The 'Table' of Belohoebe's Forehead, Faerie Queene II.iii.24

72 NOTES AND QUERIES them in the process of asking several rhetorical questions: Were they not Jesuits which laied the plot with the deceased duke of Parma, for surprising or stealing away the Ladie Arbella, and sending her into Flanders? Who employed the Messenger into England about that affaire, but Fa.[ther William] Holt Jesuit? Who but the same Jesuit was consenting with Sir William Stanley in the sending in of Richard Hesket for soliciting Ferdinando, the late Earle of Darbie, to rise against her Majestie, and to claim the Crowne?8 The revisionists might try to argue that Fr. Mush, too, is to be discredited because of his anti-Jesuit feelings, but his reputation amongst Catholics for honesty and courage in the cause of the Catholic mission to England probably ought to make them turn, rather, to the option of ceasing and desisting on the basis of the evidence—at least in the case of the Hesketh Plot. LEO DAUGHERTY University of Virginia doi:10.1093/notesj/gju237 ! The Author (2015). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] 8 John Mush. A Dialogue Betwixt A Secular Priest and a lay Gentleman . . . Rhemes (sic., i.e. London, 1601), 93. Note on Holt. THE ‘TABLE’ OF BELPHOEBE’S FOREHEAD, FAERIE QUEENE II.III.24 WHEN the reader of The Faerie Queene first encounters Belphoebe in Book II, canto iii, Spenser’s remarkable ten-stanza portrait, filtered through the eyes of the lascivious coward Trompart, begins in the form of a cap-à-pie blazon, enumerating and praising her parts. Stanza 23 is a conventional description of her eyes, in which ‘two liuing lamps did flame’ (1), and turns quickly to a form of praise specific to Belphoebe as one of the poem’s Elizabeth analogues: In them the blinded god his lustfull fyre To kindle oft assayd, but had no might; For with dredd Maiestie, and awfull yre, She broke his wanton darts, and quenched bace desire. (6–9)1 This, too, of course, is conventional praise for the Virgin Queen; Shakespeare may echo it in 2015 his treatment of the ‘fair vestal thronèd by the west’ (II.i.161), whose chaste power likewise quenches Cupid’s darts.2 The following stanza dwells for six lines on Belphoebe’s forehead: Her yuorie forhead, full of bountie braue, Like a broad table did it selfe dispred, For Loue his loftie triumphes to engraue, And write the battailes of his great godhead: All good and honour might therein be red: For there their dwelling was. (II.iii.24.1–6) These stanzas have been comparatively little remarked upon, and the standard reading of the passage, exemplified by A. C. Hamilton’s commentary note, sees a turn from the negative version of Love/Cupid in stanza 23 to a more positive one in 24: the ‘blinded god’ is distinct from the ‘Loue’ whose war stories record ‘All good and honour’. It is true that Spenser’s epic, particularly in Book III, produces much allegorical force from tensions among the god of love’s contradictory attributes. In the backstory of Belphoebe’s conception and birth, Cupid is a wanton destroyer of all social bonds in court, city, and country, the ‘enimy of peace, and author of all strife’ (III.vi.14.9). In the same book, he is mystically an aspect of the Christian God, the ‘Most sacred fyre . . . / In liuing brests, ykindled first aboue’ (III.iii.1.1–2); Spenser’s narrator argues that Love’s function as a tool of ‘diuine foresight’ caused the ancients to deify it as Cupid: ‘Well did Antiquity a God thee deeme’ (III.iii.2.1). In Hamilton’s interpretation, it is the latter of these two Cupids, the positive version, who has depicted his battles on the ‘table’ of Belphoebe’s high forehead, which word he glosses as ‘a surface for painting’ (OED 3). This interpretation is wrong in two particulars. First, the ‘table’ seems to be a surface not for painting, but for writing (OED 2)—a distinction central to Spenser’s treatment of art, nature, and poesis—since Love is explicitly considered to ‘engraue’ his triumphs, and ‘write’ his 1 Citations of Spenser’s epic are taken from The Faerie Qveene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, rev. 2nd edn (Harlow: Longman, 2006). Other Spenserian poetry is cited from The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. Oram, Bjorvand, and Bond (New Haven, 1989). 2 Citations of Shakespeare refer to William Shakespeare, Complete Works, ed. Bate and Rasmussen (New York, 2007). 2015 NOTES AND QUERIES battles, not to paint them.3 I see the phrase ‘engraue, / And write’ as rhetorical synonymia, not as two separate ideas. Spenser uses engrave in the sense of writing elsewhere: Daphnaı¨da refers to the ‘piercing words, / Which yet are deepe engraven in my brest’ (295–96). Only once does the verb appear explicitly in this sense in The Faerie Queene—tellingly with reference to Timias’s love for Belphoebe, whose name he has ‘engrauen’ on the trees (IV.vii.46)—but while he also uses it to refer to a wound (FQ III.vii.32), to ornamentation free of either word or image (FQ III.viii.37, Muiopotmos 75), or to the burying of bodies in graves (FQ I.x.42, II.i.60), the closest any Spenserian text comes to using engraue to mean ‘represent pictorially’ is in E.K.’s gloss to the August eclogue of the Shepheardes Calendar, which defines ‘enchased’—in reference to the bears and lions depicted on Willy’s mazer bowl—as ‘engrauen’ (27). Figuring Belphoebe’s flesh as a writing surface associates her with the several written-upon women of Book III: Florimel, whom the narrator calls ‘This gentle Damzell, whom I write vpon’ (vii.1.4), Amoret, who is ‘cruelly pend’ by the magician-writer Busirane (xi.11.1), Britomart, who is subject to and object of the providential writing of Merlin (iii.14), and Elizabeth herself, who presents an anxious conundrum for the narrator in III Proem 1. Spenser clearly means to prefigure this Book III anxiety about writing and women’s bodies in this Book II description of Belphoebe: his narrator both expresses the anxiety in terms similar to the Book III Proem—‘How shall frail pen descriue her heauenly face, / For fear through want of skill her beautie to deface’ (II.iii.25.8–9)—and enacts it, when his downward-moving blazon of Belphoebe’s desirable yet forbidding body skips over her groin in the choked half-line at 26.9. The second particular where the standard interpretation goes wrong is in the assumption that Love has already inscribed this table, written his battles, and engraved his triumphs on Belphoebe’s forehead. In the standard reading, these inscriptions are to be distinguished from 3 Compare Hamlet’s ‘tables’, the written miscellany wherein he sets down his observation that ‘one may smile and smile and be a villain’ (I.v.112–114). 73 the actions of the ‘blinded god’, who can kindle lust in her eyes’ ‘rash beholders’ (23.5), but fails in his attempts to do so in her eyes themselves. For Hamilton, the Love of stanza 24 must be a different agent, since the table Belphoebe’s forehead is, after all, there to be ‘red’. But nothing in the diction indicates that Spenser has switched from the bad Cupid who fails in stanza 23 to a more positive, more successful version in stanza 24. Elsewhere in Spenser’s epic, it is the dangerous, blind god who habitually represents his ‘warres’ and ‘cruell battailes’ pictorially (III.xi.29.5–6). In considering such representation on the table of Belphoebe’s forehead, the verbs in II.iii.24 are less indicative than subjunctive, less assertive than hypothetical. The triumphs and battles are only potentially, not actually, engraved in Belphoebe’s forehead, whose ‘yuorie’ complexion suggests an as-yet-uninscribed surface. Her forehead, in my reading, dispreads itself like a table that Love might write upon, and were he to do so, it would reduce Belphoebe to what rash beholders like Trompart would like to see: a woman subject to love, violently written upon as Amoret will later be, and reduced to an ekphrastic expression of the male love god’s power much like the tapestries, bas reliefs, and masque in the House of Busirane (III.xi–xii). The blinded god might mark her thus, and the table metaphor seems to invite us to read that he has already done so, but we are explicitly told no such thing. Belphoebe’s forehead remains ‘yuorie’, a blank page, but not an empty one; rather, ‘full of bounty braue’. It is in this paradoxically full blankness that ‘All good and honour’, instead of the violent narratives of Love’s conquests, ‘might . . . be red’. This text, presumably invisible to Trompart, is an alternate inscription that reinforces Belphoebe’s pre-existing virtues of good and honour, which needs no man or god to write it anew, ‘For there their dwelling was’. The paradox of eloquent blankness anticipates the more complicated tensions surrounding the narrator’s treatment of Belphoebe/Elizabeth in III.v, and it is of a piece with the other playful paradoxes involved in Belphoebe’s description here: the graces in her eyes working ‘amorous retrate’ (25.3), for example, a phrase that builds on the overdetermination of the noun to produce a ritratto 74 NOTES AND QUERIES (portrait) of retreat (at once a lover’s retreat and a retreat from love). This subtlety of II.iii.24 encodes a theological component as well, identifying the as-yet-unnamed Belphoebe as providentially elect, as it alludes to the iconography of Revelation 13, wherein the subjects of the Beast (as well as the 144,000 chosen by the Lamb) are marked on the forehead. Like so many of Spenser’s knottiest passages, Belphoebe’s forehead dares us to read both it and Spenser’s allegory correctly: to fail is to see it as Trompart does, only as a table for the carnal god of love to inscribe. JAMES D. MARDOCK University of Nevada doi:10.1093/notesj/gju250 ! The Author (2015). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] Advance Access publication 25 January, 2015 WHICH EDITION OF HOMER DID SPENSER READ? WHEN first presenting The Faerie Queene to the reading public in 1590 in the Letter of the Authors, Edmund Spenser describes his work as the culmination and implicit fulfilment of a line of epic poems inaugurated by Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.1 The sentiment is picked up by that epistle’s professed recipient, Sir Walter Raleigh, who notably concludes his commendatory sonnet to Spenser with a couplet declaring Spenser’s achievement in The Faerie Queene such that ‘Homers spright did tremble for griefe, / And curst th’acesse of that celestiall thief’.2 However, if The Faerie Queene’s paratextual apparatus argues for a clear Homeric filiation, the extent to which the poem itself reveals any direct engagement with Homer is deeply uncertain. While, as Gordon Teskey suggests, ‘Spenser is surely the first English epic poet to read Homer in Greek’, there are few, if any, Homeric echoes in The Faerie Queene directly connectible with the Iliad or the Odyssey unburdened by the mediations of medieval and 1 ‘Letter of the Authors,’ in Spenser: The Faerie Queene ed. A. C. Hamilton (Harrow, 2007), 715. All future citations will be to this edition. 2 Sir Walter Ralegh, ‘A Vision upon this conceipt of the Faery Queene’, Spenser, 721. 2015 Renaissance adaptations, allegorical commentaries, and mythographies.3 Spenser, of course, did not hesitate to incorporate closely translated echoes of his key sources throughout The Faerie Queene. Some more notable instances include the revision of the opening stanzas of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in the proem to book 1; Tasso’s rose song in the Bower of Bliss (2.12.74–75); the Virgilian blazon of Belphoebe (2.3.22–31); and the Lucretian hymn to Venus (4.10.44–47). Given the lack of similarly close borrowings from Homer, it is entirely plausible to claim that there is no direct line of influence between the Englishman and his Greek predecessor. However, there is a significant amount of circumstantial evidence suggesting that Spenser did, indeed, read Homer, and likely in the original. As T. W. Baldwin notes, Spenser’s grammar school curriculum at Merchant Taylors’ was modelled on the Greek-centric curriculum of St Pauls’ in which the study of Homer in Greek was not only required for older boys, but was the subject of a senior year examination.4 Jessica Wolfe describes the library of one ‘Henry Hutchinson, who attended the Merchant Taylors’ school several years ahead of Spenser, left a probate inventory of his books in 1573 which includes two editions of Homer (one a Greek-only edition) as well as a ‘greake lexicon in two volumes’ and several other dual-language Greek-Latin texts’.5 While this catalogue postdates Spenser’s time at Merchant Taylors’, it nevertheless suggests that Homer was not only part of the curriculum, but that Homeric texts were circulating generally among the students. Likewise, Fehrenbach and Leedham-Green’s survey of private libraries in Renaissance England reveals that Homer’s poetry was circulating reasonably widely in England during Spenser’s lifetime in a variety of formats including Latin translations, dual language Latin-Greek texts, and Greekonly editions.6 3 Gordon Teskey, ‘Homer,’ in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Toronto, 1990), 375. 4 T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana, 1944), I, 418. 5 Jessica Wolfe, ‘Spenser, Homer, and the Mythography of Strife’, Renaissance Quarterly, lviii (2005), 1220–88. 6 R. J. Fehrenbach and E. S. Leedham-Green (eds), Private Libraries n Renaissance England: A Collection and