ABSTRACT
The House of Busirane episode that concludes book 3 of The Faerie Queene has proved to be an enduring locus of interpretive intrigue, inviting a range of critical approaches and resistant to consensus. The Urania is, of course, a book filled with storytellers, poets, readers, and writers; and it, like The Faerie Queene, is endless. It is, also, like The Faerie Queene, obsessed with the idea of ending, and in its most Spenserian moments these concerns come to the forefront. It is tempting to posit that Lady Mary Wroth scripts her own vexed relation to her precursor texts in the figure of the book that makes more than a single appearance in the Urania. In one scene, Pamphilia walking in a “delicate thicke wood,” reads from “a booke shee had with her”; the story is of a Lady who loves “a brave Gentleman who equally loved” but is inconstant and “left her for a new.”.
