ABSTRACT
Until the 1970s, the Mutabilitie Cantos were read as a philosophical and cosmological conclusion to The Faerie Queene, detached from the main body of the poem in order to rise above the particularity of its relation to history to reflect its underlying theme from a different and higher perspective, like that of Troilus at the end of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. Such readings assumed that the cantos float free of the tensions and dangers which overwhelmed the poem at the end of Book VI. There the violence of the fallen world engulfed even the poem itself; here Mutabilitie's assault on heaven, symbolizing the same threat that this fallen state may prove to be all-encompassing, is overruled by the assertion of a transcendent providential order. I Insofar as these readings articulated any response to the political theme in the cantos, that response tended to be driven by the conservative implications of the metaphysical reading, seeing Mutabilitie's revolt as revealing the sinfulness of rebellion, and 'the defeat of the forces of disorder' she represents as a reaffirmation of the political status quo akin to that of 'the Jonsonian masque'. 2
The extensive work on the ostentatious Ovidianism of the cantos done in this period was likewise conditioned by the assumptions of the metaphysical reading, with the cantos seen as evoking the Metamorphoses' vision of the world in eternal flux, swayed by the passions of contending selfish powers and ungoverned by any teleology, in order to subordinate it, through Nature's verdict, to Christian belief in Providence. As Mutabilitie, the very spirit of the Metamorphoses, is 'put downe and whist' (VII.vii.59.6), Ovid's unchristian teachings too are silenced, and the limitations of his philosophy displayed.3 Parodying, subverting and overgoing the problematic classical authority who has presided over his poem, Spenser exorcizes and distances himself from the Metamorphoses' denial of any transcendent order. This rejection of Ovid's metaphysics is sometimes seen as implying a rejection of his satirical stance towards worldly authority, too. In Holahan's view, for instance, 'Dame Nature does in effect to Mutability what Spenser does to Ovid: each translating a proud assertive exile ... into a new context of humility,.4 As we shall see, Spenser is indeed as much concerned with Ovid's politics as with his metaphysics in the cantos, but not in this spirit of conservative rebuke against a disrespectful upstart.
