Reading the Allegorical Intertext: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton

4. Allegory, Irony, Despair: Chaucer’s Pardoner’s and Franklin’s Tales and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Books I and III

4. Allegory, Irony, Despair: Chaucer’s Pardoner’s and Franklin’s Tales and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Books I and III In the following chapter about allegory, irony, and despair in The Pardoner’s Tale and Book I of The Faerie Queene and in The Franklin’s Tale and Book III, I start with verbal echoes as a way of suggesting the plausibility of an interpretive context, but concentrate instead on intertextual relations between Chaucerian and Spenserian texts that are broader—more imaginative and conceptual—than local and explicitly verbal. Whether in art or life, readers and writers register, remember, and imitate much else in literary models besides the odd word or phrase, as I have noted in my introduction.1 Both subtler and more extensive relations among texts manifestly exist and convey meaning: tonal allusions, motifs and images, rhythmic effects, tropes, structural paradigms, ideological formations, and the like. Such relations are significant in culture and relevant to its historical expressions, and their observation not only modifies and enhances previously recognized dimensions of meaning but also discovers new ones. The most complex and compelling interpretations of earlier texts are to be found in writers who imitate and revise, not only their content, but also and inseparably their forms. In Gerald Bruns’s words, such a later text can elicit from the earlier one ‘‘that which remains unspoken.’’2 Particularly in the Renaissance, with its desire to recover the past, to return ad fontes, to the fountains and sources—to the deep ‘‘well,’’ in Spenser’s word for his Chaucerian source— writers tried actually to converse with their predecessors, as Petrarch did literally in his letters to classical authors such as Cicero and Livy. Their conversations with their deepest sources were touched by the primary sense of the word converse in the Renaissance itself: ‘‘to live with,’’ ‘‘to dwell among.’’ What follows listens to the conversation between Spenser’s texts and Chaucer’s.  Theresa Krier has recently suggested an allusion to The Pardoner’s Tale in The Faerie Queene, Book IV, occurring in lines that A. C. Hamilton’s second 61 62 Reading the Allegorical Intertext edition cross-references with the temptation of Despair in Book I (ix.46, vs. 1–2, 47, vs. 7–8).3 The allusive lines, spoken by the Spenserian narrator, are these: O Why doe wretched men so much desire, To draw their dayes vnto the vtmost date, And doe not rather wish them soone expire, Knowing the miserie of their estate, And thousand perills which them still awate, Tossing them like a boate amid the mayne, That euery houre they knocke at deathes gate? (IV.iii.1)4 Where Hamilton hears the despairing Spenserian questions ‘‘Why then doest thou, O man of sin, desire / To draw thy dayes forth to their last degree’’ and ‘‘Is it not better to doe [i.e., to die] willinglie, / Then linger till the glasse be all out ronne,’’ Krier hears within the Chaucer-laden context of Book IV an allusive memory of the old man’s knocking on his ‘‘moodres gate’’—Mother Earth—in The Pardoner’s Tale.5 In the early cantos of Book IV, Krier has in mind Spenser’s explicit invocation of ‘‘Dan Chaucer , well of English vndefyled,’’ numerous verbal echoes and narrative memories of Chaucer’s poems, and the more generalized incorporation of chthonic mothers that invites the memory of Mother Earth here.6 I would accept both Hamilton’s and Krier’s recollections—the one of Despair and the other of the Pardoner—and would further suggest that their coincidence is (even literally) predictable from the vantage point of the first book of Spenser’s epic romance. Awareness of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale and especially of its ‘‘olde man’’ is brooding and pervasive through much of Book I. It begins with the old man Archimago and climaxes in the related character of Despair. Conspicuously and ironically, it involves the Redcross Knight’s recurrent encounters with mirrors of himself that he fails to recognize and the progressive identification of sleep, or rest, with death. An older Chaucer criticism, as Marshall Leicester has distilled it, identifies the Pardoner as ‘‘the eunuchus non dei, the embodiment of the vetus homo, the Old Man whose body is the body of this death and who is guilty of sinning against the Holy Ghost.’’7 Specifically, this is the Bible’s Old Man who fails to put on the New, as urged in Ephesians...