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“ D O U B L E N A T U R E ” : A U G M E N T A T I O N I N S P E N S E R ’ S P O E T R Y JOANNE CRAIG Bishop’s University E ric h Auerbach characterizes medieval romance in terms of its exclusive­ ness. For the knight at the crossroads there is only one way to go: the right way, of course.1 Spenser’s characters in The Faerie Queene, on the other hand, often travel in groups, so that when they come to a crossroads the interlaced strands of their stories multiply. Compendiousness, not exclusive­ ness, is the mark of Spenser’s style. In “epical form,” according to Stephen Dedalus, the “personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea.”2 The vehicle of the simile is accidentally appropriate to Spenser, the celebrator of marriage and fertility: For much more eath to tell the starres on hy, Albe they endlesse seeme in estimation, Then to recount the Seas posterity: So fertile be the flouds in generation, So huge their numbers, and so numberlesse their nation. (4.12.1)3 Spenser typically resolves artistic dilemmas by more or less successful assimilations of the alternatives to one another. Judith Dundas has observed that an “either/or choice of artistic means was historically difficult for Spenser and, I believe, temperamentally impossible, simply because the only finality he knew was beyond his work and beyond the here and now.”4 Evidence of this habitual refusal to choose varies in extent from details of form to the shape of major episodes of The Faerie Queene. The Spenserian stanza, for example, marries iambic pentameter and the Alexandrine; and, at the same time, the native rime royal of “The Ruines of Time” and the Italianate ottava rima of “Virgils Gnat” and “Muiopotmos.” Spenser’s sonnets are “English” in consisting of three quatrains and a couplet and “Italian” in being relatively restricted in the number of rhymes because of the resumption of the b-rhyme in the second quatrain and of the c-rhyme in the third. His vocabulary is eclectic and his syntax is paratactic. He de­ clares in his letter to Raleigh that he will use both one hero and several;5 English Studies in Canada, ix, 4, December 1983 follow both classical and modern precedents; and treat both private and public virtues. The Faerie Qtieene contains both cantos and books, and the books are both overlapped and parallel.6 These familiar characteristics are continuous with Spenser’s habit of juxta­ posing contraries within a poem. It is often as if he had revised — or avoided revising — by augmentation alone, rather than by excision and replacement of the excised material. “Mother Hubberds Tale,” for instance, clearly alter­ nates between two formal options. At times the world of the fox and the ape is peopled by human beings, as in the episode in which the charitable husbandman regrettably employs the two protagonists as shepherds (lines 227-342) ; while at other times the Fox and the Ape associate with prosopopoeic animals like themselves, as when they meet the courtier mule (lines 581-654).7 The inconsistent narrative of “Mother Hubberds Tale” in a way antici­ pates the later and more complex satire of Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, which offers two distinct impressions of England and the court as opposed to the pastoral setting of Ireland. The predominant and predictable treat­ ment makes Ireland a wasteland, a thankless dead end for the talented poet; whereas England’s now greener and more pleasant land provides both a fit audience and the stimulating presence of the Queen and her courtiers: No ravenous wolves the good mans hope destroy, Nor outlawes fell affray the forest raunger. There learned arts do florish in great honor, And Poets wits are had in peerlesse price. (Lines 318-21) Yet the passage of praise in which these lines appear (lines 308-23) ends equivocally: For end, all good, all grace there freely growes, Had people grace it gratefully to use: For God his gifts there plenteously bestowes...

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