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When the Griffeth horse flies off bearing with him the hapless Ruggierio in Orlando Furioso, it prompts its English translator, Sir John Harington, to gloss the episode in an extended exegesis as follows: We may understand the Griffeth horse that carried him, to signifie the passion of the minde contrarie to reason, that carries men in the aire, that is in the height of their imaginations, out of Europe, that is out of the compasse of the rules of Christian religion and feare of God unto the Ile of Alcyna; which signifieth pleasure and vanities of this world. (Er ) A peculiarly didactic anxiety to pedestrianize Ariosto’s winged horse pervades the gloss. It emblematizes concern for how readers will respond to what Harington elsewhere refers to as the “meerely fabulous” dimension of romance.1 The gloss insists on a double reading to defuse a marvelous motif—whose contentious nature I discussed in my previous two chapters—as well as the emotions, or “passion,” it might engender. Neatly sidestepping the marvelous nature of “Griffeths” (or impossible aerial voyages), the gloss invokes the Platonic metaphor of a man overtaken by passions, imagined as being on a wildly running (or flying) horse. Thus what is fabulous at the literal level becomes believable , as well as morally significant, at the allegorical. The gloss advises the reader to look beyond the “meerely fabulous” dimension of Ruggiero’s voyage in order to recognize the real danger: belief in hippogriffs, or to put it in literal terms, naive engagement with fabulous motifs. For to do so “signifie[s] the chapter three Glozing Phantastes in The Faerie Queene 104 s u p e r s t i t i o u s r e a d e r s passion of the minde contrarie to reason,” a flight that, crucially, carries the hapless beyond the realm of “Christen religion” and “feare of God” to deposit them on a sorceress’s isle. This gloss included by Harington in his translation of that most excoriated of Italian romances proves illuminating to my reading of Spenser’s second book in The FaerieQueene. For book 2 will be preoccupied by a knight who curbs his passion and who loses his horse, turning him into a pedestrian champion whose feet pace him on his quest. This chapter takes up Spenser’s concern for how readers respond to romance as the instructive crux shaping book 2’s adventures . The proem forecasts this concern in its hedging over how its most important reader (significantly, a female), the sovereign Queen Elizabeth, might judge Guyon’s “antique history” to be an idle “painted forgery” rather than one pedagogical or “just” (2.0.3).2 Guyon’s adventures, long read for their epic contours, in my reading confront and meditate on the romance, especially its efficacy to rouse the passions.3 Critics read Guyon’s precarious performance of Temperance, at his quest’s conclusion in the Bower of Bliss, as a failed attempt to moderate passion.4 The example of Guyon, who is more human than Arthur, suggests the difficulty of achieving a mind that does not, like Ruggiero, fly “contrarie to reason.” My reading extends the ramifications of Guyon’s actions. I posit that Guyon’s questionable performance of temperance in the culminating canto compromises not only his victory but also undercuts the hope that romance might be reformed or its readers disciplined. Describing to Ralegh “his whole intention in the course of this worke,” Spenser expresses his hope to provide “great light to the Reader.”5 Doubt over the optimism in his letter’s proclamation, that his work’s “end” would “fashion” a “noble person” in “gentle discipline,” however, corrodes the triumph of book 1, leading to the defensively bristling proem to book 2 (which my first chapter analyzes as a parry against post-Reformation anxiety regarding romance’s cloistral fabulousness). The conundrum of a temperate “gentle knight” who seemingly fails to learn from his adventures, brings into question the reported “whole intention” of Spenser’s work as one that might fashion a “gentle” reader who, too, has been made “vertuous” by discipline (1.1.1).6 Book 1 reveals the dangerous path down which Redcrosse plunges, as his passions, initially raised by those “ydle” images of lust, bring him to the brink of ruin, leaving him vulnerable to Despair and tempted by the unpardonable sin of suicide (1.9). Here, as late as...

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