Since Bernard Tannier’s ‘Un bestiaire maniériste’, scholars have been interested in monstrosity in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.[1] Most recently, Maik Goth’s monograph Monsters and the Poetic Imagination in ‘The Faerie Queene’ has argued for the polysemy of the monster by looking at it as an embodiment of the poetic imagination, but also by considering its body as a weapon able to reform the text: ‘as monstrosity violates the governing force of harmony,’ Goth suggests, ‘it bodies forth the half-formed or misshapen text’.[2] Working from Joe Moshenska’s argument in his essay on Dryden’s note on The Faerie Queene and ‘The Gifts of Literal Reading’ I argue for a more positive vision of the monstrous as something wonderful which rises out of the text.[3] As I see it, however, both of these critics are looking the wrong way: by considering the presentation of the monstrous in Spenser’s poem, they distract themselves from the question of mechanics; they do not ask how the monstrous is created. It is this how on which my essay intends to shed light, and I turn to Redcrosse’s encounter with the dragon in Book I, Canto xi as a way of seeking to understand the poem’s mysterious mode of creation.
The dragon first enters the poem’s (and Redcrosse’s) consciousness in the fourth stanza of the canto:
With that they heard a roaring hideous sound,
That all the ayre with terrour filled wide,
And seemed vneath to shake the stedfast ground,
Eftsoones that dreadfull Dragon they espide,
Where stretcht he lay vpon the sunny side
Of a great hill, himselfe like a great hill.
But all so soone, as he from far descried
Those glistring armes, that heauen with light did fill,
He rousd himselfe full blith, and hasned them vntill.[4]
Spenser’s dragon is as big as a mountain: its body stretches out and overshadows the whole ‘sunny side/ Of a great hill’ in an image simultaneously of dread in darkness and drenched in sunlight. And yet the dragon is not just as big as a mountain, but seems to have risen up from the earth itself, like a mountain that rises up from the collision of two tectonic plates: ‘of a great hill, himselfe like a great hill’. This dragon, as Spenser depicts it, has not just wandered along and settled itself on a mountain, but his position is so permanent and so threateningly still – ‘stretcht’ (when used here as an adjective) and ‘lay’ are static and not dynamic – that he resembles and even becomes one of the mountains in this landscape. Of course his hugeness is important, too, and it is this deformity that ‘misshapes’ the poem: eight consecutive stanzas (8-14) are preoccupied with this monstrous being, as the dragons hugeness seems to pull the poem outwards into a horribly enormous version of itself. The dragon’s appearance reshapes both the landscape, then, and the text which describes it, aligning with Goth’s model of the physical-aesthetic effect of the monster on poetry.
Renaissance poetics, however, specifically the work of Philip Sidney in his ‘Defence of Poesy’, provides an argument to refute Goth’s idea. While Goth considers monsters to be a corruption of the poetry (misshape implies deformity), Sidney in this essay thinks about the monster as included in this golden world, and indeed even as a crucial element of it. Sidney’s description of the ‘golden world’ of poetry, the ‘rich tapestry’ that poets set forth which can never be found richer in nature, has at its centre the unnatural merging to the monstrous:
The poet […] doth grow, in effect, into another nature, in making […] forms such as never were in nature, as the heroes, demigods, cyclopes, chimeras, furies, and such like.[5]
These mythical creatures, hybrids and unnatural beings thus become not merely acceptable in but indispensable elements in the construction of Sidney’s golden world of fiction.
Indeed the appearance of the dragon at the beginning of the canto, rising up from the poem’s landscape as a mountain, seems to support the idea that dragon and poem are almost one and the same, or at least contained one inside the other. Joe Moshenska develops this idea in his essay on Dryden’s handwritten note on a line of The Faerie Queene, the argument of which can be summed up by the essay’s opening question: ‘where does all the stuff in The Faerie Queene come from?’[6] Moshenska proposes that all of the poem’s props are created by the poem itself, right in front of the reader’s eyes; they have just been made within the text itself. In his conclusion Moshenska proposes that we think about all of the props in The Faerie Queene as gifts:
Gifts from nowhere, gifts to us from the poet… heaps of particular objects at whose sheer and unevenly explained presence we are invited to wonder at and speculate before they are drawn into the poem’s various strategies of meaning-creation.[7]
In Moshenska’s view, then, the dragon in Book I matters not as a complex symbol but as a literal, monstrous being whose meaning lies not in its allegorical signification but in the ‘wonder’ of the moments of its creation.
Spenser does not just show us the dragon’s appearance in the poem, but also its disappearance, in a beautifully clever stanza which echoes its first moments of being:
So downe he fell, and forth his life did breath,
That vanish into smoke and cloudes swift;
So downe he fell, that th’earth him vnderneath
Did grone, as feeble so great load to life;
So downe he fell, as an huge rockie clift,
Whose false foundation waues haue washt away,
With dreadfull poyse is from the mayneland rift,
And rolling downe, great Neptune doth dismay;
So downe he fell, and like an heaped mountain lay. (FQ, I.xi.54.)
The same verb ‘lay’ is used as in stanza 4, and there is the same sense of awful stillness in the phrase ‘dreadfull poyse’. What stands out in this stanza, however, is the repeated downwards movement, as the phrase ‘so downe he fell’ recurs four times in a mere nine lines; the dragon sinks out of the poem again, out of the reader’s sight, and becomes a reduced version of the mountain that evoked his first appearance. Now he is defined by the disorder of ‘heaped’; the ethereal awe and marvel of the mountain has been reduced.
This lull of rising and sinking, creating and destroying, growing and falling which characterises the movement of the poem is one which Ovid represents in an image in Book III of his Metamorphoses,at the end of the story of Cadmus and the dragon. This Ovidian precedent can be felt throughout this canto of The Faerie Queene. Where Spenser describes his dragon’s mouth as hellish in the image of ‘a cloud of smoothering smoke and sulphur seare/ Out of his stinking gorge forth seemed still’ (FQ, I.xi.13), Ovid compares his dragon’s breath to the River Styx in Hades: quique halitus exit/ ore niger Stygio, vitiatas inficit auras’ [such rank breath as exhales from the Stygian cave befouls the tainted air].[8] Where Spenser describes his dragon’s scales in terms of a knight’s armour – ‘like plated coat of steele, so couched neare’ (FQ, I.xi.9) – so does Ovid combine imagery of human and monstrous, epic and deformity: ‘loricaeque modo squamis defensus… validos cute reppulit ictus’ [protected against that strong stroke by his scales as by an iron doublet] (Met. III.63-4). The significance of this allusion is based in Cadmus’s defeat of the dragon, however, and in the violent image of victory:
donec Agenorides coniectum in guttural ferrum
usque sequens pressit, dum retro quercus eunti
obstitit et fixa est pariter cum robore cervix. (Met., III. 90-2)
[But Cadmus follows him up and presses the planted point into his throat; until at last an oak-tree stays his backward course and neck and tree are pierced together.]
The assertive (and onomatopoeic) verbs ‘pressit’ [presses], ‘obstitit’ [stays, obstructs] and ‘fixa est’ [are pierced] leave no doubt as to who is the victor in this exchange between man and dragon. Ovid’s story exerts a pressure of inevitability on the dragon in The Faerie Queene which conflicts with Spenser’s language of the impenetrable and undefeatable, as the textual precedent becomes a kind of predestination for this Renaissance text. The dragon is caught in a textual existence, where his story is written out within him – and where it is the word ‘story’ and all its implications which are important.
It is these lines towards the end of the episode which are of the greatest significance for my argument, however:
sic, ubi tolluntur festis aulaea theatris,
surgere signa solent primumque ostendere vultus,
cetera paulatim, placidoque educta tenore
tota patent imoque pedes in margine ponunt. (Met., III. 111-4)
[So when on festal days the curtain in the theatre is raised, figures of men rise up, showing first their faces, then little by little all the rest; until at last, drawn up with steady motion, the entire forms stand revealed, and plant their feet upon the curtain’s edge.]
Ovid uses this simile to describe Cadmus planting the dragon’s teeth and the city which grows up from this planting, but it is the dramatic moment within the simile which is most revealing in the context of the monstrous creation in The Faerie Queene. The passive tense of the verb ‘tolluntur’ [is lifted] implies a mysterious behind-the-scenes action which the audience cannot see, and the short phrases give a sense of a gradual reveal. This is a calm and continual movement which the audience is powerless to accelerate or delay. The dragon in Spenser’s poem comes into being shrouded in a similar theatrical mystery, but it is this very theatricality in Ovid’s lines which encourages a re-reading of the dragon. The dragon in The Faerie Queene is like an actor on a stage: he enters, exits and re-enters as his character comes to the fore, speaks his lines, and then fades away again into the background or even off-stage.
In this canto, then, Spenser seems to offer us a way of thinking about the dragon as a miraculous creation, pulled up onto the stage as a gift for the audience rather than a corrupting imposition on an otherwise beautifully golden text. Spenser’s vision of the dragon seems to fall in line with Sidney’s poetics in its certainty about the reasoning behind each poetic decision, each prop and each monstrous depiction; in this way, then, the problem of navigating what James Kearney calls ‘the poem’s notorious difficulty’ has been solved.[9] Spenserian critics tend to begin their essays with an acceptance of the complexity of signification in this allegorical poem:[10] I would suggest that sometimes the answer to this question can be found within the text itself, and it is offered beautifully to the reader in this dragon episode in Book I.
Works Cited
Primary texts:
Ovid, Metamorphoses (London: The Loeb Classical Library, 1984).
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. by A.C. Hamilton (New York, NY: Longman Group, 1977).
Secondary texts:
Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills, ‘Introduction: Conceptualising the Monstrous’ in Monstrous Middle Ages, ed. by Bildhauer and Mills (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003).
Kathryn Brammall, ‘Monstrous Metamorphosis: Nature, Morality, and the Rhetoric of Monstrosity in Tudor England’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 27 (1996), 3-21.
Jeff Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
Maik Goth, Monsters and the Poetic Imagination in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).
James Kearney, The Incarnate Text (Philadelphia, PA: University of Philadelphia, 2009).
Raphael Lyne, Ovid’s Changing Worlds: English ‘Metamorphoses’ 1567-1632 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Joe Moshenska, ‘”Whence had she all this wealth?”: Dryden’s Note on The Faerie Queene V.vii.24 and the Gifts of Literal Reading’, Spenser Studies, 33 (2019), 301-13.
Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in a Poetic Mode (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).
Syrithe Pugh, Spenser and Ovid (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2005).
Philip
Sidney, ‘The Defence of Poesy’ in Sidney’s
‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. by
Gavin Alexander (London: Penguin, 2004).
[1]Bernard Tannier, ‘Un bestiaire maniériste: monstres et animaux fantastiques dans La Reine des Fées d’Edmund Spenser’ in Monstres et prodiges au temps de la Renaissance, ed. by Marie Thérèse Jones-Davies (Paris: Diffusion J. Touzot, 1980).
[2] Maik Goth, Monsters and the Poetic Imagination in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), p201.
[3] Joe Moshenska, ‘”Whence had she all this wealth?”: Dryden’s Note on The Faerie Queene V.vii.24 and the Gifts of Literal Reading’, Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, Volume XXXIII (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2019).
[4] Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. by A.C. Hamilton (UK: Longman Group, 1977), I.xi.4. All further references to The Faerie Queene are given in-text and taken from this edition.
[5] Philip Sidney, ‘The Defence of Poesy’ in Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. by Gavin Alexander (London: Penguin, 2004), p8-9. Italics mine.
[6] Moshenska, p301.
[7] Ibid, p310.
[8] Ovid, Metamorphoses (UK: The Loeb Classical Library, 1984), Vol. I, Book III, lines 75-6. All further references to Metamorphoses are given in-text and taken from this edition. Translations also from the Loeb edition.
[9] James Kearney, The Incarnate Text (Philadelphia, PA: University of Philadelphia, 2009), p86.
[10] See, as well as Kearney, Moshenska, p303; Dolven’s presentation of two opposing and yet each completely valid and possible readings and the moment of pivot in Jeff Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p140.