Dying with Speed and Felicity: Humor and Death in Book 3 of the Faerie Queene

Summary

HUMOR'S ability to halt or interrupt a given interpretive or ideological flow can be observed in the poetry of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Specifically, episodes in Spenser's Faerie Queene show how humorous treatments can arrest what may be premature or overly selfish responses to perceived death and point towards alternative assessments of the situation. The effects created by this interruption can range from strategic bathos (in the local lines of the poem) to a general reconsideration of thematic elements. In pairing humor with death, Spenser's poetry critiques the self-aggrandizement and ego glorification of the victim's discourse, questioning the assumptions of a would-be martyr.

While the disruptive power of humor can be a tool for reifying class distinction (and a sort of status quo in terms of social set ups), humor essentially serves to arrest particular linguistic or cultural equations. In poetry, this effect can problematize strict equivalence connections or culturally conditioned links. Specifically, the well-worn linguistic/cultural bonds between death and sex can be mocked, reversed, reconsidered, or even expanded in unlikely ways if humor is injected. In Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, a few passages show how an overly self-involved perspective on death actually ends up conflating sexual love with physical annihilation. The poem presents an outside perspective (be it the narrative set up or the view of another character) interjecting itself into the proceedings, making this conflation obviously specious and ultimately self-defeating. These outside perspectives utilize humorous devices to halt or undercut the grandiose claims of the lamenting or overlyserious figure.

While this period is not without its acknowledged wits and humorists, notes on Spenser's humor are a more recent addition to the scholarly conversation. Long billed as “our sage and serious Poet,” borrowing Milton's phrase, Spenser has begun to be seen as more than a dour moralizer or a humorless Protestant zealot. In the Faerie Queene, and especially in book 3 (the legend of chastity), Spenser sets up situations where death is bemoaned or threatened or effectively invoked, only for another perspective to intrude and interrupt the course of grief or fear or despair. This outside perspective belongs ultimately to the reader of the poem, but it can also belong to a character who intrudes on the insularity of the lamenting figure.