ABSTRACT
Anniversaries, even when they belong to poems rather than to persons, inspire historical reflection. In this case, the history is my own. The last time I attempted a project that was wholly dedicated to The Faerie Queene was in 1967, when I wrote the prospectus for my dissertation. I failed. And I have failed again this time. Not that I wish to suggest there is a jinx operating here; it’s just that Spenser seems to enact a peculiar sort of self-effacement within my scholarly imagination. Thirty years ago I planned a critical/interpretive thesis on The Faerie Queene that was going to observe Spenser’s habit of breaking down entities into their minute constituent parts. I talked a lot about prisms, and I took my title from the proem to Book III, where the poet invites Queen Elizabeth to observe herself figured in “mirrours more then one”—that is, Gloriana as queen, Belphoebe as chaste maid. My plan was to devote the first third of the first chapter to what I considered the most basic act of Spenserian prismatism, the allegorical breakdown of the human body in the Castle of Alma episode in Book II. After a year or so of research into the background for this third of a chapter, I started to feel that maybe I should write my whole dissertation about the human body, fitting in The Faerie Queene as best I might. I suppose I broke Spenser down into his constituent parts and threw most of them away. When I next essayed a large-scale project, this time about metamorphosis, I cannot say that The Faerie Queene played quite such a formative role. Yet as I was sending the manuscript off to the publisher and composing the foreword, I looked back a dozen or so years to the inception of the work and declared that my personal rediscovery of Ovid had inspired me because I found in the Metamorphoses the place of origin for everything I liked best about the Renaissance.1 What I might just as well have said is, everything I liked best about Spenser.
