ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the appearance and the swift disappearance of Una’s lamb point to a crisis in the representation of animals in the late sixteenth century. Scholars have not been much interested in Una’s lamb, which is unsurprising. It vanishes almost as soon as it is introduced, and it yields little obvious richness of meaning. As Una’s whiteness surpasses the whiteness of the ass, the whiteness of the ass surpasses the whiteness of snow, which itself surpasses the creamy whiteness of milk. The frustrations involved in trying to interpret Una’s lamb may finally push us to look in another direction entirely. Unlike the shepherds in The Shepheardes Calender, Una does not participate in extended dialogues; her words do not enable us to measure how far Spenser thought that Elizabethan England had fallen from the innocence of Arcadia.
