology relating to the place of the poor is manifested, indeed generated, in the laws drawn up against vagrancy and the building of hovels; the laws relating to these subjects which were at work in late sixteenth-century Ireland originated in England. Patrick Fitzgerald has shown how English laws dealing with vagrancy and poverty were transferred to Ireland; the ‘Act for Vagabonds’ which was passed in the Irish parliament of 1542, for example, is a verbatim copy of the statute passed in the English parliament in 1531. Although it sometimes refers anomalously to English customs, units of land, and so on, and takes no account of the particular culture or social conditions of Ireland, it remained in statutory force until 1772.25 While Fitzgerald shows that different local administrations in Ireland generated different policies for dealing with poverty, he also makes it clear that the ideology produced for mediating responses to that poverty was largely produced in England, usually at moments of Irish crisis or war. What Florimell sees inside the witch’s cottage seems to confirm not only the poverty of its inhabitants but also Coke’s analysis of their lives. The smoke that she initially sees shows that the house at least has a fire, but it appears to have no more than a single room, and that she discovers the witch seated on the ‘dustie ground’ (III.vii.7.5) shows that it is not only unfurnished but also dirty: This wicked woman had a wicked sonne, The comfort of her age and weary dayes, A laesy loord, for nothing good to donne, But stretched forth in ydlenesse alwayes, Ne euer cast his mind to couet prayse, Or ply him selfe to any honest trade, But all the day before the sunny rayes He vs’d to slug, or sleepe in slothfull shade: Such laesinesse both lewd and poore attonce him made. 25

(III.vii.12)

Patrick Desmond Fitzgerald, ‘Poverty and Vagrancy in Early Modern Ireland 1540–1770’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Queen’s University of Belfast, 1994), p. 4.

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The Houses of the Poor Spenser’s passage seems to produce a similar ideological position to Coke’s, and does so in the same way. It is not that his description of the witch and her son omits an account of the poverty which forces people to live in such conditions; indeed, it is not an inaccurate description of the houses where the poorest families did live.26 The ideological force of the passage is its silence – or indeed dishonesty – about the very connection between the house and the poverty. The witch’s hovel in the poem is a place of inactivity, ‘ydlenesse’, ‘sloth’, and ‘laesinesse’, and even though her son is a strong man, fit to work, he chooses not to do so. It is this choice, moreover, that has made him poor, and also, since he avoids ‘honest trade’, disreputable. It is widely acknowledged that remarks about idleness play a prominent ideological part in representations of the poor and of poverty in early modern literature.27 In his study of literary depictions of rural life, The Country and the City, Raymond Williams shows, for example, how Thomas More makes use of the theme in Utopia. For Williams, More’s simultaneous denouncements of greedy and exploiting landlords and idle labourers are exemplary of the ‘shifting intermediate groups’ of men, ‘who had risen by change’. Williams suggests that when More writes, ‘Let not so many be brought up in idelnesse, let husbandry and tillage be restored, let clotheworkinge be renewed, that ther may be honest labours for this idell sort to passe their tyme in profitablye’, he is expressing the ideal of this rising class, which seems to draw almost equally on a rejection of the arbitrariness of feudalism, a deeply felt rejection of the new arbitrariness of money, and an attempted stabilisation of a transitory order, in which small men are to be protected against enclosures but also against the idleness of their labourers.28

James Grantham Turner’s The Politics of Landscape deals with a later period in seventeenth century poetry, but it also exposes the ideology which influences descriptions of labourers and poverty in that poetry. Turner discusses a set of descriptions of the rural landscape, in which the countryside is purged of the presence of real workers, except as abstracted embodiments of toil, or as 26

27

28

Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), provides an excellent sociological analysis of the ways in which early modern English communities forced those designated as witches to dwell on the peripheries of communities, and how the notion of witchcraft itself depended on acts, and neglects, of neighbourliness and hospitality. Another part of that discourse is an attention to vagrants and the migratory poor. This has been well documented, and other than at points where vagrancy enters my analysis of hovels, I have chosen not to discuss it: partly because I feel that it lies outside the bounds of this work, and partly because I should have so little to add. I see this chapter as complementary to these studies, an excellent example of which is to be found in A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985). Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 44.

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The Landscape parodies, clowns or villains. It is a ‘magic economy’, in which ‘the real labourer has no place’,29 and where the work is done spontaneously by nature. Turner’s interest in this book is largely in the portrayal of working servants, rather than rural dwellings, but like Williams, he is very aware that the ideologically-loaded literary representations of these poor men originate with those who benefit from the economic systems which make them poor. He also alerts the reader of this body of poetry to be aware specifically of what is not being represented, whether it be the work on which the pastoral contentment of the poets and their patrons depend, or the discontent of the workers at having to participate in highly exploitative proto-capitalist systems.30 The ideas of idleness which structure late sixteenth-century descriptions of poverty and beggary depend on a central distinction, between those paupers who are physically capable of working and yet choose not to, and those who are physically incapable of working. William C. Carroll points out that this distinction also provides the basis for the Poor Laws, which prescribed severe corporal punishment for those idlers who were judged to be ‘sturdy’, without physical impediment.31 This distinction is central in the ‘Homilie Against Idlenesse’, one of the texts in the book of sermons that was appointed to be read in the Elizabethan Church. The homily places great emphasis on the description of labour as a vocation, on an utter personal dedication to one’s occupation, the impulse and requirement for which nonetheless is divine. ‘To euery one (except by reason of age, debility of body, or want of health hee be vnapt to labor at all),’ it asserts, ‘ought both for the getting of his owne liuing honestly, and for to profite others, in some kinde of labour to exercise himselfe, according as the vocation whereunto GOD hath called him shall require.’32 It also emphasizes, though, a personal choice in carrying out that vocation; when a man fails in this way, it is consciously and voluntarily: If we giue our selues to idlenesse and sloth, to lurking and loytering: to wilfull wandering, and wastfull spending, neuer setling our selues to honest labour, but

29

30

31

32

James Turner, The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry 1630–1660 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), p. 163. Turner’s book frequently and reverently cites Williams’s The Country and the City. Turner is reticent to use the word ‘capitalist’, but his account of certain poems, such as Mildmay Fane’s ‘My Hock Cart’, with its depiction of the monotonous and mechanical lives of the labourers and the abstraction of their work to a systematic process, implies it. William C. Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 24–27. The extremely severe statute of 1547, which ordained death, slavery and branding for such offenders, was modified three years later, but statutes of 1572 and 1576 established severe corporal punishment once again, and also called for houses of correction to be set up throughout the country. The Second Tome of Homilies (London, 1595), fol. 2H6r. These sermons and homilies were published in many editions during the sixteenth century; I am quoting from this edition because of its proximity to the date when The Faerie Queene was being written.

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The Houses of the Poor liuing like drone bees by the labors of other men: then doe wee breake the Lords commandement, wee go astray from our vocation.33

Furthermore, to be idle is not merely equivalent to other vices; it leads causally to us ‘giuing ourselves’ to a range of other sins, which then by implication are made close to voluntary. Idleness ‘is neuer alone, but hath alwaies a long taile of other vices hanging on, which corrupt and infect the whole man, after such sort, that hee is made at length nothing else but a lumpe of sinne’.34 William Carroll uses the example of this homily to suggest that ‘the objection to idleness was [. . .] primarily religious’.35 It is certainly true, as Carroll shows, that religious writers were extremely preoccupied with the subject, but the ‘Homily against Idlenesse’ is also a manifestation of religious beliefs at a particular historic moment. The homily and its related sermons as actively constitute and reproduce a set of ideas about idleness, and are yet also constituted by them. That is not to say that all writings with similar ideological contents have equivalent cultural positions, for the extent to which a church sermon would be distributed, and also its didactic nature, might give it an unusually active influence. Like The Faerie Queene, the ‘Homily against Idlenesse’ also links idleness to education, but it does not merely inveigh against the failure properly to educate one’s children. It sees as part of the idle conscience a failure, on the part of workers, to bring up their offspring themselves to accept work: For a great part of the beggerie that is among the poore, can be imputed to nothing so much as to idlenesse, and to the negligence of parents, which doe not bring vp their children, either in good learning, honest labor, or some commendable occupation or trade, whereby when they come to age they might get their liuing.36

The witch’s ‘laesy loord’ of a son, who meets Florimell in the dirty hovel in Book 3 of The Faerie Queene, has also been brought up not to ‘ply him selfe to honest trade’. An ideology that pictures the failure to inculcate the habits of servile drudgery into one’s children as idleness is manifested in the character of a child who has been brought up by his slovenly mother into a life of sloth. Descriptions of poor labourers from different times call upon very similar images within similar structures, the imputation of voluntary idleness being that which I have isolated here. It is partly this continuity which allows subsequent and contemporary criticism to take part in constructing this ideology. Raymond Williams’s text reminds us, however, that we have to see the ideology as generated in very precisely different ways at different historical 33 34 35 36

Second Tome of Homilies, fol. 2H6v. Second Tome of Homilies, fol. 2H7r. Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar, p. 4. Second Tome of Homilies, fol. 2H7r.

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The Landscape moments.37 By distinguishing the English and Irish descriptions of these hovels, I have not tried to find houses similar to the hovels described in The Faerie Queene in the landscape of either country, but rather to examine the ideological attitudes expressed towards them. In the View, Spenser refers to a type of hut which he has observed in Ireland, the booly. In the rural areas of medieval Ireland, a tradition had persisted of houses made with portable, light frames, ‘prefabricated, made to be dismantled and re-erected at will’.38 Boolies, McCullough and Mulvin suggest, were a continuation of this tradition; they were small houses built without a fixed wooden frame, used as shelters by the cattle farmers who worked in the mountainous areas of the country, and who moved from place to place in a system of transhumant agriculture.39 The word ‘booly’ has been used to refer both to the huts themselves and also to the pens and shelters which the itinerant farmers built for their animals. They are mentioned in the View in the context of Irenius’s review of suspicious native customs.40 It is the practice of Irish farmers, he says, ‘to kepe theire Cattell and to live themselves the moste parte of the yeare in Bollyes pasturinge vppon the mountaine and waste wilde places’ (View, p. 97). The boolies were little different in appearance and purpose from the temporary shelters built by English labourers, and as Irenius begins to describe them, he acknowledges that the nature of the cattlemen’s work, driving their herds from place to place, means that they need to live in these houses – ‘removinge still to freshe lande as they haue depastured the former’. The boolies, Irenius goes on to say, are the cause of ‘manye greate enormityes vnto that Comon wealthe’: For firste if there be any outlawes or loose people (as they are never without some) which live vppon stealthes and spoile, they are evermore succored and finde reliefe onleye in those Bollies beinge vppon the waste places, wheares els they shoulde be driven shortelye to sterve or to Come downe to the townes to steale reliefe wheare by one meanes or other they woulde sone be Caughte: besides suche stealthes of Cattell as they make they bringe Comonlye to those Bollyes wheare they are receaued readilye and the Thiefe Harbored from daunger of Lawe or suche officers as mighte lighte vppon him. (p. 98) 37

38 39 40

A further analysis of the representation of poverty, in an even more distant period from this work, is to be found in John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Niall McCullough and Valerie Mulvin, A Lost Tradition: The Nature of Architecture in Ireland (Dublin: Gandon, 1987), p. 22. See further J. M. Graham, ‘Transhumance in Ireland’, Advancement of Science 10 (1953–54), 74–79. For boolying as a part of sixteenth-century Irish culture, see Jane H. Ohlmeyer, ‘ “Civilizinge of those Rude Partes”: Colonization within Britain and Ireland, 1580s–1640s’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Wm. Roger Louis, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–99), I: The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Nicholas Canny (1998), pp. 124–47 (pp. 127–30).

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The Houses of the Poor Not only, in Irenius’s opinion, do the boolies allow Irish renegades to commit crime. They also permit the same voluntary moral degeneration that Coke sees taking place in English cottages. Moreouer the people that live thus in those Bollies growe theareby the more Barbarous and live more licentiouslye then they Could in townes vsinge what meanes they liste and practisinge what mischiefs and villainies they will either againste the gouernement theare generallye by theire Combinacions or againste private men whom they maligne by stealinge theire goodes or murderinge themselves; for theare they thinke themselues haulfe exemted from lawe and obedience and havinge once tasted fredome doe like a steare that hathe bene longe out of his yoke grudge and repine ever after to Come vnder rule againe. (p. 98)

In the statements that come out of Ireland in this period, the inhabitants of hovels are treated differently: they are still accused of idleness, but this has implications of a dangerous criminality, with a propensity to rapacious acts of thievery, that the English descriptions do not contain. Rowland White’s manuscript treatise, ‘The Dysorders of the Irisshery’ (1571), lists among the faults of the Irish natives an idleness that drives them into the property of others, in search of plunder: And thus theyr contryes are impoverisshed as inhabitants havinge nothinge lefte to cherisshe or care for (onelesse sometyme a fewe cattell which the poore people are forsed to dryve with them whereso ever they gooe for fynding their Lordes men of warre) they as carelesse of their behavyor become as idell as the reste stealing by night and robbing by daye.41

Although the English hovel-dwellers are the objects of legislation, they are not described as acting as a criminal group, as are the Irish poor in the View and in this text by White. Furthermore, there is a difference in spatial terms in the way in which they are seen as acting; whereas for Coke it was the hovels themselves which were ‘nests to hatch idlenesse’, Irenius locates the booly-dwellers in a space in the landscape: ‘theare they thinke themselues haulfe exemted from lawe and obedience’ [italics mine]. Irenius’s condemnation of the boolydwellers depends on a double-forked spatial ideology. Both the booly itself and the mountainside areas, beyond the civilization of the towns, where the itinerant cattle-herders live and work – both covered by the word ‘there’ – are represented as places where illicit activities are carried out. Thomas Scanlan’s recent study of the View identifies the extent to which the English anxiety about various native customs, such as boolying, meeting at folkmotes, and wearing distinctive clothes, is construed spatially, in either literal or metaphorical terms: ‘The customs that Irenius attacks all allow the

41

Nicholas Canny, ‘Rowland White’s “The Dysorders of the Irisshery”, 1571’, Studia Hibernica 19 (1979), 148–60 (p. 155).

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The Landscape construction of some sort of unpoliced space. [They] allow for the construction of a space in which an Irish identity might survive and flourish.’42 Scanlan argues that what Irenius expresses is also an anxiety at the way that these practices persist, because this is evidence that the English have failed to interpret and control the Irish landscape. He also sees the boolies as examples of genuine Irish resistance to the spatial control that the English are trying to exert: The bolly is [. . .] an allegorical space for the Irish, where they may appear to be submitting to English rule while in reality doing as they please. One of the goals of the English occupation of Ireland was of course to achieve the literal control of the space, and the bolly demonstrates how successful the Irish have been in maintaining their control over the countryside.43

I want to suggest, though, that the very idea that these ‘unpoliced’ places exist is itself an idea produced by the ideological position held by Irenius. There is copious testimony to the raids of Irish ‘rebels’ into English-held areas of the country,44 but to acknowledge this is not the same as asserting that there are coherent ‘spaces for the Irish’. The notion of such a coherent space, just beyond the boundaries of English control, inhabited by organized bands of poor booly-dwelling Irish, originates from English representations like the View. The ideological import of Irenius’s point is conveyed by the production of an imaginary landscape, in which two social groups occupy two discrete but connected spaces. It is also part of that process to argue that the Irish themselves, or (in the English examples) the idle cottage-dwellers, are deliberately responsible for the construction of these spaces. Meanwhile, the hovel-dwellers, unlike the inhabitants of castles without any means of defence, also suffered not only displacement by incoming colonists,45 but also the effects of the wars between English and Irish soldiers, which forced them to dwell in ever more miserable places. A report of 4 December 1582 writes that ‘the state of this countrey beinge nowe (as you can tell) so passing miserable as suche as are left of the pore inhabitauntes dare not lye in their owne cottages, but must get them to knockes & growes, seking therby to save their lyves’.46 Three years earlier, the Earl of Desmond had written to Sir Nicholas Malby, at the end of his campaign against members of the Desmond family, to plead with him not to allow his soldiers to destroy the small houses of his tenants: ‘Wisshinge you also when you bend your forces towardes the Traitors, that in your marching you haue respect that my poore 42 43 44 45 46

Thomas Scanlan, Colonial Writing and the New World 1583–1671: Allegories of Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 82. Scanlan, Colonial Writing and the New World, p. 83. See Chapter 6. ‘I will translate all that remaine of them into the places of the other in vlster, withall their Crete and what els they have lefte them.’ View, p. 179. TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/98/11(II).

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The Houses of the Poor Tenauntes be not by the Army spoiled of their Corne and Cattell, as they lately haue been’.47 In the ways in which it represents poor houses, then, and the places where they are built, the View exists in an ambiguous relation to the ideology which I have analysed in other contemporary texts. It exhibits the same attitude as the passage from Coke’s Institutes, and the relation that it suggests between a hovel and a voluntarily idle life is similar to ideas suggested by The Faerie Queene. But at other points it seems aware that the boolies do occupy a place in the Irish agricultural economy, and that there are reasons why the poor peasants would be forced to live there. This ambiguity is no easier to resolve when boolies are again mentioned, later in the text. Irenius has said that promoting husbandry among the Irish would be a good way to nurture civility among them, and Eudoxus asks whether Irenius does not count, ‘in this trade of husbandrie pasturadge of Cattell and kepinge of theire Cowes’; Irenius continues: But if they will allgates fede manie Cattle or kepe them on the mountaines let them make some Townes neare to the mountaines side wheare they maye dwell togeather with neighbours and be Conuersante in the viewe of the worlde. (View, p. 217)

Both aspects of this spatial ideology are at work when Spenser describes the witch’s house that Florimell wanders into. I have already discussed the way that the squalor of the interior of the witch’s hut depends on the idea that the poor would choose to live idly, as a way of escaping from the work that they are duty-bound to carry out. We may also note now that the cottage is built ‘far from all neighbours’, so that the witch can conceal her ‘deuilish deedes’, and also carry out malicious acts against those who could not see, and could not suspect her. The witch’s behaviour is the expression of an ideology which abstracts the desires of cottage dwellers to avoid contact with other people out of economic motives. Rather than because they cannot afford to pay rent, or do not want to, the hovel-dwellers in The Faerie Queene have looked for a hiding place because it will allow them to indulge their melancholic disposition, or – as in the case of the witch – to practise ‘hellish artes’.48 Whereas the early modern landscape is dotted with the houses of these poverty-stricken people, and whereas Coke’s text at least places them in an economic context, albeit ideologically reproduced and presented, The Faerie Queene presents a secret and marginal space, populated by characters whose decision to be there has little to do with economic necessity. 47 48

TNA (PRO), State Papers, SP 63/69/52(II). Compare the indisposition and malevolence to her neighbours of Sclaunder, whom Arthur, Amoret and Æmylia discover in ‘a little cotage farre away’ (IV.viii.23.2). Archimago is also seen first of all in ‘a little lowly Hermitage’, ‘far from resort of people, that did pas | In trauell to and froe’ (I.i.34.1–4).

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The Landscape These two spatial aspects are also at work when the poem describes the origins of Satyrane. Like many of the knights in The Faerie Queene, Satyrane is introduced with a story that refers back to the unusual circumstances of his birth. In his case, it is a story that begins in a hovel in the forest. His mother, Thyamis, had the misfortune to be married to ‘a loose vnruly swayne’ by the name of Therion, a man who ‘had more ioy to raunge the forrest wyde, | And chase the saluage beast with busie payne, | Then serue his Ladies loue, and waste in pleasures vayne’ (I.vi.21.6–9). His pastime, it is implied, involves hunting for lovers as well as for game, and Thyamis becomes distracted and wanders into the forest to search for him: to the wood she goes, to serue her turne, And seeke her spouse, that from her still does fly, And followes other game and venery: A Satyre chaunst her wandring for to finde, And kindling coles of lust in brutish eye, The loyall linkes of wedlocke did vnbinde, And made her person thrall vnto his beastly kind. So long in secret cabin there he held Her captiue to his sensuall desyre, Till that with timely fruit her belly sweld, And bore a boy vnto that saluage syre.

(I.vi.22–23)

Satyrane’s father is a man no less idle than the dissolute Therion. Both men shirk any sort of duty, and both seem to occupy their time in lustful pursuits. His hut has been built in a place where it does not belong, and Thyamis apparently comes across it by surprise. Spenser’s text confronts the ideology expressed by Coke – that these hovels promote idleness – and transforms it to produce a description no less ideological. He does not explicitly condemn Satyrane’s father for his idleness, but neither does he show him at productive work. Like a squatter, he has secretly built his house on Therion’s private land.49 His cabin is not explicitly presented as a ‘nest to hatch idlenesse’, nor as a den for crime, but it is ‘secret’, implying that it has still been built in an effort to escape from the glare of outsiders. Satyrane’s father; he is in effect a squatter, avoiding paying the rent which he owes. Rather than presenting us with isolated, documentary evidence about the

49

Cottagers who defaulted in this way would often be sought out. An investigation conducted in 1604 into cottages built illegally in the manor of Whitwick in Leicestershire, for example, revealed the presence of one such building, a ‘sorry “cote” pytched unto a nooke of a rock of stone near unto the said place where the cottage now is’. Literally built into the landscape, the hovel ‘hath been a dwelling house, upon the necessity and want of another house, of a poor man, a wisket maker, that for his own succour made the same of Stickes and turffes, but paid no rent or fine’. George F. Farnham, ‘Charnwood Forest: The Charnwood Manors’, Transactions of the Leicestershire Archæological Society 15 (1927–28), 139–292 (p. 248).

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The Houses of the Poor inhabitants of these houses, The Faerie Queene works huts and hovels – houses with specific material contexts, which generated specific ideological responses – into its allegorical stories. And these responses determine the way that the hovels are allegorically represented. When Prince Arthur’s squire, Timias, builds a hut in the forest, it is presented as a deliberate choice, and also as an attempt to avoid the attentions of society. Shunned by the irate Belphoebe for his attentions to the wounded Amoret, Timias briefly attempts to win back her favour, but then relents, and walks off into the forest: At last when long he follow’d had in vaine, Yet found no ease of griefe, nor hope of grace, Vnto those woods he turned backe againe, Full of sad anguish, and in heauy case: And finding there fit solitary place For wofull wight, chose out a gloomy glade, Where hardly eye mote see bright heauens face, For mossy trees, which couered all with shade And sad melancholy: there he his cabin made.

(IV.vii.38)

Like the witch and her son, Timias lives in the hovel voluntarily, and out of a desire to avoid society. And just as the witch and her son are seen as having deliberately created the squalor of their hovel through their idleness, Timias deliberately chooses to degrade his physical appearance: And eke his garment, to be thereto meet, He wilfully did cut and shape anew; And his faire lockes, that wont with ointment sweet To be embaulm’d, and sweat out dainty dew, He let to grow and griesly to concrew, Vncomb’d, vncurl’d, and carelesly vnshed.

(IV.vii.40.1–6)

The figure of Timias allows the poverty of a cottage-dweller to be recast as a lover’s voluntarily assumed melancholy. The episode also alters the role of the cottage in a different way. Spenserian critics have always been eager to find specific correspondences between historical figures and characters in the poem, and since Upton’s comments in his 1758 edition of The Faerie Queene, it has been accepted by editors and scholars that this episode can be read as an allegory of Sir Walter Ralegh’s disgrace and banishment by Queen Elizabeth. That there is such an allegory at work is now beyond much critical doubt.50 The fact that this episode is the 50

See James P. Bednarz, ‘Ralegh in Spenser’s Historical Allegory’, Spenser Studies 4 (1984), 49–70. For Bednarz, the identification of Timias with Ralegh in this episode is beyond question, and the uncertainty concerns whether the scene should be read as ‘a vindication or as a condemnation of his patron’s conduct’ (p. 61). Similarly, Michael O’Connell, Mirror and Veil: The Historical Dimension of Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’ (Chapel Hill: University of North

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The Landscape most heavily marked in the copy of the poem belonging to Ralegh’s wife and son is not conclusive proof that they too read the poem allegorically in such a way, but it is certainly compelling evidence.51 I do not want to, and indeed could not, contest this interpretation, but it is possible to question the effect achieved when Timias’s hovel is used as part of a specific historical allegory. Using this historically specific type of building in the service of an allegorical story does more than to use it out of context: the Ralegh allegory attempts to tear the hovel away from its material significance. Similarly, Gordon Teskey’s investigation of allegory analyses what he sees as the metaphorical violence which occurs when a female character is forced to assume a meaning within an allegorical structure. Teskey sees this as a violence equivalent to rape, of ‘reducing the other to a featureless substance imprinted by form’.52 Teskey’s argument adopts psychoanalytical and gender-based lines which I do not; he sees allegory as part of ‘a metaphysical desire that is encoded in erotic terms’,53 but his emphasis on allegory’s use of material, as an other, does apply to the historical disappearance of the hovel in this episode: ‘We can [. . .] define the material in allegory as that which gives meaning a place to occur while remaining heterogeneous to it’.54 If we extrapolate Teskey’s ontological analysis of allegory into a political analysis of this poem, we might say that by providing a place for allegorical meaning, the socio-economic aspects of materiality can also be fragmented, and in some cases, dematerialized. In terms of the narrative of the poem, however, Timias is never read as merely a poor inhabitant of a hovel. His hovel provides, in the mechanics of the poem’s allegory, a place for a set of references to Ralegh, standing for ideas of his exile from court, his shame and social descent. The story also makes use of a convention which portrays the pining and forlorn lover as a lonely cottager, as in Twelfth Night, when the disguised Viola asks Olivia to ‘make me a willow cabin at thy gate’.55 Reading the episode according to its material context involves asking what is left over from the readings that come from the allegorical context of the episode, or from the literary conventions that it makes use of. Not all individual uses of this convention are politically conscious efforts to obliterate the evidence of the rural underclass, but the economic presence which hovels do have within the landscape of The Faerie Queene is diminished, or rather blunted, when they are incorporated into the

51 52

53 54 55

Carolina Press, 1977): ‘There can be no doubt that the episode in book 4 allegorizes Raleigh’s disgrace’ (p. 116). Walter Oakeshott, ‘Carew Ralegh’s Copy of Spenser’, The Library, 5th series 26 (1971), 1–21. Gordon Teskey, ‘Allegory, Materialism, Violence’, in The Production of English Renaissance Culture, ed. David Lee Miller, Sharon O’Dair, and Harold Weber (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 293–318 (p. 300). Teskey, ‘Allegory, Materialism, Violence’, p. 304. Teskey, ‘Allegory, Materialism, Violence’, p. 302. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, ed. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1975; repr. 1988), I.v.272.

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The Houses of the Poor poem’s allegory. Similarly, the hovel in which the Squire of Dames discovers the woman who truly embodies chastity also functions as the conclusion of a story. The house, like Timias’s cottage, occurs at a place where its significance in terms of allegory and literary convention precludes any reading as a material place. The third a Damzell was of low degree, Whom I in countrey cottage fownd by chaunce; Full little weened I, that chastitee Had lodging in so meane a maintenaunce, Yet was she fayre, and in her countenaunce Dwelt simple truth in seemely fashion.

(III.vii.59.1–6)

Sir John Harington’s notes to his translation of Orlando Furioso suggest that he recognizes the literary provenance of this story in an Ariostan borrowing.56 The ‘country cottage’ has significance only in so far as it completes the fable-like narrative illustrating the nature of chastity; it is apparently meant to be read only inside the narrative that accompanies it. Although it makes reference to a very particular material space, the story forecloses any reading of the space as material. Features in the landscape of the poem that would appear to have material significance are used in the service of literary convention and allegory. The allegorization disguises the place which the hovels would occupy in the geography and economy of the poem. This disguise is all of a piece with the ideological reproduction that I have been describing. Just as I showed that legal writings defined the hovels themselves, and their locations, in relation to the work that their inhabitants carried out, the work which goes on in the hovels described in The Faerie Queene determines the relation between the material and allegorical implications of these spaces. Unlike both Timias and the witch discovered by Florimell, the shepherd Melibœ is a cottage-dweller who has built a small house in order to work. In Book 6, the knight Sir Calidore encounters a community of shepherds, and mingling with the shepherds and disguised as one of them, he falls in love with Pastorella. He receives an invitation from Melibœ to shelter for the night in his cottage: his simple home; Which though it were a cottage clad with lome, And all things therein meane, yet better so To lodge, then in the saluage fields to rome.

(VI.ix.16.4–7)

As above, even though the description is somewhat sentimentalized, Spenser is

56

‘M. Spencers tale of the squire of Dames, in his excellent Poem of the Faery Queene, [. . .] is to the like effect, sharpe and well conceyted.’ John Harington, Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse (London, 1591), p. 373.

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The Landscape certainly not blind to the poverty in which the shepherd lives. The partly nomadic lives of the shepherds suggest another allusion to the ‘customs of border-crossing boolying’, and the depradations which they suffer at the hands of the Brigants may imply criticism of the consequences of that way of life.57 The occupations of the shepherds, though, and the hospitality of Melibœ’s house, is part of the pastoral detail which Helen Cooper finds dotted throughout the sixth book of the poem.58 The ‘shepheard groomes, | Playing on pypes, and caroling apace’ (VI.ix.5.2–3) belong to the pastoral conventions of The Shepheardes Calender, as does their singing in praise of Pastorella: ‘The lustie shepheard swaynes sate in a rout, | The which did pype and sing her prayses dew’ (VI.ix.8.5–6). The hospitality which Calidore receives in Melibœ’s cottage also seems to recall the end of Virgil’s first Eclogue. The conventionality of this story and the allegorical narrative might transform the poor living spaces of these shepherds into ‘cottages’, but unlike the cabin of Timias, the material reality of these huts is not negated by the allegory. The work which Melibœ and his fellows carry out, and in the proximity of which their huts are built, is approved of by the narrative; we recall that work as a shepherd is one of those occupations which in the 1589 statute on cottages permits a man to build a cottage for himself. And also unlike the witch’s house, it has not been built ‘far off from all neighbours’, but near to the houses of fellow shepherds and close to the fields where Melibœ works. By contrast, another hovel in the poem, the house of Care, is discovered by Sir Scudamour after his encounter with Ate. Even before the house is described, the narrator points out, in common with the hovel of the witch, the lack of hospitality that its owner bears to his neighbours: Not farre away, not meete for any guest They spide a little cottage, like some poore mans nest. Vnder a steepe hilles side it placed was, There where the mouldred earth had cav’d the banke; And fast beside a little brooke did pas Of muddie water, that like puddle stanke, By which few crooked sallowes grew in ranke.

(IV.v.32–33)

The description of Care in his forge, ‘full busily vnto his worke ybent’ (IV.v.34.2), smeared with smoke and assisted by his six servants, appears to be an unusually complete description of a working artisan; however, the account which follows of the work that is going on within Care’s hovel actually negates this:

57 58

Andrew Elder Zurcher, ‘Legal Diction and the Law in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2001), p. 190. Helen Cooper, Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance (Ipswich: Brewer; Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), pp. 163–64.

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The Houses of the Poor His name was Care; a blacksmith by his trade, That neither day nor night, from working spared, But to small purpose yron wedges made; Those be vnquiet thoughts, that carefull minds inuade.

(IV.v.35.6–9)

The occupation that takes place inside Care’s hovel is the opposite of productive work; the iron wedges that he creates would be useless in material terms, and since the first place where the ‘vnquiet thought’ is manifested is inside the house – in Care, his assistants and Sir Scudamour – the occupation seems wholly introverted. The image of a poor worker inside his hovel is used in the allegory only to convey the opposite: an absence of work, and a state of mind that is unproductive and preoccupied with cares. Like Malbecco’s cave, the house of Care is used allegorically as an image of a mental state, and indeed the image of a man at his forge partakes in an established iconographic tradition.59 Unlike the image of Malbecco’s cave, though, the description of Care’s forge requires reference to an ideological account of material labour and living conditions, namely what a worker should produce, where he ought to live, and the possibility that he will use his house for harmful activities, which is not completely cancelled out or subsumed in the allegory. The initial description of the hut as a ‘poor man’s nest’, an attempt to negate the house’s status as a socially produced space and also to make it bestial, can be seen as part of that ideology.60 This ideological connection between space, work, and idleness is discernible both in early modern law and legal commentary, and in The Faerie Queene. In order to suggest that it is more widely present in society at the end of the sixteenth century, and in order also to call on a text which will again question the relation between England and Ireland, I want to analyse Richard Carew’s Survey of Cornwall (1602). Carew’s description of his county is very attentive to the local aristocratic families, and the descriptions of the county hundreds which form the last part of his book always conclude with a list of the local ‘Gentlemen of marke’. It is typical of printed descriptive surveys of the period to focus on local dignitaries in this way: John Norden’s description of Middlesex, Speculum Britanniae (1593), includes a list of the ‘Noble men, and Gentlemen, for the most part, hauing houses, or residence, within this Shire’,61 and its longest section is ‘An Alphabet of the Cities, Townes, Hamlets, Villages, and howses of name within Middelsex’,62 which prints the coat of arms of each local aristocratic family alongside their description. Unlike Norden, Carew 59 60 61 62

For a summary of the emblematic background to Care, see James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 95–96. We might recall Coke’s ‘nests to hatch idlenesse’, and also Spenser’s more abstract description: ‘Ne suffreth it vncomely idlenesse, | In his free thought to build her sluggish nest’ (III.v.2.1–2). John Norden, Speculum Britanniae, The First Parte: An Historicall, & Chorographicall Discription of Middlesex (London, 1593), p. 49. Norden, Speculum Britanniae, p. 15.

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The Landscape acknowledges the presence in his county of poor labourers and their dwellings. His account of the cottages found throughout his county seems marked by compassion for their inhabitants’ hardship and admiration at their resilience and industry: The poore Cotager contenteth himselfe with Cob for his wals, and Thatch for his couering: as for Brick and Lath walles, they can hardly brooke the Cornish weather.63

Carew sees that these are labouring men, and the description of their houses acknowledges the work which they require to be built and maintained. Carew possessed large estates in Cornwall, which had passed to him early in his life, and would presumably have derived income from such men working on his lands. He shows sympathy for the tin-miners, and for the drudgery and perils of their work in the deep mines: ‘From some of their bottomes you shal at noone dayes discrie the Starres.’64 He also has a marked insight that the huts and hovels which he is describing owe their existence to the seasonal nature of work such as fishing on the Cornish coasts, which forces local labourers to look for temporary shelter; he writes that one place, Causam Bay, is ‘an open roade’, yet sometimes affoording succour to the woorst sort of Sea-farers, as not subiect to comptrolment of Plymmouth forts. The shore is peopled with some dwelling houses, and many Cellers, dearely rented for a short vsage, in sauing of Pilcherd. At which time, there flocketh a great concourse of Sayners, and others, depending vpon their labour.65

Carew acknowledges that it is the labourers’ need to be close to the sources of temporary work that makes them build and rent the houses on the coast. He also recognizes that although the local economy clearly depends to some extent on these cottage-dwellers, they are regarded with some anxiety by local authorities, who fear that they are beyond their ‘comptrolment’. At another point in the Survey, however, Carew seems to turn back on himself, and speak about the inhabitants of hovels in the same terms as Coke uses to condemn the cottages and the people who live in them. Discussing the origin of the poor in his county, Carew describes how they come from Ireland and set up home in the ‘dishabited townes’. The Irish who arrived in Cornwall came in their largest numbers from Munster.66 Once at home in Cornwall, 63

64 65 66

Richard Carew, The Survey of Cornwall (London, 1602), fol. 53r. The walls of a cob cottage are built from mud and clay, without a supporting timber framework. See Batsford and Fry, The English Cottage, pp. 50–52. Carew, Survey of Cornwall, fol. 10v. Carew, Survey of Cornwall, fols 98v–99r. Patrick Fitzgerald, ‘ “Like Crickets to the Crevice of a Brew-House”: Poor Irish Migrants in England, 1560–1640’, in Patterns of Migration, ed. Patrick O’Sullivan, The Irish Worldwide:

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The Houses of the Poor Carew writes, they beg for money, and also for charity. Carew criticizes those who give to them, however, because charity allows them to take a place (which is actually no place at all) in the local economy as unproductive consumers: What they consume in a day, will suffice to releeue an honest poore parishioner for a week, of whose work you may also make some vse: their staruing is not to be feared, for they may be prouided for at home, if they list.67

Carew is not only opposed to a charitable system that deprives ‘the needy impotent’ of money that is rightfully theirs; he argues, like Coke, that the Irish who have set up home in these uninhabited houses will use their alms to support the dissolute lives which they have chosen to lead: ‘To the high offence of God and good order, they maintaine idlenes, drunkennesse, theft, lecherie, blasphemie, Atheisme, and in a word, all impietie’.68 The hovels, in this ideological structure, are separated from any notion of the work which their inhabitants might do, or might have come to England to search for. They are always places where poor immigrants choose to live, because of the opportunities they provide for secret mischief; unless carefully legislated against, they are places where ‘all impietie’ breeds. Like Coke, Carew uses this as evidence that the laws applying to the poor immigrants – which would for him include various Poor and Vagrancy laws as well as the 1589 cottage-dwellers’ statute – need to be applied with more efficiency and sternness: Manie good Statutes haue beene enacted for redresse of these abuses, and vpon the first publishing, heedfully and diligently put in practise: but after the nine dayes wonder expired, the law is forgotten, the care abandoned, and those vermine swarme againe in euerie corner.69

The poor are also located spatially in the Cornish landscape. They are seen to ‘swarme [. . .] in euerie corner’, close enough to menace the decent citizen but always, in terms of the image, out of sight and located in the margins, on the edges of the world. It is surely no inconvenience to Carew that he can portray them coming from Ireland, another corner of the English realm. What underlies the preceding analysis is a conviction that contemporary criticism is implicated in the ideologies that govern descriptions of poverty and the houses of the poor from the sixteenth century. In part, this results when criticism is reluctant to analyse this ideological production, but it also occurs when critics use examples of huts from literature to reinscribe this ideology. I take as

67 68 69

History, Heritage, Identity, 1 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992), pp. 13–35 (p. 15). Fitzgerald takes a sample of fifty-nine Irish immigrants arrested during the period stipulated by his article: fifty-four came from Munster. Carew, Survey of Cornwall, fol. 67v. Carew, Survey of Cornwall, fol. 67v. Carew, Survey of Cornwall, fols 67r–67v.

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The Landscape exemplary a recent book by Ann Cline, entitled A Hut of One’s Own. Cline combines references to huts and hovels, taken from literature and legend, with discussions of shanty-towns from the American cities of her contemporary experience. Cline sees her project of comparing literary examples of hovels with modern dwellings as a type of comparative history. ‘I am aware,’ she writes, ‘despite the Eastern and Western examples I have just glossed over – that there may be some who will resist any effort to position a homeless person’s shack in relationship to these more ideal primitive huts.’70 What results from her comparisons, though, is an absence, or rather an active negation, of history, and indeed she sees her work as anti-materialist: ‘What materialists would have us measure in poverty, poets would have us measure in longing’.71 It has been the contention of this book, of course, that though Spenser is a poet, he is not simply opposed to the materialists. In the place of history, Cline attempts to view all the examples that she gives – both fictional and actual – in terms of a human communion with a metaphysical mystery. Of the hut-dwellers, she writes: They all sought to experience life away from social definitions of success or failure. From there, these primitive huts marked personal, original inquiries into the ever mysterious nature of human existence. In a profound sense, these primitive huts amount to much the same thing and that thing is not unimportant – even now.72

I quote Cline’s text at length, not to dwell on its analysis of literary texts, but as an example of how these texts can be manipulated in the service of an ideological project. Cline, who uses Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenological description of spaces in her account of social phenomena, replaces any analysis of the reasons why poor people are forced to live in such degrading conditions with talk of ‘the hut dream’ and ‘the beauty of such abodes’. Cline not only avoids analysing the ideology which has influenced representations of poverty in successive centuries: she also uses the deceptive descriptions of such hovels, which past manifestations of that ideology have produced in literary works like The Faerie Queene, in order to create her own ideology. Although Cline idealizes these people for their spiritual attitudes, rather than condemning them for their slovenliness, she assumes nonetheless, for example through a parallel with Thoreau, that their choice to live ‘outside the circle of architecture’ is paramout: ‘Our view rests on the hutdwellers’ attitude. Without knowing their intentions, we tend to view them all as simply “poverty-stricken” persons, their huts as mere hovels’.73 70 71 72 73

Ann Cline, A Hut of One’s Own: Life Outside the Circle of Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), p. 14. Cline, A Hut of One’s Own, p. 22. Cline, A Hut of One’s Own, p. 14. Cline, A Hut of One’s Own, p. 7.

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The Houses of the Poor It is an error which finds its way into more historical, less phenomenological, scholarship. Niall McCullough and Valerie Mulvin, who write of small Irish hovels that ‘the Famine and evictions of the nineteenth century ensured their re-invention time and again as the small hovels of the dispossessed’, are also prone to such a judgement. To write of the Irish booly that it is a part of a tradition of ‘generations of lives lived loosely under the stars’74 avoids engaging in an analysis of the economic and ideological conditions which create it. This is not to suggest for one minute that these writers have the same ideals as the men who razed habitations or condemned their inhabitants for their sinful idleness in the sixteenth century. But, as Philippa Tristram points out in her study of nineteenth-century social reform and the cottages which appear in novels from that period, hovels visited by the most well-intentioned visitors are ‘nearly always seen with the idealizing vision of an outsider’.75 When we see that this erroneous criticism extends to discussing the degrading contemporary living conditions of countless millions of people, and when we see the use it makes of ideologically blinkered accounts of literary texts, we realize that this literary analysis has a moral duty not only to those who died in squalor four hundred years ago, but also to those who are still living, and still dying, in the same way.

74 75

McCullough and Mulvin, A Lost Tradition, p. 22. Philippa Tristram, Living Space in Fact and Fiction (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 108.

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CONCLUSION This book began with a set of contentions about two approaches to The Faerie Queene, to Spenserian poetics, and to Renaissance literature, and an attempt to bring these two approaches together. Material culture and space have recently taken an increasingly prominent place in criticism of the early modern period, and work on them has contributed to a reconsideration of the place of history, and the idea of the real, in literary study. This interest in material culture has been invigorated by a growing attention – partly a result of changes in literary historicist practice but also the consequence of an engagement with sociological and anthropological writing and earlier kinds of Marxist criticism – to objects as well as subjects, and the lives of these objects in literature and the world. This criticism has so far proved most useful to the study of early modern drama, reminding us how embedded it was in the material exchanges and dealings of the society around it, and also challenging our idea of it as an empty, dematerialized space, the domain only of poetic language. It was one of this book’s ambitions to show that the study of material culture might also provide a useful point from which to approach allegorical romance. As for space and spatiality, critics and theorists from Henri Lefebvre onwards have shown that we should see it as something more than an abstract continuum, and more than just a way of understanding narrative – rather, as something that encloses, comprises, and is produced by social and political organisation and practice. This book has made a case for the essential connection of these two areas of study, and has provided readings of The Faerie Queene that have been attentive to both of them. Edmund Spenser’s poetry both avows and disavows (and, it might be argued, reveals at the very moment that it disavows) an interest in the material – not just in objects and things, but also in substance and the qualities of substances. A proper approach to Spenserian allegory and The Faerie Queene finds within the poem a superabundance and superfluity of materiality – objects that pile up, often appearing in excess of the meaningfulness that they are made to bear. And Spenser’s work, as I have argued here with reference both to his own Letter to Ralegh and Walter Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama, requires a method of analysis that acknowledges this and asks why it is so. A discussion of these objects and material phenomena can reveal their history, inside and outside the poem: how the poem occludes or refers to that history, how it incorporates it into its allegory. Many of these centres of material interest – castles, forests, hovels, chambers, and so on – are places or 220

Conclusion locations in the poem. And an account of the production of space by historical and political forces allows us to think not only about the interaction of material history and space, but also their effect on Spenser’s narrative. The space of the poem is similarly marked by its inconsistency and ambiguity as by its materiality. Its places are often indistinct, its journeys and quests often indeterminate; but while The Faerie Queene defeats attempts to map it, it is infused with a spatial specificity that has encouraged writers and critics to see it as a continuous, coherent world. My analysis of spaces and places from the poem (many of them, such as forests and castles, common romance tropes) where these material and spatial concerns are particularly prominent has brought together historical and theoretical approaches to Spenser’s writings; it provides a historical approach that supplements recent research into Spenser’s Irish context, without being hostile to it. What it has also done is to suggest that while it is essential for us to historicize Spenser’s poem, we have to recognise the difficulties and limitations of that historicizing approach. We should not assume that objects appear in The Faerie Queene in the same way that they appear in the real world, that a simple excavation and identification of objects in the poem is enough. The status of objects and literary objects, and changes in their status as they pass through history, also need to be taken into account. As I have shown, for example, we encounter these literary and real objects and places (and both ‘literary’ and ‘real’ are terms that we should never stop interrogating) within a process of physical decay and forgetting (as with the ruins of Kilcolman Castle), a process of historical revision and material disappearance (as with the Irish forests). The book has been dominated by discussion of The Faerie Queene. It seems to me that Spenser’s great poem, even more than The Shepheardes Calender, is the place where he most extensively thinks about and works on his poetic method; more significantly here, it provides a model for thinking about the genre of allegorical, narrative romance that his other writings clearly don’t. What I have tried to avoid, moreover, is a method which would use A View of the Present State of Ireland as a stock contextual background, a prosaic storehouse for information that could be made to stand behind The Faerie Queene: discussion of the View has been given a place in its own right. As an account of The Faerie Queene, this book is selective, and deliberately so; I have not tried to map or catalogue all the places and locations in the poem, still less all of the objects and substances in it, and the reader should not expect to use it as a reference guide to those locations and materialities. The book has argued that it is part of the very spatial and material quality of The Faerie Queene that questions of politics and history, materiality and space, are manifested more acutely at some points in the poem than at others, and it is these points that have provided the centres of my argument.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Manuscript sources British Library, Harleian Manuscripts Landsdowne Manuscripts Sloane Manuscripts Adams Manuscripts Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts Preserved in the Archiepiscopal Library at Lambeth, 6 vols (London: HMSO, 1867–73) Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Ireland, 1509–1670, 24 vols (London: HMSO, 1860–1910) Cambridge University Library Manuscripts Hatfield House, Cecil Papers Historical Manuscripts Commission: Report on the Manuscripts of Lord De L’Isle & Dudley Preserved at Penshurst Place, 3 vols (London: HMSO, 1934) Lambeth Palace Library, Carew Papers The Lismore Papers: Selections from the Private and Public (or State) Correspondence of Sir Richard Boyle, First and ‘Great’ Earl of Cork, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 2nd series, 5 vols (privately printed, 1887) Public Record Office, Colonial Office, CO 167 [Colonial Papers relating to Mauritius] Exchequer, E 351 [Exchequer: Pipe Office: Declared Accounts] MPF [Maps and Plans, Foreign] State Papers, SP 1 [State Papers, Henry VIII: General Series] State Papers, SP 63 [State Papers Ireland, Elizabeth I to George III]

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245

INDEX For episodes and characters from The Faerie Queene, see under Spenser, Edmund. ‘Act for Vagabonds’: 202 Adams, Simon: 73 Addy, Sidney Oldall: 196 n.2, 196 n.4 Adelman, Janet: 13 n.26 Albion, Robert Greenhalgh: 187 allegory: 7–19, 21, 29, 34–5, 41, 44, 103, 110–15, 117–20, 159–60, 171–3, 182 n.56, 211–13, 214–15 allegoresis: 8 baroque: 15, 17 literal sense of: 7–8, 14–15, 35 place and: 41 projection: 8, 25, 39 veil, image of: 12–13 see also Benjamin, Walter; Fletcher, Angus; Harington, Sir John; history, allegory and; ‘Letter to Ralegh’; personification; Puttenham, George; Quilligan, Maureen; symbol; Teskey, Gordon America and Faeryland: 34 see also Faeryland; Indies, the, and Faeryland Anderson, Judith H.: 154 n.15 Anderson, William: 98 n.5 Andrews, J. H.: 183 n.62 antiquarianism: see under history Appadurai, Arjun: 63 Aptekar, Jane: 9 n.15, 129 n.5, 142 n.36 Arachne: see under Ovid, Metamorphoses archaeology: 160–3 architectural space: see space, architectural Ariosto, Ludovico: 10 see also Harington, Sir John arithmological stanza: 102–04 see also castles; fortifications; Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene Arlo (Aherlow), Arlo Hill: 44 n.53, 176–8, 183, 184

Aston, Margaret: 154 Avery, Bruce: 31 n.17 Bachelard, Gaston: 38 n.37, 218 Baker, David J.: 25 n.5 Baker, Donald: 83 n.31 Baillie, Hugh Murray: 74 n.4 Barber, Peter: 98–9 n.8 Barrell, John: 206 n.37 Bartlett, Richard: 138 Bartlett, William Henry: 155–6 Barton, Anne: 172, 173 bastions: see under fortifications Batsford, Harry: 196 n.2 Bednarz, James P.: 211 n.50 Beier, A. L.: 203 n.27 Bek, Lise: 104–05 Benjamin, Walter: 15–17, 41, 150 Beresford, Maurice: 200 n.21 Berger, Harry, Jr.: 32 n.21, 56 Bess of Hardwick: see Talbot, Elizabeth Bettey, J. H.: 197 Bingham, Richard: 100, 123–5 biography, Spenserian: 43, 73, 149–53, 161–3 Black Book of Edward IV: 77 Blissett, William: 30 n.11, 81–2 Blount, Charles, Eighth Baron Mountjoy: 138 Blythe, Joan Heiges: 77 n.18 Boate, Gerard: 193 Boccaccio, Giovanni: 12 body, human: 100, 103, 110–15, 117 ‘Booke of Questions and Answars, A’: 144–5 boolies: 197, 206–08, 219 see also huts Borris, Kenneth: 115 Bouchier, George: 135

247

Index Bourne, Molly: 61 n.45 Boyle, Robert: 184 Boynton, Lindsay: 52 nn.12–13 Bradner, Leicester: 67 n.56 Brady, Ciaran: 135, 136 Brahe, Tycho: 108 Braun, Georg: 120 Brounker, Sir Henry: 69–71 Brumbaugh, Barbara: 180 Bruster, Douglas: 20 n.50 buildings: see castles; houses; huts Burleigh, Baron see Cecil, William Burlinson, Christopher: 44 n.53 Bury, John: 105 n.38 Busse, Wilhelm: 182 n.57 Butler, Thomas, Earl of Ormond and Ossory: 47 n.2, 56 n.32, 90, 177 Butlin, R. A.: 146 n.48 Cairns, Conrad: 99 n.13 Camden, William: 154 Camino, Mercedes Maroto: 31 n.17 Canny, Nicholas: 146 n.49 Carew, Richard: 215–17 Carrick-on-Suir: 47 n.2, 56 n.32 Carroll, William C.: 204–05 Cartmell, Deborah: 197–8 cartography: see maps Castle of Perseverance, The: 118–19 castles: 47 n.2, 97–100, 109–15, 117–27, 128–9, 139, 140, 154, 155, 157 see also fortifications Cavanagh, Sheila: 60 Cavendish, George: 86 n.42 caves: 137–8 Cecil, Robert, First Earl of Salisbury: 47–8 Cecil, William, First Baron Burleigh: 85, 98, 116, 123, 125, 177 Charles VIII, King of France: 98 Chasteau d’Amour: 110 Chastel, André: 54–5 n.26 Chaucer, Geoffrey: 174–5 Cheney, Donald: 175 Chetwood, William: 152–3 Clifford-Amos, Terence: 34–5 Cline, Ann: 218 cloth of estate: 74, 84–7, 90–2 Clow, Archibald and Nan L.: 186

Coke, Edward: 201–02, 207, 217 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: 7, 16–17, 32–3, 198 see also symbol Comes, Natalis: 171 Commons Complaint, The: 186 Cook, Olive: 67 n.54 Coope, Rosalys: 47 n.1, 48 n.3, 52 n.11, 67, 69 n.61 Cooper, Helen: 133, 214 Cooper, Thomas: 170 Cork: 100–02, 117, 128 Cornelius, Roberta D.: 118 n.72 cottages: see houses, huts Coughlan, Patricia: 176 n.35 court, the: 29, 73–94 see also privy chamber; presence chamber Coyne, Joseph Stirling: 151, 155–6, 158 creation: see humankind, creation of Crang, Mike: 37 n.31 crannogs: 138 Crossett, John M.: 77 n.18 Crossley, D. W.: 189 n.87 Cuellar, Captain: 197 Cullen, Patrick: 171 n.18 Culler, Jonathan: 16 n.37 Cummings, R. M.: 103 n.27 Daly, John P.: 124 Dante Alighieri: 171 Davidson, Clifford: 118–19 Davies, John: 138–40, 142 Davis, Walter R.: 109 n.52 Dawson, Anthony B.: 21 n.52 De Breffny, Brian: 47 n.2 decay: see materiality, decay of De Certeau, Michel: 20 Arts de faire [The Practice of Everyday Life]: 70–1, 140, 145 deforestation: see under forests De la Croix, Horst: 102 n.24, 105 nn.37–38 De Maisse, Monsieur (French Ambassador to England): 74–5, 79 De Man, Paul: 10, 17 Demaray, John: 26 n.6 De Pasino, Marcus Aurelius: 119–20 Derricke, John, 91–2, 141 n.35 Desmond, Countess of: see Fitzgerald, Katherine

248

Index

Eagleton, Terry: 17, 42–3 Eco, Umberto: 40 Edward IV, King of England: 77 ekphrasis: 64–65 Elizabeth I, Queen of England: 49 n.7, 69, 74–5, 78, 79–81, 83–4, 85, 87–8, 90, 92, 138, 169, 189, 190, 211 Eltham Ordinances: 77, 78–9, 80 Elton, G. R.: 75 n.11 Elyot, Thomas: 110, 170 n.14 England and Faeryland: 34–5 see also Faeryland Erickson, Wayne: 11–12, 34 Errard de Bar-le-Duc, J.: 105–06, 120–1 Eschenfelder, Chantal: 55 n.30 Essex, Earl of: see Devereux, Robert Evett, David: 6 n.4

Faunchin, River: 150 Feagh MacHugh: 134, 153 Fenlon, Jane: 56 n.32 Fenton, Geoffrey: 90, 177 n.44 Ferdinand, Archduke: 108 Ferguson, Margaret W.: 158 n.26 Ffolliott, Rosemary: 47 n.2 Fifield, Merle: 118 n.72 Fisher, James Randall: 31 Fitzgerald, Gerald fitz James, Fourteenth Earl of Desmond: 129, 177, 183, 208 Fitzgerald, Katherine, Countess of Desmond: 90 Fitzgerald, Patrick Desmond: 202, 216–17 n.66 Fitzmaurice, James: 129 Fitzpatrick, Joan: 142 Fitzroy, Henry, Duke of Richmond and Somerset: 53 n.17 Fitzwilliam, William: 100, 109, 115, 117–18 Fletcher, Angus: 7–8, 9 n.15, 29, 30 Flinn, Michael W.: 186–7 Foister, Susan: 52 n.14 Fontainebleau: 53–6 forests: 29, 38, 132 n.11, 134, 137, 138, 139, 144, 153, 167–94 deforestation: 148, 167–94 fortifications: 98–102, 104–10, 115–18, 128–32, 139, 140 see also castles bastions: 104 mathematics and: 103–07 Fowler, Alastair: 49–50, 97, 103, 170 n.13 François I, King of France: 53–6 Frenzy of Sweeney, The: 174 n.29 Fry, Charles: 196 n.2 Frye, Northrop: 7 Frye, Susan: 49 n.7, 56 n.33, 57 n.36 Fumerton, Patricia: 20 n.48 Fussell, G. E.: 196 n.3, 200

Faeryland: 23, 31–6, 123, 197 Fahey, Mary Frances: 97 n.1 Fairyland: see Faeryland Farmer, Norman K., Jr.: 114–15 Farnham, George F.: 210 n.49 fastnesses: see space, fastnesses and strongholds Faulkner, P. A.: 47 n.3

Gailey, Alan: 197 n.7 Galenic physiology: 110–11 Gallagher, Catherine: 163 galleries: 47–72, 85, 90 see also Fontainebleau; paintings; tapestries Galtymore: 176 Garrard, William: 119 n.78 garrison warfare: 127, 128, 134–8, 145–6

Desmond, Earl of: see Fitzgerald, Gerald fitz James Desmond family: 151, 208 Devereux, Robert, Second Earl of Essex: 79–81 D’Ewes, Simonds: 200–01 De Yturriaga, José Antonio: 129 n.4 Digby, Kenelme: 103 display of objects: see under object, the Dixon, John: 9 n.15 Doubleday, James F.: 118 n.74 Drayton, Michael: 186 n.79 Du Bellay, Joachim: 158 DuBois, Page: 65 Dubrow, Heather: 133–4 Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester: 52 Duffy, Christopher: 98, 104 nn.33–4 Dugas, Don-John: 141 n.35 Dunlop, R.: 146, 177 n.38 Dürer, Albrecht: 105 Dymmok, John: 139 n.32, 180–1

249

Index Gascoigne, George, The Adventures of Master F. J.: 10, 67–8 geography: 23, 34–6 as metaphor: 24–5 georgic: 174 n.30 Gerard, John: 5 n.3 Gerbier, Balthazar: 106–07 Gillespie, Raymond: 187 n.80 glassmaking: 183, 187 n.83, 189–90 Glenmalure: 134 Glennie, Paul: 19 n.46 Glover, Robert: 87–8 Godfrey, Eleanor S.: 189 n.87, 189 n.89 Goldberg, Jonathan: 157 n.24 Goldstein, Laurence: 157 n.22 Gotch, J. Alfred: 66 Gough, Richard: 196 n.5 Graham, J. M.: 206 n.39 Graham, Rigby: 153 n.12 Grammaticus, Servius: 170–2 Graney, Kathleen M.: 31 n.13, 39 n.38 Graves, Robert: 174 n.29 Graziani, René: 9 n.15 Greenblatt, Stephen: 126–7, 163 Gregory, Tobias: 9 n.15 Grey, Arthur, Fourteenth Baron Grey of Wilton: 130, 131 n.10, 133, 134–5, 138, 143, 190 Greenwich Palace: 61 Grenville, Richard: 100, 118 Gross, Kenneth: 6 n.5 grotesque: 6 Grover, Richard H.: 168 n.4 Guth, Hans P.: 19 n.44 Hadfield, Andrew: 44 n.52, 93–4, 141 n.34, 142 n.39, 143, 177 n.39, 179 Hageman, Elizabeth H.: 103 n.27 Hale, J. R.: 104 n.30, 105 n.40 Hall, Mr and Mrs Samuel Carter: 149–51, 155 Hall, Valerie A.: 181 n.55 Hamilton, A. C.: 12, 36, 83 Hammersley, G.: 186 Hampton Court: 49 n.7, 60–1, 66 hangings: see tapestries Hankins, John Erskine: 171 n.15, 172 Hard, Frederick: 97 n.1 Hardwick Hall: 51–3, 60, 69–71

Harington, Sir John ‘Briefe Apologie of Poetrie’: 14–15 Metamorphosis of Aiax: 187 n.83 Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse: 14, 171–2, 213 Harold Barry family: 157 Harris, Jonathan Gil: 20–1 Harrison, G. B.: 82 n.28 Harrison, William: 195–6 n.1 Harvey, David: 41–2 Hayes-McCoy, G. A.: 124, 138 n.28 Heale, Elizabeth: 142 n.36 Healy, Elizabeth: 162–3 n.33 Heffner, Ray: 155 nn.17–18 Henley, Pauline: 153 n.11, 155 n.20 Henry VII, King of England: 74 Henry VIII, King of England: 53–5, 60–1, 66, 74 Herbert, William: 141 n.35 Herron, Thomas: 9 n.15, 137–8, 161–2, 174 n.30 Highley, Christopher, 93, 142 n.37 Hill, R. F.: 198 n.13 history allegory and: 9 n.15, 13 antiquarianism: 154 material history: 19–20, 44, 150, 161–2, 187–8 metaphysics and: 218 of Ireland and England: 191 see also Ireland spatial practice and: 39, 44, 49, 65, 175 see also new historicism Hogenberg, Frans: 120 Holahan, Michael: 175–6 Holinshed, Raphael: 83–4 Hollander, John: 59 n.40 ‘Homilie Against Idlenesse’: 204–05 Hopper, Vincent Foster: 103 n.27 Horn, D. B.: 90 n.47 Horton, Ronald Arthur: 34 Hough, Graham: 9 n.15, 73 n.3 houses: 195–219 Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey: 53 n.17 Howard, Michael: 98 n.6 Howard, Thomas, 3rd Viscount Bindon: 47–8, 51, 61 Hughes, Quentin: 105 n.39, 106 n.45

250

Index humankind, creation of: 3–4 Hume, Martín: 129 n.1 huts: 195–219 Hutson, Lorna: 34 n.26 iconography: 54–5, 56–7, 61–2, 64–5, 77, 92, 118, 141 ideology: 42–3, 84, 170, 187–8, 192–4, 202–06, 207, 209–10, 211, 218–19 idleness: 189, 202–06, 207, 209–11, 217 see also ‘Homilie Against Idlenesse’; labour Indies, The, and Faeryland: 35, 36 see also America and Faeryland inventories: 52, 60–2 see also object, the ironmaking: 5, 181, 183–90 Ireland: 21, 34, 35 n.29, 38, 42, 44, 90–4, 99–102, 104, 112, 120–7, 128–32, 134–48, 149–58, 160–3, 168–70, 176–84, 187–94, 197, 202, 206–09, 216, 219 Nine Years’ War: 138 threat of invasion from Scotland: 131 threat of Spanish invasion: 100, 102, 128–9, 131, 140 see also Cuellar, Captain waste land in: 28 see also Kilcolman Castle; Spenser, Edmund, in Ireland Ive, Paul: 102, 104 Jackson, Reg: 161 n.29 Janowitz, Anne: 157 n.22 Jardine, Lisa: 19 n.46, 65 n.53 Jenkins, Raymond: 102 n.22 Jobson, Francis: 125–6, 136, 145 Johnson, D. Newman: 99 n.10, 155 Jones, Ann Rosalind: 20–1 n.52 Jones, Frederick M.: 129 n.2 Jonson, Ben, Sejanus: 70 n.64 Jope, E. M.: 99 n.12, 104 n.31 Jordan, Richard Douglas: 103 n.26 journeys: see questing and journeying Keach, William: 176 n.36 Kearney, H. F.: 184 n.66 Kilcolman Castle: 43, 99, 147–8, 149–63, 176 Kingsford, Charles Lethbridge: 52 n.15

Kisby, Fiona: 85 Klein, Bernhard: 31 nn.16–17 Klingelhöfer, Eric: 47 n.2, 155 n.19, 160–3 Knevett, Ralph: 157 n.24 Knockfergus (Carrickfergus): 130–2 Kopytoff, Igor: 63, 65 Korda, Natasha: 20 n.50, 21 n.52 Krieger, Murray: 16 n.37 labour: 100, 101, 115–18, 160, 196, 199, 201–06, 214–15, 216–17 see also idleness; ‘travel and travail’ ‘workemanship’: 111–12, 115 Lamb, Mary Ellen: 57 n.38 landscape: 28–9, 167–219 symbolic: 172 n.25 see also topography Lanham, Richard A.: 57 n.37 Lavender, Andrew: 157 n.24 Leask, Harold: 99 Leedham-Green, E. S.: 102 n.24 Lefebvre, Henri: 20, 86 La production de l’espace [The Production of Space]: 37–42, 43, 48–9, 188 Legge, Robert: 180 n.52 Leicester, Earl of: see Dudley, Robert Leicester House: 52–3 Leslie, Michael: 106 n.44 Lewis, C. S.: 30–1 Lewis, Michael J.: 105 ‘Letter to Ralegh’: see Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene, episodes or passages from Limerick: 100–02, 117 Little Moreton Hall: 48 n.3, 60 n.43 location: see place long galleries: see galleries Longe, George: 189–90 Longfield, Ada Kathleen: 183 Loomis, Roger Sherman: 118 n.73 Lovett, Richard: 151, 157 Luckombe, Philip: 152–3 Lumbarde, Nicholas: 109–10, 116 Lupton, Julia Reinhard: 28, 44 n.53, 134 n.16 Lyne, Raphael: 186 n.79 McCabe, Richard: 9 n.15, 191 n.98 MacCaffrey, Wallace T.: 79 n.20

251

Index MacCarthy-Morrogh, Michael: 146 n.49, 183 n.59 McClintock, H. F.: 141 n.35 McComish, W. A.: 99 n.13 McCracken, Eileen: 178 n.45 McCullough, Niall: 206 n.38, 219 MacLure, Millar: 159 n.28 McNeir, Waldo F.: 10 n.16 Macro Plays: see Castle of Perseverance, The Magennis, Hugh: 133 Malby, Nicholas: 208 Maley, Willy: 44 n.52, 73 n.2, 92, 102 n.21, 102 n.23 Manwood, John: 173 n.27 maps: 25, 31, 36, 136, 138 Mariborough: 127, 146 Marx and Marxist criticism: 19–20 Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots: 86 material culture: 19–21, 37, 63, 65, 161–3 literary studies and: 19–21, 162–3 see also material production; materiality; object, the material production: 37, 41–3 see also material culture; materiality; object, the materiality: 3–21, 38, 58–60, 62–3, 89–90, 109, 111–15, 150, 159, 170, 172–3, 212 decay of: 3–4, 111, 122–3, 149, 158–60 fluctuation: 7, 10, 44, 173 fragmentation: 7, 10, 15, 29, 157, 162–3 heaping: 50 non-materiality: 32, 58, 60, 112 see also material culture; material production; object, the matter: see materiality Mauritius: 167–9 Merrifield, Andrew: 37 n.32, 39 Miller, David Lee: 114 Miller, J. Hillis: 16 n.34 Mills, Jerry Leath: 103 n.27 mining: 5 see also ironmaking Molanna, River: 150 Montrose, Louis: 44 n.53, 94 More, Thomas: 203 Moroney, Maryclaire: 154 n.15 Moryson, Fynes: 197 n.10 mountains: 132 n.11, 137, 138, 139, 142, 144, 153, 176–7 Mountjoy, Lord: see Blount, Charles

Mukerji, Chandra: 19 n.46 Mulvin, Valerie: 206 n.38, 219 Murrin, Michael: 13, 98 Nagle, Captain Garrett: 149 Naylor, E. W.: 103 Nef, J. U.: 185 Neill, Michael: 139 n.31 Nelson, William: 10 n.16, 170–1 new historicism: 19, 43, 160–3 new materialism: see material culture, literary studies and; new historicism Newry: 131 Nicholson, C. E.: 19 n.45 Nohrnberg, James: 170–1, 215 n.59 Nolan, John S.: 101 n.18 Norden, John: 215 Norreys, John: 101, 177 Norreys, Thomas: 101, 115, 117, 129, 183, 190 Northrop, Douglas A.: 86–7 numerology: 49–50, 60, 103 see also arithmological stanza Nuttall, A. D.: 3 n.1, 16–17 Oakeshott, Walter: 212 n.51 object, the: 20–1, 58–62, 63, 65, 72, 86, 89–90, 163 display of: 59, 63–5 see also material culture; material production; materiality O’Callaghan, John: 99 n.12 occultatio: 18, 51, 64, 160 occupation: see under space O’Connell, Michael: 9 n.15, 211–12 n.50 Ó Danachair, Caoimhín: 197 n.7, 197 n.9 O’Dwyer of the Glen, Sean: 193 Ohlmeyer, Jane H.: 206 n.40 O’Keeffe, Tadhg: 47 n.2 O’Neill, Hugh, Earl of Tyrone: 79 O’Neill, Turlough Luineach: 91–2, 129, 130 n.6, 131 n.10, 133 O’Rahilly, Alfred: 129 n.2 Oram, William: 133, 142 Orme, A. R.: 184 n.65 Ormond, Earl of: see Butler, Thomas O’Sullivan, M. D.: 100 n.14, 188 n.86 Ovid, Metamorphoses: 169–70 n.11, 174, 175–6

252

Index Pyrrha and Deucalion: 3–4 Arachne and Minerva: 49 Owen, W. J. B.: 83 paintings: 51–4, 58, 61–2 see also tapestries Panofsky, Dora and Erwin: 54–5 paralepsis: see occultatio parliament: 82, 86–8 pastoral: 133, 213–14 Patricius, Franciscus: 102 n.24 Payne, Robert: 190–1 Peacham, Henry: 172 Pepper, Simon: 98 n.6 Perrott, John: 100, 180 n.52 personification: 8–9, 13 Pesez, Jean-Marie: 19 n.46 Petrarca, Francesco (Petrarch): 171 Philipstown: 127, 146 Phyton, Edward: 176 Piehler, Paul: 172 n.25, 173 place: 26–30, 38 space and: 39 see also space plantations: 138, 139 n.32, 146–7, 179, 190–1 Plat, Hugh: 187 n.83 Plato (and Platonism): 17, 170 Platter, Thomas: 75, 78 Pollitt, Ronald L.: 187 n.82 Ponsford, Michael: 161 n.29 Pope-Hennessy, James: 168 n.5 Pope Hennessy, John: 167–9, 192 Powell, C. L.: 110 n.55 Pratt, Fletcher: 22–3 presence chamber: 47 n.3, 49 n.7, 73–94 Pressouyre, Sylvia: 55 n.29 Prinz, Wolfram: 55 private spaces: see space, private; privy chamber privy chamber: 47 n.3, 74–5 proper place (or proper space or ‘lieu propre’): see space, proper properties: 20, 21 see also object, the Prudentius: 118 Puttenham, George: 14 Pyrrha and Deucalion: see under Ovid, Metamorphoses questing and journeying: 24–5, 32

Quilligan, Maureen: 8, 10 Rackham, Oliver: 187 n.82 Ralegh, Walter: 118, 168–9, 182 n.56, 183–4, 189, 211–12 see also ‘Letter to Ralegh’ Rambuss, Richard: 44 n.53 Ranger, Terence O.: 184 n.66 Read, David: 34 n.26 Reade, Andrew: 155 realism and reality: 7–8, 35, 36–7, 43 see also allegory, literal sense of Recorde, Robert: 60 n.43 referentiality: 8, 10 Renaissance Culture and the Everyday: 19–20 Rhu, Lawrence F.: 13–14 n.27 Rice, Paul F.: 55 n.28 Richmond, Duke of: see Fitzroy, Henry Ringler, Richard N.: 178 n.46 Robinson, Philip: 197 n.7 Roche, Daniel: 19 n.46 Roche, Thomas P., Jr.: 56 n.33 Ronnes, Hanneke: 47 n.2 Ross, Charles: 121–5 ruins: 16, 149–63 Russell, William: 134 Sadowski, Piotr: 103 n.27 St James’s Palace: 54 Samuel, Mark: 99 n.11 Sanford, Rhonda: 31 n.18 Saunders, Corinne: 170–1 Scanlan, Thomas: 207–08 Schama, Simon: 28 n.9 Schmidtchen, Volker: 98 n.6 Schoenfeldt, Michael: 110–11 Schubert, H. R.: 184 n.68, 185 n.70 Schulze, Ivan L.: 83 n.32 secretaryship: see Spenser, Edmund, career as secretary Seed, Patricia: 139 n.32 Segal, Charles Paul: 169–70 n.11, 172 n.25 Sehrt, Ernst Th.: 172 n.23 Sentleger, Warham: 100, 126, 144, 145, 177, 180–1 Seymour, William: 69 Shakespeare, William Hamlet: 70 n.64 Twelfth Night: 212

253

Index Sheehan, Anthony: 116–17, 146 n.48, 147 n.53 Shuger, Debora: 191 n.99 Shute, John: 106 n.42 Sidney, Henry: 91–2 Sidney, Philip: 108–09 Sidney, Robert: 79 Silberman, Lauren: 56–7 Silke, John J.: 129 n.1 Skelton, R. A.: 98 n.8 Skretkowicz, Victor: 108 Smerwick (battle at): 129 Smith, Charles: 151–2, 158 Smythes, Jesse: 146–7 souterrains: see caves; crannogs Southern, Richard: 118 n.75 space: 21, 22–44, 74–5, 82, 86, 90, 182, 207–08, 215 architectural: 48, 73, 102–09, 195–8, 218–19 see also houses, huts defended: 127, 128–32 domestic: 67–8, 94 fastnesses and strongholds: 137–9, 142–4, 177, 207–08 imaginary: 32–3, 172–3 industry and: 188, 215 literature and: 39–42 occupation: 130, 136–9, 144–7, 179, 184, 190–1, 192 private: 47 n.2, 74–5 production of: 37–42 see also Lefebvre, Henri proper: 139–40, 144–7 see also De Certeau, Michel reading and: 39–41, 48–9, 54, 57–60, 65, 86 see also iconography representation and: 37 royal power and: 69–70, 75–81, 86–88 spatial coherence, continuum: 23, 28, 29, 31, 35 textual: 58 see also Bachelard, Gaston; Faeryland; geography; Lefebvre, Henri; landscape; maps; place; spatial practice; strategies, spatial; tactics, spatial; topography; waste spatial practice: 68–71, 74–7 Spenser, Edmund ‘Astrophel’: 177–8

254

Brief Note of Ireland: 135 career as secretary: 44, 101 letters written, addressed, copied, or endorsed by: 90, 129, 131 n.10, 133, 135, 138, 190 Colin Clouts Come Home Againe: 74, 92–4, 151, 157 Faerie Queene, The, episodes or passages from: Dedicatory sonnets: 12–13 Letter to Ralegh: 11–12, 13, 15, 83–4, 157 I.i (Redcrosse Knight): 24, 28 I.i (Forest of Errour): 24, 25–6, 171, 172, 173–5, 192 I.i (Archimago): 27, 209 n.48 I.iii (Una and the Lion): 24 I.iv (House of Pride): 49, 62–3, 73, 76–8, 79, 84, 89, 92, 115 I.vi (Una overtaken by Sansloy): 35 I.vi (Satyrane and ‘saluage nation’): 30, 175 n.33, 182, 210 I.vi (Archimago): 35 n.29 I.vii–viii (Orgoglio): 87–9, 114 I.viii (Duessa): 28 I.ix (Despair): 110 I.x (House of Holiness): 73, 115 I.xii (Palace of Una’s parents): 73, 89–90 II.Proem: 33–4, 63 II.i (Guyon and Duessa): 28 II.i (Guyon and Archimago): 24 II.i (Guyon and the Palmer): 27 II.ii (Gloriana): 62 II.iii (Belphoebe): 175 n.33 II.vi (Guyon and Phaedria): 28 II.vii (poet as ‘Pilot’): 32–3 II.vii (Mammon): 4–5, 28 II.ix–xi (Maleger and the Castle of Alma): 26–7, 35 n.29, 102–04, 106, 109–15, 117–18, 123, 127, 137 II.xii (Bower of Bliss): 31, 111, 126–7, 179 III.i (Florimell’s flight): 175 n.33, 195 III.i (Castle Joyeous): 18–19, 49, 63–6, 113 III.ii (Britomart’s quest): 25 III.iii (Merlin): 36 III.v (Timias): 30, 175 n.33, 181–2

Index III.vi (Belphoebe): 29 III.vi (Garden of Adonis): 31, 175 n.33 III.vii (Witch): 112–13, 175 n.33, 195–6, 202–03, 205, 209, 213 III.vii (Squire of Dames): 213 III.x (Malbecco and Hellenore): 8–9, 175 n.33, 182, 215 III.xi–xii (Britomart and Busyrane): 49–51, 56–60, 65, 68–9, 71 IV.i (Scudamour and Amoret’s bridal feast): 71 IV.i (Ate): 60 n.41 IV.v (False Florimell): 113 IV.v (Care): 214–15 IV.vi (Scudamour and Britomart): 175 n.33 IV.vii (Amoret and Lust): 175 n.33, 182 IV.vii (Timias and Belphoebe): 175 n.33, 211, 213–14 IV.viii (Sclaunder): 209 n.48 IV.x (Temple of Venus): 18, 31 IV.xi (river pageant): 178 n.45 V.Proem: 3–5 V.i (Artegall’s sword): 4, 5–6 V.ii (Munera): 114, 121–6 V.iii (tournament): 113–14 V.vi (Britomart and Dolon): 124–5 V.viii (Souldan): 129, 132 V.ix (Malengin): 133, 140–3, 144, 147, 162 V.ix (Mercilla and trial of Duessa): 73, 75–6, 78–9, 84–5, 86–7, 92, 143, 198 VI.Proem: 25 VI.i (Calidore’s quest): 24 VI.i (Briana and Crudor): 121–2, 125 VI.iv (Calepine, Turpine, and child of Sir Bruin): 175 n.33 VI.v (Matilda and the wild man): 175 n.33 VI.ix (Calidore pursues the Blatant Beast): 28–9 VI.ix–xi (Shepherd nation and Brigants): 28, 29, 133–4, 137–8, 144, 162, 213–14 VII.vi–vii (Mutabilitie cantos): 81–2, 175–80, 188, 192 VII.viii: 3 Fowre Hymnes: 17–18

in Ireland: 44, 149–53, 155–8, 160–3, 176–7, 190 see also biography, Spenserian; Grey, Arthur; Ireland; Kilcolman Castle; View of the Present State of Ireland ‘Ruines of Rome’: 158–9 ‘Ruines of Time, The’: 149, 159–60 Shepheardes Calender, The: 214 View of the Present State of Ireland: 31, 99, 121, 128–30, 132, 133, 134–6, 141, 153–4, 179, 191–2, 206–09 Spenser, Sylvanus (son of Edmund Spenser): 155 Spenser, William (grandson of Edmund Spenser): 153 Sprague de Camp, L.: 22–3 Spufford, Margaret: 196 n.4 Stafford, Thomas: 100 Staines, John D.: 9 n.15, 142 n.36 Stallybrass, Peter: 20–1 n.52 Standish, Arthur: 186 Stanley, William: 132 Starkey, David: 74, 76 n.13, 86 n.40 statues: 54, 57–8 Steadman, John M.: 171 n.18 Stow, John: 123 n.84 strategies, spatial: see De Certeau, Michel, Arts de Faire Strong, Roy: 74 n.5 Stuart, Arabella: 69–71 Stump, Donald V.: 77 n.18 Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture: 19 Summerson, John: 98 n.8 Surrey, Earl of: see Howard, Henry symbol: 16–17 tactics, spatial: see De Certeau, Michel, Arts de Faire Talbot, Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury (Bess of Hardwick): 69–71 tapestries: 48–51, 56–62, 64–5, 68 see also paintings Tasso, Torquato, Gerusalemme Liberata, ‘Allegory’: 13–14 temperance: 110, 120 Teskey, Gordon: 3 n.1, 11, 15 n.31, 212 Theatre for Worldlings, A: 158

255

Index Theobalds: 85 Thirsk, Joan: 196, 200 Thomas, Keith: 203 n.26 Thompson, Claud A.: 64 Thoms, William J.: 52 n.16 Thrift, Nigel: 37 n.31 Thurley, Simon: 48 n.3, 74 n.7 timber: 183–91 see also forests; glassmaking; ironmaking topography: 28, 30, 36, 132 n.11, 142, 198 see also caves; forests; landscape; mountains; waste; wilderness ‘travel’ and ‘travail’: 25 see also labour; questing and journeying Tristram, Philippa: 219 Turlough Luineach: see O’Neill, Turlough Luineach Turner, Henry S.: 20 n.49 Turner, James Grantham: 203–04 Tyrone: see O’Neill, Hugh Upton, John: 103 n.27, 211 vagrancy: 138–9, 143–4, 203 n.27, 217 see also ‘Act for Vagabonds’ Van Es, Bart: 154, 158 n.27 Venus and Adonis: 64, 65 View of the Present State of Ireland: see under Spenser, Edmund Virgil: 170–2, 174, 214 Virgilius, Polydorus: 102 n.24 Vitruvius (Marcus Vitruvius Pollio): 106 Wales: 36 Wallace, Jennifer: 162 n.32 Wallop, Henry: 177 n.44 Wallop, John: 53–5 Walsingham, Francis: 115–16, 129, 131 n.10, 177

Walton, Julian: 117 n.69 Warton, Thomas (Spenserian commentator): 198 waste: 28 see also wilderness Waterford: 100–02, 109, 116–17, 128, 140 Waterhouse, Edward: 177 n.44 Weatherby, H. L.: 154 n.14 West, Michael: 97 Westropp, M. S. Dudley: 189 n.88 White, Rowland (Irish writer): 207 Whyte, Rowland (royal steward): 79 wilderness: 28–9, 170, 182 see also waste Williams, Penry: 75 n.12 Williams, Raymond: 203–04, 205 Willis, Nathaniel: 151, 155–6, 158 Wilson, Robert R.: 58 n.39 Wilson, Scott: 108 n.50 Winthrop, John: 199–200 n.19 Wofford, Susan Lindgren: 57 n.37, 58 Wolsey, Cardinal Thomas: 86 n.42 wolves: 179–80 Woodcock, Matthew: 31 Woodward, Donald: 117 n.69 Woolway Grenfell, Joanne: 24–5, 31, 39 n.38, 130 ‘workemanship’: see under labour Wotton, Henry: 48, 108–09 Wright, Pam: 75 Yachnin, Paul: 21 n.52 Yorke, Edmund: 100–01, 102, 109, 116–17, 120 Youghal: 177, 184 Young, Charles R.: 184 n.69 ½i¼ek, Slavoj: 23 n.2 zodiac: 31 Zurcher, Andrew: 44 n.53, 144 n.42, 214 n.57

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Studies in Renaissance Literature Volume 1: The Theology of John Donne Jeffrey Johnson Volume 2: Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry Studies in Donne, Herbert, Crashaw and Vaughan R. V. Young Volume 3: The Song of Songs in English Renaissance Literature Kisses of their Mouths Noam Flinker Volume 4: King James I and the Religious Culture of England James Doelman Volume 5: Neo-historicism: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History and Politics edited by Robin Headlam Wells, Glenn Burgess and Rowland Wymer Volume 6: The Uncertain World of Samson Agonistes John T. Shawcross Volume 7: Milton and the Terms of Liberty edited by Graham Parry and Joad Raymond Volume 8: George Sandys: Travel, Colonialism and Tolerance in the Seventeenth Century James Ellison Volume 9: Shakespeare and Machiavelli John Roe Volume 10: John Donne’s Professional Lives edited by David Colclough Volume 11: Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance Alex Davis Volume 12: Shakespearean Tragedy as Chivalric Romance: Rethinking Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and King Lear Michael L. Hays

Volume 13: John Donne and Conformity in Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit Jeanne Shami Volume 14: A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England Adam Smyth Volume 15: John Bunyan and the Language of Conviction Beth Lynch Volume 16: The Making of Restoration Poetry Paul Hammond