CHAPTER 6 - PAIN, COMPASSION, AND COMMUNITY FROM SPENSER TO MILTON

Summary

Suffering is one of the recurrent themes of The Faerie Queene. Many of its characters suffer from various kinds and degrees of pain, and the poem is one of the most elaborate early modern literary explorations of the meaning of pain. In Book I, Una, forsaken by Redcrosse, is described as ‘in close hart shutting vp her paine’.1 When she is captured by Sansloy later in the same canto, she ‘filleth his dull eares’ ‘with great lamenting paine, / And piteous plaints’ (1.3.44.1–2). In canto 6, when she is led to believe that Redcrosse has died, ‘stony horrour all her sences fil[ls]’ and she falls ‘downe […] for paine’ (1.6.37.1–4). In one of the climactic episodes of Book I, Redcrosse undergoes a form of penitential suffering in the House of Holiness that brings intense physical pain and causes him to ‘rend his flesh, and his owne synewes eat’ (1.10.28.3). Spenser also emphasizes the pain inflicted during the many duels in The Faerie Queene, as when the giant Orgoglio is ‘Dismaied with […] desperate deadly wound, / And eke impatient of vnwonted paine’ (1.8.11.1–2) when Arthur wounds him. In Book 2 Amavia is described as a ‘pittifull spectacle of deadly smart’ (2.1.40.1), while Phedon is tormented ‘with great crueltee’ and ‘gor'd with many a wound’ by Furor. At seeing Sir Mordant's corpse, Guyon is moved to ‘shew his inward paine’ by his ‘ruth and fraile affection’ (2.1.42.8–9).