The Specter of Dido: Spenser and Virgilian Epic [Hardcover ed.] 0300058837, 9780300058833

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~JOHN

WATKINS,vinmodes of concupiscence and irascibility ("A Better Teacher than Aquinas," Studies in P/1ilolo,-sy I4 [1917): 196-217). 17. See James Nohrnberg's complementary characterization of Mordant as a type o( the Pauline Adam (TI,e Analogy q( The Faerie Queene [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976], 287-88).

THE SPECTER OF DIDO

18. See Hamilton's note to II.ii.3 in his edition of The Faerie Queene (Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton [London: Longman, 1977), 182). See also Hamilton, "A Theological Reading of The Faerie Queene, Book II," ELH 25 (1958): 155-62; Fowler, "The Image of Mortality"; Kathleen Williams Spenser's World of Glass, 41-44; Nohmberg, Analogy, 288; Hume, Edmund Spenser, 171-73. For alternative readings of the episode in terms of secular themes and sources, see Lewis H. Miller, Jr., "A Secular Reading of The Faerie Queene, Book II," ELH 33 (1966): 154-69; Carol V. Kaske, "The Bacchus Who Wouldn't Wash: Faerie Queene II. i-ii," RenaissanceQuarterly 29 (1976): 195-209. 19. Caxton's Eneydos, 1490, ed. W. T. Culley and F. J. Fumivall, Early English Text Society (London: N. Triibner, 1890), 113. 20. For recent discussion of Acrasia as a type of Circe, see Nohmberg, Analogy, 494-502. But as Douglas Bush has argued, Homer is hardly Spenser's only source for the Bower (Mythology and the RenaissanceTradition in English Poetry [Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1932), 100-101). Krier's view that Guyon's later voyage to the Bower is closer in spirit to Aeneas's voyage than to Odysseus's corroborates my own sense of a dominant Virgilian influence on Spenser's characterization of Acrasia (Gazing on SecretSights, 100-101). 21. Boccaccio called the historical Dido a "limb of Satan" because she was still a pagan, despite her natural virtue. He does not explicitly condemn her suicide (De Claris Mulieribus, trans. by Guido A. Guarino as ConcerningFamous Women [New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1963), 91). 22. See O'Connell's

Mirror and Veil, 102-3.

23. Paul Johnson, Elizabeth I: A Study in Power and Intellect (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974), 112-18; Christopher Haigh, Elizabeth I (London: Longman, 1988), 95-96. 24. See Roy Strong' s discussion of the iconographical significance of the Siena-Sieve portrait in PortraitsefQueen Elizabeth I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 66-68. Doris Adler ("The Riddle of the Sieve: The Siena Sieve Portrait of Queen Elizabeth, RenaissancePapers [1978]: 1-IO) and Lowell Gallagher (Medusa's Gaze: Casuistryand Consciencein the Renaissance[Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1991), 123-40) interpret the portrait's allusion to Dido in terms of the controversy stirred by the French marriage negotiations. See also Stephen Orgel's discussion of the painting in "Shakespeare and the Cannibals," in Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce:Estranging the Renaissance,ed. Marjorie Garber, Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1985, New Series, II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), 4o-66. 25. For an account of the Brant illustrations, see Anna Cox Brinton, Maphaeus Vegiusand His Thirteenth Book ef the Aeneid: A Chapter on Virgil in the Renaissance(Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1930), 40-44; Eleanor Winsor Leach, "Illustration as Interpretation in Brant's and Dryden's Editions of Vergil," in The Early fllustratedBook: Essays in Honor of Lessing]. Rosenwald, ed. Sandra Hindman (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1982), 175-2!0. The Galle Aeneid engravings are in the Bodleian Library. 26. See G. W. Kitchen, ed., Book II of the Faery Queene (Oxford, 1887), 188; Hughes, Virgil and Spenser, 330--3I. 27. Macrobius: The Saturnalia, trans. Percival Vaughan Davies, Records of Civilization: Sources and Studies, 79 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1969), 159. 28. "Hie post mensam seria tractantur et ad erigendam rem publicam erigitur uiri!e robur; ibi ut luxuriae faueant fusis precibus inuitantur. et numina," in Joannis SaresberiensisEpiscopi CarnotensisPolycratici,sive De Nvgis Cvria/ivm et VestigiisPhilosophorvmLibri VIII, ed. Clemens

199

NOTES TO PAGE 128-149

C. I. Webb, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), 2:73od. I have supplied my own translation in the text. · 29. "Jmmoderatio cibi et potus dispensatricem omnium officiorum temperantiam abigit. Ea impellente fit homo ad audiendum tardus, uelox ad loquendum et uelox ad iram; fit ad libidinem pronus et ad quaeuis flagitia praeceps," in Polycraticus,2:727d. 30. William Nelson, T11ePoetry ofEdmund Spenser: A Study (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963), 18 I. 3 I. David Miller, The Poem's Two Bodies: T11ePoeticsofthe 1590 Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988), 164-214. 32. Maurice Evans, Spenser's Anatomy of Heroism: A Commentary on The Faerie Queene (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), 141. 33. See Theresa Krier's discussion of the episode as a fiction exploring the dynamics of self-consciousness (Gazing on Secret Sights, 157-59). 34. T11eBoke Named The Govemovr, deuised by sir T11omasElyot, Knight (London, 1580), I.ix. See A. C. Hamilton's note to II.ix.40 (FQ, 255). 35. Berger, Allegorical Temper, 77n; Jerry Mills, "Symbolic Tapestry in The Faerie Queene II.ix.33," PhilologicalQuarterly 49 (1970): 568-69. 36. On the seductiveness of Dido'.s murals, see W. R. Johnson, Darkness Visible: A Study (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976), 99-105; Krier, Gazing 011 Secret Sights, 37-41.

of Vergil's Aeneid

37. See Joan Rossi's "Britons moniments: Spenser's Definition of Temperance in History," English Literary Renaissance 15 (1985): 42-58. Mills offers a darker interpretation of the Chronicles' historical vision in "Prudence, History, and the Prince in 77ieFaerie Queene, Book II," Huntington Library Quarterly 41 (1978): 83-101. 38. Edward Dowden,

Transcriptsand Studies (London, 1888), 287.

39. Herbert Grierson, Cross Currents in English Literatureofthe Seventeenth Century: Or, The World, the Flesh & the Spin"t, their Actions & Reactions (London, 1929), 61. 40. Graham Hough, A Prefaceto The Faerie Queene (New York: Norton,

1962), ~156-57.

41. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, I 964),

3 5.

42. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From Afore to Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), 157-92. 43. Berger, Allegon·calTemper, 212. See C. S. Lewis, T11eAllegory ofLove: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1936), 324-33; Isabel MacCaffiey, "Allegory and Pastoral in The Shepheardes Calender," ELH 36 (1969): 260; Nohmberg, Analogy, 502. For the view of Carthage as a false Rome, see Mario A. Di Cesare, T11eAltar and the City: A Reading of Virgil's Aeneid (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1974), 2. 44. One might compare Putnam and W. R. Johnson's discussions of the Aeneid with W. B. Y eats's remarks on the Bower of Bliss in Essays and Introductions(New York: Macmillan, 1961), 37D---74. 45. On the conflict between Alcinan and Logistillan views of Ariosto, see Albert Ascoli, Ariosto's Bitter Harmony: Cn"sisand Evasion in the Italian Renaissance(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), I 22-3 5. Proponents of an Alcinan Ariosto include Croce; Attilio Momigliano, Saggio sufOrlando Furioso (1928; Bari: Laterza, 1973); Francesco De Sanctis, "Ariosto," in Storia

200

THE SPECTER OF DIDO

de/la Letteratura Italiana, ed. M. T. Lanza, 2 vols. (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1964); and Donato. Those upholding a Logistillan Ariosto committed to his readers' education include the sixteenth-century allegorizers as well as Vincent Cuccaro (The Humanism if Ludovico Ariosto: From the Satire to the Furioso, L'lnterprete 18 [Ravenna: Longo, 1981), and to an extent, A. Bartlett Giamatti, Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966), 137-64.

46. Martha Craig, "The Secret Wit of Spenser's Language," in Elizabethan Poetry: Modern

J. Alpers (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), 464. The translation is from John Florio's Qveen Anna's New World if Words, or Dictionarie if the Italian and English tongues (London, 16II). Essays in Criticism, ed. Paul

47. See David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993), 249-53. As Quint argues, Tasso transforms the errant boat of romance into a vessel with an epic mission to fulfill. Spenser suppresses Tasso's assimilation of the romance motif to the epic idealization of labor in order to dismiss him as a writer solely of romance. 48. For a complementary Sights, 109-1

account of Acrasia's murderous gaze, see Krier, Gazing on Secret

1.

49. Renaissance debates over the brutality ofTurnus's death at Aeneas's hands provide yet another analogue to the controversy over Guyon's destruction of the Bower. For a discussion of these controversies and of Tasso's modification of the Aeneid's conclusion in response to them, see Lauren Scancarelli Seem, "The Limits of Chivalry: Tasso and the End of the Aeneid," Comparative Literature 42 (1990): 116-25.

Chapter 6: "Diverse Folk Diversely They Demed" 1.

See Kate M. Warren, "Introduction"

to her edition of Book III, quoted in Varionim,

3:311-14; R. E. Neil Dodge, "Spenser's Imitations from Ariosto," PMLA 12 (1897): 190-95; Josephine Waters Bennett, T7ie Evolution if The Faerie Queene (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago

Press, 1942), 138-53. 2. Thomas P. Roche, Jr., The Kindly Flame: A St11dy if the T11ird and Fourth Books of Spenser's Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1964), 210. For earlier versions of

this view, see Ernest de Selincourt, "Introduction" to his edition of The Faerie Queene (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1921), xliv-xlvii; Frederick M. Padelford, "The Allegory of Chastity in The Faerie Queene," Studies in Philology 21 (1924): 367-81. 3. See Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1977), 300.

4. Malecasta's tapestries mark an important halfway point in the transformation ofVerdant and Acrasia into Venus and Adonis, and of the Bower into the Gardens. See James Nohrnberg, Tire Analogy if The Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976), 491-502. 5. Fichter also sees Britomart's story as a revision of the Aeneid's first four books. But he offers an alternative explanation for Spenser's Virgilianism in terms of the Christian felix ailpa (156-65).

6. Donald Cheney links this particular incident to Ariosto's "comic disintegration of chivalric ideals" in Spenser's Images