Spenser and Ovid [Reprint ed.] 0754639053, 9780754639053

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Spenser's New Fasti: Ovidian Strategies of Protest in The Shepheardes Calender
2 Epic Idolatry and Concupiscent Romance in Book I of The Faerie Queene
3 Ovid and the Limitations of Temperance in Book II of The Faerie Queene
4 Unbinding Love: Britomart's Ovidian Inquest
5 Vates profugus: Love, Exile and Authority in the poems of 1595
6 Sors mea rupit opus: Exile and the 1596 Faerie Queene
7 Spenser, Ovid, and Political Myth-Making: Mutabilitie's Challenge to the Ideology of Power
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

SPENSER AND OVID Pugh ... is a gifted intertextual critic, as much at home in Ovid as she is in Spenser ... heady and eloquent, an important contribution to early modern studies. Patrick Cheney, Professor of English, Penn State University

In Spenser and Ovid, Syrithe Pugh gives the fIrst sustained account of Ovid's presence in the Spenser canon, uncovering new evidence to reveal the thematic and formal debts many of Spenser's poems owe to Ovid, particularly when considered in the light of an informed understanding of all of Ovid's work. Pugh's reading presents a challenge to New Historicist assumptions, as she contests both the traditional insistence on Virgil as Spenser's prime classical model and the idea it has perpetuated of Spenser as Elizabeth I's imperial propagandist. In fact, Pugh locates Ovid's importance to Spenser precisely in his counter-Virgilian world view, with its high valuation of faithful love, concern for individual freedom, distrust of imperial rule, and the poet's claim to vatic authority in opposition to political power. Her study spans Spenser's career from the inaugural Shepheardes Calender to what was probably his last poem, The Mutabilitie Cantos, and embraces his work in the gemes of pastoral, love poetry, and epic romance. Syrithe Pugh is British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Leeds, UK.

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Spenser and Ovid

SYRITHE PUGH

First published 2005 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint a/the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Syrithe Pugh 2005 Syrithe Pugh has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part ofthis book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Pugh, Syrithe N.A.M Spenser and Ovid I.Spenser, Edmund, 1552?-1599-Criticism and interpretation 2.Spenser, Edmund, 1552?-1599- Knowledge-Latin literature 3.Spenser, Edmund, 1552?-1599. Fairie queene 4.Ovid, 43 B.C.-17 or 18 A.D.- Influence 5.Virgil- Influence 6.Spenser, Edmund, 1552?-1599- Sources 7.English poetry-Roman influences 8.Intertextuality I.Title 821.3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pugh, Syrithe. . Spenser and Ovid I Syrithe N.A.M. Pugh. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7546-3905-3 (alk. paper) 1. Spenser, Edmund, 1552?-1599-Knowledge-Literature. 2. Politics and literatureGreat Britain-History-16th century. 3. Ovid, 43 B.C.-17 or 18 A.D.-AppreciationEngland. 4. Spenser, Edmund, 1552?-1599. Faerie queene. 5. Ovid, 43 B.C.-17 or 18 A.D. Metamorphoses. 6. Ovid, 43 B.C.-17 or 18 A.D.-Influence. 7. Spenser, Edmund, 1552?-1599-Sources.8. English poetry-Roman influences. 9. Intertextuality. I. Title. PR2367.L5P842004 821'.3-dc22 2004016094 ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-3905-3 (hbk)

Contents Acknowledgements Introduction

1 2

3

vii

1

Spenser's New Fasti: Ovidian Strategies of Protest in The Shepheardes Calender

12

Epic Idolatry and Concupiscent Romance in Book I of The Faerie Queene

42

Ovid and the Limitations of Temperance in Book II of The Faerie Queene

77

4

Unbinding Love: Britomart's Ovidian Inquest

119

5

Vates profugus: Love, Exile and Authority in the poems of 1595

152

6

Sors mea rupit opus: Exile and the 1596 Faerie Queene

203

7

Spenser, Ovid, and Political Myth-Making: Mutabilitie's Challenge to the Ideology of Power

246

Bibliography

278

Index

297

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Acknowledgements lowe a debt of gratitude to the wide academic and literary community without whose help, both witting and unwitting, this book could not have been produced. Of those who taught me homely, as I can, to make, especial thanks are due to Richard McCabe, Patrick Cheney, Julian Lethbridge and Tom Roche for their stimulating conversation and generous and painstaking advice and support. The wealth of existing scholarship on Spenser and on Ovid has shaped my thinking in ways too profound and pervasive for notes to do more than gesture towards: its influence will be visible on every page. Thanks also to the staff of the Bodleian for their patient assistance and to the English department at Leeds, which provided a welcoming and supportive environment in the finishing stages. For gifts of fortune, I am grateful to the British Academy, whose patronage has funded this project from its beginnings as a doctoral thesis at Oxford to its completion during a postdoctoral fellowship at Leeds. I am indebted also to the editorial staff at Ashgate for their patience and efficiency in answering my many queries. The book is dedicated to Joseph Burn, without whose endless understanding and encouragement it would never have been written. All the good is theirs; the faults which remain are entirely original. A version of chapter 3 appears in Julian Lethbridge (ed.), New and Renewed Directions in Spenser Studies (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), and I am grateful to the publishers for granting permission to reproduce the material here.

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Introduction From the early days of 'source-study' it has been recognized that Spenser's poetry is as full of Ovidian allusion and imitation as of Virgilian, as a glance at the great Variorum edition or at Lotspeich's Classical Mythology in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser reveals. The sustained attempt to read such allusive or imitative practices as constitutive of meaning in more recent intertextual approaches, however, confronts critics with a fork in the road. There has been a growing awareness that the Virgilian and Ovidian models represent widely divergent values, poetic purposes and conceptions of the role of the poet and his relation to political power, and that the two tendencies in Spenser's poetry cannot exist peaceably and on an equal footing-that the individualism, eroticism, playful irony and exilic discontent which seep into Spenser's poems through his allusions to Ovid threaten to undermine the public-minded values, imperialist politics and serious poetic stance which he seems to derive from Virgil. In response to this, critics have continually, though in a variety of ways, subordinated the Ovidian to the Virgilian in Spenser's poetry. While the allusions to Virgil have been treated as systematic, part of the overall plan (or posited authorial intention) and system of meaning in the poems, and of his self-presentation across his career, the allusions to Ovid have tended to be treated as merely local, restricted to passing significance, regarded as superficial embroidery or momentary waverings in what remains a dominantly Virgilian narrative. Such Virgilio centric reading of Spenser is influenced by, and in tum reconfirms, the role of spokesman for Elizabethan imperialism in which he was cast early on by the New Historicist movement, whose underlying Foucauldian view of literature as unable to reflect on or diverge from its constitutive ideology has helped to mute those aspects of his poetry which do not conform to the Virgilian imperialist model. I Yet recent readings of Spenser's politics have detected ambivalence towards Elizabeth's imperial monarchy and anxieties about its absolutist tendencies. 2 Meanwhile in Ovidian studies there has been a developing sense that the ways in which Ovid diverges from Virgil reflect his resistance to Augustan imperial ideology, and even an anti-Augustan or counterAugustan programme of his own. 3 This book represents an attempt to read as systematic the allusions to and imitation of Ovid across Spenser's career which have previously been kept fragmentary and contained, in a study whose methods and aims are at once historicist and intertextual. 4 From this altered perspective the Virgilian elements appear-as do the Virgilian elements in Ovid's own worksometimes as a veil to deflect the censor from an underlying political heterodoxy, sometimes as a citation of the imperial stance from which the work distances itself, and there emerges a profoundly coherent counter-Virgilian system of thought, embracing philosophy, politics and poetics, in which Spenser draws together various aspects of his reading of Ovid into a formidable conception of the role and

2

Spenser and Ovid

scope of the Ovidian poet, affording an alternative model of poetic authority which bypasses the Virgilian poet's reliance on monarchical power. The Ovidianism of Spenser's self-presentation and poetic project has lately been acknowledged in two areas in particular, and before I outline my argument I shall say a word about the significance of these recognized Ovidian aspects, how they have been subordinated and controlled in Virgiliocentric readings, and how their implications change and develop when freed from this constraining narrative. The first is Spenser's representation of his life in Ireland as analogous to Ovid's 'exile' or relegation to Tomis. This has been noted by several critics, responding usually to the echoes of Ovid's Tristia in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, yet its implications, and its possible effect on the idea of the Virgil ian Spenser, tend to be shut down prematurely.5 Helgerson's treatment is typical. Having argued at length that Spenser's ambitions throughout his career are fundamentally Virgilian, he represents Spenser's implied comparison of himself to the exiled Ovid as a passive reflection on a set of external circumstances brought about by misfortune late in his career: 'No wonder if Spenser saw himself less as a new Virgil and more as the Ovid of the Tristia, abandoned by his friends for his carmen et error. ,6 So far from being a purposeful act, the adoption of an Ovidian stance is for Helgerson a measure of Spenser's failure to fulfil his Virgilian intentions. Yet the exilic stance is not an accident of external circumstance, but so voluntary an act that Spenser adopts it at the beginning of his career, before his physical move to Ireland, in the work in which he is supposed first to announce his Virgilian intentions, the Shepheardes Calender. McCabe and Hadfield have described the mood of 'internal exile' in the Calender and how it is used to express Protestant disaffection with Elizabethan policies. 7 But they do not explore its Ovidian nature: though McCabe links the 'reminiscences of Ovid's Tristia' in CCCHA with its satirical view of Cynthia's court, his observation in relation to the Calender that 'Despite similarities between his own literary career and that of Virgil in their common movement from eclogue to epic, it soon becomes clear that Spenser enjoys the patronage of no Augustus, that his position is, in fact, closer to that of the exiled Ovid' suggests a reflection of misfortune, like Hegerson' s, rather than a purposeful act of self-presentation. 8 In fact the Calender is constructed to evoke, urgently and pervasively, both Ovid's exile and the ideological distance from the centre of power of which it was both an effect and a symbol. Modelled structurally on Ovid's calendrical Fasti, the work which Ovid presented as broken off by his exile, informed by Ovid's parody of Virgilian pastoral in the exile poetry, and imitating the pseudo-Ovidian Nux, read as an allegory of Ovid's exile, it employs Ovidian strategies of oblique satire, the manipulation of myth and conspicuous self-silencing to voice concerns about censorship, the failure of patronage and the absolutism implicit in the imperial model of monarchy which Spenser recognizes as shared by Ovid. Ovid is historically situated at a crosscurrent of traditional republican thought and the new imperialism, which sustained its hold on power through carefully

Introduction

3

cultivated ambiguity, claiming to 'restore the republic' after a period of civil strife while actually replacing the participatory and representative government of the republic with authoritarian one-man-rule. 9 A crucial part of this was the emperor's shift away from the idea that his authority derived from the people towards the idea that it derived from the gods, and that therefore he could not be challenged by the people and was not subject to law. This careful tying in of imperial to divine authority was performed in many ways.1O Augustus' appointment to the role of Pontifex Maximus put him in control of the state religion and of all consultation with the gods through augury and prophecy: he thus became the sole mouthpiece of the gods, a role which remained integral to the role of Emperor until it was assumed by the Popes, deriving their spiritual empire from this aspect of imperial authority through the forged Donation of Constantine. He was elevated to quasidivine status himself, adopting one of Jove's titles, 'Augustus', officially declaring his adoptive father Julius Caesar a god, and, according to Suetonius, claiming Apollo as his biological father. Iconography and the poetry of Virgil and Horace contributed to the programme. 11 Ovid satirizes these insidious approaches to selfdeification in the Fasti, while the violence and injustice of the gods in the Metamorphoses, particularly those to whom Augustus was most often compared, Apollo and Jove, can be read as an indictment of the abuses to which absolute power is open. In the exile elegies he ostensibly participates in the cultural deification of the emperor, but in ways which ironically emphasize the contradiction between the necessity for his own posture of craven servility and flattery before a wrathful and all-powerful Augustus and the traditional rights and dignity of a freeborn Roman citizen. Spenser similarly writes at a period when the definition of England's monarchy is evolving, contested and ambiguous. Henry VIII's redesignation of the English monarchy as imperial at the time of his break from Rome redefined the monarch's powers in ways modelled on the role of the Roman emperors. 12 Where mediaeval theories of kingship enshrined in common law saw England as a mixed or limited monarchy, in which the King's authority derived directly from the people, though ultimately from God, so that the King was accountable to parliament and subject to law, Henry followed a similar course to Augustus in shifting away from this notion of a monarch representative of and answerable to the people towards the idea that his authority derives directly from God, with the implication that the King is 'under God but not the law, for the king makes the law'. 13 This association and nearidentification of imperial and divine authority provided the basis on which Tudor monarchs could defy any attempt to resist or limit their power: the Homily on Obedience promises 'everlasting damnation to all disobedient persons ... forasmuch as they resist not man, but God.'14 It is attacked in the Vindiciae contra tyrannos, published in the same year as the Calender, which adjures its readers to reject these detestable faithless and impious vanities of the Court-Marmousites, which makes Kings Gods, and receive their sayings as Oracles; and which is worse, are so shameless to perswade Kings, that nothing is just or equitable of it self, but

4

Spenser and Ovid takes its true form of Justice or Injustice, according as it pleaseth the King to ordain: as ifhe were some God, which could never err nor sin at all. 15

As supreme head of the Church of England (a title modified by Elizabeth to 'supreme governor', in response to increased anxiety about the extent of monarchical power due to her gender) Henry effectively became Pope in his own kingdom, assuming the control of the state religion wielded by the Roman emperors as Pontifici Maximi and assumed by the popes. Like Augustus, Elizabeth used these powers to regulate the public sphere and limit her subjects' freedom of speech. The punishment of Archbishop Grindal for denying her authority to suppress 'prophesyings' is one object of the Calender's satire, and she introduced the concept of 'matters of state', the Tacitean arcanum imperii of the Roman emperors, making it an offence for subjects to discuss sensitive policy areas, even in parliament. The Calender adopts Ovidian strategies of oblique satire to voice concerns about this political climate which will recur throughout Spenser's career. Its warnings against the implied deification of the imperial monarch will return in Books I and V of The Faerie Queene and in the Mutabilitie Cantos, and the acts of conspicuous self-silencing which draw attention to the pressure of censorship throughout the Calender anticipate the breaking off of his epic, like Ovid's Fasti, after six books. In a later essay, Helgerson observes that the romance elements of The Faerie Queene are used to advocate limited monarchy, against the absolutist connotations of 'classical' or Virgilian epic. 16 But the flouting of classical rules of 'unity and historicity' and concomitant opposition to royal absolutism which Helgerson ascribes to 'Gothic' romance are also a feature of the 'counter-classical' Ovid of the Metamorphoses, recognized by contemporaries as a precursor of cinquecento romance. The Faerie Queene will show awareness of these relations as it engages in the formal and ideological dispute between epic and romance, and between its models in Virgil and Ovid. Spenser's self-presentation then, early and late in his career, by analogy with the exiled Ovid, a figure of political alienation and punished speech, announces an Ovidian career of ideological independence and scrutiny of political power. Patrick Cheney challenges the Virgilian model by identifying another Ovidian aspect of Spenser in his high valuation of love and inclusion of love lyric within his epic career. Cheney argues that this represents a deliberate modification of the Virgilian career model in response to what Spenser perceives as one of its limitations: Virgil's 'political telos marginalizes wedded love, on the one hand, and remains ignorant of Christian salvation, on the other,' and Spenser compensates by 'integrating' the Ovidian and Augustinian career models, in the genres oflove lyric and hymn, with the Virgilian.1 7 But Cheney subordinates the Ovidian part to what remains a Virgilian whole, and makes the Amoretti merely instrumental. The literary exercize and the love relationship itself are supposed simply to refresh Spenser's energies and 'renew his epic strength'; the emphasis is on 'the value of wedded love to national service, ... the value of Elizabeth Boyle to Elizabeth

Introduction

5

Tudor, ... the value of the love lyric to the national epic,' not on their inherent value. 18 Cheney can reconcile and subordinate this Ovidian moment to the aims of the Virgilian career only by regarding it as simply amatory. But the love poetry of both Ovid and Spenser is rarely only about love. Ovid's erotic elegies ostentatiously flout Augustus' moral legislation, and the exploitative relationships they depict have been read as a satire on the libido dominandi which characterizes imperial Rome. The exile elegies use the rhetoric of love elegy to suggest the demeaning inequality of Ovid's relation to Augustus, presenting the emperor as a cruel dominatrix, Ovid as his slave-like wooer. Spenser's revision of Petrarchism is concerned with the relation between the Queen and her male courtiers so often couched in Petrarchan rhetoric as well as with private love. Both poets see the spheres of love and politics as analogous: each is a site in which power may be abused and mutual care may be striven for. By making it a means of renewal for Virgilian epic, according to Cheney, Spenser converts into success what in Ovid marked 'disastrous' failure: 'the Ovidian model...show[s] how the love lyric sabotages the poet's epic career' and 'introduces the love lyric as an impediment to a successful Virgilian or civic career.' 19 But what is striking about Spenser's poetry is not the renewed vigour of a return to a Virgilian 'mission' but what Spenser himself presents as repeated lapses from grand epic into the amatory and pastoral. Indeed he is supposed to have lapsed before he has even started: already at the beginning of the Calender Colin has given up composing Virgilian hymns to the god-like Elisa in favour of love laments, and the pattern continues through the poems of 1595 and Calidore's pastoral truancy in Book VI of The Faerie Queene to the Faunus episode, 'iII fitting for this file', in the Mutabilitie Cantos. Ovid, meanwhile, does not fail to be Virgil because his career is hijacked and destroyed by love. It is true that Ovid presents himself, over and over again, as thwarted in Virgilian epic intentions, lapsing despite himself into elegy because bullied by Cupid or distracted by his mistress. Like Spenser he has supposedly lapsed before he has begun: the Amores open with the poet beginning to write an epic-the opening is the same as that of the Aeneid, 'arma'-and at the start of the second book he remembers how he had once been writing a Gigantomachy when his mistress closed her door against him and he returned to elegy to woo her back. But these supposed Virgilian intentions are not to be taken seriously; his continual return to 'low' elegy and amatory subject-matter is a deliberate choice with ideological implications. Both Ovid and Spenser do present themselves as 'failing to be Virgil', but in both it is a rhetorical gesture intended at once to convey and to excuse what is actually a refusal to devote themselves to Virgilian praise. The very notion of an ascent from pastoral, with its private and amatory concerns, through the labour of the Georgics to the Aeneid's militarism, ethos of sacrifice and duty, and idea of imperial destiny rests on a hierarchy of values which Ovid and Spenser challenge. The continual return to ' low' genres in each expresses a concern for the individual, a high valuation of love, and a distrust of political absolutism, which places love-poetry and pastoral

6

Spenser and Ovid

higher than the poetry of arms or praise of a monarch, as is suggested when the climactic vision of Spenser's epic on Mount Acidale is evoked by his pastoral persona Colin, hymning his love. In a later work, Cheney recognizes the ideological force of Ovid's 'generic oscillation' and his treatment of love, but it is Marlowe who is credited with imitating them, and Spenser (seen through Marlowe's eyes) is thoroughly a Virgil once more. 20 Spenser's exploration of love, so deeply and pervasively informed by Ovid, is central to his philosophy at every level and across his works. His Ovidian reformation of the power dynamics of Petrarchism in favour of mutual wedded love in Book III of The Faerie Queene and the Amoretti is at the heart of his ethics; his analysis and rejection of Virgilian anti-eroticism in favour of Ovidian elegiac values of sympathy, care and loyalty expands into a social vision in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe and Book IV of The Faerie Queene; the care, respect and reciprocity of true love is the model for his ideal political system; and his insistence on the intimate relation of love between man and woman to divine love makes it central to his religion, enabling him to take seriously Ovid's jocular elegiac self-presentation as vates Veneris ('prophet of Venus'). Colin hailed as the Priest of Love in CCCHA effectively presents an Ovid reincarnated as a Christian prophet in Spenser. Ovidian love in Spenser is no mere part to be subsumed into a Virgilian whole: rather the political ends of Virgilian pastoral and epic are contained and qualified by their inclusion in the overarching philosophy which is Spenser's interpretation of the Ovidian. Spenser's Ovid may be less witty and obviously irreverent than the Ovid of Marlowe's Amores, Donne's love poetry and the erotic epyllia of the 1590s, or of the seventeenth century cavalier poets, but he is more coherent and formidably authoritative a model for the public poet who wishes to remain independent of monarchical power. 21 Milton learned more from him than perhaps has been recognized. In my first chapter I argue that the Shepheardes Calender sets up the supposed model of Virgil's Eclogues with its connotations of praise of a divine ruler only to distract the censor from its satirical agenda and as a citation of the imperialist stance from which it distances itself, aligning itself instead with that of the exiled Ovid. Spenser uses strategies of oblique satire on censorship, absolutism and the deification of the imperial monarch learned from Ovid's calendrical Fasti and exile elegies. The presentation of his persona Colin as a figure of Ovidian exile has two functions, firstly symbolizing his ideological distance from the centre of power, and secondly exemplifying the ruinous effects of love as part of its warning to Elizabeth against her planned marriage to the Duc d' Alen~on. Chapter 2 examines Book I of The Faerie Queene as Spenser's intervention in the epic/romance debate, formulating it as a contest between Virgilian and Ovidian poetics. The Wandring Wood shows how Ovidian poetics are demonized by Aristotelian critics drawing on Horace's and Virgil's insistence on unity, and dramatizes the inadequacy of the cinquecento defence of Ovidian romance on the basis of pleasing variety alone, which reads such poetics as merely un-Virgilian,

Introduction

7

failing to escape the terms set by its critics and so ultimately yielding to the Virgilian claim to moral utility. In the defeat of Errour and the departure from the wood Spenser appears to reject Ovidian romance in favour of Virgilian epic. Yet this judgement quickly proves to be premature. The episode at Archimago's house rewrites Aeneas' desertion of Dido in favour of Roman destiny, the paradigmatic assertion of unity over digression and the ideology it entails, as Redcrosse's abandonment of Una and rededication to Duessa, implying a condemnation of Virgilian poetics on moral, political and religious grounds, and a rereading of Ovid as a counter-Virgilian poet, exponent of a set of values more amenable to Spenser's poem, and which will shape the rest of the book. Loyalty in love is elevated above Virgilian anti-eroticism and sacrifice of the individual, private emotional ties and religious faith are preferred before a quasi-religious Virgilian devotion to empire which is condemned as idolatrous, and humanity's reliance on grace is shown to be better served by the poetics of metamorphosis and by Ovid's policing of the boundaries between the human and the divine in his political satire than by Virgil's model of heroism and narrowly political formulation of divine providence. In Chapter 3, I examine Book II's apparently Virgilian, Stoical analysis of desire and self-control, and find that Guyon's Virgilian model of Temperance is qualified, and its limitations exposed, by the book's Ovidian subtext. The antierotic morality of the Aeneid is seen to be fatally flawed by its obliviousness to the possibility and value of virtuous love founded on mutual care and respect, to the distinction between such love and a lust which is damaging to self and other, and to divine grace. Ultimately the Ovidian analysis of exploitative and self-consciously transgressive desire in the Bower of Bliss reveals that the Virgilian conception of the passions and drive to suppress them are complicit in their perversion. Acrasia and Guyon share the same understanding of desire and the same blindness to true love, human and divine. Chapter 4 shows how Book III meets this deficiency by embracing the Ovidian, feminine and amatory pole of the ethical and philosophical divide between Virgil and Ovid, epic and romance, using Ovidian intertexts and methods to pursue Ovidian ends: a sympathetic exploration of feminine psychology in his Ovidian heroine, and an analysis of desire which separates and rescues true love from the threat of its perversions. Undoing the nightmare of monstrous birth which springs from the anti-erotic imagination, dispelling the depictions of 'monstrous' love in the House of Busirane, and countering the Horatian condemnation of Ovidian poetics as monstrous embodied in the figure of Errour in Book I, Book III has at its centre an Ovidian celebration of procreative sexuality as normal, healthy and divinely ordained. In the book ostensibly closest to Elizabeth and to Virgilian justification of her rule through the prophetic depiction of her ancestral descent, the Ovidian values of the Garden of Adonis displace and marginalize the political ends of Virgilian epic, replacing the dynastic prophecy which Aeneas receives in Virgil's underworld as the visionary core of the book, and subordinating Spenser's duty to the queen to his role as a moral and religious teacher.

8

Spenser and Ovid

In Chapter 5, I explore how the Amoretti and CCCHA rework various aspects of Ovid's treatment of love and exile and assemble them into a programme of moral and religious teaching. Spenser's reformation of the 'egotistical conflict' of Petrarchism in favour of mutual wedded love is modelled on the transition from the corrupt power dynamics of Ovid's early ironic Amores to the celebration of his wife in the exile elegies. In both poets the study of love in its good and bad forms has political implications. The political Petrarchism of Elizabeth's court is seen as reflecting its inequitable power-structure and the resulting servility, hypocrisy and self-seeking behaviour of her courtiers, in ways modelled on Ovid's satire on Augustus' despotism and the death of friendship in imperial Rome. Spenser's model of mutual love adumbrates an alternative social vision, which he locates in an idealized literary community in the Ireland of CCCHA and in the metaphorical space of his poetry, in which he communes with his readers. The poet's experience of marginalization and frustration in the real society governed by political power becomes a position of centrality and authority in this ideal realm, a realm projected by the imagination but always fully social and political in content. This refashioning of Ovidian exile from a space of victimization and complaint into one of freedom and authority develops another strain of Ovid's exile poetry. The assertions of his own immortality which in Ovid mark this sense of independent power countering Augustus' are modulated in Spenser into an assertion of vatic authority and divine inspiration in his role as 'Priest of Love' or religious teacher, access to eternal truths underwriting the Ovidian immortality of fame. Yet even this is presented as a serious reworking of Ovid's jocular self-presentation as vates Veneris. In Colin Ovid is refashioned into a Christian prophet, and placed at the centre of what amounts to an alternative court, in Ireland and in the republic of letters, with a moral authority lacking in the corrupt court of Cynthia. Chapter 6 traces these themes through the 1596 addition to The Faerie Queene. Framed by allusion to Ovid's exile, Books IV to VI develop both aspects of what that exile has come to symbolize in the 1595 poems. Book IV offers an optimistic vision of an harmonious reordering of society in obedience to the teachings of the Priest of Love, Spenser's version of the 'informal De amicitia' of Ovid's exile elegies. Book V turns from the ideal to the reality of contemporary society, and to Ovidian complaint and satire on the degeneracy of the age, focussing again, as in the Calender, on a critique of censorship and of the deification of the monarch in the court of Mercilla. Book VI, like the Metamorphoses, depicts 'the helplessness and vulnerability of the individual in the vast... imperium '.22 Powerless individuals and the prophetic poet are marginalized and crushed in a society characterized by economic exploitation and abuse of power, where political authority fails in its duty of patronage, protection and care towards its subjects. Yet, though the poem itself is presented as the latest victim of a corrupt court, Colin's vision on Acidale symbolizes the ultimate invulnerability, authority and immortality of the poet's Ovidian teachings. Chapter 7 looks at the final presentation of the poet's relation to political power and to God in the Mutabilitie Cantos, Spenser's last and fullest Ovidian critique of

Introduction

9

the implicit deification of the monarch which underwrites absolute power in the imperial concept of monarchy. Drawing on Ovid's parodic gigantomachies, with their sceptical analysis of the political use of myth by Virgil and Horace, and on Ovid's tales of Niobe, Marsyas and Actaeon, Spenser presents an upstart Titaness who not only challenges the sovereignty of Jove and Cynthia, Augustus and Elizabeth, but reflects back to them the hubris of their own assumption of an absolute power which rightly belongs only to God. The Ovidian poet who, like Faunus spying on Diana, reveals the arcanum imperii of rule by force underlying the veil of divine election in imperial politics emerges ultimately as an agent of Providence exposing the fraud of its worldly imitators. The contention between the traditional Virgiliocentric reading of Spenser and my own Ovidian one is by its nature not susceptible to fmal proof; the ambiguity which makes both readings possible is integral to the texts. Indeed, if I and others are right to perceive a subversive voice challenging the extent of monarchical authority in Spenser, such a voice would have to make itself ambiguous and deniable to avoid such treatment as befell the banned Mother Hubberds Tale or the mutilated John Stubbes. It is necessary that a subversive work should make different meanings available to different readers. I hope that this study makes visible again one face of Spenser available to his original readers, which had become obscured by the general and too sweeping acceptan.ce of the Virgilian orthodoxy. Whether I have succeeded in making the picture plausible and interesting must be left to the reader to judge.

Notes

2

3

E.g. Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 55-100; Louis Adrian Montrose, "'The Perfecte Paterne of a Poete": The Poetics of Courtship in The Shepheardes Calender,' TSLL 21 (1979),34-67; Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance SelfFashioning: from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 157-92; Patrick Cheney, Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counternationhood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), esp. 14; Thomas H. Cain, Praise in the Faerie Queene (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), esp. 24,34. E.g. David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 59-90 and 109-56; Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: the Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 21-62; Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: CUP, 1994) and 'Was Spenser a Republican?' English: the Journal of the English Association 47 (1998), 169-82; Louis Adrian Montrose, ' Spenser and the Elizabethan Political Imaginary,' ELH 69 (2002), 907-46. E.g. Stephen Hinds, 'Generalising About Ovid,' in The Imperial Muse: Ramus Essays on Romal! Literature of the Empire ed. A. J. Boyle (Victoria: Aureal Publications, 1988), 4-31; Philip Hardie, 'Ovid's Theban History: the First "Anti-Aeneid"?' CQ 40 (1990), 224-35; Elaine Fantham, 'Review Article: Recent Readings of Ovid's Fasti,'

10

Spenser and Ovid

CPh 90 (1995), 367-78; Alessandro Barchiesi, The Poet and the Prince: Ovid and Augustan Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), esp. 15-44,25156; Denis Feeney, 'Mea Tempora: Patterning of Time in the Metamorphoses,' in Ovidian Transformations: Essays on the Metamorphoses and its Reception ed . Philip Hardie et al., Cambridge Philological Society Supplementary Volume 23 (Cambridge, 1999), 13-30. 4 I use the broadest definition of intertextuality and intertextual methods, as described by Stephen Hinds, Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry (Cambridge: CUP, 1998); see also Michael Worton and Judith Still (eds.), Intertextuality: Theories and Practices (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 1-44. Philip Hardie, The Epic Successors of Virgil: A Study in the Dynamics of a Tradition (Cambridge: CUP, 1993), demonstrates the political nature of imitation and the importance of combining intertextual and historicist approaches. 5 E .g. Rosamund Tuve, 'Spenserus,' in Millar MacLure and F. W. Watt (eds.), Essays in English Literature from the Renaissance to the Victorian Age Presented to A. S. P. Woodhouse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964),3-4; Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates, 86; Richard McCabe, 'Edmund Spenser: Poet of Exile,' Proceedings of the British Academy 80 (1991), 79; Richard Rambuss, Spenser's Secret Career (Cambridge: CUP, 1993), 129; John Breen, 'Edmund Spenser's Exile and the Politics of Pastoral,' Cahiers Elisabethains 53 (1998),27-41. 6 Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates, 86. 7 McCabe, "'Little booke: thy selfe present": the Politics of Presentation in The Shepheardes Calender,' in Howard Erskine-Hill and Richard McCabe (eds.), Presenting Poetry: Composition, Publication, Reception (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), 15-40; Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity, 170-201 . 8 McCabe, 'Edmund Spenser: Poet of Exile,' 90,79. 9 Barchiesi, The Poet and the Prince, 105-119. 10 See further 1. Pollini, 'Man or god: Divine assimilation and imitation in the late Republic and early Principate,' in Between Republic and Empire ed. Kurt Raaflaub and Mark Toher (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990),334-357. liOn the iconographical aspects, see Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus tr. Alan Shapiro (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988). 12 John Guy describes Henry's theory of monarchy as 'Caesaropapist'. See also Frances Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 29-47. 13 Manuscript marginalium quoted John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: OUP, 1988),371 . 14 Certayne sermons appoynted by the Quenes Maiestie (London, 1559), sig. s.ii'. 15 Hubert Languet, Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, or A Defence of Liberty against Tyrants tr. William Walker (London: Richard Baldwin, 1689),88. 16 Helgerson, Forms ofNationhood, 40-59. 17 Cheney, Spenser's Famous Flight, 5-7, 56-57; quotation at 6. 18 Ibid. 153, 183. 19 Ibid. 56-57. 20 Cheney, Marlowe 's Counterfeit Profession, 31-48. 21 Spenser's mode of resistance to monarchical absolutism is crucially different from that associated with Stoic discourse in the Renaissance (on which see Markku Pelton en, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570-1640 (Cambridge: CUP, 1995) and Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney 's Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven : Yale University Press, 1996)). In contrast to the Stoic vision of individual autonomy arising from the suppression of the passions, Spenser's ideal is based on a high valuation of love rightly directed and a clear distinction between the human and the divine, the earthly and the heavenly, both of

Introduction

11

which are, odd as the pairing may sound, common to Ovid and Augustine. Spenser's political thought is thus closer, in my opinion, to the Lutheran-Augustinian than to the Stoic current of Renaissance resistance theory. Herein I diverge from two recent influential readings of Book II, those ofM. C. Schoenfeldt in Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (Cambridge: CUP, 1999) and Louis Adrian Montrose in 'Spenser and the Elizabethan Political Imaginary,' both of whom invoke the association of political liberty with Stoic self-control. I discuss Spenser's attitude to Stoicism at length in chapter 3, but in my reading the virginal Guyon is too like his Faerie Queene, or the icy Belphoebe, to be an effective model of resistance to her power: that role is open only to those figures elsewhere in Spenser's work who are capable of love and of apprehending the divine. Stoicism is not of political importance to Spenser as it is to Sidney, and therefore it is not in connection with Book II, the book most concerned with Stoic ideas, that I discuss Spenser's politics. 22 Charles Segal, Landscape in Ovid's Metamorphoses: A Study in the Transformations of a Literary Symbol, Hermes Einzelschriften 23 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1969), 93.

Chapter 1

Spenser's New Fasti: Ovidian Strategies of Protest in The Shepheardes Calender

As a pastoral work, introducing to the nation a 'new Poete' who will restore its literary fortunes and anticipating a 'greater flyght' in higher genres to follow, The Shepheardes Calender courts the assumption that it 'announce[s] ...the poet's ambition to follow a Vergilian career,.1 E. K.'s introductory epistle, and later the October eclogue, draw heavily on the notion of the Virgilian rota, the ideal poetic career modelled on Virgil's, beginning with pastoral, the private, lyrical poetry of otium, and progressing through the didactic poetry of the Georgics to dynastic epic celebrating the current regime. But the identification is not straightforward: in October Cuddie ('alias you know who' as Harvey puts it, another veil for 'the authour selfe') rejects the Virgilian paradigm, and E. K. entangles Virgil's name in a web of others, ancient and modern. 2 There is throughout, in fact, a persistent pattern at work distancing the Calender from its supposed model in Virgil's Eclogues, and from the political obedience and complacency implicit in the relationship between Virgil and Augustus. Simultaneously another pattern emerges which points to Ovid, poet of love, of indirect political satire against Augustus, and of exile and complaint, as the presiding genius of the Calender. While the politically safe model Virgil is named repeatedly and prominently by E. K., the work's allegiance to the subversive Ovid is not stated openly, but implied by an accumulation of mostly covert allusions. Such obliqueness is apt in this anonymous work, which continually draws attention to its careful shrouding of 'secret meaning,.3 Ultimately the apparent announcement of a Virgilian career seems to be another veil thrown over the provocative self-alignment with Ovid, to distract the censor from its promise of a career of critical distance from state ideology. What Luborsky has called the 'allusive presentation' of the work points in both directions. While E. K.'s scholarly annotation ranks it with classical texts, the accompanying woodcuts underline its relation to Virgil's Eclogues, and its innovative and equally ostentatious calendrical structure evokes Ovid's Fasti. Ultimately, it is the latter relation which is borne out by the mood and themes of the text, the pastoral locus itsef converted from Virgil's hopeful symbol of peace under the protection of a beneficent ruler into a rustication modelled on Ovid's exile and reflecting embittered alienation from the centres ofpower. 4

Spenser's New Fasti

13

The Pastoral of Exile: Colin, Meliboeus and Ovid Several of the Calender's woodcuts are visibly based on the conventional composition of illustrations to Virgil's first eclogue, yet diverge from it systematically. Virgil's first eclogue is a dialogue between Meliboeus, who has been dispossessed of his farm and is now departing into melancholy exile, and Tityrus, who, having obtained favour with his deus at Rome, is allowed to remain, and reclines comfortably sub tegmine fagi (under the shade of a beech). Traditionally Tityrus was taken to represent Virgil himself, the 'god' his patron Octavian (later to become Augustus); the sheltering tree became a conventional metaphor for the ideal patronage their relation was taken to represent. Illustrations to this eclogue in sixteenth-century editions consistently represented Tityrus seated beneath his tree, playing his pipes, with Meliboeus standing ready to depart, and the city, origin of Tityrus' patronage, in the background. The Januarye woodcut obviously alludes to the type, but as in the text only one shepherd, Colin, is present. Though as E. K. explains the poet 'secretly shadoweth himself under this name 'as sometime did Virgil vnder the name of Tityrus,' yet in the woodcut Colin assumes the stance of Meliboeus. Where Tityrus sits and plays, Colin like Meliboeus stands, and his pipes lie broken at his feet. His wistful look towards a city recognizable as Rome in the distance suggests that lack of the patronage accorded Tityrus causes his grief. In the text Colin's account of how he visited 'the neighbour towne' (50) and there saw Rosalind recalls Tityrus' tale of visiting Rome where 'illum vidi[t] iuvenem', but the outcome is opposite. Where Octavian favours Tityrus' plea, Rosalind despises Colin and his music: 'Such sight hath bred my bane.' (53) This unrequited love is clearly symbolic of a lack of royal favour. E. K. glosses line 60 Rosalinde) ... a feigned name, which being weI ordered, wil bewray the very name of his loue and mistresse, whom by that name he coloureth. So as Ouide shadoweth hys loue vnder the name of Corynna, which of some is supposed to be Iulia, themperor Augustus his daughter. ...

It seems probable that 'Rosalind' well ordered is intended to bewray 'Elizabeth',

the 'beautiful rose' or rosa linda of the Tudor dynasty.s The gloss identifies Colin's amatory poetics as Ovidian, but moreover the close relation in the eclogue, and the Calender as a whole, between amatory and political complaint is here related to Ovid too, for the idea that the Amores' Corinna was Augustus' daughter was a common explanation for his exile in the vitae prefacing Renaissance editions of Ovid. 6 When Colin next appears in June he is joined by Hobbinol, so there are two figures beside the tree in the woodcut, but Colin still stands with broken pipes before him. The text reveals that the same relationship pertains between these two as between Tityrus and Meliboeus in Virgil, but again Colin, who 'Can nowhere fynd, to shroude [his] lucklesse pate', plays homeless Meliboeus to Hobbinol's contented Tityrus, rejecting the Virgilian ease Hobbinol presses upon him. In

14

Spenser and Ovid

September the woodcut resembles the Virgilian illustration more closely still, and the seated figure, Diggon, is this time the one associated with the author. (E. K. tells us that his emblem, inopem me copia fecit, a quotation from Ovid's story of Narcissus, has 'bene much vsed of the author': it is an apt gloss on Colin's hopeless love, the sight that bred his bane, and is the central figure in Sonnets 35 and 83 of the Amoretti.) However on reading we discover that Diggon is ruined, disillusioned, and seated through mere exhaustion, uttering dangerous satire rather than Tityrus-like praise. In both eclogues it is Hobbinol and not the poet who corresponds to Tityrus, and the reflection he offers of the Virgilian poet is far from flattering. His complacent concern with personal comfort in an earthly paradise, perhaps a fools' paradise, in June, and his alarm at Diggon's radicalism, cautioning him to submissive silence in the face of 'forced' 'iI' (139), in September, suggest that a sacrifice of moral independence is implicit in Virgil's patronage by Augustus. Following Sidney's formulation of the differing functions of pastoral, Is the poor pipe disdained, which sometime out of Meliboeus mouth can show the misery of people under hard lords or ravening soldiers? And again, by Tityrus, what blessedness is derived to them that lie lowest from the goodness of them that sit highest; sometimes, under the pretty tales of wolves and sheep, can include the whole considerations of wrong-doing and patience,7

Spenser, identifying with Meliboeus, indicates that his is the satirical rather than the panegyric strain. Meanwhile Colin in June continues to align himself with Ovid as well as with Meliboeus. It is a short step: Ovid implicitly compares himself to Meliboeus in his exile poetry, drawing on Virgil's first eclogue in Ex Ponto I.viii particularly.s Colin presents himself as, like Ovid at Tomis, an exile in a harsh setting, implicitly comparing himself, pursued by 'angry Gods ... from coste to coste,' (15) to Ulysses pursued by the wrath of Neptune. Ovid frequently makes the same comparison in his exile poetry, the 'angry God' being in his case, of course, Augustus. 9 Like the exiled Ovid, Colin says he has abandoned 'wanton' love poetry. (48)10 The tale of the music contest between Pan and Phoebus has warned Colin of the 'rebuke and Daunger' (69) attending over-bold poets: the myth is famously treated in the Metamorphoses, where it is one among many tales revealing the tyranny of the Olympians over aspiring and disrespectful artists, often resembling Ovid himself. In the Renaissance the myth was often conflated with Marsyas' contest with Apollo earlier in the Metamorphoses: Pan actually escapes unscathed from defeat, and Colin's reference here rather recalls the terrible punishment of Marsyas, flayed alive by the vengeful Apollo. Apollo's cruelty in the Metamorphoses reflects on Augustus, who revived the cult of Apollo in Rome and encouraged identification of himself with the god, and Ovid later compares his own exile to Marsyas' punishment. II From classical times into the Renaissance the myth was usually interpreted as a demonstration of the musical superiority of the lyre over the flute. 12 (Pan also plays pipes, of course, so the allegory fits both equally.) For both Ovid

Spenser's New Fasti

15

and Spenser, the lyre, as Apollo's instrument, would be associated with the higher gemes of literature. The flute or pipe, meanwhile, is symbolic both of pastoral poetry, a point made repeatedly in Spenser's work, and, in Ovid's time, of elegy. 13 Ovid, of course, composed most of his works in elegiacs, and espoused the Hellenistic values associated with the form against the pressures of Augustan moralism. He uses the tibia, the boxwood flute, as a metonym for his poetry both explicitly (for instance, Tristia V.i.48) and implicitly in his sympathetic and extended treatment of the exile of the flute-players in the Fasti (Vl.651-710), where the story of Marsyas is also repeated. Both for Ovid and Spenser, then, the punishment of Marsyas is peculiarly assimilable to the potential persecution of their own daringly offensive work in low gemes by powerful authorities. The 'rebuke and Daunger' Colin fears would seem to be political victimization such as that suffered by Ovid. Playing 'to please [him] selfe, all be it ill' (72) instead of aspiring to fame he again echoes the exiled Ovid, who repeatedly, though disingenuously, insists that his writing is merely therapeutic, 'poor stuff (mala), and no longer seeks fame: Siqua meis fuerint, ut erunt, vitiosa libellis, excusata suo tempore, lector, habe. exul eram, requiesque mihi, non fama petita est.. .. ipse mihi-quid enim faciam?-scriboque legoque, tutaque iudicio littera nostra suo est. quo mihi diversum fama contendere in orbem? quem fortuna dedit, Roma sit ille locus .... sed neque pervenio scriptis mediocribus istuc, famaque cum domino fugit ab urbe suo. [Reader, if there should be defects in my books, and there will be, excuse them because of the circumstances under which they they were written. I was an exile, and sought not fame but respite .... For myself alone I both write and read-what else should I do?-and my writings are safe in their own estimation,' Tristia IV.i.I-3, 91-92; 'Why should I strive to reach with my fame a remote part of the world? The place which fortune has given me, let that be my Rome .... But I with my mediocre writings do not attain to the place where you are; my fame was banished with its master from his city.' (EP Lv.67-68, 83-84. Cpo Tristia V.i.)]

In the fIrst of the elegies quoted above Ovid compares his song to that of a weary shepherd soothing his sheep with pipe-music (Tristia IV.i.l1-12), and Colin returns the compliment in his deeply Ovidian self-presentation: Nought weigh I, who my song doth prayse or blame, Ne striue to winne renowne, or passe the rest: With shepheard sittes not, followe flying fame:

16

Spenser and Ovid But feede his tlocke in fields , where falls hem best. I wote my rymes bene rough, and rudely drest: The fytter they, my carefull case to frame: Enough is me to paint out my vnrest, And poore my piteous plaints out in the same. (73-80)

The pastoral setting is no longer the scene of Tityrus' contented retirement and eulogy, but of 'vnrest' and solipsistic complaint, in 'fields' where the poet is thrust by 'cruell fate', (14) Ovid's 'quem fortuna dedit...ille locus,' excluded from fame and the city's patronage. Colin's praise of Hobbinol's abode, where flocks 'wander may .. .IWithouten dreade of Wolues to bene ytost', (11-12) implies that he himself occupies an inhospitable region resembling Ovid's anti-pastoral portrayal of his place of exile, in the elegy already quoted: ut...rapax pecudem, quae se non texit ovili, per sata, per silvas fertque trahitque lupus, sic, siquem nondum portarum saepe receptum barbarus in campis repperit hostis, habet. ... hic ego sollicitae lateo novus incola sedis .... [And as the plundering wolf carries off the sheep that has not hidden in the sheepfold and drags it through newly sown fields and through woods, so it is for him whom the barbarous enemy discovers in the fields, not yet admitted into the protective hedge of the gates .... Here I live in obscurity, a new colonist of a troubled region,' (Tristia IV.i.79-82, 85.)]

Virgilian pastoral is converted into Ovidian exile. The implied parallel with Ovid's exile poetry is carried over into E. K.'s epistle and the verses which frame the work. Like Colin, represented as having abandoned poetry and become 'alienate and with drawen' (April! 'Argument'), Immerito himself has been 'for long time furre estraunged'. 14 The verse envoy and epilogue, meanwhile, echo Ovid's first exile elegy. 15 He implies that his book, like a bastard child, has cause for shame and fear in the conditions of its authorship; it must remain anonymous as association with his name may injure it. Goe little booke: thy selfe present, As child whose parent is vnkent .... But if that any aske thy name, Say thou wert base begot with blame: For thy thereof thou takest shame. ("To His Booke" 1-2, 13-15)

Ovid similarly warns his book in Tristia I.i to go anonymously to avoid the blame associated with Ovid's name, lest someone 'te, quia sis meus, esse legendum/non putet, e gremio reiciatque suo':

Spenser 's New Fasti

17

cIam. ..intrato, ne te mea carmina laedant; non sunt ut quondam plena favoris erant. [deem you unfit to be read because you are mine, and thrust you from his lap,' 'enter secretly, lest my songs should hurt you; they are not in as much favour as they once were.' (Tristia I.i.63-66. CpoEP l.i .29-30.)]

Yet he admits that this will not work, for, like a bastard child, the poem will be recognizable as his by its colore ('complexion, physical appearance' or 'rhetorical style,).16 As Spenser expects his work to be attacked by 'Enuie' (5) and to encounter "ieopardee," (16) so Ovid warns his book 'tu cave defendas, quamvis mordebere dictis .... ne mota resaeviat iralet poenae tu sis altera causa, cave!' ('Be sure to make no defence, however much you are attacked with biting words .... Take care lest a calmed anger, stirred, should become savage again, and lest you should be another cause of punishment to me.' Ibid. 25, 103-4.) Ovid's fmal exile elegy, 'Invide, quid laceras Nasonis carmina rapti?' (EP IV.xvi) represents his work as still suffering the attacks of his old enemy, Envy (Livor). But despite this taint, the books have a better lot than their exiled author's, for 'nihil irnpedit ortos/exule servatis legibus urbe frui .' ('Nothing prevents the children of an exile from enjoying the city, as long as they obey the laws,' EP I.i.21-22.) Ovid repeatedly makes this contrast: Parve-nec invideo-sine me, Iiber, ibis in urbem. ei mihi, quod domino non Iicet ire tuo! [Little book, you will go into the city without me-and I don't grudge it you. Alas that it is not permitted to your master to go!' (Tristia I.i.I -2.)]

Yet despite its freedom Ovid recommends that it go without ornament (incultus, 3), conscious of mediocrity not deserving fame (49), and venture only among commoners, fearing the mighty: ergo cave, liber, et timida circurnspice mente, ut satis a media sit tibi plebe legi. [Therefore beware, my book, and consider carefully with fearful mind, so that it should be enough for you to be read by common people.' (Ibid. 87-88)]

Spenser's epilogue gives the same advice: Goe Iyttle Calender, thou hast a free passeporte, Goe but a lowly gate emongste the meaner sorte. Dar not to match thy pype with Tityrus hys style, (7-8)

the emphasis on the work's 'passeporte' suggesting a situation similar to Ovid's

18

Spenser and Ovid

exile. Since Spenser's anticipation of ' ieopardee' and 'blame' apparently refers to, and in fact further advertises, the work's dangerous political import, particularly as a polemic against Elizabeth's planned marriage to the Duc d'Alenyon, this assimilation implies an understanding of Ovid's exile as symbolic of his marginalized ideological position.

The Calendar as Ideological Tool

Other aspects of the Calender's presentation are Ovidian from the start. Its calendrical structure alludes in part to the old Kalender of Shepherdes, a popular almanac translated from a fifteenth century French work, but the prefatory material and commentary seem to indicate a classical model. The reader is therefore reminded of Ovid's Fasti, the only significant poem of calendrical structure extant when Spenser was writing and a work almost as widely read in the sixteenth century as the Metamorphoses itself. 17 Recent criticism has identified strong satirical undercurrents in the Fasti challenging Augustus' systematic appropriation of the Roman calendar as a personal ideological tool. 18 Augustus added dozens of anniversaries celebrating himself and his family to the calendar, transforming it into 'a line of celebrative events which imposes the cycle of its Historia Augusti on everyone', and inextricably implicating his personal cult with traditional religious festivals. I9 Readers of the Fasti in the late 1570s might well perceive a parallel with Elizabeth's additions to the calendar, making national holidays of her birthday on 7th September (the eve of the nativity of the Virgin Mary), her accession to the throne on 17th November, and the Feast of the Order of the Garter, of which she was the head, on st. Georges Day, 23rd April, 'annual manifestations of Tudor queenship' amounting to 'a liturgy of state unfolding itself across the seasons. ,20 There is some evidence of objection by Puritans to the crown's usurpation of a domain traditionally belonging to religion, much as Ovid satirizes Augustus' manipulation of the calendar and of state religion for the purposes of personal power. A sermon was preached in 1581 in favour of the Accession Day celebrations, comparing the Queen to Romulus, founder of Rome, and arguing that as his birthday was celebrated in ancient Rome, so the beginning of Elizabeth's reign should be in England. (Augustus, too, modelled his public image largely on the deified Romulus or 'Quirinus', even considering adopting the title 'Quirinus' instead of 'Augustus'.) Robert Wright, a Puritan, protested that Romulus had been a 'subject...of idolatrous worship', and that sermons and prayers celebrating Accession Day would similarly make Elizabeth 'a god,.21 The cultural deification of the ruler is a concern in both Ovid's and Spenser's poems, and the Calender maintains an ironic distance from the ruling ideology through strategies of oblique protest learned from Ovid's Fasti. 22 The two eclogues which treat the Queen most directly represent the months of her most important festivals, April's Feast of the Garter and November's Accession Day. In place of

Spenser's New Fasti

19

the national rejoicing of Accession Day, however, Spenser has an elegy for the death of Dido, Virgil's and Ovid's 'Elissa', irresistibly suggesting the death of 'Elisa', Elizabeth herself. The implication is that, with the Queen's planned marriage to the French Catholic Duc d'Alenyon, the glorious age of national Protestantism brought about by her reign and celebrated on her Accession Day will have passed, leaving her subjects to mourn. 23 It is a daring conversion of a festival designed to celebrate Elizabeth's rule as divinely ordained and carrying implications of her own semi-deification into a reminder of her mortality and an occasion for profound though oblique protest against her policy. April!, meanwhile, is double-edged and ambiguous, simultaneously participating in and criticizing the glorifying cult of Elisa, and to do so it draws on Ovid's witty portrayal of an ideological competition between the old cult of licentious Flora and the cult of the virgin Vesta, revived by Augustus, in Book IV of the Fasti, the book of April. The oblique means he uses to express this criticism, through the manipulation of differing versions of myth, multiplicity of voices and conspicuous self-silencing, are typical of Ovid in the Fasti. That this should be so is not surprising, for both poets were striving to articulate a dangerously heterodox political position in a climate of increasing censorship in the dawn of imperial rule. 24 Daniel Iavitch compares these two periods in which 'Ingratiating deceit is ... necessitated by the futility of communicating truths plainly', and Barchiesi bases his reading of the Fasti on the 'premise that Ovid's poetry is evolving in the direction of a courtly type of position,' artistically emiched by the necessity for indirection.25 Both poets, however, ingratiate themselves with authority only to the extent necessary to evade the delator, while addressing 'the general public .... and not [merely] the narrow circle of the nascent court' through publication, appealing to and helping to mould public opinion against the policies of those in power. 26 Both, also, characteristically employ 'low' gemes for the purpose, Spenser continually reverting to pastoral, Ovid to elegy, thereby distancing themselves from the political aims of Virgilian dynastic epic. Spenser was not the first to imitate the Fasti: the Ovidian calendar already had a history both as a Catholic and an anti-Catholic form. The last work of Mantuan, author also of popular pastoral poetry to whom E. K. refers, was the 1516 Fastorum libri duodecim, explicitly modelled on Ovid's Fasti and attempting to do for the Catholic year what he had done for the Roman, cataloguing and explaining the saints days, holidays and ceremonies of the church in Latin verse. Much of its substance was absorbed into the second edition ofPolydorus Virgilius' widely-read De inuentoribus rerum in 1521, and Thomas Kirchmeyer, called Naogeorgus, concluded his anti-Catholic treatise Regnum papisticum with a travesty of Mantuan's work, arranging its catalogue of the Roman church's abominations as a calendar. The Regnum papisticum went through several editions between its publication in 1553 and its translation into English by Bamabe Googe in 1570. Despite the marked difference in tone between Naogeorgus' crudely abusive tract and Spenser's subtle satire in the Calender, Spenser's adoption of the form helps to indicate his own anti-Catholic affiliation.

20

Spenser and Ovid

Spenser's text diverges in important ways, of course, both from Ovid's Fasti and from Mantuan's imitation, not least by adopting a title reminiscent of a humble almanac. This change itself reflects a major difference in content, for while Ovid's and Mantuan's works are structured around the religious festivals and rituals of the year, Spenser never addresses religious festivals directly, except for E. K.'s mention of Christmas in the 'Generall Argument'. Religious experience, under the guise of the worship of Pan, arises instead in everyday, secular contexts. Colin invokes Pan in the plaints of Januarye and December, so that they hover between lyric and prayer; the mother goat sends up a quick prayer as she goes about her business; Thomalin inserts a quatrain of praise for Pan's sacrifice into his conversation with Morell. Piety is expressed not by observing rites (though spontaneous prayer results naturally from it) but by a sense of humility and gratitude, and as the ultimate guide in ethical decisions, as in Piers' reference to the Day of Judgement concluding his reply to Palinode in Maye. (54) The material trappings of worship appear only as the fox's treacherous 'trusse of tryfles', glossed by E. K. as 'reliques and ragges of popish superstition'. (Maye 239 and 240 gloss) By removing the emphasis on the festivals, rules and observances which Mantuan was happy to take over from Ovid, Spenser underlines the Protestant nature of his own version. Spenser's Protestant polemic is not, however, purely sectarian, but is concerned with church reform as a focus for wider political and economic issues.

Three Targets of Satire in Ovid and Spenser: Wealth, the Deification of the Ruler, and Censorship

The satire on wealth which underpins so much of The Shepheardes Calender's antiCatholic polemic is also a recurring theme in Ovids Fasti. As Spenser continually contrasts the pious simplicity of good shepherds with the exploitative greed satirized in Maye, Julye and September, Ovid repeatedly contrasts the origins of Roman religion in the homely rituals of poor rustics with the ostentatious display of personal wealth and power in Augustan Rome.27 Ovid's first encounter in the Fasti is with the god Janus, represented as supremely ancient and authoritative, and he puts into the god's mouth a long and biting satire on the opum furiosa cupido of modem Rome. 28 Contrasting the simplicity of early Rome with present-day greed, he implicitly parodies the idea of Augustus' reign as a return of the Golden Age expressed in Virgil's fourth eclogue. If the present age is golden, it is so only in its lust for gold: pluris opes nunc sunt, quam prisci temporis annis, dum populus pauper, dum nova Roma fuit .... frondibus omabant quae nunc Capitolia gemmis, pascebatque suas ipse senator oves; nee pudor in stipula placidum cepisse quietem

Spenser's New Fasti

21

et fenum capiti supposuisse fuit .... at postquam fortuna loci caput extulit huius, et tetigit summos vertice Roma deos, creverunt et opes et opum furiosa cupido, et, cum possideant plurima, plura petunt. quaerere, ut absumant, absumpta requirere certant, atque ipsae viti is sunt alimenta vices .... in pretio pretium nunc est: dat census honores, census arnicitias: pauper ubique iacet.... nos quoque tempI a iuvant, quamvis antiqua probemus, aurea: maiestas con venit ista deo. laudamus veteres, sed nostris utimur annis .. .. [Riches are more valued now than in the good old times, while the people were poor, while Rome was new .... With foliage they adorned the Capitol, which now they adorn with gems, and the senator fed his own sheep; nor was he ashamed to take his quiet rest on straw or to put hay under his head ....But since the fortune of this place has reared up its head, and Rome has touched the highest gods with the top of her head, both wealth and the mad lust for wealth have grown, and they who possess most seek more. They strive to obtain so that they may consume, and to regain what they have consumed, and vicissitudes are themselves fuel for their vices .... All that is valued today is money: property brings honours and friendships; the poor man is everywhere downtrodden .... We too are pleased by golden temples, although we approve of the old ones: such majesty is fitting for a god. We praise the old ways, but we use those of own time.' (Fasti I.l97-225)]

The reference to templa aurea at the end directly implicates Augustus, who, though supposed to live humbly in a casa parva, made it inseparable from the adjacent lavishly embellished temple of Apol1o. 29 Putting this into the mouth of Janus rather than saying it himself, Ovid shields himself as Diggon does in September when he claims merely to report what 'Some sticke not to saye' (112), but also adds another barb to his satire when this two-faced god neatly encapsulates and expresses approval of Augustus' hypocrisy. Janus goes on to associate ancient Latium with Saturn's reign before Astraea's desertion of earth, present-day Rome by contrast with rule by terror (metu), force (vi), and war (bello), the very opposite of a Golden Age. Janus' speech closely resembles several passages of satire on wealth in The Shepheardes Calender, but especially Thomalin's in Julye. The eclogue is a dispute between 'prowde' (1) Morrell who loves hills and Thomalin who prefers the 'lowly dales,' (102) Morrell's pride recalling Rome's in Janus' description, which in its image of Rome on her hills 'touching the highest gods' implies comparison with the rebel Giants. Thomalin's contrast between the early Christians and the modem church is reminiscent of Janus' between Romulan and Augustan Rome, indicating the same hypocrisy:

22

Spenser and Ovid Such one he was, (as I haue heard old Algrind often sayne) That whilome was the first shepheard, and Iiued with little gayne .... Whilome all these were lowe, and lief, and loued their flockes to feede, They neuer strouen to be chiefe, and simple was theyr weede. But now (thanked be God therefore) the world is well amend, Their weedes bene not so nighly wore, such simplesse mought them shend ... They reigne and rulen ouer all, and lord it, as they list: Y gyrt with belts of glitterand gold .... These wisards weltre in welths waues, pampred in pleasures deepe, They han fatte kernes, and leany knaues, their fasting flockes to keepe. (125-28,165-77,197-200)

Thomalin employs the same heavily ironic tone of approval as Ovid's Janus in 'the world is well amend', evidently spoken sarcastically and intended to provoke shocked disagreement. Spenser can afford to make his irony more obvious, since his explicit target, Rome, is external to his society, but, as the September eclogue in particular makes clear, the Anglican church and even the non-ecclesiastical ruling class (Diggon's 'bigge Bul1es of Basan', 124) are implicated in the corruption satirized. The immediate object of the Calender's urgent warnings about Catholicism is, in any case, Elizabeth's proposed marriage to a French Catholic duke. Piers' version of the same history of early simplicity and modern worldliness and greed in the church, in Maye (103-31), makes the specific target clear: Some gan to gape for greedie gouemaunce, And match them selfe with mighty potentates, Louers of Lordship and troublers of states (121-23)

where 'gape', occurring in such close proximity to 'match' (marriage) and 'state', seems to allude to Stubbs' notorious anti-Alenc;on tract, the Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf Whereinto England is like to be Swallowed. 30 But the satire is also directed even more personally against Elizabeth herself at the beginning of the eclogue. Piers reacts to Palinode's envious admiration of May-day celebrants with another passage on greed:

Spenser's New Fasti

23

Thilke same bene shepheards for the Deuils stedde, That playen, while their flockes be vnfedde. Well is it seene, theyr sheepe bene not their owne, That letten them runne at randon alone. But they bene hyred for little pay Of other, that caren as little as they, What fallen the flocke, so they han the fleece, And get all the gayne, paying but a peece. (43-50)

The 'mery' (1) celebration Palinode has described strongly resembles the 'meriment' described in Colin's lay to Elisa in April!. (112) Palinode has seen youths gathering 'sweet Eglantine,lAnd girlonds of roses and Sopps in wine' (1314): Elisa in April! wore a garland of roses as a crown (60), and Colin instructed the shepherds daughters to 'Bring Coronations, and Sops in wine,lworne of Paramoures' (138-39) among other flowers to adorn her. Maye's 'Eglantine', meanwhile, was the flower most particularly associated with Elizabeth's personal iconography.3l In both scenes there is singing and dancing (Maye 21-28, April! 100-113) and fine garments (Maye 4-7, April! 132-35), and each centres on a 'Queene' attended by a 'beuie' (April/ll8) or 'flocke' (Maye 32) of nymphs, with prominent reference made to Flora (called Chloris in April!, which Flora gives as her former name in Ovid's Fasti, but her identity being quite clear from E. K.'s gloss recounting Flora's story). Robert Lane observes that Palinode's description 'suggest[s] a royal progress in the countryside,:32 for Elizabeth such progresses yielded rich gifts and lavish entertainment, while for those she honoured with a visit they were so expensive as to be sometimes ruinous, and therefore they are an example of the culture of fmancial exploitation which Spenser is satirizing, as well as of the cultivation of the Queen's public image, which he also subjects to scrutiny.33 As much as the clergy and landlords who exploit the system of church benefices for profit, Elizabeth 'get[s] all the gayne, paying but a peece.' Despite the pastoral register of Colin's 'prayses and comparisons' in April!, E. K. disingenuously reminds us that beneath Elisa's feigned coronet of flowers lies the reality of 'perles and precious stones, wherewith Princes Diademes vse to bee adorned' (59 gloss). Elizabeth is implicated in the same love of wealth, pursuit of pleasure and irresponsible management of her flock as Thomalin's 'wisards weltr[ing] in welths waues'. This love of wealth and self-adornment carries the same implications of sinful pride and hubris in Elizabeth as in Morrell. Julye concludes with a thinly veiled account of Archbishop Grindal's punishment for opposing Elizabeth on the question of the royal prerogative in spiritual matters. In the letter of 1576 in which he refused to obey her command to suppress 'prophesyings', he exhorts Elizabeth, look not only (as was said to Theodosius) upon the purple and princely array, wherewith ye are apparelled; but consider withal, what is that that is covered therewith. Is it not flesh and blood? Is it not dust and ashes?34

24

Spenser and Ovid

The reminder to Elizabeth of her own mortality forms part of his ongoing admonition that she should not arrogate to herself an authority which belongs only to God, that 'in God's causes the will of God, and not the will of any earthly creature, is to take place,' that the queen's 'earthly majesty' is subject and inferior to 'the heavenly majesty of God. ,35 He presents Elizabeth's imperious approach to church government as an attempt to play god. Like Janus' concluding 'such majesty is fitting for a god,' which hints at Augustus' aspiration to quasi-divine status as manifested in the lavish display of his public image, Grindal's letter and The Shepheardes Calender associate the wealth and grandeur of the ruling classes with an hubristic assumprion of god-like authority on the part of the queen. The Fasti and The Shepheardes Calender also satirize the cultural deification of the ruler which underpinned power in both the Augustan and the Elizabethan court. Augustus exploited Hellenistic ideas about the divinity of kings to consolidate and safeguard his newly despotic power, replacing the old Republic: in 42 B.c. he obtained the official deification of his adoptive father Julius Caesar, thereafter calling himself 'Divi filius', and throughout his reign he encouraged the identification of himself with Apollo (whom, according to Suetonius, he claimed as his biological father) and with Jove, adopting one of Jove's titles, 'Augustus,.36 Ovid ostensibly promulgates the myth, but without disguising its political motives. In the Metamorphoses, he introduces the apotheosis of Julius Caesar with the cynical observation that he is obliged to make Augustus' father a god lest the immortality of his son be called into doubt (XV. 760-61), and in the Fasti there is an undercurrent of wry humour about the hubris of self-deification: Hercules is represented setting up an altar to himself under the name Maxima, 'Greatest', (1.581) though traditionally it was supposed to be Evander who dedicated it to him, and even this comic arrogance is outdone a few lines later by Octavian who, rejecting the names Magnus and Maximus ('Great' and 'Greatest') as merely human, adopts Augustus, socium summo cum love nomen, a title in common with highest Jove (608). Romulus, too, is ironically portrayed demanding his own worship (11.507), and, like Augustus, assiduously rewriting his own genealogy to stress his divine connections (IV.23-58).37 The cult of Elizabeth had involved the suggestion of her divinity since as early as 1569, the date of a portrait showing Elizabeth, holding a globe which represents at once the world and the golden apple of discord, triumphing over the three goddesses of the Judgement of Paris. 38 The cultural deification of the Queen is an important theme of Spenser's April! eclogue, which ostensibly participates in the practice with Colin's exclamation :Shee is my goddesse plaine', (97, cpo 101) and with the concluding emblems. Yet as Feeney says of Ovid's relation to Augustan propaganda in the Fasti, he is 'implicated in it in order to explore it'.39 It is sung in the absence of the 'alienate and with drawen' Colin, who nowadays composes only laments fitted to the 'sollein season' (November 17) of his amatory and political discontent, by Hobbinol, whom we have seen assuming the quietist stance of Virgil's Tityrus in several eclogues. Presented as radically detached from its author's current feelings, there is little sense of conviction or sincerity in its panegyric as it is now relayed. 40

Spenser's New Fasti

25

While the placing of the lay for Elisa in the fourth month is often explained by comparison with Virgil's messianic fourth eclogue, it is also significant that April is, in the Fasti, the month which saw both the foundation of Rome and the coronation of Augustus as emperor. 1. M. Richardson sees a connection between Phoebus hiding his face in Spenser's April!, 77-78 and Ovid's representation of Venus telling the sun to set early on the fifteenth of April to speed Augustus' coronation next morning. 41 Yet even as he pays Elizabeth this compliment, showing not only Phoebus but Cynthia too shamed by her brilliance, Spenser subjects it to a severe critique by his allusion to Niobe, the queen whose dreadful punishment for daring to think herself worthy of worship as a divinity is recounted in Metamorphoses VI. Sandys' interpretation of Niobe is traditional and brings out the satirical force of the allusion in its application to Elizabeth: Niobe glories .. .in her beauty, her riches, her dependancy, but especially in her children, exalting her selfe aboue the reach offortune, or degree of a mortall, affects divine honours .... Niobe is said to be the daughter of Tantalus, and Taygeta ... that is, of Avarice and Riches, which in gender pride in the hearts of Mortalls: from whence proceeds the contempt both of God and man, and an insolent forgetfulnesse of humane instability.42

The allusion to Niobe indirectly warns Elizabeth to remember her 'humane instability' and not to 'affect. .. divine honours' . The obliqueness of this warning is necessitated, as Spenser is at pains to emphasize, by the severe restrictions on freedom of speech under Elizabeth, a culture of censorship which is another target of the Calender's satire. E. K. reminds us of the necessity of placating powerful queens by his reference to Stesichorus, who 'For. .. his praesumptuous and vnheedie hardinesse' in denigrating Helen in his writings 'lost both his eyes'. (26 gloss) Such ostentatious care in avoiding offence to the powerful, coupled with reference to those whose incautious utterances have brought ruin upon them from vengeful powers, is characteristic of the Fasti. At the beginning of Book I Ovid expresses pavidos metus (1.16; cpo 4, 19, 22) presenting his poem to Germanicus and begging him to read forgivingly, and the punishment of forbidden speech is a recurrent theme throughout the poem. Several stories, for instance, treat those who prevent gods from committing rape by warning the intended victim, and pay for it with their lives. 43 Ovid continually expresses cautious hesitation over what he mayor may not be permitted to say, and eventually he even declares that he is forced to remain silent for fear of vengeance if he supports one deity's claim to the honours of a month over another's (Fasti VI.97100). Such silences, bewraying the climate of authoritarian censorship and intimidation in which Ovid felt himself to be writing, so different from the tradition of free speech and open debate under the Republic, constitute the most pointed form of protest in the Fasti, one visibly embodied in the poem's overall structure. Begun in Rome, some passages, referring to Ovid's exile, seem to have been interpolated at Tomis, but the work breaks off after only six of its projected twelve

26

Spenser and Ovid

books (each dealing with one month), and Ovid in the Tristia represents its incompleteness as caused by the sudden misfortune of exile: sex ego Fastorum scripsi totidemque libellos, cumque suo finem mense volumen habet, idque tuo nuper scriptum sub nomine, Caesar, et tibi sacratum sors mea rupit opus [I have written six of the Fasti in as many books, and each volume comes to an end along with its month. This work-written recently under your name, Caesar, and dedicated to you-my fate has broken off.' (Tristia II.549-52)]

The rupture of the work is presented as a symbol of Ovid's ostracization, and of the antipathy between his values and those of Augustan ideology which caused it. Recent criticism has seen this as a deliberate part of the Fasti's self-presentation, 'symbolic, in that it represented the discontinuity caused by exile, and strategic, in that this discontinuity vividly reminded the reader of its cause,' and representing the Augustan regime as 'basically indifferent to the humane values of the playful poet of peace. ,44 This image of the breaking off of song, embodied in the Fasti, is a recurrent one in The Shepheardes Calender. In Januarye Colin ' broke his oaten pype, and down did lye', (72) the 'Argument' also emphasising the image, 'hee breaketh his Pipe in peeces'. In April! Hobbinol tells Thenot that Colin 'Hys pleasaunt Pipe ... wylfully hath broke, and doth forbearelHis wonted songs' (14-16), an ironic preface to the rehearsal of his lay to Elisa. Colin continues to dismiss his songs as 'weary wanton toyes' in June, (48) and in Nouember he urges 'Breake we our pypes, that shrild as lowde as Larke,' and 'Sing now ye shepheards daughters, sing no moe/The songs that Colin made in her prayse' . (71, 77-78) Finally in December he declares 'My Muse is hoarse and weary of thys stounde:lHere will I hang my pype vpon this tree'. (140-41) Thenot's fable in F ebruarie is broken off in mid-line by the interruption of Cuddie, who forbids him to 'tel it... forth' (239). Cuddie describes the tale as 'lewd', a tenn commonly applied to seditious literature by the censors: he seems to be responding to the disturbing political implications of Thenot's depiction of the unjust destruction of the English oak by a rash 'soueraigne' (163) at the instigation of a vain and foolish briar compared to 'a mayden Queene' (132).45 Palinode's refusal 'to beare and to heare' Piers' Puritan views in Maye, (141) Morrell's disparagement of Thomalin's satire, warning him of possible reprisal in Julye, 'Now sicker I see, thou doest but clatter:lhanne may come of melling' (207-8), and Hobbinol's caution to Diggon in September, 'thou speakest to plaine:lBetter it were, a little to feyne,' (136-37) all spring from the same felt pressure of censorship. Both Ovid and Spenser are of course disingenuous in their supposed selfsilencing. Ovid ostensibly fears to offend the Augustan 'gods' and deferentially claims that he desires to say only what is permissible (licet et fas est, I.25), hoping that on this condition Gennanicus' protection will enable him to complete his

Spenser's New Fasti

27

poem, totus ut annus eat.... ne seriem rerum scindere cogar ('that the year may run its entire course .... and that I may not be forced to break the thread of my discourse' , I. 26, 62). Indeed, the very name of the Roman calendar, and therefore the title of the work, Fasti, refers to what isfas, what is permitted on certain days, and Ovid tellingly expresses this as the permission and proscription of speech: ille nefastus erit, per quem tria verba silentur ... simul exta deo data sunt, Iicet omnia fari, verbaque honoratus lib era praetor habet. [That day is nefas when the three words are silenced .... As soon as the entrails have been given to the god, anything can be said, and the honoured praetor has freedom of speech.' (Fasti 1.47,51-52)]

(Tria verba refers to the praetor's formula describing the practice of business and law: on a nefas day business cannot be conducted.) However, Ovid does say much that is nefas, or at least imprudent, frequently referring for instance to the bloody civil wars of Augustus early reign, or, in describing Livia as sola toro magni digna reperta Iovis ('she who alone was found worthy of the marriage-bed of great Jove,' 1.650), reminding us by a disclaimer, as is E. K.'s wont, of Augustus' complicated marital history. Ultimately the fact that Ovid must after all 'break the thread' of his poem, the year not being permitted to 'run its entire course', itself helps to highlight how controversial and undeferential his work has really been: by making it 'read like a poem whose licentia has been suppressed, which has not been allowed to keep speaking, which has become nefas', he draws attention to its subversive elements. 46 Likewise, though continually representing his speakers, including those identified by E. K. with 'the author selfe', as silenced for more or less overtly political reasons, Spenser nevertheless, and partly by these very means, articulates what is nefas. Each small silencing is, as in the Fasti, 'a mute reproach to the constraints set upon the poet's speech' and on the public's speech in general, a satire on the increasingly draconian censorship in Elizabeth's early reign.47 There is also what Lane calls the Calender's 'conspicuous affiliation with the party of silenced speakers' through its dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, its printer Hugh Singleton, and its repeated invocation of Algrind as a venerable authority.48 (This is another Ovidian ploy: Ovid made no attempt to change the principal dedicatee of the Fasti after the death of Germanicus, rumoured to have been on the orders of Tiberius, and as Ronald Syme observes, 'Ovid mentions by name Cornelius Gallus [the poet and general whom Augustus had forced to commit suicide] no fewer than seven times. ,)49 This affiliation effectively alerts us to the Calender's status as a poem of protest, and to the objects of its satire. 'Algrind' clearly refers to Archbishop Grindal, removed from office for his views on the church's independence of Elizabeth's authority, and the Calender too embraces the Puritans' call for reform and protests against abuses resulting from court interference. 50

28

Spenser and Ovid

Sidney seems to have been temporarily banished from court at the time for his outspoken letter advising Elizabeth against her planned marriage to the Duc d' Alenyon, and Hugh Singleton had recently been convicted of sedition for printing the anti-Alenyon Gaping Gulf, narrowly escaping punishment. 51 Their names on the title page prompt the reader to seek out the anti-Alenyon polemic in the Calender, and politicize the critique of love which pervades the work. Colin's 'ill gouernement' of his flock (Januarye 45) warns Elizabeths subjects what will come of her love.

Flora and the d' Alen~on Match: Spenser's Polemical Manipulation of an Ovidian Myth

One of the more oblique methods which Spenser uses to decry Elizabeth's proposed marriage is a characteristically Ovidian manipulation of and equivocation over competing versions of a myth, and moreover, though E. K. elides any mention of Ovid, citing other sources, it is a myth central to the Fasti. The praise of Elisa in April! is surrounded by references to 'Flora' in March and Maye, with 'Chloris', whom we discover to be identical with Flora, appearing in April! itself. Books IV and V of the Fasti (April and May) feature a conflict between the old licentious cult of Flora and the Augustan cult of the virgin Vesta. 52 The Floralia traditionally extend from late April into early May, but Ovid is forced to defer his treatment of them until the latter month because of an Augustan insertion into the calendar: the celebration of Vesta's relocation in Augustus' house, so that 'aeternos tres habet una deos.' ('A single house holds three eternal gods.' Fasti IV.954) The clash is represented as a violent imposition by Vesta (implicitly, of course, by a selfaggrandizing Augustus) on religious tradition-Ovid tells Vesta 'aufer...diem!', a verb with overtones of robbery-and also epitomizes the conflict between Augustan moralitas and the licentia embodied in the Floralia and in elegy itself, Ovid's favoured geme. Ultimately Ovid hints at the hypocrisy of Augustus' religious and moral reforms by suggesting a parallel between Augustus' selfaggrandizing appropriation of the Vesta cult and cohabitation with the virgin goddess, supposed to be unapproachable by men, and the indecorous story he tells of Priapus' attempted rape of Vesta. Spenser's Spring eclogues are similarly concerned with the contrast between loose amorous behaviour, epitomized in the figure of Flora alluded to in March and pictured as the May-Queen in Maye, and venerable virginity celebrated in April!, and with the relation of these to the ruler's praiseworthiness. He insists that Elizabeth's virginity is ideologically indispensable to her power, as Augustus' power was shored up by his association with the cult of Vesta, and represents her prospective marriage as a lapse tantamount to the prostitution characteristic of Flora in Tacitus' account and of the Floralia in Ovid, and to the notorious sexual freedoms of the English May-games, which her government repeatedly tried to suppress. Where Ovid champions the elegiac licentia of the Floralia and takes a cynical view of Augustus' exploitation of

Spenser's New Fasti

29

Vesta's cult and its associated moralitas to strengthen his power, Spenser's polemic is almost opposite in purpose, reminding the Queen of the ideological importance of her 'Vestal' virginity and in effect exhorting her to follow the Augustan programme, relying on the cult of virginity and shunning and denigrating sexual love. As for Augustus, it is a question of selecting and adapting older traditions to support her personal cult. As Augustus appropriates Vesta, so Elizabeth can fruitfully fill the space left by the Catholic cult of the Virgin Mary (St. George's Day, the occasion of April's important royal celebration, was originally Catholic), and indeed draw on the Vesta cult herself, as she did from 1579 on. 53 As Augustus denigrated the ethos of the Floralia, so Elizabeth must avoid the sexual liberty associated with May Day by remaining unmarried. Discussion of the Alenc;on match had begun in March of 1579, and so had sermons opposing it, angering Elizabeth. 54 In March the first mention of Flora is made as Willye argues that the season for love is beginning: she is commencing to deck 'Maias bOWIe' (17), anticipating the culmination of allusions to Flora and love in Maye. But E. K.s jaundiced gloss undercuts the tone ofpastoraljouissance: Flora) the Goddesse of flowers, but indede (as saith Tacitus) a famous harlot, which with the abuse of her body hauing gotten great riches, made the people of Rome her heyre: who in remembraunce of so great beneficence, appointed a yearely feste ...

Thomalin's emblem makes the anti-erotic satire personal by equating the bitterness oflove with the Frenchman in Elizabeth's affair in the spelling and capitalization of 'Gaule,.55 In April!, however, Flora is mentioned under an alternative name, Chloris, and E. K.'s gloss here follows the myth as it appears in Ovid, with no hint of disapproval: Cloris) the name of a Nymph, and signifieth greenesse, of whome is sayd, that Zephyrus the Westeme wind being in loue with her, and coueting her to wyfe, gaue her for a dowrie, the chiefedome and soueraigntye of al flowres and greene herbes, growing on earth.

The implication is that 'Cloris' refers to Flora before her abduction and marriage. E. K. elides any mention of the marriage itself, describing only the wooing: from his account, and especially in the context of April/'s emphasis on virginity, it seems possible that Chloris remained a virgin. The idea of ascribing Flora's two names to different stages of her life, Chloris describing the virgin and Flora the wife and goddess, was a common misreading ofOvids account in the Fasti. Flora tells Ovid Chloris eram, quae Flora vocor.... Chloris eram, nymphe campi felicis .... [I, who am called Flora, was Chloris ... .! was Chloris, a nymph of the fertile plain.'

(Fasti V.195-97)]

30

Spenser and Ovid

The Greek name, she explains, has been corrupted in the Latin tongue, an historical process of linguistic change having nothing to do with her biographical transition from maid to wife or nymph to goddess. Ovid's etymology is flagrantly wrong: 'Flora' clearly derives fromjlos, flower. His explanation is in fact wittily devised to emphasize the licentia of her cult, for as Barchiesi points out, 'Chloris' seems to have been 'a typical professional name for girls employed in the sex trade' in Augustan Rome. 56 Without this historical information, however, the connotation of 'greenesse', symbolic of youth and innocence, makes Chloris an apt name for the unravished virgin. Ovid's quibble thus enables E. K. to split Flora into two distinct personae, praising the nymph as she is wooed, still in her maiden state, in April/, while in March effectively replacing the reward of deification she receives after her rape in Ovid with blame for her loss of virginity. The May celebration described by Palinode is, as we have seen, on one level another and more critical perspective on April/'s public celebration of Elizabeth, a correlation which identifies Elisa with the May 'Queene ... Lady Flora'. E. K. offers no gloss here, but we are mindful of the Roman harlot of March. It is significant, though, that this Queen is accompanied by a May-lord 'in a royall throne,lCrowned as king' (29-30). Celebrations of Elizabeth will resemble the licentious May-Games if she 'fetche[s] home' a king from France. The allusions to Flora spread across the Spring eclogues, then, present Elizabeth with a stark contrast between the veneration she can command while unmarried and the hostility with which her subjects would meet her succumbing to Alenc;:on's courtship. November 1579 saw Simier signing the articles for the marriage and returning to France, allowing two months for Elizabeth to win over her subjects, during which time the Calender was published. Nouember, which represents Elizabeth as Dido, a Queen whose death was caused by foolish and excessive love for a foreigner in the Aeneid, remembers her as 'The fayrest May... that euer went' (39). E. K. explains 'May) for mayde', but it also brings to mind the 'wanton' Mayqueen 'Lady Flora' of the Maye eclogue, an image recalled a few lines earlier by Colin's now nis the time of merimake. Nor Pan to herye, nor with loue to playe: Sike myrth in May is meetest for to make, Or summer shade vnder the cocked haye. (Nouember 9-12)

Thenot's epithet encapsulates the choice of roles confronting Elizabeth, and implicitly attributes her metaphorical death to her desire to marry. Youth and Eld in Februarie and December: Love, Exile and the Political Significance of the Calender's Ovidianism A further Ovidian exile poem underlies one of the Calender's representations of unjust persecution, in Thenot's fable of the Oak and the Briar in Februarie, and

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31

also informs Colin's self-presentation in December. In the Nux, a walnut-tree laments its sufferings at the hands of passers by who beat it for its fruit, and the lack of protection, ingratitude and further abuse it receives from the husbandman who should care for it. Though Ovid's authorship of the piece is now disputed, it reads persuasively as an allegory of Ovid's own fate: if the author was not Ovid, at any rate s/he took pains to make the voice of the walnut tree resemble very closely the voice of Ovid's exile epistles. 57 The tree complains that is continually injured, not because it has committed any crime deserving public anger (3-6), but because it bears fruit: 'my fruit has injured me, it has harmed me to be prolific' (107). It would have been safer, it observes, if it had never produced any (25). Similarly Ovid in the exile poetry repeatedly denies having earned his exile by committing any crime (e.g. Tristia IV.x.90), explains that it was his literary productivity, his authorship of the Ars, which caused his punishment (e.g. Tr. IV.i.25-26, EP I.v.27-28), and wishes that he had never learned to write (Tr. 11.341-44, IV. 1.27-28). The walnut tree bitterly observes that all he has to be thankful to the husbandman (colo no) for is a poor patch of ground at the very edge of the estate, where he has been placed in fear that he might harm the crops: me sata ne laedam, quoniam et sata laedere dicor, imus in extremo margine fundus habet. [Lest I should harm the crops, since I am said even to harm crops, I am put in the meanest part of the farm, on its extreme margin.' (Nux 61-62)]

Likewise Augustus, thinking Ovid a harmful influence on Roman citizens, has thrust him to the extreme margin of the empire, a land which 'vix ... / haeret in imperii margine' (,barely clings to the very edge of the empire,' Tr. 11.199-200), where Ovid 'procul extremo pulsus in orbe latet' ('lives in obscurity far away, driven to the furthest part of the world,' Tr. III.i.50).58 Like Ovid, who repeatedly complains that in this outpost of empire he is exposed to the danger of barbarian violence (Tr. IV.i.65-86, V.x.l5-28), the walnut tree is thus exposed to the public highway and the attacks of passers by (59-60). Like Tomis, the tree's despised patch of ground is perpetually hard and waterless, and its cultivation is neglected (63-66; cpo Tr. V.ii.66, EP III.i.l7-18, Tr. I1I.x.67-70). Such injustice, the tree observes, is theoretically impossible under the Pax Augusta, the universal just government of Augustus, who 'spreads his aid through all the world' (146), 'But what good is that,' he asks, if he continues to be beaten in broad daylight and has no safety? (147-48) The idea of the Pax Augusta is undermined, and Augustus parallelled with the neglectful and unjust husbandman. This too is a frequent tactic in Ovid's exile epistles (Tr. 11.197-206, EP lI.v.17-l8, lI.vii.67-68). The walnut tree wishes to die (159-62) to escape further persecution, a continual refrain in the exile epistles, and compares itself to the 'beaver of Pontus' which escapes the hunt by biting off its testicles, the hunter's object: Pontus of course is the place of Ovid's exile.

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Thenot's fable is about an oak rather than a walnut tree, but an oak which has also been fruitful, until smitten with the ills of age: A goodly Oake sometime had it bene, With annes ful1 strong and largely displayd, But of their leaues they were disarayde: The bodie bigge, and mightely pight, Thoroughly rooted, and ofwonderous hight: Whilome had bene the King of the field, And mochel1 mast to the husband did yielde, And with his nuts larded many swine. But now the gray mosse marred his rine, His bared boughes were beaten with stonnes, His toppe was bald, and wasted with wonnes, His honour decayed, his braunches sere.

(Februarye,103-114) It weaves in with the fruitful but abused tree which, as I have argued, represents Ovid in the Nux, Ovid's self-presentation in the Tristia as sick and aging like a tree in winter: quisque per autumn urn percussis frigore primo est color in foliis, quae nova laesit hiems, is mea membra tenet, nee viribus adlevor ul1is. [My body has such a complexion as leaves have in autumn, stricken by the first cold, when the new winter has damaged them, and I am cheered by no blooming strength.' (Tristia III.viii.29-31. Cpo also Ovid's description of himself as inutilis herba, 'a useless plant', at EP II.i.15.)]

The cause of the oak's destruction in Thenot's tale is the malice of the 'bragging brere' which grows 'hard by his side' (115). Ovid's walnut tree also complains of the undeserved hatred of neighbouring trees which, themselves 'unfruitful and conspicuous only for their foliage' (34), are injured by the missiles aimed at him: ergo si sapient et mentem verba sequantur, devoveant umbras proxima quaeque meas. quam miserum est, odium damnis acceder nostris meque ream nimiae proximitatis agi! [Therefore if they were sensate, and words could fol1ow their thoughts, they that are nearest to me would curse my shade. What misery, that hate should be added to my injuries, and that I should be indicted for too much proximity!' (Nux 53-56)]

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33

Thenot's vain but fruitless briar, concerned that its 'Sinamon smell' (136) and 'the beauty of [its] blossomes' (134), 'meete to clothe a mayden Queene' (132), should be impaired by the neighbourhood of the oak, bears a strong resemblance to these beautiful but fruitless trees which bear Ovid's nux such malice. Like the walnut tree, which after all its sufferings must further endure the ungrateful and unjust accusations of the husbandman, who rather than protect it from stoning blames the tree for the fact that his field is now full of stones (Nux 123-26), Thenot's oak suffers unjust condemnation by the husbandman. The closing appeal of Ovid's nux, Si merui videorque nocens, excidite ferro et liceat miserae dedoluisse semel [If I have deserved it and I seem to you to be guilty, fell me with the axe, and let my sorrows come to an end once and for all.' (Nux 179-80)]

is carried through literally by Spenser's husbandman, who fells the oak despite its groans and its sacred connotations, in a passage reminiscent of Erysichthon's felling of the sacred oak in Book VIII of the Metamorphoses. Like Erysichthon, the foolish briar gets its come-uppance, when in the following winter it dies for lack of the shelter from wind and snow which the oak had afforded it, playing out the consequences of the walnut tree's questions in the Nux, quid si non aptas solem vitantibus umbras, finditur Icario cum cane terra, darem? quid nisi suffugium nimbos vitantibus essem, non expectata cum venit imber aqua? [What if I did not give needed shade to those escaping the sun, when the land is cracked in the dog-days of summer? What if I were not a shelter for those escaping the clouds, when an unexpected rainstorm comesT (Nux 117-120)]

Despite E. K.' s insistence in the 'Argument' that 'this JEeglogue is rather morall and generall, then bent to any secrete or particular purpose,' it insistently employs political and religious language which invites the reader to search for a topical application to religious or political factionalism. The Oak was once 'the King of the field,' (108) and is described as one of the husbandman's 'trees of state,' (146) while more problematically it is also associated with Roman Catholicism (209 and E. K.'s gloss); the Briar addresses the husbandman as 'my liege Lord' and 'my soueraigne,' (150, 163) and the red and white of the flowers which bedeck the Briar are described as 'Colours meete to clothe a mayden Queene' (132)-they are of course the colours of the Tudor rose. Various attempts have been made to identify a specific historical allegory, but without concensus,59 and the ambiguity of the fable perhaps suggests a more general reference to unjust punishment meted out by 'soueraigne' power associated with a 'mayden Queene' to those who have

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Spenser and Ovid

undeservingly fallen from Elizabeth's favour in a variety of spheres. Like the Nux, it uses an Aesop-like fable of speaking trees to insinuate a political allegory which attacks the injustice of the ruling powers. The debate between Thenot and Cuddie which forms the context of the fable deepens the eclogue's association with Ovid's exile. The hints of specifically amatory folly in the briar's beauty and vanity are reflected more explicitly in Cuddie's preoccupation with love and with writing love poetry (61-68), dismissed as vanity by Thenot, for 'All that is lent to loue, wyll be lost.' (70) This giddy worldliness is, according to Thenot, what makes Cuddie so unable to bear patiently the vicissitudes of the seasons and of fortune. Both Cuddie's preoccupation with love and love poetry and his lack of resilience and tendency to complain about the cold weather are reminiscent of Ovid, first as author of erotic elegies in which, if he did not 'hymn' his 'lasses gloue' (62), he hymned her fmger-ring (Amores Il.xv), and then in his exilic complaints about frozen Tomis (e.g. Tristia III.x.9-54). Thenot's Boethian idea of a causal connection between the two, meanwhile, recalls the judgement expressed in Petrarch's De vita solitaria on an Ovid quem conventus foeminei delectarent usque adeo, ut illis foelicitatis suae apicem summaque reponeret. ... nisi his moribus et hoc animo fuisset, et clarius nomen haberet apud graves viros et Pontic urn illud exilium atque Istri solitudines vel non adiiset vel aequanimius tolerasset. 6o [whom intercourse with women delighted so much, that in them he placed the sum and pinnacle of his happiness ... .If he had not been of these habits and this temperament, he would have had an honourable reputation among serious men and would either not have had to go into exile in Pontus and the solitudes of the Hister, or else would have been able to bear it with equanimity'.]

Both sides of the debate in this eclogue, then, both youth and eld, are implicitly compared to Ovid, bringing out the two most important aspects of the significance of Ovid in the Calender, and more specifically in its political programme. Cuddie, in the framing dialogue, embodies the levity and irreverence of the philandering author of the erotic elegies, and Thenot's judgement on him echoes the moralistic Petrarchan judgement on Ovid, that his worldly and sinful concern with love was part of an overall weakness of character, and that it was justly repaid with exile. This constitutes part of the Calender's ongoing argument that love leads to misgovernment and disaster, most prominently expressed in the woebegone state of Colin himself, and driven by the work's polemical purpose of opposing Elizabeth's planned marriage. Meanwhile, within Thenot's fable, it is the Oak, the example of eld, which is modelled on Ovid, this time an exiled Ovid viewed as a victim of unjust punishment by despotic power. This participates in another ongoing political concern of the Calender, which motivates the larger part of its allusion to and imitation of Ovid, its interest in the victims of abuses of political power, and especially those punished for their heterodox views.

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While such political significances must be expressed obliquely and denied by E. K., Thenot ostensibly presents his fable as a lesson exhorting youth to respect the old. It was as precisely such a lesson that the Nux had been popularized in the sixteenth century by Erasmus' commentary, written for the young son of Thomas More, and published with the poem in many editions between 1532 and 1579. 61 It has been observed that the ultimate undecidability of the debate between youth and eld, Cuddie and Thenot, in Februarie is a necessary consequence of the subject, since youth and age are not securely separable but parts of a single continuum, that Cuddie is in a sense Thenot's own past, and Thenot Cuddie's future. 62 It is certainly the case that Colin, who is both young and old, a mere 'boy' in love in Januarye yet in December looking back on the four seasons of his life and forward only to death, unites both the aspects of Ovid which we have seen embodied in Cuddie's youth and the Oak's eld. December encapsulates this through imagery which reinvokes both the Februarie eclogue and its Ovidian intertext, the Nux. Colin's reminiscences of the 'ioyfull spring' (19) of his youth picture him in opposition both to 'the craggie Oke' of Februarie and to 'the stately Walnut tree' of the Nux which lay behind it, and cast him indeed as one of the unsympathetic tormentors of Ovid's tree: What wreaked I ofwintrye ages waste, Tho deemed I, my spring would euer laste. How often haue I scaled the craggie Oke, All to dislodge the Rauen of her neste: Howe haue I wearied with many a stroke, The stately Walnut tree, the while the rest Vnder the tree fell all for nuts at strife: For ylike to me was Iibertee and Iyfe. (December 29-36)

This carefree and licentious youth, with his display of irreverence for 'Eld' embodied in the 'craggie' oak and 'stately' walnut, recalls the Cuddie of Februarie, and indeed he is soon to fall victim like the amorous Cuddie to 'loues vnbridled lore' (63), which torments the summer of his days. Colin has been associated with amatory Ovidianism and its ill effects, like Cuddie in Februarie, from the first: in Januarye we are told that he hides 'the very name ofhys loue and mistresse' under the 'feigned name' of Rosalind, 'so as Ouide shadoweth hys loue vnder the name of Corynna' . (Januarye, E. K.'s gloss on I. 60, 'Rosalinde') The 'ill gouemement' (45) of his flock and his neglect of his friends and his art (57-60,67-72) which all result from his love-melancholy, recurred to in April!, June and October, form the strongest strain of the work's ongoing demonstration that 'All that is lent to loue, wyll be lost,' as Thenot puts it, its lesson to the queen that she should resist the temptation to marry. As the opening couplet of the passage quoted above points out, however, only

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the youthful Colin's over-confidence and lack of imagination about his own future enables him to show such carefree irreverence and unsympathetic cruelty towards the aged trees. Though Colin here believes himself an embodiment of perpetual spring which need have no concern for creatures of 'wintrye age', the passage anticipates the later stage when Colin's spring will pass into winter, and he will identify himself with the very image of Eld which he once tormented: My boughes with bloosmes that crowned were at firste, And promised of timely fruite such store, Are left both bare and barrein now at erst: The flattring fmite is fallen to grownd before, And rotted, ere they were halfe mellow ripe: My haruest wast, my hope away dyd wipe. (103-8)

Colin's metaphor recalls at once Ovid's explicit comparison of himself to a frostbitten tree in Autumn in Tristia III.viii, the belaboured walnut tree which allegorically represented the same exiled Ovid in the Nux, with its 'top bare of leaves' and its 'fruit struck off before it was ripe' (10 1, 94), the walnut tree which Colin himself belaboured in his youth, and the ravaged and doomed oak of Februarie. The despair of his umequited love and his sensation of weary old age are equated, through this Ovidian image already so deeply rooted in the Calender, with the sorrows of Ovid's exile. As well as being a negative exemplum showing the dangers of youthful Ovidian amorousness, Colin embodies the role of the exiled Ovid, a figure of political alienation, ideological distance from the centre of power, and the danger of victimization which is the price of voicing dissent in a repressive state. That the love which Rosalind denies to Colin is so easily readable as patronage, and Rosalind herself as Elizabeth, in the context of the political Petrarchism of the Elizabethan court, articulates the two roles together: in effect each is a metaphor of the other. The ambiguity of Colin's age in the Calender, so often remarked, is then in part a consequence of the Ovidianism of the work, and its dual nature. To contribute both to the anti-erotic polemic and to the stance of political disaffection and hard usage, Colin must resemble both the Ovid of the erotic elegies who continually refused to 'grow up' into higher gemes and serious subject matter and the Ovid prematurely aged by exilic suffering. 63 These aspects of the Ovidianism of the Calender will be continued and varied throughout Spenser's work. The anti-erotic polemic which has so acutely topical a motivation in the Calender will be transformed in the later works into a more nuanced and complex exploration and revision of Petrarchan and Ovidian love, which will ultimately place a reformed eros at the centre of Spenser's moral, political and religious teachings. This will be an important concern of the 1590 Faerie Queene, the Amoretti and Epithalamium and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe. The exilic stance and its connotation of critical distance from the centre of

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power will once again be crucial in the poems of 1595, the 1596 additions to The Faerie Queene, and the Mutabilitie Cantos. The Calender's final word transcends the ambiguities of youth and age we have been discussing in an image of artistic immortality also imitated from Ovid. E. K. 's gloss on Colin's missing emblem is: The meaning wherof is that all thinges perish and come to theyr last end, but workes of learned wits and monuments of Poetry abide for euer. ... Therefore let not be enuied, that this Poete in his Epilogue sayth he hath made a Calendar, that shall endure as long as time &e. folowing the ensample of Horace and Quid in the like. Grande opus exegi quod nee louis ira nee ignis, Nee ferrum poterit nee edax abolere vetustas &e.

The verses are a slight misquotation of the epilogue of the Metamorphoses, 'Now I have completed my work, which neither Jove's anger, nor fire, nor the sword, nor consuming age can destroy,' (Met. XV.871-72) a gesture imitated by Spenser's epilogue which ensues: Loe I haue made a Calender for euery yeare, That steele ill strength, and time ill durance shall outweare: A nd if I marked well the starres relloilition, It shall continewe till the worlds dissolution.

If the rupture of Ovid's Fasti, the calendrical work in which he sang of the setting and rising of the stars (1.2), was, as he presented it in the Tristia, a symbol of his victimization by political power, then, in completing his own Calender despite the many images of the breaking off of song which it contains, Spenser has achieved an artistic triumph over the pressures of censorship and political opposition. His proud vaunt invokes another familiar strain of Ovid's self-presentation, exemplified not only in the MetamOlphoses epilogue quoted by E. K., in which the poet achieves an apotheosis more triumphant than those of Julius and Augustus Caesar which precede it (XV. 843_70),64 but also in the exile poetry itself, which repeatedly asserts the poet's immortality, his power to mete out lasting fame, infamy or oblivion to those of whom he writes, and his ultimate invulnerability to persecution. en ego, cum eaream patria vobisque domoque, raptaque sint, adimi quae potuere mihi, ingenio tamen ipse meo eomitorque fruorque: Caesar in hoc potu it iuris habere nihil. quilibet hane saevo vitam mihi finiat ense, me tamen extineto fama superstes erit, dumque suis vietrix omnem de montibus orbem prospieiet domitum Martia Roma, legar.

Spenser and Ovid

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[Look at me, now I am deprived of my country, of you and of my home, and everything which could be taken away has been snatched from me; yet I enjoy and have for company my own mind: in this Caesar could have no authority. Should anyone end my life with the fierce sword, nevertheless when I am dead my fame will survive, and while Mars' Rome looks forth from her hills, a conqueror, over the world she has subdued, I shall be read.' (Tristia III. vii. 45-52)] This conclusion to the Calender, then, looks forward to what will become another important strain in Spenser's subsequent Ovidianism, most fully articulated in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe. Despite the pose of self-silencing, fear of punishment and political victimization by which Spenser conveys his Ovidian stance of political opposition, he also shares with Ovid a supreme confidence in the invulnerability of his own immortal fame. That confidence is the basis of the arch sense of his own poetic authority and public power which will pervade his whole career.

Notes

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 II 12 13 14 15

E. K.'s 'Epistle', Edmund Spenser: The Shorter Poems ed. Richard McCabe (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1999), 25, 29; Ruth Luborsky, 'The Illustrations to The Shepheardes Calender,' SS 2 (1981), 24. See also Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates, 197-231; Cheney, Spenser's Famous Flight. Three Proper and Wittie Familiar Letters, in J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (eds.), Spenser: Poetical Works (London: OUP, 1912; rpt. 1969),628; October I, gloss. E. K.'s epistle, Shorter Poems, 29. On Colin's stance of Ovidian exile, see McCabe, 'Edmund Spenser: Poet of Exile,'

79,89.

See 'Rosalind' in A. C. Hamilton (ed.), The Spenser Encyclopedia (London: Routledge, 1990), 622; Paul McLane, Spenser's Shepheardes Calender: A Study in Elizabethan Allegory (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1961), ch. 3. E.g. 'Ovidii Vita per Paulum Marsum,' in P. Ovidii Nasonis Fastorum ... cum commentarii A. Constantio, P. Marso, et al. (Venice, 1508), sig. p3 v . The idea originates in Sidonius Apollinaris' fifth century Carmina XXIII. 158-61. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973; rpt. 1984), 116. Gareth Williams, Banished Voices: Readings in Ovid's Exile Poetry (Cambridge: CUP, 1994),32-33. E.g. Tristia Lii .9-12, Lv.57-84, III.xi.61-62. Cp., e.g., Tristia V.i .15-20, 43-44. EP III.iii.42. Plato, Republic 1II.399d-e; Aristotle, Politics 1341 a-b; Fulgentius, Mythologies 3.9. Barchiesi, The Poet and the Prince, 90; Stephen Hinds, 'Arma in Ovid's Fasti,' Arethusa 25 (1987), 103-4. E. K.'s epistle, Shorter Poems, 29-30. For the history of the author's address to his book, which begins with Ovid's Tristia, see 1. Tatlock, 'The Epilog of Chaucer's Troilus,' MP 18 (1921), 625-59; R. Schoeck, 'Go Little Book: A Conceit from Chaucer to William Meredith,' N&Q 97 (1952),370-72, 413.

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16 Tristia 1. i. 61. 17 The relation of Spenser' s Calender to the Fasti is noted in passing by E. K. Rand, Ovid and his Influence (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1963), 163, L. P. Wilkinson, Ovid Recalled (Cambridge: CUP, 1955), 408, and more recently Colin Burrow, 'Spenser and Classical Traditions,' in Andrew Hadfield (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Spenser (Cambridge: CUP, 2001), 225 . 18 Barchiesi, The Poet and the Prince, 69-73; D. C. Feeney, 'Si licet et fas est: Ovid's Fasti and the Problem of Free Speech under the Principate,' in Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus ed. Anton Powell (London : Bristol Classical Press, 1992); Hinds, 'Arma in Ovid's Fasti,' Arethusa 25, (1987), 81-149; Carole Newlands, Playing With Time: Ovid and the Fasti (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). 19 Barchiesi, The Poet and the Prince, 71. Cpo Mary Beard, 'A Complex of Times: No More Sheep on Romulus' Birthday,' PCPhS 213 (1987), 1-15; A. Wallace-Hadrill, 'Time for Augustus: Ovid, Augustus, and the Fasti,' in Homo Viator: Classical Essays for John Bramble ed. M. Whitby et al. (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1992), 221-30. 20 Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 114. 21 Ibid., 125-26. 22 On Spenser's 'warning' critique of Elizabeth's cultural deification, see Robert Lane, Shepheards Devises: Edmund Spenser 's Shepheardes Calender and the Institutions of Elizabethan Society (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 16-26, Richard F. Hardin, Civil Idolatry: Desacralizing and Monarchy in Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992) and Me Bergvall, 'Between Eusebius and Augustine: Una and the Cult of Elizabeth,' ELR 27 (1997), 3-30. On Ovid's critique of Augustus, see Barchiesi, The Poet and the Prince, 92-99, 106-19. 23 McLane, Spenser 's 'Shepheardes Calender', 47-60, McCabe, 'Little booke: thy selfe present,' 34. 24 Ronald Syme, History in Ovid, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) 212-14; Lane, Shepheards Devises, 56-73 . 25 Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 46; Barchiesi, The Poet and the Prince, 40. 26 Ibid. For views of Spenser as appealing to a nascent public sphere beyond the court, though from different perspectives, see Lane, Shepheards Devises, 27-55; Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity, 170-201. 27 As well as Janus' New Year festival, see, for instance, the shepherds' festival, the Parilia, which marks the founding of Rome, (IV.721-806) and the Cerealia (IV.393416). 28 E. K. 's history of the calendar in the 'Generall Argument', though attributed to Macrobius, could also come from this early part of Fasti I, alerting us to the importance of this sub text in the Calender's subsequent satire. See Fasti 1.27-44 on the ten- and twelve-month year, and 149-64 on the debate over whether January or March is the first month. Janus' defense of the former, 'Midwinter is the beginning of the new sun and the end of the old one: Phoebus and the year take their start from the same point,' (1.163-64) translates easily, given the common allegorization of Phoebus as Christ, into E. K.'s 'speciall cause,' 'the incarnation of our mighty Sauiour ... who ... left ... a memoriall of his birth in the ende of the last yeere and the beginning of the next.' (Shorter Poems, 33) On Apollo as Christ, see James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of The Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 141-44. 29 Zanker, The Power of Images, 51. 30 Noted by McCabe, Shorter Poems, xiii . 31 Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth, 68-91 . 32 Lane, Shepheards Devises, III. 33 1. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth 1(1934; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960, rpt. 1973),211-

40

Spenser and Ovid

13. 34 Edmund Grindal, The Remains ed. William Nicholson (Cambridge, 1843),378. 35 Grindal, Remains, 389, 387. 36 Lily Ross Taylor, The Divinity of the Roman Emperor, American Philological Association, Philological Monographs no. 1 (1931); 1. Pollini, 'Man or god: Divine assimilation and imitation in the late Republic and early Principate,' in K. A. Raaflaub and M. Toher (eds.), Between Republic and Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990),334-57; Zanker, The Power of Images, 34-37, 48-53; Suetonius, Lives of the Twelve Caesars, 'The Deified Augustus' 70, 94. 37 Barchiesi, The Poet and the Prince, 98, 113-118, 171 ff. 38 Wilson, Englands Eliza, ill. facing 238; Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 61-65; Lane, Shepheards Devises, 1819. See also Stanley Stewart, 'Spenser and the Judgement of Paris,' SS 9 (\ 988), 161209. 39 Feeney, 'Si licet etfas est,' 6. 40 McCabe, '''Little booke: thy selfe present",' 21-23. 41 Fasti IV.673-76; 1. M. Richardson, Astrological Symbolism in Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender: The Cultural Background of a Literary Text (Lampeter: Edwin Meller Press, 1989), 280. 42 George Sandys, Ovids Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologizd and Represented in Figures (Oxford, 1632; facs. rpt. New York: Garland, 1976), 222. 43 FastiL415-40; II.583-616; VI.331-46. 44 Betty Rose Nagle, The Poetics of Exile: Program and Polemic in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto of Ovid, Collection Latomus 170 (Brussels: Latomus, 1980), 20; Newlands, Playing With Time, 19. 45 Lane, Shepheards Devises, 62; cpo Malfont's 'lewd poems,' FQ V.ix.25.7. 46 Feeney, 'Si licet etfas est,' 15. 47 Ibid., 20. 48 Lane, Shepheards Devises, 60. 49 See Tacitus, Annals III. 15, on contemporary belief in Tiberius' responsibility for Germanicus' death. Syme, History in Ovid, 191. 50 Patrick Collinson, Archbishop Grindal 1519-1583: the Struggle for a Reformed Church (London: Jonathan Cape, 1979),233-52. 51 1. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth 1(\934; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), 24059; Wallace T. MacCaffrey, Queen Elizabeth and the Making of Policy, 1572-88) (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1981), 251-66. 52 Barchiesi, The Poet and the Prince, 133-40. 53 Yates,Astraea, \02-3, 113-117. 54 MacCaffrey, Queen Elizabeth and the Making of Policy, 255, 262. 55 McCabe, "'Little booke: thy selfe present",' 25. 56 Barchiesi, The Poet and the Prince, 191. 57 On the authenticity of the Nux, see A. G. Lee, 'The Authorship of the Nux,' in N. L Herescu (ed.), Ovidiana: Recherches sur Ovide (Paris, 1958),457-71. 58 See also EP Lvii .5, III.xiii.II-12. 59 E.g. McLane, Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, 61-76; Lane, Shepheards Devises, 89101; R. B. Bond, 'Supplantation in the Elizabethan Court: the Theme of Spenser's February Eclogue,' SS 2 (1981),55-65. 60 De vita solitaria II.vii.2, in Opera Latine di Francesco Petrarca, ed. with Italian trans. Antonietta Bufano (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1975), Vol. I, p. 508. 61 Elaine Fantham and Erika Rummel (eds.), Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and Educational Writings 7 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). 62 Harry Berger, Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988),416-41.

Spenser's New Fasti

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63 EP Liv.3-8, 19-20. 64 Denis Feeney, The Gods in Epic: Poets and Critics a/the Classical Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 210-17.

Chapter 2

Epic Idolatry and Concupiscent Romance in Book I of The Faerie Queene

The opening stanza of Spenser's The Faerie Queene combines two very different models.! Lines 1-4 clearly imitate the probably spurious lines appended to the beginning of the Aeneid in Renaissance editions, drawing attention to the Virgilian nature of Spenser's own progression from pastoral to epic: ille ego, qui quondam gracili modulatus avena carmen, et egressus silvis vicina coegi ut quamvis avido parerent arva colono, gratum opus agricolis; at nunc horrentia Martis. [I am he who once made music on the slender shepherd's pipe, and then, leaving the woods for the neighbouring fields, I drove them to serve the farmer's highest hopes, and my work was pleasing to farmers. But now I turn to Mars' bristling weapons.]

But, just when we are expecting Spenser to arrive at horrid Mars as the theme of his epic poem, he veers from Virgil to Ariosto, imitating the opening of the Orlando Furioso: Le donne, i cavallier, I'arme, gli amori, Ie cortesie, I'audaci imprese io canto. [Of Dames, of Knights, of armes, of love's delight/Of courtesies, of high attempts 1 speake,' in John Harington's translation.]

Adding ladies and love to Virgil's 'Arms and the man,' the Ariostan end of the stanza embraces the characteristically feminine and amatory concerns of romance. The skilful grafting of the two allusions comically disguises as a smooth synthesis what is actually a violent transition between radically opposed positions. In reality the amatory ethos of romance undermines the martial ethos of Virgilian epic. When Mars finally appears in stanza 3 he is the disarmed, emasculated lover of Venus from the Odyssey and the Metamorphoses. Following passively in her train, 'In loues and gentle iollities arrayd,' he resembles Mercury's picture of an uxorius Aeneas unmanned by sloth and sensuality which shames Virgil's hero into quitting

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Carthage, an image representing the antithesis of pietas and virtue in the Aeneid's scheme. To invoke this disarmed, amorous Mars advertizes a departure from Virgil: when Ovid invites Mars to appear in the Fasti on condition that he lay aside his arms, it is an expression of his rejection of epic themes in favour of the elegiac values oflove and peace. 2 From its inception, the 1590 Faerie Queene presents itself as confronted by a choice between two alternative models: on one hand Virgil's Aeneid, and on the other Ariostan romance, envisaged as a descendant of Ovid's Metamorphoses. In doing so it reflects the debate going on in contemporary Italy over Ariosto's claim to be called an epic poet, in light of his perceived departure from classical rules. 3 Central to the debate was the issue of unity of action: in place of the unity stipulated by Aristotle and seen as exemplified in Virgil's epic, Ariostan romance foregrounds its proliferation of characters and plots and the waywardness of its own narrative as it flits between them, in what was widely recognized as a distinctively Ovidian manner. 4 The Aeneid itself opens with a major digression, as Aeneas literally departs from his course to take refuge in Dido's Carthage, but the purpose of the digression is to be overcome, purged for the sake of reasserting the linearity of Aeneas' pursuit of his quest, subordinated to the main action even as the principles it represents-female authority and private desire-are subordinated to the principles governing Aeneas' quest-patriarchy and the destiny of the state. Spenser's narrative in canto i opens with an echo of the Aeneid's initial digression: like Aeneas and his men driven into harbour at Carthage by the storm in Book I, and like Aeneas and Dido driven into the cave where they consummate their love by another storm in Book IV, so Redcrosse and Una leave their path to shelter from a storm in the seemingly 'faire harbour' of the Wandring Wood. It is the way in which this digression will be handled, how final it is to be, and how consistent the values implied by its handling with the rest of the poem, which will reveal on which side of the divide between Virgilian epic and OvidianiAriostan romance Spenser stands, and why. In his handling of his Homeric models, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Virgil systematically denigrates and subordinates the episodic structure of Odysseus' wanderings in favour of the Iliad's taut Aristotelian unity, and equates that formal suppression with his own ideological programme. 5 In Aeneas' sojourn at Carthage he recapitulates several of Odysseus' experiences-both his amorous adventures with Circe, Calypso and Nausicaa and his encounters with monstrous barbarity in the Cyclops and the Laestrygonians-and moralizes Aeneas' ultimate rejection of this distraction from his quest to found a new Troy as a victory of reason, public duty and obedience to the gods over private desire. The poem's rejection of Dido for destiny, digression for narrative linearity, defines Romanitas as the virtuous capacity for self-control and the control of others, associating the epic digression with the forces of disorder, the irrational, the feminine and the foreign, and reflects the unifying teleology which Virgil imposes on Roman history, making all things serve the single fmal purpose of Augustus' destined imperium.

44

Spenser and Ovid

The multiplicity and variety of form and matter in Ovid's Metamorphoses seems designed in deliberate opposition both to the Aristotelian demand for unity, rearticulated in Horace's Art of Poetry, and to the ethical and political values which have become so deeply identified with that formal principle in Virgil's poem. The history of the world is here seen as a loose, episodic succession of mainly violent acts by gods who are driven, not by reason, historical purpose or concern for mankind, but by passionate impulses of libido or rage. The apotheosis of Julius Caesar and reign of Augustus at the end of the poem is bound to this assemblage of mythical events by no causal connection, so the poem foregoes at once unity of action and Virgilian teleology: Augustus' rule seems not destined but arbitrary, its connection to the preceding history being if anything that it recalls the arbitrary power of the tyrannical Olympians in earlier tales. 6 Where Virgil elicits the reader's emotion in the form of patriotic feeling and a simultaneous sense of the cost of empire, for instance in the pathos of Dido's abandonment, which nevertheless only increases the sense of the worth of the empire thus achieved, the emotional investment of the Metamorphoses is in sympathy with private individuals, and especially women, in their sufferings and sometimes in their loves. The mutual care and fidelity of couples such as Philemon and Baucis or Ceyx and Alcyone provide gleams of positive value against the dark background of unlimited power and its abuse. Wittily reflecting on the diagnostic nature of this moment in his poetics, Spenser makes the Wandring Wood an extended metaphor of digressive romance poetry itself, constructed, in both its positive and negative aspects, out of the terms of the epic/romance debate. Una's and Redcrosse's exploration of the wood culminates in the apparently decisive demonization and rejection of un-Aristotelian or romance poetry in the figure of Errour, whom they overcome, rededicating themselves to the single straight path of linear narrative (28.3-6). But this is an index only of how effectively Virgil's ideological scheme, with the moral values he assigns to digression and to unity of action as elements of literary form, has continued to dominate the literary debate. As the Wandring Wood has only variety and delight to recommend it, and these are ultimately condemned as dangerously seductive, so Ariosto's defenders in the Italian debate rarely went beyond pleading the need for variety and delight as the justification of his departures from classical rules. Such a defence can easily be read as making romance itself into a locus amoenus of sensuality and otium, so opening it to further condemnation by the Aristotelians: there is no suggestion that the formal innovation of romance may express a meaningful challenge or positive alternative to the Virgilian value system. In Spenser, however, the sternly classicist rejection of romance poetics figured in Redcrosse's struggle with Errour and departure from the wood is soon revealed to be simplistic and hasty, and Spenser returns to the problem of Virgil's treatment of digression in an episode whose rewriting of Aeneas' abandonment of Dido mounts a devastating critique of the moral, political and religious values underlying the principle of formal unity in the Aeneid. From this point on, The Faerie Queene increasingly embraces Ovidian poetics as the natural medium of

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counter-Virgilian values, apt to express a wariness about absolute power and a high ethical valuation of love and concern for the individual which he shares with Ovid, and which are opposed to the imperialism and anti-eroticism of the Aeneid.

The Wand ring Wood: Ovidian Poetics and the Epic/Romance Debate

When Redcrosse and Una enter the wood in stanza 7 it is an ostentatiously 'romance' moment in the poem, a digression which will either be condemned, rejected and overcome, establishing the poem's Virgilian intentions, or which will set the course for a chronically wayward and digressive romance narrative. It is presented from the fIrst as an Ovidian setting, indeed as a self-conscious and selfreferential embodiment of Ovidian poetics, recognizing Ovid as the source of the romance impulse and taking the Metamorphoses as a paradigm of counterV irgilianism. The wood takes the form of a tree catalogue, a popular topos of literary imitation in a tradition which stretches back through Chaucer, Boccaccio and Statius to Ovid's catalogue in Book X of the Metamorphoses, thus invoking both Ovid and imitation of Ovid. Already in the Metamorphoses Ovid's catalogue constitutes an elaborate comment on several aspects of his own poetics, 7 and Spenser is alive to these undercurrents as he uses the wood to comment both on Ovid and on the traditions which he sees as springing from him. Ovid's catalogue occurs during the story of the archetypal poet, Orpheus, as he sits down to sing about love on a green hillside. The place is introduced with a variation on the locus est which traditionally introduces an ecphrasis of a landscape, but one thingshade-is lacking to make the setting typical of the literary locus amoenus: collis erat collemque super planissima campi area, quam viridem faciebant graminis herbae: umbra loco deerat; qua postquam parte resedit dis genitus vates et fila sonantia movit, umbra loco venit. [There was a hill, and on top of the hill a level open plain, which herbs and grasses made green. Shade was missing from the place. But after the poet born of a god had sat down in this spot and touched the sounding strings, shade came to the place. Met. X.86-90.]

Animated by the beauty of his song, trees gather around him, and there follows Ovid's catalogue. Ovid wittily presents Orpheus' magical poetic powers as achieving a rhetorical effect: by supplying shade, the missing ingredient, Orpheus creates a literary locus amoenus, and indeed, since he is mythically the fIrst poet of mankind, he must be originating the tradition. 8 The act of creation is of course Ovid's as well as Orpheus', and perhaps in the suggestion that the tradition

46

Spenser and Ovid

originates here Ovid is pointing out how important his own contribution has been to its development, in the many extremely elaborate loci amoeni of the Metamorphoses. Ovid's treatment of the catalogue represents in little his technique in the Metamorphoses as a whole, drawing together and loosely interweaving a variety of myths. Among the trees several are the results of metamorphosis, and prompt allusion to tales told elsewhere in the poem: the poplars are 'the grove of the Heliades,' whose transformation by grief for their brother Phaethon was told in Book II, the laurel is innuba (virgin) because it is Daphne metamorphosed to escape rape by Apollo, as told in Book I, and the palm and cypress give rise to a brief sketch of the tale of Artis and the lengthier treatment of Cyparissus. Moreover, the song which Orpheus sings when the trees are gathered, taking up the rest of Book X, also reflects Ovid's own methods. Like Ovid in Amores II.i, he tells us he has turned from singing a Gigantomachy to a 'lighter lyre', in order to sing of love; the combination of his grand hyrnnic opening formula ab Jove, Musa with the low subject matter of female lust and divine pederasty recalls the tension throughout the Metamorphoses between epic grandeur on one hand and Callimachean elegance and the erotic subject matter of elegy on the other, summed up in the Proem's paradoxical perpetuum deducite ... carmen (1.4); and it shares the variety of Ovid's poem, as an assemblage ofloosely connected narratives. 9 These aspects of Ovid's poetics in the Metamorphoses represented selfreflexively in the Orpheus episode constitute a deliberate flouting of Aristotelian rules of classical decorum, which had been reformulated for the Augustan age by Horace. The opening section of Horace's Art of Poetry is concerned with unity. (I shall give it at some length, because it will be necessary to come back to it several times.) Humano capiti cervicem pictor equinam iungere si velit, et varias inducere plumas undique collatis membris, ut turpiter atrum desinat in piscem mulier formosa supeme, spectatum admissi risum teneatis, amici? credite, Pisones, isti tabulae fore Iibrum persimilem, cui us, velut aegri sornnia, vanae fingentur species, ut nec pes nec caput uni reddatur formae .... inceptis gravibus plerumque et magna professis purpureus, late qui splendeat, unus et alter assuitur pannus, quum lucus et ara Dianae, et properantis aquae per amoenos ambitus agros, aut flumen Rhemum, aut pluvius describitur arcus; sed nunc non erat his locus: et fortasse cupressum scis simulare; quid hoc, si fractis enatat exspes navibus, aere dato qui pingitur? amphora coepit

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institui; currente rota cur urceus exit? denique sit quod vis, simplex dumtaxat et unum. If a painter should choose to join a horse's neck to a human head, and to spread variegated feathers on limbs collected from all over the place, so that what is a beautiful woman above should end foully in a black fish's tail, would you restrain your laughter, my friends, if you were invited to view it? Believe me, my dear Pisos, just like that painting would be a book which, like the dreams of a sick man, fashions vain images, so that neither foot nor head can be attributed to a single form .... To grand openings which promise great things are commonly stitched one or two purple patches, to shine far and wide, as when the poet describes the grove and altar of Diana, and the windings of fast-flowing streams through pleasant fields, or the river Rhine, or a rainbow; but now was not the place for these. And perhaps you know how to depict a cypress; but what good is that, if you are being paid to paint a despairing man swimming away from his wrecked ship? Preparations were being made for a wine-jar; why does a jug come off the circling potter's wheel? In short, let your poem be what it will, as long as it is single and unified.' (1-9, 14-23)]

Ovid's poem of course is anything but simplex et unum . Made up of many separate stories, its only connecting thread, the theme of metamorphosis, means by its very nature that each individual fable within the collection already breaks the rule, its protagonist failing to remain unum by becoming something other. It also mixes styles and subjects drawn from a great variety of genres, refusing to limit itself to what is appropriate to epic. lO Ovid's particular investment in the development of the locus amoenus is antithetical to Horace's strictures here on 'purple patches' of landscape description. II Horace likens such rhetorical display without regard to decorum to the failure of a painter who, hired to paint a shipwreck, paints a cypress instead, simply because he is good at painting cypresses: one wonders whether Ovid was thumbing his nose at this when he decided that the tree catalogue which constitutes the locus amoenus in Book X should culminate in the tale of Cyparissus, the cypress. 12 Grand openings that lead to banal matter, as when a potter sets out to make a great amphora but ends up producing only homely jugs, are also reviled by Horace and exploited by Ovid, as when Orpheus' hyrnnic formula ab love turns out to mean only that he will begin his series of pederastic affairs of the gods with Jove's rape of Ganymede. Such counter-classical aspects of Ovid exercized a strong influence on Ariosto and sixteenth-century romance. 13 The Metamorphoses' multiple narratives, its mixing of styles and genres, its concentration on erotic subject matter, its rhetorical excess and its irreverent treatment of the gods, deviating both from Horatian unity and decorum and from the ideology with which that has become identified in Virgil's Aeneid, are all mirrored in the Orlando Furioso, where the dominant motive of erotic desire continually overcomes loyalty to the military cause, dispersing the narrative into proliferating story lines and subverting traditional hierarchies. Such passages as Ovid's descriptions of the vale of Tempe (1.568-73),

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Spenser and Ovid

Gargaphie (III.155-62) and Enna (Y.385-91) become crucial models for the loci amoeni in which the heroes of romance lose sight of their quests in amatory delay. In the sixteenth-century debate over whether the Orlando Furioso merited the name of epic, it was widely recognized that Ariosto had a precedent in Ovid for his departure from Aristotelian rules. Giraldi notes approvingly In his Metamorphoses, Ovid has shown what is fitting for the ingenious poet to do, for abandoning Aristotle's laws of art with admirable mastery, he commenced the work at the beginning of the world and treated in marvellous sequence a great variety of matters .... [I]t seems to me, this method is more suited to composition in the form of Romances than is one sole action. Isay this because diversity of actions carries with it the variety that is the spice of delight and so allows the writer a large field to use episodes, that is, pleasing digressions.14

Conversely, for Giraldi's Aristotelian opponent Minturno, rejecting Ariosto's challenge to classical rules means rejecting Ovid too: Vespasiano. How is it that the rule Aristotle gave us and Horace confirmed can be true if he who wrote the Heracleid, and he who composed the Theseid, ... and Ovid, who narrated the metamorphoses of the gods, of men, and of things, are all looked on as poets? Mintumo. I surely will concede to you that those authors, who, as you say, are put in the number of the poets, wrote stories in verse, and Ovid in the Metamorphoses made a fabulous story.... Yet ... Ovid does not merit the name of poet because of it. 15

As Daniel Javitch observes, 'the "counter-classical" aspects of Ovid's poetry began to be more widely perceived in the latter half of the cinquecento as a result' of this debate. 16 Reflecting this acknowledgement of Ovid as the origin and model of the counter-classical elements in Ariostan romance, Spenser's Wandring Wood, introduced as an embodiment of the poetics of the Metamorphoses, develops into 'the archetypal locus of romance, the "selve e boscherecci labirinti" in which the direct route is obscured,' 17 a setting which is at once typical and emblematic of the romance narrative, with its labyrinthine structure and diverting pleasures. As Redcrosse and Una, 'Led with delight,' 'wander too and fro in wayes vnknowne,' (10.1, 5) their experience mirrors both that of the errant knights ofromance and of its readers. Like Ariosto's amorous knights they are distracted from the set course of their quest and wander with no constant direction in pursuit of pleasure; like the reader of romance they lose sight of the initial purpose and ultimate aim of the quest narrative in the local delights of the novel, the surprising and the various. The digressiveness and variety which characterize the romance plot come, in the rhetoric of the debate over epic and romance, to be applied to romance itself as

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a genre and its relation to classical rules. Like the errant knights which people it, the romance narrative 'wanders': Minturno. Since that sort of composition gives the deeds of errant knights, they obstinately affirm not merely that it is not fitting to write poetry in the manner of Vergil and Homer, but even that it is desirable that poetry also should be errant, passing from one manner to another, and binding together various things in one bundle. 18

The root of 'error' is errare (to wander), and for the Aristotelian critic the romance narrative's wandering is a sign of the romance poet's artistic 'error', an error which again is represented as an ill-judged or wilful deviation and wandering from the correct course of poetry as sign-posted by the classical rules: Minturno. I cannot but be greatly astonished that there are some learned men, ... who acknowledge that there is not in the romances the form and the rule that Homer and Vergil follow, and that Aristotle and Horace command as appropriate, and who nevertheless labor to defend this error. Inartistic digressions ... are made by bad poets through ignorance ... , but by the good because they tum aside from the right path ... knowingly ... to please others .... Let him who wishes to see an example of unfitting digressions brought in to please others read those in the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto, ... yet none of these paths is legitimately trod by him. 19

On the other hand, Ariosto's supporters use the same terms to praise the originality of the romance poet: authors ... ought not so to limit their freedom ... that they dare not set foot outside the tracks of others .... good writers, treading where the ancients trod, can tum aside somewhat from the beaten path, letting at times their own footprints go toward Helicon .20

Not only romance's geography of diverging paths but also its typical setting of the 'gran selva' becomes an image of the genre itself in the rhetoric of the debate. Another of the modernists, Jacopo Mazzoni, this time defending Dante against similar charges of breaking the Aristotelian rule of unity, writes: as we see that gardens with various leafy trees are not less but more beautiful than groves in which we see oaks only, in like manner I think the beautiful and attractive variety of our epic poets ... is much more to be commended than the severe and rigid simplicity of the ancients.21

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Spenser and Ovid

For the Aristotelian critics, meanwhile, such variety and license smack too strongly of the negative connotations with which Virgil embued all that deviated from or threatened the 'severe and rigid simplicity' of Aeneas ' pious purpose. Here too the romance 'gran selva' serves as a metaphor for the geme itself, but as a place of danger and potential error: the material [of poetry] is like a dark forest, murky and without a ray of light. Hence, if art does not illuminate it, one might wander without guide and perhaps choose the worse instead of the better. ... no forest was ever so full of such variety of trees as poetry is variety of subjects. 22

Spenser has taken these images, of a variety of trees, divergent paths, and error or wandering, commonly applied both for good and for ill to the modern Ovidian romanzo, and has constructed out of them the extended metaphor of the Wandring Wood. The justifications of the romance form's deviation from Aristotelian unity by its supporters always rested on the delightfulness of variety, an amoral appeal to the reader's pleasure which their Aristotelian opponents saw as dangerously scanting the second part of the Horatian formula that poetry should delight and teach. For them, romance's over-emphasis on variety and delight is seen as obscuring poetry's didactic purpose. Tasso, for example, warns that 'variety is laudable only up to the point where it turns into confusion,' and once this point is reached there is frequently an implication that not only will it fail to guide readers morally towards the good, but will mislead them into the moral dangers with which digressiveness has become identified in Virgil's Aeneid.23 The account of Redcrosse's and Una's experience in the wood is at first non-judgemental and reflects Giraldi' s praise of romance on the amoral grounds of variety and delight, but in the absence of any more robust justification it soon develops into the suspicious and disapproving view of Aristotelians like Tasso and Minturno: Led with delight, they thus beguile the way, Vntill the blustring storme is ouerblowne; When weening to retume, whence they did stray, They cannot finde that path, which first was showne, But wander too and fro in wayes vnknowne, Furthest from end then, when they neerest weene, That makes them doubt, their wits be not their owne: So many pathes, so many turnings seene .. . (I.i.IO.I-8)

Passing from delight in variety to confusion, their innocent wandering begins to assume the overtones of moral error and madness of romance digression seen from the perspective of Virgil and the Aristotelians.

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This sense is crystallized in the figure of Errour encountered at the heart of the wood. Errour personifies Ovidian romance as seen by its harshest critics. An 'vgly monster,' Halfe like a serpent horribly displaide, But th'other halfe did womans shape retaine, (I.i .14.6-8)

her form resembles the opening image of Horace's Art of Poetry, the ludicrous painting of a monster, a beautiful woman with a fish's tail, which Horace offers as an analogy for poems which, like the Metamorphoses or the Orlando Furioso, disobey the rule of unity. Cinquecento Aristotelian critics of Ariosto echo Horace's metaphor of monstrosity. Camillo Pellegrino, for instance, remarks that where Aristotle demanded unity, so that the poem 'may be perceived in one single view', romance is 'a monster of many heads and various irregular limbs that tires the intellect considering them. ,24 Spenser's Errour embodies this Horatian condemnation of Ovidian poetics: in her, the Ovidian elements which have been vying for the allegiance of Spenser's poem from the beginning are gathered up and presented as an abomination. 'Her huge long taile ... in knots and many boughtes vpwound' (15.2-3) is kin to those huge long tales by Ovid and Ariosto, with their many complications of plot (OED knot, sb. l II.l.b, a mediaeval usage) and circuitous narrative paths (OED bout, sb. 1: 'a roundabout way'). Errour is also a promulgator of further literary 'monsters'. Along with 'bookes and papers' (20.6) she spews eyeless 'deformed monsters, fowle, and blacke as inke' (22.7), described in an image of prodigious fecundity taken from the Metamorphoses: As when old father Nilus gins to swell With timely pride aboue the A egyptian vale, His fattie waues do fertile slime outwell, And ouerflow each plaine and lowly dale: But when his later spring gins to auale, Huge heapes of mudd he leaues, wherein there breed Ten thousand kindes of creatures, partly male And partly female of his fruitfull seed; Such vg\y monstrous shapes elswhere may no man reed. (I.i.21)

The unusual use of 'reed' here reinforces the sense that, in part, it is a particular type of literature which is under consideration. This time it is not only that Ovidian romance is metaphorically seen as monstrous itself, but that it creates monsters by depicting fantastic creatures and marvellous phenomena such as never existed in nature. The image of the Nile's fecundity used to describe this creation is modelled very closely on Metamorphoses 1.416-437, in which Ovid tells of the earth's

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spontaneous generation after the world-engulfing Flood: 'partimque figuras/rettulit antiquas, partim nova monstra creavit' ('In part she brought back the ancient forms, in part she created new monsters,' Met. 1.436-37). One of the monsters thus produced is Python, whom Apollo defeats, and his consequent arrogance is punished by Cupid with hopeless love for Daphne, thus sparking the first of the Metamorphoses' amatory tales. The passage also sets the tone for the miraculous fluidity of forms which is the poem's ostensible and pervasive subject. It is thus symbolic of the counter-classical creativity of the Metamorphoses itself. Ariostan romance follows Ovid in this disproportionate exploitation of the fantastic elements of epic, metamorphosis in Boiardo's shape-shifting magicians and Alcina's transformation of her lovers in Ariosto, and the introduction of monsters with Boiardo's centaur, his beasts guarding Falerina's garden and Ariosto's hippogryph and orcs. Sidney follows Giraldi and Mazzoni in making this imaginative license to depict the marvellous the basis of the poet's laudable status as 'maker': Only the poet, ... lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature, in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like: so as he goeth hand in hand with Nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit. 25

But romance's excessive recourse to such subjects was criticized by the Aristotelians, Tasso for example arguing that Centaurs, Harpies, and Cyclopes are neither an adequate nor a principal subject for poetry, nor are flying horses and the other monsters that fill the fables of romance. But since the poet, in Aristotle's phrase, imitates things either as they are or as they may be ... the principal subject of the poet is what is, or may be ...26

Over-emphasis on the marvelous and the monstrous, then, is another of the features of the licentious imagination of Ovidian romance which is represented and condemned in the demonized figure of Errour. Ironically, however, just as the episode of the Wandring Wood participates in the poetics of digressiveness, variety and the Ovidian locus amoenus which it seems at this point to be condemning, so the depiction of the monster Errour itself constitutes an example of the fantastic subject-matter of romance. While creating an image of the Aristotelian distrust and rejection of Ovidian poetics, Spenser's poem is becoming deeply inflected by those poetics. Errour's form also gives expression to the Virgilian distrust of the amatory and of the feminine which are bound up with the classical rejection of Ovidian romance's digressiveness, variety and over-emphasis on delight in the sixteenthcentury debate. Errour's cave, central to the digressive episode with which

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Spenser's poem opens and through which it promises to establish its relation to previous epic, corresponds, of course, to the cave in which Dido and Aeneas shelter from the storm and consummate their love in Aeneid IV. Virgil immediately condemns this clinching moment of Aeneas' distraction from his quest as Dido's 'sin' (culpa), the beginning of ruin and woes (Aeneid IV.169, 172); thereafter the two are described as turpi ... cupidine captos ('held fast/enslaved by shameful lust, ' IV. 194). Aeneas' lesson that such love is shameful (194), unmanly (266) and mad (101) and his consequent rejection of Dido in favour of a return to his quest, an anti-erotic message which forms a key part of the didactic value of the Aeneid for commentators like Fulgentius and Bernardus Silvestris, help to foster the 'opinion that love is not suitable material for the heroic or the tragic poet' which Tasso combats in the Discourses. Ovid and the romance poets meanwhile, inverting Virgil's hierarchy of values, tend to privilege love and women as motivating forces, to sympathize with women, and to praise love as a noble instinct. To Aristotelian critics, whose benchmark of epic excellence is Virgil, such preoccupation with the amatory often seems antagonistic to the moral didactic purpose found in the Aeneid, tempting the reader to go astray, as Dido tempts Aeneas, rather than teaching virtuous resistance to temptation as poetry should. Sidney reports the complaint 'that even to the heroical Cupid hath ambitiously climbed,' and the charge that such poetry is the nurse of abuse, infecting us with many pestilent desires, with a siren's sweetness drawing the mind to the serpent's tale of sinful fancy .... training it to wanton sinfulness and lustfullove. 27

The pun 'tale/tail' is evidently to be understood, and like the mermaids, with whom the sirens were often confused, Errour's biform nature seems to embody this charge. That the episode is concerned with the place of love in literature is suggested too by setting the Wandring Wood beside Ariosto's description of love as 'come una gran selva, ove la vialconviene a forza, a chi vi va, fallire' (,As in a wildernes where men do seek/And more and more in seeking loose their way,' OF 24.2.3-4, tr. Harington). Spenser's comparison of the wood to a 'labyrinth' (11.4), meanwhile, recalls E. K.'s comment on Immerito's purpose in writing The Shepheardes Calender: his vnstayed yougth had long wandred in the common Labyrinth of Loue, in which time to mitigate and allay the heate of his passion, or els to warne (as he sayth) the young shepherds ... of his vnfortunate folly, he compiled these xij Aeglogues .. .. 28

Errour, then, also embodies the amatory concerns of romance seen through the eyes of an Aristotelian critic or of Sidney's unnamed opponent. At the same time, she embodies the threat of amatory temptation experienced by Aeneas in the cave of Book IV. Una's interpretation of Errour's cave is a bilingual pun which presents the commentators' didactic warning as the essential meaning of the Dido episode.

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For the moment the poem seems to endorse the Virgilian condemnation of the digressive and the amatory so thoroughly that the landscape needs only literal translation to arrive at the moral warning: seeing Errour's 'cave', Una 'read[s] beware' (13.8) as though she were seeing and translating the Latin imperative cave ('Beware!'). Redcrosse obeys the didactic warning, breaking free from the 'sore constraint' (19.1) in which he is held fast by Errour just as Aeneas breaks free from his 'captivity' to shameful lust (IV. 194). But what Redcrosse is here rejecting is not merely the moral threat identified with Dido in Virgil's poem and its commentaries, but also Ovidian poetics. Redcrosse and Una escape the Wood by rigid, Aristotelian single-mindedness, as if passing out of romance and into Virgilian epic. Rejecting digressiveness and the delights of the locus amoenus they rededicate themselves to narrative linearity and their purposed end: That path he kept, which beaten was most plaine, Ne euer would to any by-way bend, But still did follow one vnto the end, The which at last out of the wood them brought. So forward on his way (with God to frend) He passed forth ... (I.i.2S.3-S)

Yet this apparent rejection of the Ovidian in favour of the Virgilian is deceptive. The Wandring Wood and the encounter with Errour are programmatic for The Faerie Queene, which will continue to be allegorical and digressive and will include further metamorphoses, and indeed frequent reminiscences of this very episode. As Patricia Parker puts it, 'Spenser's 'Errour' disappears, leaving her trace in the serpentine progress of the poem itself, the vestigia the reader must follow in order to thread the labyrinth. ,29 A hint of the yet umealized value of what Redcrosse is leaving behind is buried in the tree catalogue with which the episode opened. Among the trees is 'the Mirrhe sweete bleeding in the bitter wound,' (9.6) wounded because in the story of Myrrha, which forms part of Orpheus' song following the Ovidian tree catalogue on which this one is based, Myrhha gives birth to Adonis, fruit of her incestuous union with her father, after her metamorphosis into the myrrh: nitenti tamen est similis curvataque crebros dat gemitus arbor lacrimisque cadentibus umet. constitit ad ramos mitis Lucina dolentes admovitque manus et verba puerpera dixit: arbor agit rimas et fissa cortice vivum reddit onus, vagitque puer; quem mollibus herbis naides inpositum lacrimis unxere parentis. laudaret faciem Livor quoque; qualia namque

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corpora nudorum tabula pinguntur Amorum, talis erat, sed, ne faciat discrimina cultus, aut huic adde leves, aut iBis deme pharetras. [The tree however, like a woman in child-birth, bends, gives frequent groans, and is wet with faBing tears. Mild Lucina stood firm by the suffering branches, laid her hands upon them, and spoke words which assist a birth. The tree cracked open, and from the cleft bark gave up its living burden, and the boy cried. The naiads laid him on soft herbs and anointed him with his mother's tears. Even Envy would praise his beauty, for his body was like those of the naked Loves painted in pictures. But, lest their dress should distinguish them, you should either give him a light quiver, or take theirs away from them.' Met. X.508-518.]

At the time, Redcrosse and Una could respond to this Ovidian allusion only in the terms of the cinquecento debate, as part of the amoral delightful variety of the wood and of Ovidian romance. But it hints at a deeper significance, and at a deeper potential value in Ovidian poetics. In Ovid's account, Adonis 'is avenged for his mother's passion' (524) by becoming the object of Venus' love, causing Venus, who had inspired Myrrha's ill-fated passion, great grief at his death while hunting. Renaissance mythologists, following suggestions in Theocritus and Macrobius, read the myth of Venus and Adonis as a seasonal allegory, and Adonis as a god of the sun, fertility and renewa1. 30 Spenser's Garden of Adonis, in which Adonis appears as the 'Father of all formes' (III.vi.47.8) engaged in perpetual love-making with Venus, draws on this tradition. Another inmate of the garden of Adonis is the unarmed Cupid, to whom Ovid compares the baby Adonis in the passage quoted above. This unarmed Cupid was invoked in the Proem to Book I, along with Venus and the unarmed Mars, promising an Ovidian and Ariostan concern with love in the poem to follow, and it is also to him that the angel who brings succour to the fainting Guyon will be compared (II.viii.6). That angel is explicitly a revelation of God's 'exceeding grace' and 'loue' towards mankind (II.viii.l). Such an identification of Cupid with love of and for God evokes the idea of the two Venuses and the two Cupids, stemming from Plato's Symposium (180d-181c): commentators as diverse as Erasmus and Ficino interpreted Plato's Heavenly Aphrodite as divine love.3 ! In Spenser the relation between sexual and divine love involves more continuity and less opposition than in other versions of this idea: the betrothal of the lovers in Amoretti 68 is seen as reflecting and returning the love of Christ, and in the Fowre Hymnes the 'Hymn to Love' (Cupid) is fulfilled rather than displaced by the 'Hymn to Heauenly Love' (Christ). Standing out from the other trees in Spenser's catalogue, described mostly according to their practical uses, though with occasional hints of the underlying Ovidian tales of metamorphosis (as in 'the Poplar never dry' because it represents the weeping Heliades, or the cypress 'funerall' because Cyparissus was transformed through grief), the description of 'the Mirrhe sweete bleeding in the bitter wound' recalls the langauage applied to the crucifixion a few stanzas earlier:

56

Spenser and Ovid But on his brest a bloudie Crosse he bore, The deare remembrance of his dying Lord, For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore. (I.i.2.1-3)

The connection is elusive and strange, but replete with interpretive possibilities which will become clear only retrospectively, as the ideas of human and divine love, and the figures of Cupid and Adonis, are developed later in the poem. It is not unprecedented, though. The anonymous fourteenth century Ovide moralise interprets the birth of Adonis as the birth of Christ: La mirre amere signifie Nostre mere, sainte Marie, La sainte, Ie vierge pucele, Qui de Dieu fu fille et ancele .... Pour \'amour Dieu mist en refu Toutes terriennes amours .... Et de cele sainte assamblee Nasqui Ii douz, Ii delitables, Li savoureuz, Ii amiables En qui toute biautez habonde, Adonin, Ii sires dou monde, Li sauvierres et Ii garans Qui tout dlivra ses parans Et do reprouche et de pechiez. 32 [The bitter myrrh signifies our mother, blessed Mary, the saint, the virgin maiden, who was the daughter and handmaiden of God .... For the love of God she refused all earthly loves .... And from this blessed union was born the mild, the delightful, the sweet, the lovely Adonis, in whom all beauties abound, the Lord of the world, the saviour and guardian, who delivered us all from blame and sin.]

A moral allegory follows on from this, in which Myrrha is the sinful human soul, which receives divine grace when it truly repents: her story shows God's limitless capacity for forgiveness no matter how great the sin, and Adonis is 'divine amour'. (X.3861-77, 3939-50) (Of course this nexus of ideas will be central to Spenser's Book I.) In his subtle connection of the crucifixion and the myrrh's bitter-sweet wound, then, Spenser points towards mediaeval Christian allegoresis as an aspect of the Ovidian tradition embodied by the Wandring Wood, an aspect which makes the Wood more pertinent to Redcrosse than the knight himself seems to realize at this stage. Towards the end of Book I, Spenser too will fmd in the miracles of Ovidian metamorphosis a capacity to symbolize the Christian miracles of grace and resurrection, in the Well of Life, the Tree of Life and Arthur's magic shield,

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beyond what the self-sufficient virtue of Virgil's Aeneas offers. In doing so, he restores to Ovid some of the integuments of mediaeval allegoresis which Ariosto ' s sceptical, amoral romance had removed. 33 One of the lessons of Book I is that man's achievements and salvation depend on God's grace rather than his own strength or merit: only Christ's sacrifice can redeem the soul of fallen man. Like Ovid's Myrrha, Redcrosse will be guilty of sinful concupiscence, and he will be restored not by heroic effort like Aeneas' but by the charitable forgiveness of God, imaged in part in the 'entire affection' (I.viiiAO.3) of Una and Arthur. In his seminal paper introducing the idea of 'the counter-classical sensibility', W. R. Johnson describes the Metamorphoses as 'among the most charitable poems in Western literature' in its 'deep awareness of and deep compassion for man in his failure' to live up to the ideas 'about the possibility of order and lucidity in human existence, which the classical tradition fosters,' and it is this disenchanted but compassionate view of human nature which Spenser finds he can accommodate to his Protestant theology more easily than the stoic heroism of the Aeneid. 34 The connection of Christ's loving sacrifice and Redcrosse's answering love in I.i.2 with the Ovidian knot of amatory tales in Orpheus' song also anticipates the close relationship which will develop between divine and sexual love in Spenser's poem, and the strongly positive value which he will attach to faithful human love. Faithful mutual love is the highest value of the Metamorphoses, too. Ovid has been called 'the West's first champion of true, normal, even conjugal love,' and Una's fidelity to Redcrosse in his absence represents not only an allegory of the relationship of the church to Christ or Truth to the human soul, but also the enduring love of a woman like the Alcyone or Baucis of Ovid's Metamorphoses, like one of his Heroides, or like his own wife celebrated in the Tristia. 35 The crucial symbolic roles of Adonis in the Garden of Adonis, sustaining the created world through his love-making with Venus in obedience to God's command, and of the unarmed Cupid who links this scene of procreative love with the divine grace he symbolizes in Book II, confirm the centrality of love as a positive value in Spenser's poem. The anti-erotic turn which forms such an integral part of the Aeneid's ideology, and which the conclusion of the Wandring Wood episode seems to follow, will prove antithetical to The Faerie Queene's core values, and the poem will increasingly adopt Ovidian poetics as more conducive to their expression. Spenser thus reveals a far deeper understanding of the force of Ovid's counterclassicism than is displayed by those who defended Ovidian romance on the grounds of variety and delight in the cinquecento debate. While for the inexperienced Redcrosse such weak defences fall easily to the attacks of the Aristotelian critics backed by the influential moral and ideological scheme of Virgil, ultimately Spenser embraces and develops a more robust justification of Ovidian poetics, and in the course of doing so, turns the chief accusations levelled against them onto Virgil himself.

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Archimago's Plot: an Ovid ian Expose of Virgilian Ideology

Having confronted and destroyed the embodiment of Ovidian poetics as seen by Horace and the cinquecento anti-Ariostans, Redcrosse is left in the position of the stem Aristotelian critic, proud and complacent in his condemnatory rejection of Ovid and romance. He has embarked on an Aenean career. Like Aeneas he is confident of his own virtue, moral judgement and strength, and his experience in the Wandring Wood has taught him to associate and to reject those principles against which Aeneas defines himself, particularly in his desertion of Dido: the feminine, the erotic, the private. But this state is no less dangerous than his former pleasant wandering, and in it he soon proves susceptible to Archimago's insinuations. Archimago's aim is to overcome Redcrosse's faithful love for Una, prompting him to reject and abandon her, as he earlier rejected Errour and the Wandring Wood. But as he achieves his aim it becomes clear that he has played the role of Virgil's Mercury, and induced in Redcrosse another imitation of Aeneas' abandonment of Dido, inspired by a Virgilian demonization of the feminine and the erotic. In Archimago, Virgilian poetics and Virgilian values achieve what the Ovidian poetics of the Wandring Wood could not, separating Spenser's hero from Truth and from the pursuit of his quest for holiness. Archimago accomplishes his deception by fetching a false dream from the House of Morpheus, in a passage modelled closely and conspicuously on the House of Sleep from Ovid's story of Ceyx and Alcyone in Book XI of the Metamorphoses. But as Colin Burrow has recently pointed out, Ovid's episode parodies Aeneas' descent to the underworld in Book VI of the Aeneid. 36 This episode is crucial to the ideology of Virgil's poem, as it contains the prophetic visions by which Aeneas learns of the future greatness of his race, expanding and making explicit Mercury's references to future regnum in the speech which persuades him to abandon Dido in Book IV. It inspires him anew to devote himself to his quest, sacrificing all else to the vision of patriarchal descent and Rome's destiny to conquer and rule, and forms the strongest expression in the poem of the teleological shape which Virgil is imposing on history and of the claim that supernatural forces are conspiring to bring about Augustus' reign. In the light of the outcome of Spenser's Morpheus episode, it appears that he recognizes Ovid's House of Sleep as a parody of the Virgilian descent to the underworld, and imitates it with the same purpose of casting doubt on the ideological content of the original. Ovid's episode elides Virgil's central notion of cosmic forces beneficently promoting the interests of an individual or race; the instigator here is a goddess quite indifferent to human concerns. Juno sends Iris to fetch a false dream to inform Alcyone of her husband's death, because she is weary of hearing Alcyone's prayers for his safe return. (When supernatural forces interfere in human history in the Metamorphoses, it is usually motivated by selfishness or malice, and results in grief, suggesting a wry gloss on Virgilian claims that Augustus' reign is divinely ordained). Ovid selects and amplifies only the disturbing hints at the beginning and

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end of Aeneas' descent which provoke the smallest quiver of doubt as to the reality and trustworthiness of the claims and visions we find there. In the entrance hall to Virgil's underworld stands an elm thronged with false dreams (somnia vana, VI.283-84), which Aeneas is instructed to ignore; at the end there are said to be two exits from the underworld, described as 'two gates of Sleep' (geminae Somni portae, VI.893), one of horn, an exit for 'true shades' (veris umbris, VI.894), and one of ivory, through which 'false dreams' ([alsa insomnia, V1.896) pass-and through which, puzzlingly, the newly enlightened Aeneas passes. Ovid's House of Sleep is peopled solely by false dreams (somnia vana, XI.614), all alike deceptive ([allax, 643) in their simulation of men, beasts and objects. There is no trust in prophetic visions here. Moreover, Ovid's description of the false dreams 'clustering around' (hunc circa) Somnus beside the Lethe in the cave of Sleep, countless as the corn at harvest, leaves in a wood, or grains of sand on the shore (XI.613-15), echoes Virgil's description of the souls gathered (hunc circum) at the shores of Lethe, waiting to be sent back into the world, numberless as the bees in summer (VI.706-709), which prefaces the procession of his unborn descendants which Aeneas is about to view. The sly suggestion is that Virgil's account of Roman history is a false dream too. As Burrow puts it, 'Ovid's imitative nether worlds cast a shadow of duplicity over the mythical warnings and dynastic prophecies which rise from the Underworld in Virgilian epic. ,37 Spenser signals his awareness that Virgil's underworld is implicated in Ovid's House of Sleep, and that he is concerned with the Virgilian as well as the Ovidian source, by giving the House of Morpheus the 'double gates' of Virgil's Hades, The one faire fram'd ofbumisht Yuory, The other all with siluer ouercast, (I. i.40.2-3)

(the latter replacing Virgil's gate of horn), and having the false dream return 'by the Yuorie dore' (44.6). The duplicitous dream which emerges from Morpheus' House, then, is somehow related to Virgil's 'mythical warnings and dynastic prophecies', and Archimago' s deception, like Ovid's somnia vana, is a sceptical representation of the lesson Aeneas receives in Virgil's underworld. But Archimago's false dream is also a distortion of the Ovidian source. Putting aside for the moment the question of how the false dream relates to Virgilian ideology, let us see how it differs from the false dream sent to Alcyone in Ovid's episode. Ovid's story of Ceyx and Alcyone is a moving tale of 'the conjugal love of husband and wife', which according to Brooks Otis 'is the most adequate instance of Ovid's amatory ideal'. 38 The whole account is fraught with elegiac pathos, in a characteristically marked and self-conscious way. (That a pallor buxo simillimus (like that of boxwood) comes over Alcyone's face on hearing of her husband's planned voyage may be a witty generic pointer: buxum is a common poetic metonym for the tibia, the boxwood pipes which are a well-known symbol of elegy, so this description makes Alcyone almost an embodiment of elegiac values

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and emotions./ 9 The strength of the couple's mutual love is emphasized throughout. The idea that they are really one being is repeatedly expressed, suggesting that any separation is unnatural. Alcyone begs Ceyx to take her with him so that they may bear together whatever befalls, but Ceyx refuses to expose her to danger. He dies with her name on his lips, praying that his body may return to be buried by her hands. The dream sent to her bedside by Sleep is only an impersonation by Morpheus, a simulacrum, but nevertheless it tells her the truth, and pathos is the central note here, too: the shade bids her weep for him, and weeps itself. Unable to bear her bereavement, declaring that she has already died with Ceyx, 'fidissima' Alcyone resolves to drown herself. It is tempting to read the apparition and A1cyone's response as a reaction to another episode in the Aeneid, Aeneas' abandonment of Creusa, which sets the tone for all the personal emotional ties which he must subsequently break in favour of his public destiny.4o Creusa's infelix simulacrum appears to Aeneas in Book II and, speaking for the will of the gods, tells him to banish tears and insane grief for her and to pursue his destiny of happiness, a kingdom and a royal wife. Despite trying to embrace her, ter conatus ibi coJlo dare bracchia circum; ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago, par levibus ventis volucrique simiJlima somno [Three times I tried to fling my arms around her neck; three times the image I clutched in vain fled my hands, like breezes and most like a winged dream,' Aen . 11.792-94]

Aeneas obeys and leaves. Ovid imitates the attempted embrace, as Alcyone, stretching her arms towards what in her case really is a 'winged dream', ' seeking his body, embraced only air' (XI.675). But Ceyx's umbra calls for tears and remembrance, where Creusa forbids them, and the result of the Ovidian dream is the lovers' reunion and 'the world well lost', not separation and the sacrifice of love to duty. As if even they are moved by the couple's love and grief, the gods in pity transform husband and wife into birds and allow them to continue their lives together: et tandem, superis miserantibus, ambo alite mutantur; fatis obnoxius isdem tunc quoque mansit amor nec coniugale solutum foedus in alitibus: coeunt fiuntque parentes ... . [And at last, through the pity of the gods, both were changed into birds. Each suffered the same fate, but stiJl their love remained, and their conjugal bonds were not untied now they had wings. They couple and become parents,' Mel . XI.741-44.]

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The episode as a whole is an empathetic celebration of faithful, married and procreative love, culminating in the image of winter storms calmed for seven days a year to enable the pair to hatch their brood. But the world which Archimago evokes through the agency of Morpheus is not that of the story of Ceyx and Alcyone, but rather the adulterous erotic world of Ovid's Amores. The false dream has Una ushered in to Redcrosse's bedside by a selection of deities all bearing a special relation to Ovid's amatory writings, the 'false winged boy' Cupid (Li.47.8), 'Faire Venus' (48.2), the Graces singing the Roman wedding chant 'Hymen io Hymen', and Flora, patron goddess of the decadent Floralia alluded to in The Shepheardes Calender, bearing the Bacchanalian 'Yvie girlond' (48.7-9). (Ovid's interview with Flora in Fasti V evinces great fondness for the goddess, and on her departure, leaving the fragrance of flowers in the air, he asks her to bless his work, suggesting through a punning introduction of his cognomen, Naso, that with his large nose he has a special ability to appreciate, and right to patronage from, the fragrant goddess of flowers.) Ovid's erotic elegies, the locus classicus for the portrayal of 'loues and lustfull play' (47.4), are evoked in the rest of the canto and the beginning of the next. The apparent hypocrisy, in Redcrosse's eyes, of Una's chaste behaviour during the day in light of her present wantonness is reminiscent in this context of Ovid's representation of Roman women in his Amores and Art of Love. She is 'instructed' (Li.47.1) by Archimago in the artfulness which characterizes her advances, 'hyding her bayted hooke' (49.6), both in the feigned modesty of 'as halfe blushing offred him to kis' (49.7) and in her tale of anguished insomnia and her affected tears, tactics recommended to male lovers in the Ars, and her methods are described as 'her art' (54.7), recalling Ovid's didactic poem. 41 The switch effected by Archimago in the context and purpose of the Ovidian Morpheus episode, from the story ofCeyx and Alcyone to an evocation of the Ars, is, as any reader familiar with the Metamorphoses would be aware, deeply significant, for where the tale of Ceyx and A1cyone celebrates faithful married love, Archimago's strategem distorts and misrepresents the underlying story and the love it praises. Ovid's portrayal of promiscuous, self-seeking and deceitful love in the erotic elegies is witty and intended to shock, and his persona ironic. Unbridled lust becomes in the Metamorphoses the subject of many tales of violence, rape and betrayal, and set against them as a foil are such stories of innocent mutual love as those of Ceyx and Alcyone, Cephalus and Procris, Galatea and Acis, and Philemon and Baucis. Archimago's misrepresentation of Ovidian love is fore grounded as significant, because through it he also misrepresents Una's relationship with Redcrosse, causing the most nearly disastrous error of Redcrosse's career. Archirnago reduces the 'highest instance of Ovid's amatory ideal' to a level with the amatory elegies read without irony, presenting all Ovidian treatments of love as alike 'the nurse of abuse, infecting us with many pestilent desires,' projecting an exaggerated, monstrous, demonized view of the amatory and the Ovidian akin to the Aristotelian condemnation embodied in the Wandring Wood, and in the same stroke persuades Redcrosse that his love for Una and hers

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for him is mere lust. For Ovid as for Spenser there are evidently important distinctions to be made between different expressions of erotic desire, between 'naturall affection faultlesse' (IV.Pr.2.4) and a merely 'fleshly flame' (III.i.50.2), between the faithful love praised in Ceyx and Alcyone and the lust of a Tereus or a Myrrha. By blurring this distinction, misrepresenting even the love of Una and Redcrosse as corrupt and lustful, Archimago tricks Redcrosse into seeing only a simple choice between a shameful, demonized eros and the forgoing of all ties. Thus he provokes the breach of Redcrosse's faith and his abandonment of Una, the very opposite of the unbreakable conjugal bond described by Ovid, but precisely the course repeatedly followed by Aeneas, in his abandonment first of Creusa and then of Dido. Redcrosse's desertion of Una imitates Aeneas' flight from what Virgil has presented as Dido's sinful love and shameless passion (culpa, 172; turpis cupido, 194). Already resolved to depart, Aeneas is visited in his sleep by a vision of Mercury, who urges haste, lest Dido burn his ships, concluding 'varium et mutabile semper/femina' ('Woman is always fickle and changeful.' Aen. IV.569-70). Similarly, it is the added suggestion that Una is fickle, in the vision of her lovemaking with a squire, which finally persuades Redcrosse to abandon her. Aeneas wakes his men, and 'rapiuntque ruuntque;llitora deseruere' ('They hurried and rushed and left the shore,' Aen. IV.5SI-S2), as 'hastily' (I.ii.6.S) as Redcrosse and the dwarf. Una, like Dido, wakes to find herself deserted in a dawn resembling that which immediately follows Aeneas' departure in Virgil: Now when the rosy-fingred Morning faire, Weary of aged Tithones saffron bed, Had spred her purple robe through deawy aire ... The royal! virgin shooke off drowsy-hed ... Et iam prima novo spargebat lumine terras Tithoni croceum Iinquens Aurora cubile. regina, e speculis ut primum albescere lucem vidit. .. [And now the Dawn, leaving Tithonus' saffron bed, was beginning to spread new light through the lands. The Queen, as she saw from her watchtower the first light whiten the sky... ' Aen. IV.584-87.]

But where in the Aeneid Aeneas is justified by the will of the gods, as well as by the moral slant of the narrator's assessment of Dido's love, Spenser (as Tate was to do a century later in his libretto for Purcell's Dido and Aeneas) makes the hero's vision the trick of a wicked sorceror, his abandonment of his lady a cruel mistake. From this perspective it is the anti-eroticism of the Aeneid, rather than the amorous subject-matter of the Metamorphoses and Ariostan romance, which appears ethically perverse. By representing this Virgilian motive for Redcrosse's desertion of Una in the lying dream, Spenser takes up another of the images used by Horace

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to condemn Ovidian poetics and turns it against the ethos enshrined in Virgil's more decorously Aristotelian poem. Un-Aristotelian poetry was, according to Horace, velut aegri somnia, like fever-dreams, wildly misrepresenting reality. (As with so much of Horace's Ars, this image too had been taken up by the neoAristotelians in their argument against romance.)42 Now it is the Virgilian devaluation and rejection oflove and of the female which is presented as irrational, feverish and false, velut aegri somnia. Like Ovid's House of Sleep, Spenser's episode implies that what Virgil presents as the commands of the gods are only false dreams. Such a response to the Dido episode is not unheard of in the sixteenth century. Though Sidney explicitly praises Aeneas' excellence, yet his recognition of the transgression against 'not only all passionate kindness, but even the human consideration of virtuous gratefulness' involved in his pious desertion is eloquent on behalf of the prosecution. The historical falsity of the affair was well-known, and the political motives of Virgil's anachronism were understood. Tasso observes that he brings together two who lived in different ages because 'he wishes to assign an ancient and hereditary motive to the enmity between the Romans and Carthaginians,.43 Castelvetro condemns the episode for slandering Dido to 'flatter ... Augustus', arguing that the infamy with which he attempts to soil the glory of the founder of Carthage ... is common to Aeneas .. .for the affair is not conducted much to his honor but shows his great ingratitude. 44 Spenser goes even further. His rewriting of Virgil's episode unambiguously rejects the ideology of the original, on the moral, political and religious levels. As Aeneas rejects love for Dido in favour of love for Rome, declaring hic amor, haec patria est ('this is my love, this my homeland,' IV.347), Redcrosse replaces Una with Duessa, who introduces herself as the sole daughter of an Emperour, He that the wide West vnder his rule has, And high hath set his throne, where Tiberis doth pass. (I.ii.22.7-9)

Duessa is clearly associated with the Roman empire, the empire for whose sake Aeneas abandons Dido and Virgil writes his poem, as well as with the more often mentioned Roman Catholic Church. She leads Redcrosse into the House of Pride, whose dungeons contain The antique ruines of the Romaines fall: Great Romulus the Grandsyre of them all, Proud Tarquin, and too lordly Lentulus, Stout SCipio, and stub borne Hannibal!, Ambitious Syl!a, and sterne Marius,

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Spenser and Ovid High Caesar, great Pompey, and fierce Antonius.

(I.v.49.5-9) This list largely coincides with the prophetic vision offered Aeneas in Book VI of the Aeneid, but represents even those most central to Virgil's epideictic purpose, Romulus and (Julius) Caesar, as captive to the seven deadly sins. Like the Hell to which Duessa descends in her unjust attempt to restore Sansjoy, Pride's dungeons are another parodic rewriting of Virgil's underworld, identifying Virgil's most positive values with sinful pride. Finally, Duessa appears in the House of Orgoglio riding the seven-headed beast of Revelation 13.1 and 17.3-4, an image implicating, as in the Geneva glosses, 'the ancient Rome' of the Empire, 'because it was first governed by seven Kings or Emperours after Nero, and also is compassed about with seven mountaines', as well as 'the new Rome, which is the Papistrie' .45 These points cannot be stressed too strongly, because they directly contradict some deeply ingrained critical assumptions. Probably because of an insufftcently examined prejudgement that Spenser models himself on Virgil and embraces Virgil's imperial aims, it has been assumed that Spenser 'recasts Aeneas's truancy in Carthage as Redcrosse's dalliance with Duessa,' making the shape and ethos of Book I, with the hero's eventual rejection of this amatory idyll and return to the quest, resemble those of the Aeneid. 46 It follows from this that Archimago's deceptive poetics and Redcrosse's affair with Duessa tends to be associated with the romance or Ovidian impulse which is seen as competing with the Virgilian model in the poem, and as being overcome by it, just as Aeneas overcomes the temptation posed by Dido. 47 And finally, the assumption that Spenser approves of Virgilian imperialism and associates it with Una means that Duessa tends to be identified exclusively with Roman Catholicism, obscuring the political implications by over-emphasis on the sectarian. These assumptions do not stand up to scrutiny. It is primarily Una whom Spenser aligns with Dido, Redcrosse's abandonment of her picking up again the evocation of the Dido episode at the beginning of canto i. Duessa meanwhile is clearly imperial Rome as well as the Roman Catholic Church. Aeneas' distraction, then, is parallelled with Redcrosse's purpose, and Aeneas' purpose with Redcrosse's culpable delinquency. This striking inversion raises at once three issues fundamental to Spenser's rejection of Virgilian ideology. Firstly, it rejects the anti-eroticism of the Aeneid. Where Virgil praises the piety and Stoic self-control of Aeneas' suppression of desire and solicitude (cura, IV.332, 394) for Dido, Spenser's rewriting presents such a breach of love as impious, a fall away from truth and into sin, and the Virgilian condemnation of all love as mere lust implicit in the rhetoric of Iarbas, Mercury and the narrator as a malicious misrepresentation. Redcrosse's fall consists in mistakenly condemning true love for sinful lust, and having thus lost the ability to distinguish one from the other, he falls into the clutches of the wanton Duessa, until the distinction is taught to him by his rescue by the 'flIme' love and care of Una, Arthur, and heauenly grace, and his education by Charissa.

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Secondly, it implicitly raises questions about the political ideas of the Aeneid, which will be explored later in the poem. There are two aspects to this: the idea of the individual's relation to the state, and that of the state's, or the ruler's, relation to God. Where the Aeneid advocates the sacrifice of private ties to public duty to the state, Spenser's rewriting implies the opposite: that the allegory parallels the love of Redcrosse and Una with the soul's adherence to truth suggests that the underlying Protestant belief in the primacy of the individual's inner connection to God constitutes a positive revaluation of the private which may extend to personal relationships, too. As regards the ruler's relation to God, the metaphysics of the Aeneid serves the purpose of justifying, to a nation historically distrustful of monarchy, Augustus' despotic imperial rule, presenting it as divinely ordained, and Augustus himself as quasi-divine. 48 By making Duessa stand for this ideal of Empire espoused by Virgil's poem, Spenser implies that such a political theory is idolatrous, putting worldly power and pride in the place of God and religious truth, and associates it, in the House of Pride and Orgoglio's dungeons, with tyranny and oppression. Thirdly, there is the religious question which underlies and unites these other issues. Christian faith in Spenser's poem seems to demand an evaluation of the Dido episode which opposes Virgil's. What in Virgil's hero is an heroic affirmation of self-sufficient virtue becomes in Spenser's evidence of the weakness of fallen human nature when it fails to add faith unto its force: the heroism of Aeneas, through which Virgil expresses his moral and political ideals, cannot compass the humility and recognition of divine grace which are so central to Spenser's system. As elsewhere in Spenser's poems, true love is intimately connected with this notion of divine grace, or God's love towards mankind: the faithful love and 'entire affection' of Una and of Arthur which redeem Redcrosse from Orgoglio's dungeon symbolize divine grace, and the Venus-like Charissa is presented as the most important of the theological virtues in canto x, and the one who guides him to his meeting with Contemplation and his vision of the New Hierusalem. And that vision will present Virgil's imperial ideal, for which Aeneas deserts Dido, as flawed from a Christian perspective: where Aeneas' vision in the underworld, the episode usually allegorized as 'Contemplation' by Renaissance commentators, celebrated Rome as the urbs eterna and the purpose of human history, Spenser's Christian Contemplation reminds us that the real urbs eterna is heaven, and that worldy centres of power such as Cleopolis must always be held secondary and inferior to it. 49 Spenser shares with Ovid the first two of these three major points of divergence from Virgil. As we have seen in the suppressions and distortions of Archimago's rewriting of the Ceyx and Alcyone episode, Ovid is deeply interested in discriminating between different varieties of eros, and in celebrating faithful and caring love. This will be especially important to Spenser in Books II and III. Politically, Ovid continually takes the side of the individual and the private against the power of the state, and views with scepticism the presentation of Augustus' rule as divinely sanctioned, satirizing the semi-deification of the ruler for instance

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in the Fasti. This is especially significant to Spenser in the Shepheardes Calender and the Mutabilitie Cantos. Of course Ovid does not share the Christianity which also draws Spenser away from Virgil, yet nevertheless some aspects of Ovid prove more amenable to expressing Spenser's religious views than Virgil could, and these are crucial to Book I. As the appearance of Myrrha in the Wandring Wood hinted, it gradually becomes clear that the Ovidian poetics of metamorphosis are more adequate for describing the soul's experience of the Fall and redemption than the Virgilian poetics of heroism could be, for the Christian story is not one of heroic human achievement, but one of the changing state of mankind, brought about by human frailty and by the supernatural and miraculous. Ovid's wry view of attempts by worldly authority to present itself as divine or divinely ordained, meanwhile, though motivated by concern over the erosion of civil liberties rather than by piety, is nevertheless a policing of the boundaries between the human and the divine which goes part of the way with Spenser's Christian critique of Virgil. Though Ovid provides no vision of the true eternal city, the New Hierusalem, he nevertheless debunks Virgil's claim that it can be found in Augustus' Rome, by including Rome in Pythagoras' sweeping account of universal mutability and the decay of human power in Book XV of the Metamorphoses. 5o By the end of the sojoum at Archimago's house, then, the apparent rejection of Ovidian in favour of Virgilian poetics in the Wandring Wood has been decisively reversed. The Ovidian poetics which there appeared merely un-classical, disobeying Aristotelian or Horatian unity and decorum simply for the sake of variety and delight, can now be embraced as counter-classical, as a medium lending itself to the expression of principled opposition to Virgilian values.

Providence and Ovidian Pastoral: Una among the Satyrs In her desertion, Una becomes an implicitly Ovidian heroine. Her situation recalls not only Dido's but Ariadne's on Naxos, who similarly discovers at dawn her lover Theseus' stealthy departure by night. This resemblance is prepared for by the Wandring Wood: as Ariadne, in the story told in Book VIn of the Metamorphoses, helped Theseus to fmd his way in and out of the Cretan Labyrinth, and thus to defeat the biform Minotaur lurking at its centre, so Una, in the 'labyrinth' (i. I I A) of the wood, effectively saves Redcross in his struggle with Errour by her injunction 'Add faith vnto you force, and be not faint' (19.3).51 Una's meeting with the lion and her plaint at iii.7 literalizes and expands the opening of Ariadne's epistle in the Heroides: 'I have found every species of wild beast milder than you. I would have done no worse to trust any of them than I did to trust you.' Like Ariadne, an exul on a desert island unable to return to Crete, Una is described 'as in exile,lIn wildernesse and wastfull deserts,.52 Moreover, Una will be rescued by a band of satyrs, as Ariadne is found, consoled and wedded by Bacchus, attended by his satyr troop. Both Ariadne and Dido are prominent objects of Ovid's literary compassion, which he characteristically extended to the female victims of heroic

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myth. They figure among the popular and influential Heroides, in which Ovid prided himself on having created a new genre, the elegiac epistle in which a woman from mythology laments her abandonment by a lover, and both also receive substantial treatment elsewhere in Ovid. 53 In her essentially Ovidian position, it is not surprising that she should be plunged back into the romance forest, and exposed to the paradigmatic Ovidian danger, that of rape. To signal that the forest into which Sansloy leads Una is a resumption of the Wandring Wood's metaphoric representation of Ovidian poetics, it prompts a retelling (vi.l7) of the story of Cyparissus, the Ovidian tale which formed the culmination of the tree catalogue on which the Wandring Wood was based (Met. X.106_42).54 But Ovidian poetics is no longer the source of danger, but rather the medium of Providential protection against it. Modelled on Bacchus with his train of satyrs who come to Ariadne's rescue in one of Ovid's favourite myths, the fauns and satyrs who rescue Una are another embodiment of Ovidian poetics. Such 'wyld woodgods' are preeminently at home in Ovid's poetry, with their associations with Greek myth, comedy, satirical literature, licentious sexual behaviour, and Bacchus, patron god of poets. 55 In Virgil's sixth eclogue the old satyr Silenus sings a song which seems to prefigure Ovid's enterprise in the Metamorphoses, beginning with the Creation and meandering through a medley of stories of love and metamorphosis, most of which would appear in Ovid's poem. And the silene Marsyas was the inventor of the tibia, traditional symbol of Ovid's favoured genre, elegy. The forest of canto vi, then, is the world of Ovidian myth, metamorphosis and natural magic as a benign and sheltering place, characterized by pity for the unprotected female and by a natural instinct of religious awe, though ill-expressed as idolatry. By making Sylvanus' crew the agents of divine providence, Spenser begins to suggest a certain compatability between Ovid and Christianity, especially in his pity for the weak and vulnerable, and in his interest in the miraculous. These fauns and satyrs do not stand merely for Ovidian poetics in general, however, but specifically look back on Spenser's own Shepheardes Calender, representing it as an Ovidian pastoral, and particularly emphasizing and celebrating (or defending) its vein of Ovidian satire. Fauns and satyrs are traditionally associated with pastoral poetry. Pan is god of shepherds, inventor of the syrinx reed-pipe, emblem of pastoral song; the name 'Tityrus', prominent in Theocritean and Virgilian pastoral and in The Shepheardes Calender, is in Greek merely the Doric form of cr