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Spenser's Art of War: Chivalric Allegory, Military Technology, and the Elizabethan Mock-Heroic Sensibility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Michael West
Michael West*
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
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Extract

In the medieval romances single combat was the knightly norm. The Italian chivalric epics sought to adapt this convention to the ideals of the Renaissance courtier. In Il Cortegiano, Frederico Fregoso explains “that where the Courtyer is at skirmishe, or assault, or battaile upon the land, or in such other places of enterprise, he ought to worke the matter wisely in seperating himself from the multitude, and undertake his notable and bould feates which he hath to doe, with as little company as he can.“’ But such displays of panache had little place in the massed infantry tactics that dominated the actual battlefields of the sixteenth century. It was disciplined self-restraint that made the Swiss and Spanish pike phalanxes so formidable, relegating cavalry to secondary importance. The Italian courtierknights had been rudely humbled, after all, when Charles XII invaded Italy in 1494 and deployed his excellent artillery.

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Study
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , Winter 1988 , pp. 654 - 704
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1988

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References

1 Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, tr. Sir Thomas Hoby, ed. Walter Raleigh (London, 1900) 113. All early texts are cited with normalized typography and expanded contractions. Earlier versions of this paper were presented during 1986 at the conference of the Renaissance Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; at the meeting of the West Virginia Shakespeare and Renaissance Association in Morgantown, West Virginia; and at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. I am grateful to my audiences for helpful suggestions.

2 Vale, Malcolm, War and Chivalry: Warfare and Aristocratic Culture in England, France, and Burgundy at the End of the Middle Ages (Athens, Ga., 1981) 174.Google Scholar

3 Howard, Michael, War in European History (Oxford, 1976) 26–27, 34—37.Google Scholar

4 FQ, II.x.25; I cite Spenser from the Variorum Works, ed. Edwin A. Greenlaw et al. (Baltimore, 1932-1949). On Spenserian ambivalence about warfare see esp. Michael West, “Spenser and the Renaissance Ideal of Christian Heroism,” PMLA, 88 (1973): 1013-32; and “Warfare,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto, forthcoming)

5 “A Letter of the Authors,” in Works 1:167.

6 With Edwin A. Greenlaw, “The Influence of Machiavelli on Spenser,” Modern Philology, (1908): 187-202, cp. H. S. V. Jones, “Spenser's Defense of Lord Grey,” Univ. oflllinois Studies in Language and Literature, No. 3 (1919): 1-75, which stresses Bodin's influence. See also Sheila T. Cavanagh, “Such Was Irena's Countenance: Ireland in Spenser's Prose and Poetry,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature, (i986):24∼50.

7 According to Alexander B. Judson's Life, when the privy council nominated Spenser to be sheriff of Cork in 1598, it described him as “a man … not unskilful or without experience in the service of the wars” (Variorum Works, 8:200). But in the Vewe his spokesman Irenius disclaims personal knowledge of garrison tactics, saying, “I am noe marshall mao” (3718-19), and his apparent military inexperience is emphasized by Roland M. Smith, “The Irish Background of Spenser's View,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 42 (1943): 499-515.

8 Cyril Falls, Elizabeth's Irish Wars (London, 1950)69. Philippe Contamine, Warinthe Middle Ages, tr. Michael Jones (London, 1984) 179-184, reviews controversy over the stirrup. For further evidence of Spenser's naivete’ see Allan H. Gilbert, “Spenserian Armor,” PMLA, 67 (1942): 981-87. Derricke's woodcut is reproduced from the unique illustrated copy in the Edinburgh University Library by their kind permission. I am grateful to the University of Edinburgh's Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities for electing me an Honorary Fellow during 1987 to pursue research on this topic and to my colleagues there for helpful suggestions.

9 To James Nohrnberg's The Analogy of the Faerie Queene (Princeton, 1976) I owe much. But his treatment of this passage suggests how even so elegant an allegorist can slight Spenser's epic dimension: “Different ranks merit different courtesies, and Calidore conforms to decorum even when he arms himself to attack the brigands. He provides himself with ‘a sword of meanest sort,’ and only when victory is in sight does he employ ‘a sword of better say’ “ (708). Should a reader really think that Calidore exchanges weapons out of decorous courtesy? I doubt that this idea occurred to Spenser; but if he did toy with it, or if he wrote in such a fashion elsewhere as to encourage us to do so, then this passage like much else in the poem must be recognized as ludicrous.

10 See John P. Daly, S. J., “Talus in Spenser's Faerie Queene,” Notes & Queries, n.s. 7 (1966): 49. The moral interpretations compiled in the Variorum edition are usefully supplemented by Hankins, John Erskine, Source and Meaning in Spenser's Allegory (Oxford, 1971) 171-73Google Scholar. The best discussion ofTalus is offered by Nohrnberg 409-25, who develops the iron man's threefold significance as a legal, technological, and military symbol. But he rather slights Talus’ military dimension, as is evidenced by his outright misunderstanding of wont in this passage: “Somewhat confusingly Spenser says that Talus does not use his flail in war.” Instead of seeing Talus as a military subordinate with some capacity for independent action, he claims that “Talus is basically a slaie.” But after arguing that the iron man suggests the Hegelian-Marxist analysis of master-slave relations, he must admit that “Talus’ obedience, I hardly need say, is never explicitly characterized in terms of the class relation just described. We must reason back to such a relation from indirect evidence” (409-410).

11 William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. M. R. Ridley for the Arden Shakespeare (London, 1954) II.vii.73-75. Richly suggestive though his analysis is, in refusing to grant this automaton any effective autonomy Nohrnberg oversimplifies him and nullifies one of Spenser's main points. Thus after noting that, like the Palmer, Talus precedes his knight, suggesting that legal and martial precedent direct Artegall's operations, Nohrnberg must reverse himself and deny the narrative's clear implication by arguing that Talus is no “true guide” but simply a bodyguard, for “he takes direction rather than giving it” (409).

12 Hamilton, A. C., ed. The Faerie Queene (London, 1977)Google Scholar ad loc. Nohrnberg explains this feat by tentative resort to historical allegory (406-7), but even more convincing parallels would not diminish the explosive oddity of Artegall's epic aristeia.

13 Faerie Queene, V. viii. 28. Annotating this passage, A. C. Hamilton rehearses the parallels first pointed out by Upton and adds others. However, he errs in attributing to William Camden a claim that “the Spanish ships were ‘headed with yron, and hooked on the sides.’ “ Camden's phrase actually describes iron-tipped pilings carried by the fleet for mooring, not the ships themselves. For Philip's impresa see Jane Aptekar, Icons of Justice: Iconography and Thematic Imagery in Book V of The Faerie Queene (New York, 1969) 80-83.

14 See Hans Delbriick, History of the Art of War within the Framework of Political History, tr. Walter J. Renfroe,Jr. (3 vols.;Westport, Conn., 1975-82) 3 494-97; Ferdinand Lot, L'Art militaire et les armees au moyen age (Paris, 1946) 2:184-214, 437.

15 Olaus Magnus, Compendious History of the Goths, Swedes, and Vandals, tr. Joshua Sylvester (London, 1658) 118. Figs 2, 3, and 4 are reproduced from the Historia (Roma, 1555) sigs. AA5 v., AA6 v., and L3V. The original Latin reads: “Curribus falcatis, & hamatis … olim usi sunt… Gothorum pugnatures” (IX.iii). For Spenser's likely use of this book see West, “Spenser, Everard Digby, and the Renaissance Art of Swimming,” Renaissance Quarterly, 26 (1973): 11-22.

16 Figs. 4 and 7, which originally appeared in the second edition of Roberto Valturio's De re militari (Verona, 148 3) are here reproduced by kind permission from the University of Edinburgh's copy of Les douze livres de Robert Valturin touchant la discipline militaire, tr. LoysMeigret (Paris, 1555) sigs. Bbi v. andDd2 v. The binding of this French translation bears the arms of James Hepburn, the great Earl of Bothwell. It evidently belonged to him in his capacity as Lord High Admiral of Scotland and Lieutenant of the Borders. A formidable tactician who personally wounded Spenser's employer Lord Grey (then serving as a young officer) during a sally at the siege of Leith, Bothwell, unlike the artist, was presumably experienced enough to realize that weapons could scarcely be aimed with assurance from a horse-drawn cart trundling rapidly across uneven ground like that depicted; indeed, its lurching would probably make the crew as much of a hazard to each other as to the enemy. On the woodcuts for Vaiturlo see Max Sander, Le livre a figures italien depuis 1467jusqu'd 1530 (Milan, 1943) 4:xlv-xlvii.

17 Figs. 5,6,9, 11, 13, and 15 are here reproduced from Bothwell'scopyofF/oMe Vegece Rene … du fait de guerre: etfleurdechevalerie, quatre livres, . . . tr. N. Wolkyr (Paris, 1536) sigs. g4v, q4, n5, S4, and d2 v. bound together in the Latin edition of the Roman military writers published at Paris in 1532. See French 16th Century Books, comp. by Ruth Mortimer as Pt. I of the Harvard College Library Department of Printing and Graphic Catalogue ofBooks and Manuscripts (Cambridge, Mass., 1964) 2:599-601, 654-56, forfurther discussion of these illustrations, probably copied by Mercure Jollat from later German copies of woodcuts by Hans Knapp and others published at Erfurt in 1511. These in turn derive from a complicated tradition of manuscript illustration to which the best introduction is offered by Bertrand Gille, Engineers of the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass., 1966).

18 For this design see Gille, Bertrand, “Etudes sur les manuscrits d'ing£nieurs du XVe siècle,” Techniques et civilisations, 5 (1956): 77–86 Google Scholar, Fig. 5.

19 For amusing reproductions of one-man chariot designs by the Italian engineer Taccola see Giuseppe Canestrini, Arte militare meccanica medievale (Milan, 1946), Figs. LXIII and LXIV. In the first Taccola sought to create the effect of flame-breathing horses by recommending that Greek fire be placed at the tip of the chariot's long projecting tongue. Then, realizing that any blaze there would terrify the unfortunate beasts even more than the enemy, in the second sketch he tried to salvage his plan by incorporating a screen. But for various reasons this design, too, was obviously an unworkable pipe-dream.

20 On the utter impracticability of “the complex grappling devices recommended by Valturio for siege work,” see Hale, J. R., Renaissance War Studies (London, 1983) 369.Google Scholar

21 Figs. 8, 10, and 12 are reproduced by kind permission from the Huntington Library's copy of Vegetius, De re militari (Erfurt, 1511), Figs. CXXIII, LXXXI, and CXXX, which actually lacks any text. Evidently the cuts by Hans Knapp and others enjoyed an independent circulation; for many reasons they merit a modern edition. I am grateful for the support of a Huntington-NEH Fellowship while I investigated this among other topics.

22 De hello belgico: The history of the Low-Countrey wanes, tr. Sir Robert Stapylton (London, 1650) VIII. 8, sig. Aaa4 v. See Norhrnberg 393-407 for a labored effort to relate the Souldan's chariot with “graples” to the “monstrous Scorpion … / With ugly craples” (V.viii.40) as elements in an elaborate scheme of zodiacal symbolism.

23 Vale 166. For the impact of gunpowder on the European imagination see esp. Hale's richly detailed “Gunpowder and the Renaissance: An Essay in the History of Ideas” 389-421, from which I draw heavily.

24 Cited by Hale 407; see further his “War and Public Opinion in Renaissance Italy” 359-87.

25 Daumas, Maurice B., A History of Technology and Invention, tr. Hennessy, Eileen B. (New York, 1969)2:483.Google Scholar

26 Ffoulkes, Charles, The Gun-founders of England (Cambridge, Eng., 1937) 28.Google Scholar

27 Cipolla, Carlo M., Guns, Sails, and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansion, 1400-1700 (New York, 1965) 43.Google Scholar

28 Duffy, Christopher, Siege Warfare: The Fortress in the Early Modern World, 1494-1660 (London, 1979) 76.Google Scholar

29 On geometry and dancing as part of military training see Hale's “The Argument of Some Military Title Pages in the Renaissance” and “The Military Education of the Officer Class in Early Modern Europe,” Studies, esp. 228, 243n. On the occult background see Gille, Engineers 59-60.

30 For parallels to this mixture of genres see esp. Carmelo Previtera, La poesia giocosa e I'umorismo (2nd. ed. rev., 2 vols.) for the Storia deigeneri letterariitaliani (Milan, 1953) 1: 294-2:68; Alison I. T. Higgins, Secular Heroic Epic Poetry of the Caroline Period (Bern, 1953)-

31 The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes toward a Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance (Chicago, 1969) 142. Elegant efforts to define andjustify Spenser's narrative inconsistencies, like Paul Alpers, “Narration in The Faerie Queene,” ELH, 44 (1977): I9-39. have not entirely persuaded those who, like Madelon Gohlke, “Embattled Allegory: Book II ofThe Faerie Queene,” English Literary Renaissance, 8 (1978): 123-40, feel that strain in the allegory often reflects underlying intellectual tension.

32 E.g., recent studies like Jonathan Goldberg, Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse (Baltimore, 1981), and Kenneth Gross, Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), which accept the poem's lack of an integrated vision and seek to valorize it. But as Gross wisely admits, “exaltation of the Renaissance artist's ironic, self-limiting enterprise may involve as much of a reduction as the idea of a totally self-absorbed visionary poet” (200). When Goldberg urges an approach where “the reader plays before the vast aod powerful indifference of the text, learning the pleasures of being made subject to it” (29), some may suspect that they are being asked to prostrate themselves not before the text but before hermeneutic cant. Few except professional Spenserians seem likely to share his masochistic delight in “a freeplay within the text's own narcissism, which also leaves the text playing with itself and the reader defeated” (n6n). If the Faerie Queene resembles Finnegans Wake, Spenserians are fast coming to rival Joyceans in their penchant for learned foolishness. In The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed. Boris Ford (New York, 1982), W. W. Robson honestly faces up to some of the poet's traits that make it “difficult to feel that his work is really alive today.” Noting the plight of the reader “caught between some experts using freedom of association ever more and more widely, and others demanding a heavier and heavier burden of esoteric knowledge,” he soberly concludes, “Studies multiply, often repetitive; one scholar may differ from another, but no interpretation gets eliminated; more and more are added. And as this is a world without a common reader, there is no common-sense check on these interpretations, no public opinion that may be attended to. It is not a healthy state of affairs for a supposedly classic author” (2:119-36). Three remedies might help: i) a moratorium on scholarly adulation of the poet, which masks his declining reputation from no one but academics and does little to address its causes 2) less critical pomposity and a livelier sense of humor when reading Spenser 3) an approach to his intellectual background like that of Robert Grudin in Mighty Opposites: Shakespeare and Renaissance Contrariety (Berkeley, 1979), which might make Spenser's polarized thinking seem both less smugly secure and less self-canceling—in short, more genuinely dialectical. See further Grudin s.v. “Humanism,” Encyclopedia Britannica (Chicago, 1986).

33 Allen, Don Cameron, “On Spenser's Muiopotmos,” Studies in Philology, 53 (1956):141-58Google Scholar. Allen's identification of the butterfly with the soul, now widely accepted, is further developed by Judith Anderson,” ‘Nat worth a boterflye': Muiopotmos and The Nun's Priest's Tale,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 1 (i97i):89-io6.

34 See William Wells, “ ‘To Make a Middle Construction': The Significance of the Opening Stanzas ofMuiopotmos,” Studies in Philology, 42(1945)1544-54. Also tempting is the conjecture of Isabel E. Rathborne, “Another Interpretation of Muiopotmos, PMLA 49 (1934) 11050-68, that Spenser set out to depict a war between the two “mightie ones” Aragnoll and Muscaroll, with their respective insect armies; but as Wells notes, formally the poem seems a polished mock tragedy rather than a fragment of a larger mock epic.

35 This notion was first proposed by Anne Kimball Tuell, “Note on Spenser's Clarion,” Modem Language Notes, 36(1921):182-83. In “Invidia and the Allegory of Spenser's'Muiopotmos,’ “ English Studies in Canada, 2(1976):144-55, Ronald B. Bond modified it by identifying Clarion not with Spenser's epic muse but with fame. His Spenser is more medieval than mine, but his focus on the role oiaemulatio in the poem, which may denote either envy or heroic emulation, reinforces my conception of the poem's ambivalence about heroic values.

36 George Sandys, tr., Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, ed. KarlK. Hulley and Stanley T. Vandersall (Lincoln, Neb., 1970) 125. For an interpretation of Muiopotmos stressing the role of the tapestry in somewhat similar terms and treating the butterfly as a generic Elizabethan courtier satirized for political impotence, see Robert A. Brinkley, “Spenser's Muiopotmos and the Politics of Metamorphosis,” ELH, 48 (1981):668-76. In “Spenser's Muiopotmos,” ExpHcator, 40:4(1982):9-n, Thomas Ramey Watson finds in the tapestry yet another allegory of the Fall, but proves only that Christian exegesis itself can fall into monotonous reductionism. More persuasive is Terrance Brophy Kearns, “Rhetorical Devices and the Mock-Heroic in Spenser's ‘Muiopotmos,’ “ Publications of The Arkansas Philological Association, 9:2(i983):58-66.

37 On Dryden's anti-heroic vision see West, “Dryden and the Disintegration of Renaissance Heroic Ideals,” Costerus, 7 (1973)1193-222; also West's other works on Dryden therein cited.

38 English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 1954) 523. On the implications of this tendency for Elizabethan genres see West, “Drayton's ‘To the Virginian Voyage': From Heroic Pastoral to Mock-Heroic,” Renaissance Quarterly, 24 (i97i):50i∼506. For treatment of Renaissance burlesque poetry as symptomatic of “der Krise der epischen Dichtung,” see Erich Loos, Alessandro Tassonis “La Secchia Rapita” und das Problem des heroisch-komischen Epos, Schriften und Vortrage des Petrarca-Instituts Kolns, 20 (Cologne, 1967) 28; also Karlernst Schmidt, Vorstudien zu einer Geschichte des komischen Epos (Halle, 1953); and Previtera, Poesia giocosa. On “il pacifico temperamento dell'autore” characteristic of heroi-comic poets see Domenico Oritisi, “La satira nei poemi eroicomici del Seicento,” Cenobio, 8 (1959): 136-59; also Fernand Fleuret and Louis Perceau, eds., Les Satires francaises du XVIIesiecle (Paris, 1923) i:vi.

39 Cited by Plett, Heinrich F., “Aesthetic Constituents in the Courtly Culture of Renaissance England,” New Literary History, 14 (1983): 597–621 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. My argument in this paragraph draws heavily on this excellent article.

40 Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1577; rpt. Menston, 1971) sig. Dii. See Plett, “Konzepte des Allegorischen in der englischen Renaissance,” in Formen and Funktionen der Allegorie, ed. Walter Haug (Stuttgart, 1979) 310-35.

41 The Garden of Eloquence, ed. William G. Crane (1593; rpt. Gainesville, 1954) 26-27.

42 Letter: Describing a Part of the Entertainment unto Queen Elizabeth at the Castle ofKenilworth in 1575, ed. F. J. Furnivall (London, 1907) 37. My discussion of Laneham develops a pregnant footnote in Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioningfrom More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980) 28411.

43 Laneham 25. Cp. his odd description of Killingworth's clock, which Leicester stopped for the Queen's visit. Equating the number one with the dignity of sovereignty and the number three with plurality “or els confusion,” Laneham speculates elaborately about the numerological significance of stopping the clock at two. He finally reads his own riddle by deciding that it must stand for amity or “a freendly conjunction of two ones,” but does so in a manner that sounds suspiciously as if he were tempted to see in this choice of time another emblem of courtly duplicity (53-55).

44 Nelson, T. G. A., “Sirjohn Harington and the Renaissance Debate over Allegory,” Studies in Philology, 82 (1985): 359-79.Google Scholar

45 Letter-Bookoj'Gabriel Harvey, ed. Edwardjohn Long Scott (Westminster, 1884) 78-79.

46 Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Stratford-Upon-Avon, 1913) 214. On the achievements of early divers, both legendary and factual, see Reg Valentine, Divers and Diving (Poole, Dorset, 1981) ch. 1.

47 “Letter of the Authors,” Variorum Works 1:167. See Huston Diehl, “Graven Images: Protestant Emblem Books in England,” Renaissance Quarterly, 39 (1987): 49-66 for evidence of how analogous iconoclasm helped shape a distinctive rationale for Elizabethan emblem literature.

48 “Spenser ludens,” in A Theatre for Spenserians, ed. Judith M. Kennedy and James A. Reither (Toronto, 1973) 83-100. On Spenser's comic vision see also C. A. Patrides, “Spenser: The Contours of Allegorical Theology,” Centennial Review, 26(1982): 17-32.

49 The Arte of English Poesie (1589; rpt. Menston, 1968) 157-59. In addition to Gohlke 139, see Dundas, Judith, “Allegory as a Form of Wit,” Studies in the Renaissance, 11 (1964): 223-33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar