Showing Like a Queen. Katherine Eggert
might simply ride away from the inaction their wife enforces.53 Such was the wish expressed by the Lincolnshire rector Henry Hooke, whose short manuscript treatise of 1601 or 1602 entitled “Of the succession to the Crowne of England” digresses from praising Elizabeth into desiring her replacement by a king whose “first intent” would overgo his predecessor’s feminine stasis on the question of religious reform: “so the brightnes of [Queen Elizabeth’s] daye … shineth still: and more & more may it shine unto the perfect daye: that what corruptions in justice, what blemishes in religion, the infirmitie, and inconveniency of woemanhead, would not permitt to discover and discerne, the vigor, and conveniency of man sytting as king in the throne of aucthoritie; maye diligently search out, and speedylie reforme.”54 Hooke’s remarks couple a desire for the repeal of female authority with a hope for an entirely new mode of monarchical endeavor, one that brings heretofore unenacted intents to fruition. As Christopher Highley has detailed, English officials in Ireland (such as Spenser himself) shared with particular intensity Hooke’s desire for a ruler whose policies were more direct and aggressive.55
But as Artegall’s recall to Gloriana’s court demonstrates, such a hope for reform in 1596 remains suspended, both in terms of English politics, where the anticipation of a king’s succession only added to the internecine wrangling of Elizabeth’s court, and in terms of The Faerie Queene’s ambitions as an activist poem. Book 5’s revision of literary form might take the poem out of the realm of romance, but it cannot repeal the rule of queens, either of Elizabeth or of Gloriana. In this way Book 5 debunks the misogynist fallacy of The Faerie Queene’s earlier scenes of seduction and of wedlock. Artegall’s recall reveals that heroic expeditions are delayed not in the private female world—not in either the illicit bower or the sanctioned bridal chamber—but rather in the public world of political aspiration. And if the poem’s opposition between romance (to which that feminized private world corresponds) and masculine heroism is shown to be a false opposition, then the nostalgia for an epic form that predated romance no longer holds any attraction.
Instead, The Faerie Queene passes over the uncompleted ending of Book 5 by engaging upon yet another generic experiment. Book 6’s reformation into pastoral stands in contrast to Book 5 not only as a conspicuously anti-epic form, but also as a conspicuously and innovatively masculine anti-epic form.56 Although Book 6 seems to accept with pleasure poetry’s suspension of experience—as does the narrative voice, which in the Proem admits itself “nigh rauisht with rare thoughts delight” in Faery land’s delightful ways (6.Pr.1)—it does so in a way untainted by the interruptive demands of feminine authority. Queen Elizabeth’s appearance in this Book is a pointed nonappearance: Colin Clout eliminates Gloriana from his configuration of the graces’ dance on the revelatory Mount Acidale, replacing her instead with “certes but a countrey lasse” (6.10.25). In contrast to The Shepheardes Calender’s April eclogue, where Colin confidendy fashioned his queen as an appropriate object for poetry, here Spenser’s poetic alter ego apologetically but firmly defines poetry as that which takes shape when female rule is out of the way.57 Even more than splintering Elizabeth into “mirrhours more than one,” displacing her entirely from consideration leaves room for poetic accomplishment.
Not that Book 6 is therefore marked by triumphant poetic closure. The “untimely breach” of Arthur’s rent chronicle not only recurs as Calidore’s comically blundering “luckelesse breach” in Colin’s perfect vision (6.10.29), but also might be taken as the model for Book 6’s narrative, which is hardly famous for its seamless conclusions. The end of Book 6 is similarly not one of perfection, either promised or fulfilled. Like Artegall’s recall to Gloriana’s court, the Blatant Beast’s present-tense rampage at the end of Book 6 wrenches poetry from the domain of the past(oral) to the unnatural shocks of the present day, so that conclusion once again is disrupted by uncertainty—in this case, uncertainty imposed by readers more willing to slander poetry than to be melted into sweetness by it. “Ne spareth [the Beast] the gentle Poets rime, / But rends without regard of person or of time” (6.12.40). Though drastically different experiments in poetic form, Books 5 and 6 thus share a mode of inconclusion. Both books play out fantasies of freeing politics and poetry from feminine rule; both envision a newly masculine poetics. And both, in the end, acknowledge those fantasies as fantasies, enacting the futility of imagining that a male-gendered mode, either of monarchy or of poetry, will bring about the wished-for consummation.
I come to this conclusion (or to The Faerie Queene’s nonconclusion), however, with my ear cocked to Berger’s warning that what we hear in Spenser’s magnum opus as argument—as assertion, refutation, judgment, revelation, demonstration, or any other of those rhetorical certainties which we so often attribute to Spenser’s poetry—cannot be taken as “Spenser’s” or even “the poem’s” settled opinion, but rather must be viewed skeptically as one of the discourses that, like dummies at a ventriloquists’ contest, voice the competing desires that prompt their speaking. In his challenge to Paul Alpers’s thesis that Spenser’s stanzas are “modes of address by the poet to the reader,” Berger argues that “Alpers misdescribes the transaction as an empirical one between the author and actual readers, whereas I take it to be a virtual or fictive transaction, one that the poem actively represents and subtly criticizes, and therefore one that constitutes a rhetorical scene of reading from which actual readers can dissociate themselves.” Hence we can undertake “an ideological reading of The Faerie Queene as a critique of the cultural discourses it represents.”58 Berger’s subtle argument describes The Faerie Queene as radical in ways that all its Elizabethan source materials and cultural commonplaces, rampant as they are in Spenser’s poetic field, could never countenance. I would like to make use of his insights to examine the radical critique ultimately disclosed by the generic experiment of Book 5: not a critique of attempting closure via masculinized poetic form, but rather a critique of desiring closure in poetry at all. In particular, the failures of Book 5’s final cantos unsettle the impulse toward closure that is, or at least can be, the impulse toward allegory. Allegory proposes that we can metonymically replace what is troublesome and undefinable by something that looks hermetically sealed: not sexuality, but Immoral Lust or Wedded Love; not savage massacres in Ireland, but a gratefully free Irena; not Elizabeth, but Gloriana. The problem of obtaining allegorical closure, however, is akin to the difficulties critics have had in plotting out Book 5’s structural, mythical, or moral unity. To create a transcendent order, one must repress the messy and conflicting nature of the facts or events that are transcended. Spenser in this clunkiest portion of The Faerie Queene anticipates how ballasted allegoresis of his poem can become, by showing how ballasted his own poetry can be when it succumbs to a fully allegorizing impulse. For that reason I think we should see Book 5’s historical allegory not so much as a failed experiment, but as an experiment whose failure is allowed to stand for all failures to impose univocal meanings upon complicated poems. Like the nostalgia for an unsullied genre before romance, Book 5 shows us, so too is the desire for unsullied truth based on false premises. Just as the “problem” of female authority precedes and enwraps and even motivates The Faerie Queene—and hence is not to be “solved” by backward glances to some golden age—so too are Spenserian irresolutions not to be wished away.59
Book 5’s demonstrated failure forewarns of the dangers of excess complacency toward what critics usually take to be the real final statement of The Faerie Queene, the Mutability Cantos. Most critics describe Mutabilitie as the consummate enactment of allegorical closure. Hamilton’s edition of the poem approvingly quotes a number of these judgments, including William Blissett’s that the cantos are “a detached retrospective commentary on the poem as a whole, forming as they do a satisfactory conclusion to a foreshortened draft, a stopping place at which, after a seriatim reading, can be made a pleasing analysis of all” (p. 711).60 But as Gordon Teskey has pointed out, Blissett’s essay also addresses the ways in which Mutabilitie, not so detached from its historical moment as it seems, in fact troubles itself again with the problematics of late Elizabethan female rule. As Teskey paraphrases Blissett, Mutabilitie undertakes “the shocking representation (especially shocking in the late 1590s) of Mutabilitie threatening Cynthia’s chair”; and Teskey adds the comment that “[c]riticism has yet to come to grips with Mutabilitie’s being not only