The Self in Early Modern Literature: For the Common Good

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ONE Spenser ❖ Persons Serving Gloriana Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene begins in medias res. A “Gentle Knight” (1.1.1.1)1 on a “great adventure” given by Gloriana, the “greatest Glorious Queene of Faerie lond,” is silhouetted against a plain. The occasion for his “adventure” rides beside him, a “louely Lady” (1.i.4.1) grieving for royal parents in “subiection” to an “infernall fiend” (1.1.4.6–7). Contemporary readers would recognize in this chivalric silhouette the commitment to common good shared by Christian civic humanism and Protestant vocation. Readers would view the poet’s epic intention to “sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds” (Proem 1.5) in the same light. Spenser’s letter to Walter Raleigh accompanying publication of the poem’s first three books throws further direct light on his vocational “intention”: “The generall end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline” (“Letter,” 737). In fashioning fictional heroes as “ensamples” and, through them, virtuous citizens, 50 Spenser’s poetic discipline subsumes the humanistic emphasis on active virtue serving common good within a Protestant vocational imperative. Each “person” — reader, fictional hero, poet — fulfilled by obeying this imperative is strengthened against threatening cultural discontinuities. To follow Spenser’s development of this notion, a thread running throughout The Faerie Queene, is to discover the self or the person in his thought. The Letter to Raleigh Basic vocabulary expressing elements of “person” can be found in Spenser’s letter to Raleigh.2 Nagging critical problems resulting from the letter3 do not diminish the importance of this vocabulary everywhere in the poem itself. Published with books 1–3 (1590), the problematical letter disappeared in the expanded 1596 edition, which included the books 4–6 and the mutability cantos (1596), reappearing in print only after Spenser’s death. Even in 1590 it enjoyed no pride of place, tagged to the poetic text just before tail-end dedicatory letters. Nonetheless, the working vocabulary of this text, pointedly “expounding his whole intention” to a friendly, respected patron, clarifies important dimensions in the poem. A case in point is Spenser’s interest in “intention,” which, as the poem itself demonstrates, emerges as a distinguishing mark of “person,” not just the poet himself, but the virtuous “ensamples ” of human behavior which comprise his narrative poem and fashion his readers as “persons.” We can usefully begin with connections between “persons,” “intentions,” and “ensamples.” Spenser’s intention in the poem, as he tells Raleigh, includes an object, an action, and a method. His ambiguous object is “a gentleman or noble person”; the action, “to fashion”; and the method, a “vertuous and gentle discipline.” Spenser’s ambiguity allows “gentleman” and “noble person” to be taken either as synonyms for the same category or as optional categories. The flexible “gentleman ” in Spenser’s time could include not just hereditary members of the landed gentry, but recent nonhereditary landholders, Spenser: Persons Serving Gloriana 51 university graduates, lawyers, educated civil servants, and wealthy merchants.4 A “noble person,” while alluding specifically to persons of noble birth, thereby honoring class differences, more generally includes any virtuous person of high moral ideals, including gentlemen (OED).5 This inclusiveness also makes way for Spenser’s women readers. The poem offers several literary models, most notably Britomart representing the marital love so important to a Protestant audience. Spenser has in mind not only Queen Elizabeth and the high-born women honored in his dedicatory sonnets to the poem, but also the readership of learned Protestant women who distinguished his era. In short, Spenser’s ambiguity multiplies categories of readers and, paradoxically, collapses them together in “noble person,” including “gentlemen” and their literate wives. Spenser is keeping one pivoting foot stationed on “person.” That is, the most “generall” object to be fashioned in a “vertuous and gentle discipline” is a “person” or, as we might say, a “self.” Widely assumed is that the “person” to be fashioned refers both to the fictional character as the virtuous “ensample,” and ultimately to the reader who imitates that “ensample.” But the fictional “ensamples” come first. Chosen as “most fitte for the excellency of his person,” Spenser’s primary fictional “ensample,” Arthur, is a layered model, himself imitative of previous epic heroes: “I have followed all the antique Poets historicall, first Homere, who in the Persons of Agamemnon and Vlysses hath ensampled...