ABSTRACT
In The Faerie Queene, besides ‘real’ mirrors like Lucifera’s ‘mirrhour bright’ (1 iv 10), Merlin’s magic looking glass (III ii 18-21), and ‘the fountaine shere’ in which Narcissus views his face (44), we find metaphorical mirrors like the fair air woman of high birth (Una, I vi 15; Belphoebe, II iii 25), the human face (of Scudamour, IV v 45), the head of the slain Pollente (V ii 19), the ‘curtesie’ of the present age (VI proem 5), Elizabeth as ‘Mirrour of grace and Majestie divine’ (I proem 4; cf VI proem 6)—all of them conventional. The qualities of these mirrors are also conventional: the prevailing kind of courtesy is a flattering mirror letting brass appear as gold, the Queen’s mind is a ‘mirrour sheene,’ and the splendor of ‘great dame Nature’ is so great that she can be seen only in an ontologically reduced form, ‘like an image in a glass’ (VII vii 6). What is quite original, though, is the shape of Merlin’s mirror: being round and hollow, a ‘glassie globe,’ it ‘seem’d a world of glas’ (III ii 18-21).
