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The Challenge to Chastity: Britomart at the House of Busyrane

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Thomas P. Roche Jr.
Thomas P. Roche Jr.*
Affiliation:
Princeton University, Princeton, N. J.
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Extract

The final episode of the third book of The Faerie Queene has never received adequate interpretation. By analogy to the final episodes of the other books Busyrane should be the great enemy to chastity, and his defeat should be accomplished through the virtue of chastity. Previous interpretations have not defined the allegorical appropriateness of Busyrane and his mask of Cupid as the climactic testing of Spenser's knight of chastity. The problem for the reader is to see how Britomart's experience at the house of Busyrane solves Amoret's problem and at the same time is the final challenge to her own virtue.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 76 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1961 , pp. 340 - 344
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1961

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References

Note 1 in page 340 Chaucer, The Romaunt of the Rose, Fragment A, 11. 531–584, Works, ed. F. N. Robinson (Cambridge, Mass. 1957).

Note 2 in page 340 Beaumont and Fletcher, A Wife for a Moneth, Works, ed. A. R. Waller, 10 vols. (Cambridge, 1907), v, 25–26.

Note 3 in page 341 C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, pp. 364–366.

Note 4 in page 342 See Variorum, i, 441; iii, 303, 320, 326, 354, 373; viii, 446. 5 Variorum, iii, 287.

Note 6 in page 342 See Wallis Budge, Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, 2 vols. (London, 1911). Chapter i gives a summary of the ancient writers who deal with this story, including Plutarch, Diodorus Siculus, Apollodorus, Isocrates, Herodotus, and Ovid. See also Heywood's dumbshow in The Brazen Age, Dramatic Works, ed. Pearson, 6 vols. (London, 1874), iii, 183; Ralegh, The History of the World (London, 1614), p. 204; Paradise Lost, i.307, and Isabel Rathborne, The Meaning of Spenser's Fairyland, pp. 86–90.

Note 7 in page 342 Ovid, Ars Amatoria, trans. J. H. Mozley (Loeb, 1947), p. 57 (Book i,11. 643–658).