Abstract

The Mutabilitie Cantos treats the inability of allegory to image ideal truth. In the Faunus episode, Spenser critiques his own program of allegory by associating poetic invention with metamorphosis. Here Diana, who for Giordano Bruno represents unmediated truth, gains only Faunus's laughter because he sees the difference between what she should represent and what she is: a naked woman. Faunus becomes a paradoxical figure of liberation from the pursuit of ecstatic vision. Nature's veil in 7.7 stands as an image of allegory itself, always blinding the reader, keeping him or her at one remove from the truth.

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