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  • Reformed Dragons:Bevis of Hampton, Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur, and Spenser's Faerie Queene
  • Kenneth Hodges

There is a missing dragon in book 1 of The Faerie Queene that reveals a lot about how Edmund Spenser adapted medieval romance for use in Protestant England. In Spenser's direct source for the dragon fight, Bevis of Hampton, two Christian kings from southern Italy had been ceaselessly at war, destroying the land, until they were turned into battling dragons for their sins (Bevis of Hampton 2611-60).1 One flees north, through Tuscany, Lombardy, Provence, and ultimately to Köln (Cologne) in Germany. There Bevis kills it in a three-day fight, in which he is providentially saved by a well whose virtue heals and protects him from the dragon's poison. The other dragon, however, flies to Rome, where "he there rested his cursed bones, some say in a caue of stones, / men say he is there yet, enclosed with clearkes wit" (Bevis of Hampton f. 122r).2 This origin for Bevis's dragon establishes part of its symbolic significance: Bevis's worst enemies are not the Saracens, but Christians whose rivalries and betrayals leave him vulnerable. It is no accident that the fight occurs just as Bevis crosses from Muslim to Christian lands and the plot shifts from fighting Saracens to finally revenging himself on his archenemy, the Emperor of Germany. After the Reformation, Spenser could have rendered highly topical the fortuitous details of two dragons in Germany and Rome, with the English killing the German dragon but the Roman dragon enduring, enclosed by clerics' wit. That he took only one means that, however similar the details may be, Red Crosse's dragon is a very different beast from Bevis's.

Because of their wide-ranging symbolic potential, dragons are especially useful in revealing Spenser's techniques of reforming romance. Since the image of the dragon as adversary is familiar from the Bible, especially from Revelation, dragon fights in romance often crystallize ideas of evil. They are thus useful emblems of religious conflict, and religious conflict changed with the Reformation. Bevis's dragon marks Bevis's passage [End Page 110] from Muslim lands to Christian. When the Reformation redrew the political map, Muslims might still be enemies, but they might also be valuable allies against the Catholics; and European warfare was no longer an embarrassment blocking crusade, but something elevated (if that is the right word) to religious warfare in its own right. Red Crosse's religious challenges include not simply Muslims abroad and disunity at home, but also the lure of Catholicism. Spenser's dragon is a final conflict against all kinds of sin. It is not a creature of boundaries, the way Bevis's is, but it remains a potent symbol of how religious zeal leads to necessary warfare.

Other Spenserian dragons mark more specific types of evil, and they also show engagements with earlier romance. The seven-headed dragon that Duessa rides (I.vii.17) and the serpentine Errour that Red Crosse defeats in his first fight, are adapted from Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur, in which they are associated with the Grail quest. In Malory, both dragons are associated with upheaval: one prophesies civil war; the other represents the replacement of the old faith by the new, both Judaism being superseded by Christianity and the pagan faith of Britain being replaced by Christianity. Spenser makes good use of both dragons, but alters their significance to match his allegory. The first dragon becomes a sign of struggle with a corrupted literary and historical tradition; the second becomes a marker of the transition, not from paganism to Christianity, but from Catholicism to Protestantism.

While there is symbolic value to Spenser's dragons, their worldliness is worth emphasizing. They allude to the Book of Revelation, certainly, but equally importantly they point to romance.3 The tendency in Spenser studies has been to privilege the theological and the classical, but The Faerie Queene is itself a romance. Spenser's purpose is to "fashion a Gentleman," not a theologian (Spenser, "Letter to Raleigh" 714). Gentlemen read romance, and underneath the fantasy learned codes of behavior and...

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