ABSTRACT
As with the other courted ladies in FQ VI (Priscilla, Blandina, Serena, Mirabella, and Pastorella), Briana serves Spenser as a means to explore relations between love and the protocols of courtship and hospitality (i 11-47). Although the defects portrayed in Book VI are primarily social (shame is a surprisingly prominent motif, eg, stanzas 12, 14), they are often psychological. Briana’s flaw is manifested as defective hospitality but arises from the nature of her attachment to Crudor. Her forwardness has encouraged a high disdain in him, and she is forced to comply with the bizarre conditions that he lays down: with the help of her seneschal Maleffort, she cuts off the locks of ladies and beards of men who seek to traverse the narrow pass that her castle commands. This hair is to line a mantle which Crudor wants as a dowry before he will love her in return. Here Spenser adapts an Arthurian story, the Castle of Beards from Perlesvaus (see Var 6:365-7); his version retains the sense of inhospitality and perverted social games in his original, but adds a parallel disgrace to the lady and omits the grimmer display of maimed slaves and severed heads in his original.
