ABSTRACT
To interpret the extended celebratory ecphrasis with which Prince Arthur enters the poem, the reader of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (sixteenth-or twentieth-century) similarly must enter into a landscape characterized by peculiar and unexpected tensions between esthetic, religious, and political (national and courtly) meanings.1 What is most striking about Arthur in his appearance is his resistance to allegorical meaning or intentionality. He remains Prince Arthur, a character described in an unusually consistent chivalric idiom from the moment of his appearance in Book I until his departure from the poem in Book VI. Some interpreters of the poem respond to the many possible meanings that may be attached to Arthur by choosing one as the primary or determining symbolism, and leave the matter there. Arthur, then, may be said to embody the virtue of magnificence (as Spenser tells us he is intended to do in the “Letter to Raleigh”), which itself may refer to Aristotle’s concept of magnanimity, or may be a combination of aristocratic munificence, patronage, and another version of the Glory to which the poem in one aspect of itself may be devoted. But “magnificence” recedes from view in the course of the narrative, since Spenser seems to identify Arthur at the moment of his entry with “heavenly grace” (1.8.1). C.S. Lewis was perhaps one of the most honest of twentieth-century critics when he commented about Arthur in Allegory o f Love: “It will be noticed that I have made no mention yet of Prince Arthur. The regrettable truth is that in the unfinished state of the
poem we cannot interpret its hero at all.”2 This essay proposes that Arthur becomes a central figure-perhaps the central figure-through which Spenser attempts to work out the deeper implications of his poem’s effort to unite religion, politics, and romance. What analogy pertains, in other words, between chivalric romance and the work of grace? Attempting to understand the role that Arthur plays in the poem, and the reasons that the imagery associated with him is overdetermined, is also to reconsider the place, in our readings of Spenser at the turn of the millennium, of theories of symbol and narrative that connect Spenser’s methods to concerns of genre or figuration. One of the challenges that faces historicist readers of the poem is to explain why Spenser is so committed to the romance texture of his poem, and why chivalry might possibly be thought a vehicle with which to express the workings of grace.3
