ABSTRACT
Identity in Spenser’s poetry (here limited to FQ) is extremely various. There is no single formula that will serve to explicate the way in which the social situation of Spenser’s characters-their objective position in a network of obligations, roles, status hierarchies, kinship bonds, and possessions-is coordinated with their particular perceptions, desires, and actions. This is not to say that each character possesses a unique and irreducible core of selfhood; on the contrary, nothing is more familiar in The Faerie Queene than the linked narrative principles of interchangeability and duplication (whereby, for example, Sansfoy, Sansloy, and Sansjoy all seem, in effect, versions of one another and of the characters they encounter). But these allegorical fragments of identity coexist and interact with f ar more complex, nuanced characters who arouse in the reader the moral discriminations and identifications that are among the familiar pleasures of literary realism.
