ABSTRACT
There are two assumptions which underlie much recent critical discussion of the ‘Legend of Chastitie’. The first is that love, as it is depicted in the romance of Britomart and Artegall, ‘ceases to be a metaphor and is treated in its own right’; the second is that Book III, in narrating the adventures of ‘a heroine whose mission is to fit herself for the husband through whom she may fulfil her destiny is the book of ‘married love’. Unexceptionable as such a reading may seem, it presents us with a problem when we find that the introductory stanzas of Book III, like those of Book II, are devoted entirely to explaining that the poem is a mirror in which Elizabeth may see her own ‘glorious pourtraict’. The Garden of Adonis is one of the great set pieces of The Faerie Queene.
