The Faerie Queene and Middle English Romance: The Matter of Just Memory. (Reviews).

Andrew King, The Faerie Queene and Middle English Romance: The Matter of Just Memory.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. xiv + 246 pp. $70. ISBN: 0-19-818722-X.

Henceforward, any serious study of Spenser's Faerie Queene must include King's remarkable book. Clearly and cogently written, this work is grounded in his close reading of the poem's Books I, II, and V through the lens of a comprehensive review and discussion of Spenser's mediaeval, native English predecessors in the romance tradition from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries. Artfully woven, King's work also considers carefully the relevant secondary material while it addresses a lacuna in Spenserian scholarship by detailing Spenser's reception of the corpora of his anonymous and named English antecedents and by studying the poet's application of that material to the construction of his own epic.

In the early chapters, King explores the survival into the sixteenth century of the romance tradition, both in print and manuscript. He examines elements of native romance and of specifically English hagiography that, refashioned by Spenser's artistry, lent support to an ardently nationalistic and militantly Protestant poet. In romances like Horn and Havelock, Eglamour of Artois, Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hampton; in the accounts of "displaced youths" and "slandered ladies;" and even in the work of Mallory, Spenser discovered matter that, when recalled rightly, asserted a providential role for a Protestant England. Protestant apologists argued that England was destined to lead the world back to a primitive, pre-Roman-Catholic, Christian religion -- the true faith early brought to Britain - as John Foxe asserted -- by Joseph of Arimathea. King argues that, in Books I and II, Spenser brilliantly adapts to these purposes aspects of native romance. Such aspects include an emphasis on "local and national history, geography, and society," remembered correctly in two ways: first, recalled historically as "only what really happened" and, second, recollected righteously, according to the justice of both divine and human law (56). In the course of his adaptation of English romance tradition to Protestant political purposes in Book I, King argues, Spenser redeems the native tradition, which in Protestant circles had come to be thought "monkish."

From Book II forward, however, King finds, Spenser begins to draw distinctions between the version of England mirrored in Faerie Land and the version being played out in the real world. The poet makes these distinctions between "Phantastes" and "Eumestes" - between the work of the imagination and the work of memory. These distinctions suggest "a Spenserian anxiety" that a providential "view of British, specifically Tudor, history. . . may in fact be phantastic [sic] rather than informed by verifiable signs of election" (171). In Book II, "an ideal temperance. impervious to mutability is not achieved" (187).

The fifth book of The Faerie Queene denies, "with a heuristic honesty... usually overlooked ... providential support for native history" (189). Whereas Tudor propaganda tried to establish an hereditary link between King Arthur and the Tudor line, Spenser doggedly exposes that fiction. Not Arthur, but Artegall, flawed with a tendency toward guile and representing a relative not an absolute justice, is repositioned as the dynastic head of Elizabeth's line. The allegory of Book V more-over, King suggests in his eighth chapter, may alter the way Spenser presents Duessa, who chiefly represented Mary Queen of Scots in Book I. In the fifth book, standing before Mercilla, Duessa may also represent "a mirror image of [Queen Elizabeth's] own dividedness" (207). In the same discussion, King posits that "if Britomart demonstrates how Elizabeth should govern, then Radigund," who subdues all knights "by force or guile" may be "an oblique, critical representation of the Queen as she emasculates and frustrates her courtiers , civil servants, and warriors (207) and may reveal Spenser's ultimate disenchantment with his ruler.

Rich in example, closely reasoned, and devoid of jargon or cant, King's work also provides in its discussion and apparatus a convenient handbook to surviving manuscripts, to their available facsimiles, and to printed editions of native English romance. The book elucidates as well not only Spenser's but also Mallory's reception and use of native material. King's work should prove equally useful to scholars working on Spenser and to professors striving to interest undergraduates in a poet whom many find difficult.