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The Bacchus Who Wouldn't Wash: Faerie Queene II.i-iiAuthor(s): Carol V. KaskeReviewed work(s):Source: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Summer, 1976), pp. 195-209Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2860466 .Accessed: 21/09/2012 14:01

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The Bacchus Who Wouldn't Wash: Faerie Queene II.i-ii

by CAROL V. KASKE

FEW sources or targets of allusion have been adduced for the com- plex and tragic episode of the Nymph's Well early in Book ii of

Spenser's Faerie Queene;1 hence we lack that check on our interpretations and that isolation of the individual author's emphases which literary history can provide. Perhaps the only characterization of the episode which all Spenser critics would accept is that it is about acrasia and that it is extraordinarily rich in meanings-one of those which stand out, as Kermode remarked of the Mammon's Cave episode, from the generally thinner allegorical texture of its surroundings. Its resulting complexity and difficulty have divided its many recent critics into two main camps, the secular and the theological.2 The primary purpose of this brief ar-

1 The theme of temperance, intemperance, continence, incontinence, and the mean is agreed to derive from Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, Book vn; i.57-58 is in fact a direct paraphrase of EN 1150b 19 and 1151b 23ff. (I am indebted to Professor James Hutton for this and other advice on the present article, though the direction it has taken is of course entirely my own); still in all, Aristotle provides no explanation for the problems of why Mordant dies as he does and of the stain on Ruddymane. As for sources of motifs, my chief interest in this paper, Amavia's despair and suicide are modeled on that of Dido, as William Nelson has most recently and thoroughly argued, The Poetry of Edmund Spenser (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1963), p. 142. The Nymph's Well derives in part, along with the name of the book's villain, 'Acratia,' from Trissino's L'Italia liberata dai Goti (1547-48), as C. W. Lemmi long ago pointed out ('The Influence of Trissino on The Faerie Queene,' PQ, 7 [1928], 220-223); and the myth of the Nymph in ii.7-9 is modeled on the myth of Alpheus and Arethusa along with other nymph-chases in the Metamorphoses (Lemmi, 'The Symbolism of the Classical Episodes in The Faerie Queene,' PQ, 8 [1929], 286). The sources previously recognized for 'So soone as Bacchus with the Nymphe does lincke' are listed in n. 3, below.

2 Frank Kermode, 'The Cave of Mammon,' in Elizabethan Poetry, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 2 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1960), p. 151. To recount the battle over whether the episode should be interpreted theologically is beyond the scope of this paper. The theological critics, who are the more likely beneficiaries of my discoveries, are as follows: A. C. Hamilton, 'A Theological Reading of The Faerie Queene, Book In,' ELH, 24 (1958), 155-162; later incorporated in The Structure of Allegory in 'The Faerie Queene' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), pp. 106-110; Alastair Fowler, 'The Image of Mortality: The Faerie Queene, nx, i-ii,' HLQ, 24 (1961), 91-11o. Much subsequent criticism agrees that Ruddymane's problem (and possibly even Mordant's) is original sin; but it has joined Kathleen Williams (Spenser's World of Glass [Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1966], p. 43) in rejecting Fowler's ill-

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RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

ticle is to point out two sources-a classical and a Christian-which jointly underlie the behavior of the Nymph's Well toward Mordant, Amavia, and especially their son Ruddymane. If my sources are ac- cepted, they will add a gloss to three lines (II.i.53.7-9), will replace an old gloss on another line (ii.2.2) with a new and more relevant one, and will favor the theological interpretation while checking its tendency to optimism.

One allusion which has been partially explained is the prerequisite expressed in Acrasia's cryptic curse of death for Mordant, 'So soone as Bacchus with the Nymphe does lincke' (n.i.55.6)-fulfilled when Mor- dant drinks water from the pure well on top of Acrasia's wine. It alludes to some version of the classical proverb that one should temper one's wine, metonymized as 'Bacchus,' with water, 'the Nymphs.' The proverb has been traced through the general emblematic tradition of water and wine to specific references in Erasmus' colloquy 'Convivium Pro-

phanum,' in Natalis Comes, and in Heliodorus' romance, £Ethiopica.3

founded belief that the well represents baptism, and in substituting one of two alternate meanings. Williams believes it represents 'natural purity'; in this she is followed by Patrick Cullen, 'Guyon Microchristus: The Cave of Mammon Re-examined,' ELH, 37 (1940), 153-174. More closely conformable to the action, though it raises a problem about the Palmer's obtuseness, is the interpretation of the well as the Old or Mosaic Law: Northrop Frye tentatively implied it in his important article, 'The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene,' UTQ, 30 (1961), 120, reprinted, among other places, in A. C. Hamilton, ed., Essential Articlesfor the Study of Edmund Spenser (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1972), p. 164; Fowler in the article cited above noticed the resemblances to the Old Law but proceeded to ignore them; the first full-scale interpretation of the well as Mosaic Law was my unpublished dissertation, 'Spenser and the Exegetical Tradition: Nature, Law, and Grace in the Episode of the Nymph's Well,' Diss. Johns Hopkins U.

1964; see also my review of Williams,JEGP, 67 (1968), 303; the idea was further devel- oped by R. Kellogg and 0. Steele, eds., Books I and II of' The Faerie Queene' (New York: Odyssey Press, 1965), pp. 57-58, and by Maurice Evans, Spenser's Anatomy of Heroism (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1970), pp. 117-119, in both cases in tandem with quite different and I think untenable interpretations. The sources I propose in the present essay could support either meaning of the well.

3 Alastair Fowler states on the authority of Emile Male that the mixing of water with wine is represented in many emblems of temperance, 'Emblems of Temperance in The Faerie Queene, Book In,' RES, N.S., 11 (1960), 143-149. Fowler does also cite in passing at second hand via Mignault (a commentator on Alciati) 'the Greek anthology,' but not particularly as a source for this episode and only to deny its relevance for Spenser, pp. 147-148. As it happens, Mignault may well be an immediate source, since he adduces from the Greek Anthology exactly the epigram I am about to propose as the ultimate source; see n. 6, below. Erasmus' Colloquy 'Convivium Prophanum,' tr. Craig Thomp- son (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 597, is cited by William Nelson, The Poetry, p. 190. Natalis Comes has been proposed as at least one of Spenser's immediate sources here as elsewhere by C. W. Lemmi, 'Symbolism of the Classical Episodes,' pp. 276-277.

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THE BACCHUS WHO WOULDN'T WASH

But an epigram of Meleager preserved in the Greek Anthology (ix, 33 1) has the same motifs as the above-mentioned sources-Bacchus, Nymphs, wine, water, and their linking-plus unique motifs which are echoed elsewhere in our episode:

When the child Bacchus leaped from the fire, and had just been rolling in the ashes, the Nymphs washed him. Therefore with the Nymphs Bromius is kindly, but if you keep them from mingling, you will take a fire that is still burning.4

As James Hutton shows, it 'was much appreciated in the sixteenth century,' with twenty-five separate editions, quotations, translations, or allusions before 1590 in France, and thirteen in Italy.5

The epigram alludes to the whole story of Bacchus or Dionysus and the Nymphs. It has never been noticed that this story is extensively and

Since Comes too quotes the epigram I am about to propose, he too may well be an immediate source but not for the reasons Lemmi states, which are quite different; see n. 6, below. Heliodorus, Ethiopica, Book v, is cited by Upton, an eighteenth-century editor, in Spenser, Works: A Variorum Edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1932-57), u, 193. (All Spenser quotations are from this edition, except that I have normalized u-v and i-j-y; prose quotations are entirely in modem spelling.) The AEthiopica was available to Spenser in the original Greek in the ed. of Basle, 1534; I have used the ed. of Comme- linus (Lyon: de Harsy, 1611), with parallel Latin translation, sig. P5-p5v. The French translation by Amyot (1513-93) also preserves the key words: 'je boy a vous de ceste eau toute pure comme vous l'aymez, ce sont nymphes toutes pures, non meslees avec Bacchus, ains encore veritablement vierges,' Amours de The'agenes et Chariclee par Heliodore, traduction de Jacques Amyot, Collection des Romans Grecs, ed. M. P. L. Courier (Paris: J. S. Merlin, 1822), II, 170. The Elizabethan translation of Thomas Underdowne (1587), An Aethiopian Historie, ed. Charles Whibley, The Tudor Translations (London: D. Nutt, 1895), p. 135, resembles neither the original nor Spenser at this point.

4 AL NulcLAat r6v BaKXov, 5r' iK 7rVpbs jXa0' 6 KoUpos,

vil/av bTrip Tre<>p7Xs aprr KVXt6.evov.

'Toi,eKa ovv NbjuAqats Bp6ouos Xclkos' ~iv 1e Vtv elp'ys .foa"yeOOat, 613T 7TVp nrt Kat6o.Levov.

Tr. James Hutton, The Greek Anthology in France and in the Latin Writers of the Netherlands to the Year 18oo, Cornell Studies in Classical Philology, xxvni (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell U. Press, 1946), p. 353, n. 38; see also for a freer rendering W. R. Paton, The Greek Anthology, Loeb Library (London: W. Heinemann, 1917), m, 179. The Greek original of Meleager's epigram was placed in Book I, third under the heading EI2 OINON, in the only version of the Greek Anthology then available, the Planudean. This was available to Spenser in the editio princeps (Florence: Laurentius de Alopa, 1494) and in five later eds. which I have not been able to examine, and in the eds. ofJoannes Brodaeus (Basle: Froben, 1549), PP. i15-116, and H. Stephanus ([Paris]: Stephanus, 1566), p. 82, which I have used.

5 Hutton, Greek Anthology in France, 'Register,' pp. 697-698, and its cross-references down through Tamisier (1589); The Greek Anthology in Italy to the Year 18oo (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell U. Press, 1935), 'Register,' p. 547, and its cross-references down through Guicciardini (1565), not counting the version by Erasmus because it was counted in the preceding list but counting both Soter's and Comarius' reprintings of it.

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pervasively echoed in the story of Ruddymane. Whereas in the proverb recognized in i.55 Bacchus is only a metonymy for wine, in the epigram (11. 1-2) he is also a literal baby and a foundling like Ruddymane. Now the main event of the Ruddymane plot is Guyon's attempt to wash his foundling in a well which has been metonymized as 'the Nymph' and which is in fact a nymph under metamorphosis (ii. 7-9). What the Nymphs do when they are linked with Bacchus is to wash him; no critic has noticed this fact, even though both it and the epigram itself appear, among other places, in the chapter on Bacchus in Natalis Comes (v.12), one of the recognized sources for this episode.6 'The Infant Bacchus and the Nymphs' was a popular subject in ancient and Renaissance art, and here too the Nymphs frequently are pictured as washing Bacchus.7 In so doing, all these Nymphs are performing one of the duties of midwives, as would be perceived not only from art but from experience in an era when babies were delivered at home.8 Amavia therefore was not just using a figure of speech but was describing a par- tial reenactment of the Bacchus myth when she recounted that at Ruddy- mane's birth, 'the Nymphes . . . my midwives weare' (i.53.7). These

midwifely Nymphs are the antitypes of the fastidious 'Nymph' or well which will refuse to wash Ruddymane. The next two lines of Amavia's

6 Natalis Comes, Mythologiae (Frankfort: A. Wechel, 1588), v.12, sig. G8. In his treatment of Spenser's indebtedness to Comes here, Lemmi overlooks the washing motif supplied by the quoted epigram to fasten on a sexual allegory which has not won general assent, 'Symbolism,' pp. 276-277. Alastair Fowler ('Emblems,' pp. 147-148) similarly overlooks the washing motif, and hence the epigram, in Mignault, Andreae Alciati . . . Emblemata cum Claudii Minois . . . commentariis (Leyden: Plantin, 1591, first printed, 1573), p. 132 on Emblem 25, 'In statuam Bacchi.' Indeed, Alciati's emblem itself is in part a version of the epigram: 'Cum Semeles de ventre parens me fulmine traxit / Ignivomo, infectum pulvere mersit aquis. / Hinc sapit hic liquidis qui nos bene diluit undis. . .' (11. 15-17); it evinces the Spenserian motifs of washing and ashes, though Jove ('parens') takes the place of the Nymphs.

7 Among many versions of the washing scene, the Photographic Collection of the Warburg Institute contains reproductions of three executed within or before Spenser's time: A sketch by Pirro Ligorio (1513 or 1514-1583) of an ancient relief depicting the washing of a baby presumed to be Bacchus; an ancient relief depicting the Infancy of Bacchus from the Villa Albani, now in the Glyptothek at Munich, one manuscript sketch of which is reportedly located at Eton College, see S. Reinach, Repertoire des reliefs grecs et romains, ii (Paris: Leroux, 1912), 74.3; and 'The Birth and Washing of Bacchus,' by Taddeo Zuccari (or Zuccaro) and assistants executed 1560-61 on the ceiling of the Stanza del Autunno, Villa Farnese, Caprarola. I am grateful to the Warburg Institute and particularly to Dr. Jennifer Montagu for access to and advice about the Collection.

8 See for example Alfred Hellman, A Collection of Early Obstetrical Books (New Haven: no pub., 1952), illustrations on pp. 27, 39, 66, 73.

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speech (11. 8-9), moreover, verbally foreshadow Spenser's one direct recounting of the story, thus swelling the allusion to three lines.

Before Bacchus was born, his mother, Semele, was burned up by the thunderbolts of his father, Jupiter. In the Faerie Queene, this much of the story is told among the amours ofJupiter in In.xi.33.i-4. The poet comments (1. 5): 'Whence dearely she with death bought her desire'- an observation frequent in Spenser, but in view of the similar contexts an echo in particular of Amavia's 'So deare thee babe I bought, / Yet nought too deare I deemd, while so my dear [Mordant] / I sought' (n.i.53.8-9).

The next event of the stor-y, in Meleager's version of the myth but

according to Comes in no other, is that the Nymphs take the infant

right from his dead parent's ashes: 'vTrip rEcprs apirt KvXLt6evov.' Only allusion to this particular myth of Bacchus can account for the words of

Guyon's description of Ruddymane-which has no basis, as Kellogg and Steele remark, in the previous story-as 'in dead parents balefull ashes bred' (ii.2.2). The target of allusion previously supposed (by Warton and his many followers) is the phoenix, which, however, does not need to be washed from its ashes and is after all only a bird.9 I might add that if'bred' means 'born,' as it seems to, then it too is even more applicable to Bacchus than to Ruddymane, since Ruddymane's birth occurred not simultaneously with but well before his parents' death. The birth is only symbolic in this reenactment of the Bacchus

myth-Ruddymane's second, but the third and most explicit in the

episode as a whole. Here, then, is still another small influence on Spenser of what was

then a newly recovered piece of Greek culture. How did it reach him- in the original Greek, or in a translation, or in an imitation? The an- swer might of course be 'all of the above,' and with a poem of such diffusion, it is difficult to say. The Planudean version of the Greek An- thology was available in the original; and translating its epigrams, in-

cluding IX, 331, was a school-exercise, as Hutton shows;10 but there is

9 Warton, Var., in, 196; Hamilton, Structure of Allegory, p. 10o8; Kellogg and Steele; P. C. Bayley, ed., The Faerie Queene, Book II (London: Oxford U. Press, 1965); Kathleen Williams, Spenser's World, p. 42.

10 Greek Anthology in France, pp. 13-22, 'The Greek Epigrams as Schoolbook,' see also pp. 85 et passim; Ix, 331, occurs in editions of selections of Epigrammata Graeca which were used as or drawn upon for school textbooks-Soter (2nd ed., Cologne, 1528, not in 1st ed.), Cornarius (Basle, 1529), Stephanus (Paris, 1570), see Registers of this and Greek Anthology in Italy, of which see also p. 38.

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nothing in Spenser's dramatization of it which he could not have gotten via one or another of the translations or imitations, so that the question of Spenser's knowledge of the Greek language remains right where it was. Of the eleven versions which I have seen, the most likely interme- diaries, on grounds both of internal correspondence (e.g., distinct words for 'link' and 'ashes' and motifs of washing and a fountain) and of availability to Spenser seem to be those in Natalis Comes, Alciati and his commentator Mignault, and Erasmus' Adagia.11

A fourth possible intermediary seems to reinforce Robert Ellrodt's discoveries of French channels for Spenser's knowledge of another as- pect of Greek thought and literature, Platonism.12 The 'Epigramme du fleuve Clitorie' possesses neither linking nor ashes but a more striking correspondence: a single washing 'nymph' (so designated in the accompanying 'Fable') who has been metamorphosed into a fountain because she was 'fondant de pleurs,' 'welling out streames ofteares' (ii.8.7):

Dans un feu, foudroye d'une tempeste obscure, Pour caresse amoureuse indignement cherchee, La simple Semele de Bacchus acouchee, De la plus aigre mort receut la peine dure:

Mais du petit enfant la divine nature (Divine, et qui ne peut de mort estre aprochee) De ce feu sans dommage est mollement leschee, Luy laissant quelque part de sa force et pointure.

Au piteux accident Clytorie arriva Qui secourant le Dieu, de larmes le lava Estaignant a 1'entour la vive flame emprainte.

11 est encor ardent a qui sans eau l'espreuve: Elle, fondant en pleurs, de son nom fait un fleuve, Qui rend l'ardeur du vin pour enyvrer, estainte.

The author of this version is Pontus de Tyard; and the work it appears in, composed ca. 1555, is one whose plan would have caught Spenser's eye (though it contains no other striking correspondences that I can see), Douze fables defleuves oufontaines, avec la description pour la peinture, et les epigrammes.13

A further similarity to Spenser arises out of the fact that the name of 11 Erasmus's version, Adagia, Book 11.2.96, 'Perdidisti vinum infusa aqua,' LB 2, 482b.

For Comes and Alciati, see n. 6, above. 12 Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Spenser (Geneva: Droz, 1960), e.g., on the works of

Louis le Roy and Guy le Fevre de la Boderie, pp. 99-105; 114-120. 13 (Paris: Jean Richer, 1585, 1586). I quote the modem edition based on both of these

eds. by John C. Lapp, CEuvres po&tiques completes (Paris: Didier, 1966), pp. 257-259.

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Tyard's nymph, Clitorie, is the name of an anti-wine fountain in Ovid, Metamorphoses, xv, 322-328, which Tyard has personified as a nymph and conflated, as Hutton notes, with the washers of Bacchus in the epigram.14 Now Ovid's Clitorian fountain underlies Spenser's well too. The Clitorian fountain bears toward wine a natural 'vis contraria' or 'antipathy' (the translation is that of Ovid's seventeenth-century trans- lator and commentator, George Sandys)15 which it passes on to its drinkers. Similarly, the Nymph's Well 'ne lets her waves with any filth be dyde' (ii.9.8) and will not mix with the wine in Mordant's body. Moreover, just before thus describing the Nymph, the Palmer gives a survey of'every fountain and .. . every lake' (ii.5-6) which bears struc- tural resemblances to the surrounding survey of 'lacus et flumina' in the same book of the Metamorphoses-the same subject, their diverse 'virtues'

(ii.5.6-7, cf. Met. xv, 334-335), and a similar subdivision, Spenser's into natural and supernatural effects, Ovid's into physical and mental (ii.6.1- 2; 6; cf. Met. xv, 317-318). One could say that Mordant and Guyon approached the Nymph's Well expecting it to behave like Melcager's Nymphs (and Tyard's Clitorie), diluting wine and washing babies, and found it to be a Clitorian fountain of even more violent antipathy than in Ovid, killing rather than curing the drinker. True, Spenser has in- tensified the antipathy whereas Tyard has toned it down to an antidote, because of their divergent purposes-Tyard to expand the epigram, Spenser, as I will argue below, to invert it. This influence of Ovid, on the other hand, cannot account on its own for the whole Bacchus/ Ruddymane story, since Ovid in his enfances of Bacchus hardly men- tions the Nymphs and never the wine, water, linking, or washing (Met. III, 314ff.); nor does he connect, even latently, Bacchus with Clitor as do Spenser and Pontus de Tyard. Both Meleager's epigram and Meta- morphoses xv are present, and Tyard was the first to combine them. There is no reason why Spenser could not have known the French work; even if he did not, however, it illustrates the typicality of the synthesis.

The salient feature of Spenser's treatment of the epigram is inversion.

14 Greek Anthology in France, p. 377. Unaware of the Meleager epigram, John C. Lapp, in his note on the accompanying 'Fable,' cites only the quite different enfances of Bacchus in Ovid (Met., m, 254[sic]-315). He then correctly muses: 'Nous n'avons trouve aucune mention d'une nymphe Clitorie. Pontus se souvenait sans doute d'Ovide, Meta., xv, 322-328, ou il s'agit de la source de Clitor, qui fait prendre en degoiut le vin a quiconque y boit, et dont l'eau sert d'antidote contre la chaleur du vin,' p. 258, n.

15 Ovids Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologiz'd, and Represented in Figures ... (Oxford: Lichfield, 1632), sigs. Nnn4v, Qqq2V.

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What traditionally has been an emblem of temperance, Spenser satiri-

cally inverts by his sinister outcome: attempting to link Bacchus with the Nymph, Mordant promptly falls down dead. Similarly, the Nymph's water will not in this case wash the metaphorical 'ashes' off the foundling, and in fact only proves the stain indelible. As if to confirm the pattern, another uncooperative body of water again refuses to meet two similar and sin-related needs-those of Tantalus and of Pilate-in Mammon's Cave just five cantos later (vii.56-62). Fully to appreciate an inversion, whatever its meaning, the reader needs to recognize the source, making it a target of allusion. The Greek Anthology was familiar to the sixteenth-century reader, as I have argued above, and ap- parently more so than most Greek literature; for, as Hutton says (Italy, p. 38), 'among the greater Greek classics only Homer and Isocrates were in print before the Anthology, anid during the sixteenth century few of the classics were more often reprinted.'

Various critics have perceived something of the well's two disappointments of expectation and have seen them as reflecting some inadequacy of classical temperance.16 My discovery that these disappointments rep- resent inversions of a definite and classical source reinforces that opinion. What exactly is the trouble with classical temperance? Among several possible answers, one which Christian thought certainly gives is 'Noth- ing, except that it is unattainable for more than a moment'; and this is literally dramatized by Mordant's backsliding to the extent of accept- ing the cup from Acrasia (55.1-3) after his reformation (54). In addition, Mordant's death seems to me to point up an inadequacy within the ideal of temperance itself-specifically within Aristotle's doctrine of the mean. The proverb's recipe for temperance through mixing Bacchus with the Nymphs implies dilution and hence the mean. Just three stanzas later, temperance will be defined along Aristotelian lines as observing a

16 Kathleen Williams, Spenser's World, pp. 40-41, and n.: 'To a contemporary reader the reversal of a familiar emblem must have been striking'; Nelson, Poetry, p. 19o; and on the critique of classical temperance, speaking of Book ii in general, Nelson says, p. 195, '[Aristotle] concludes, "Why then should we not say that he is happy, who is active in accordance with complete virtue ... ?" But, for Spenser, no man since Adam could conceivably live his life "in accordance with complete virtue." Herein lies the critical difference between the pagan philosophers and the Christian poet.' Kellogg and Steele see this 'impossibility in the Christian world view of perfect temperance' in the well's refusal to wash Ruddymane, p. 57. In a sense, I am simply hooking the critique of classical ethics already recognized elsewhere in Spenser onto the inversion of a classical allegory of temperance already partially recognized here.

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mean in one's reactions to pleasure and to pain (58.1-5). The wine aptly symbolizes the specified excess of abandonment to pleasure, and the water of abandonment to grief (tears). To 'fare ... atween' them would be to mix them, which according to i.58 should produce temperance; but instead it produces death. The fact that it is the Palmer, hitherto

Spenser's mouthpiece, who is advocating the doctrine does not preclude criticism of it, since it may be (as I will argue in another essay) that

Spenser's point about the mean is being made for the reader over the Palmer's head.

The harshness of Mordant's death can be accounted for by no inter-

pretation but the theological. According to it, the blood on Ruddy- mane represents the guilt of original sin. The wine which has made it indelible (ii.4.6-9) is concupiscence, man's innate tendency to acrasia, those involuntary sinful desires inevitable in man since the Fall; and the well has sometimes been interpreted as law-specifically, the demand for a temperance impervious even to concupiscence, such as is suppos- edly held up by the Tenth Commandment.17 According to this interpretation, the mixture or mean would be a compromise-either Aris- totle's 'continence,' which he is willing to accept (EN 115ob 23ff.) in default of perfect temperance, or his 'incontinence,' which he calls 'half wicked' (EN 1152). Mordant is in this state of continence-incontinence in that he has renounced Acrasia for Amavia but still carries her wine of

concupiscence within him. Whatever Aristotle would have said, the all-or-nothing Christian God will accept no such mean or compromise. St. Paul's persona in Romans 7 was unable to reconcile his concupiscent nature with the perfectionism of God's standard (7:7-8). As a result, he 'died' (7:9-10), that is, according to many commentators, he realized that he was already spiritually dead.18 Mordant, unable to reconcile the

17 On the unattainability of temperance, see the citations from Nelson and Kellogg and Steele, n. 15, above; on the well as Law, see the critics in n. 2, above. The interpretation of Paul's and the Mosaic Law's commandment 'Thou shalt not lust' (so Geneva version; Vulgate, 'Non concupisces') as 'Thou shalt not have concupiscence' is that of the Re- formers, though originating with Augustine; counter-reformation Catholics wrested Paul's absolutist commandment more in the direction of Aristotle and common sense; see, for a useful survey of opinions, Cornelius a Lapide, a Flemish Jesuit (1567-1637), Commentaria . . . (Antwerp: Nutius & Meursius, 1616-1653), pp. 94.2.d-95.2.c on Rom. 7:7.

18 'Paul speaketh not here chiefly of the death of the body, although it also do follow, but rather of that death, whereinto we incur, when we earnestly feel our sin by the knowledge of the Law .... we feel in our selves some taste of eternal condemnation,' Peter Martyr Vermigli, Most learned andfruitfull Commentaries ... upon . . . Romanes, tr.

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wine and water representing these same two extremes, dies-that is, he accepts the fact that he is spiritually dead. He had worked up to that middle state of continence-incontinence, but as Peter Martyr would say, 'before God' it was 'not sufficient.'19 If this is indeed Spenser's objection to classical temperance, a hint for it could have come from the epigram itself: even there, although wine and water can and should mix, the human and divine do not, as Semele too learned at the cost of her life.

The Spenserian detail missing from the Bacchus story is of course the literal substance which needs to be washed off the infant, nanmely, the blood. Also the male washer, Guyon, remains unaccounted for. A bloody foundling who needs to be and finally is washed appears in Ezekiel 16; in the Geneva version, the relevant verses read as follows (with variants where significant from other versions):

(2) Son of man, cause Jerusalem to know her abominations, (3) And say, Thus saith the Lord God unto Jerusalem, Thine habitation and thy kindred is of the land of Canaan: thy father was an Amorite, and thy mother an Hittite. (4) And in thy nativity when thou wast born, thy navel was not cut: thou wast not washed in water to soften thee [Vulg., 'in salutem,' 'unto health' or 'unto salvation'; Great, 'to cleanse thee']: thou wast not salted with salt, nor swaddled in clouts. (5) None eye pitied thee to do any of these unto thee, for to have compassion upon thee, but thou wast cast out in the open field to the contempt of thy person [JTB, 'cum fastidio tui,' translated by KJV 'to the loathing of thy person'] in the day that thou wast born. (6) And when I passed by thee, I saw thee polluted in thine own blood, and I said unto thee, when thou wast in thy blood, Thou shalt live: even when thou wast in thy blood, I said unto thee, Thou shalt live [Calvin's Latin translation, R-D,JTB, 'Live in thy blood']. (7) I have caused thee to multiply as the bud of the field.... (8) Now when I passed by thee, and

H[einrich?] B[ullinger?] (London: John Daye, 1568), sigs. fi.i and Gg.viV; see also the still-important 'ordinary gloss,' Glossa ordinaria cum postilla . . . Nicolai de Lyra (Venice: Paganinus de Paganinis, 1495), VI, interlinear gloss on 'Ego autem mortuus sum,' i.e., 'Novi me mortuum,' sig. 2oiiii, col. 1; and col. 2 on 7:9-10; 13; Hugh of St. Cher, Opera (Lyon: Societas Bibliopolarum, 1645), vIl, 42.3 on 7:9; 43 on 7:13; Luther, Werke (Weimar: H. B6hlau, 1883-1972), LVI, 65 on 7:4; 67-69 on 7:9-10; 69 on 7:13; Melanchthon, 'Annotationes in Ep.... Rom.,' Opera, ed. C. G. Bretschneider, Corpus Reformatorum (Halle: C. Schwetschke & Sons, 1834-60), xv, 464-465.

19 Exactly this point is made by Peter Martyr Vermigli, The Common Places, tr. Anthony Marten (1574) [Colophon, London: Denham, Chard, Broome, & Mansell, 1583], 2.9, sig. RriiV: 'The first way is civil, to wit, through moral virtues. For those do reduce them [involuntary yet sinful desires] to a mediocrity; and those would suffice, if we should only have respect unto the present life. But in truth before God they are not sufficient.'

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looked upon thee, behold, thy time was as the time of love .. .. and thou becamest mine. (9) Then washed I thee with water: yea I washed away thy blood from thee ....20

The basic situations are similar in that both infants are bloody, un- sheltered, and abandoned by their undesirable parents when they are found; and in that a good male rescuer tries at some point to wash off the blood. In addition, motifs and verbal echoes from the biblical pas- sage appear in Ruddymane's story. Amavia's earlier command to the babe, 'Live thou,... Thy litle hands embrewd in bleeding brest / Loe I for pledges leave' (i.37), echoes God's repeated command to the babe in verse 6, 'Live in thy blood.' Guyon calls Ruddymane a 'budding braunch,' and Jerusalem is 'as the bud of the field.' Guyon laments that Ruddymane is 'in the wide world scattered' and like a branch 'throwen forth, till it be withered' (ii.2); Jerusalem is 'cast out in the open field'

(v.5) and in danger of dying (implied in v.6). 'With bloud defild' (Amavia's description of Ruddymane in i.5o.9) and 'guiltie' (ii.3.4) echo the biblical 'polluted in thine own blood' (v.6). Spenser's com- ment on Guyon's rescue, 'So love does loath disdainfull nicitee' (ii.3.3), is an adaptation of the 'loathing' of the babe's 'person' (v.5) which like- wise failed to deter God from rescuing Jerusalem. Guyon's eventually entrusting the baby to Medina for 'gentle noriture' (iii.2) corresponds to God's rearing ofJerusalem. The difference in sex of the infants does not appear to be significant. In the light of these similarities, it seems clear that Ruddymane's story, besides borrowing from the epigram, is somehow modeled on that of the bloody babe in Ezekiel.

In a Bible-centered culture such as Spenser's, a biblical source is ne- cessarily also an allusion and brings with it some sort of theological meaning; and blood needing to be washed off an infant naturally sug- gests original sin and baptism. Seven out of the ten commentaries on this chapter which I have examined read the blood as, among other

20 The Geneva was the ordinary Bible of Elizabethan homes. In the Variants, Vulg. stands for Vulgate: R-D for the Rheims-Douai English translation of the Vulgate, of which only the New Testament would have been in print (1582) when Spenser was composing this episode; Calvin's Latin trans. is found in the lemmata of his commentary; JTB stands collectively for the O.T. trans. by Junius and Tremellius (my ed., London: Middleton, 1585) and the N.T. trans. by Beza, rev. by Junius (my ed., Frankfurt: Wechel, 1590), which together formed the main Protestant Latin version; 'Great' refers to the Great Bible, ordinarily used in Elizabethan churches, also called Cranmer's Bible, essentially reproduced in the Bishop's Bible; KJV is of course the King James version. The Douai O.T. and the King James version, while appearing after Spenser's time, are often relevant as apparent reflections of a sense latent in earlier versions.

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things, original sin;21 a slightly different seven read the washing as baptism.22 The first thing we learn from this source, therefore, is that a theological reading is indeed called for and that the blood, at least, seems to bear its exegetical meaning of original sin, whatever the washing may symbolize.

The second thing we notice is that the 'happy ending' of this story too has been inverted, in that the well does absolutely nothing for Ruddymane. This time the illversion is underscored by Guyon's reactions, first, of incredulity-

He washt them oft and oft, yet nought they beene For all his washing cleaner. Still he strove, Yet still the litle hands were bloudie seene; The which him into great amaz'ment drove,

And into diverse doubt his wavering wonder clove

(3.5-9)

-and then of bewildered speculation (4). The well's two refusals to help people contrast with rather than conform to Spenser's view of baptism as expressed in his Well of Life: 'unto life the dead it could restore, / And guilt of sinfull crimes cleane wash away, / Those that with sick- nesse were infected sore, / It could recure,' etc. (I.xi.30.1-4). The futile washing must therefore portray some sort of baptism manque. It cannot, therefore, in the absence of positive evidence, offer Ruddymane any personal rebirth, forgiveness, or salvation such as is seen by some theological critics.23

The failure of the washing is adumbrated within the episode, being implied by Amavia's cryptic prophecy, 'Live thou, .. . Thy litle hands embrewd in bleeding brest / Loe I for pledges leave' (i.37). Similarly,

21 Origen, PG 13, 712 on 16:4; 715 on 16:5; Jerome, PL 25, 127 on 16:4; Rabanus Maurus, PL 110o, 668 on v. 4, quoting Jerome, above; Glossa ordinaria, rv, sig. uuiiiiv on 16:4; Hugh of St. Cher, Opera, fol. 58.b on 16:9; Calvin, Commentaries: Ezekiel, tr. T.

Myers (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1850), II, 108-109; Cornelius a Lapide, Commentaria, pp. 1047.2.b on 16:6.

22 Origen, PG 13, 713-714 on 16:4; Jerome, PL 25, 127 on 16:4; Rabanus Maurus, PL 110o, 668 on 16:4; Glossa, rv, sig. uuv interlinear (not found in the PL ed., which is

why I do not use it) on 16:9; Hugh of St. Cher, Opera, fol. 56.c on 16:4; 58.b on 16:9; Hieronymus Lauretus, Sylva allegoriarum totius Sacrae Scripturae (Lyon: Vincentius, 1622), 'Abluere,' sig. A5; Lapide, Commentaria, p. 1046.2.d on 16:4. Lauretus omitted original sin, Calvin, baptism, and the glosses to the Geneva Bible, both.

23 Fowler, 'Image,' p. 110o; Kellogg and Steele, p. 58; Evans perceives the contrast with the Well of Life or baptism, Anatomy, p. 114, but still confusedly feels that the well 'slays but . .. saves' somebody, presumably Ruddymane, p. 118.

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God's first gesture toward the babe in Ezekiel, which is merely to bid it 'live in thy blood' (16:6, JTB, R-D, Calvin's Latin versions), could imply God's refusal or inability to wash it just then. More important, an ineffectual washing is read into Ezekiel 16:4 by several commentaries. Hieronymus Lauretus, a Benedictine of the sixteenth century, explains that when the babe is said in verse 4 not to have been washed with water unto salvation, this means not that no attempt had been made, but that someone had tried without effect-that is, without removing the blood:

And indeed generally 'to be washed' pertains to 'from the filth of sin,' either through baptism or through the tears of penitence.... But when in Ezekiel 16.a that soul is rebuked, which is not washed unto salvation, it seems to be indicated that certain ablutions are unto salvation, but others not unto salvation.

If a sixteenth-century reader could see an ineffectual washing in Ezekiel, no critic need shrink on theological grounds from acknowledging the ineffectuality of the Nymph's Well. Lauretus attributes the ineffectual washing to anyone who merely 'goes through the motions'; Origen, Jerome, and Rabanus Maurus adduce baptisms of pagans or heretics, or Christian baptisms to which the person comes unworthily.24 These glosses are widely suggestive for Spenser. I suppose they provide am- munition most directly to critics who, like the late Kathleen Williams, prefer to see the well as the natural virtue attainable by pagans; even so, such glosses do not preclude our seeing the well as the Old Law, which also had its lustrations that were somehow incomplete.

At the end of the episode, the Palmer suddenly reveals that the blood on Ruddymane is a 'Symbole' of something good (ii.io). Of this curi- ous stanza, which cannot be explicated here, it can rightly be said, as Maurice Evans wrongly says of the babe playing with his dying mother's blood:

There could be an allusion here to the Christ child who, through the Fall of Adam

[sic, presumably meaning the Incarnation or the Crucifixion] takes on human cor- ruption and, bearing on his hands the stigmata of sin, carries thereby the promise of redemption which his Incarnation makes possible.25

Another exegesis of Ezekiel 16-one slightly later than Spenser, but useful as an analogue or possibly as a representative of a tradition going back to his time-shows that Spenser could have found such a symbol-

24 'Abluere,' p. 9; Origen, PG 13, 713-714; Jerome, PL 25, 127; Rabanus Maurus, PL lio, 668, all on 16:4.

25 Anatomy, p. 119.

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ism of Christ in Ezekiel's bloody babe. Cornelius a Lapide remarks that whereas God washed the bloody babe, Christ Himself became one:

Behold the love of God acting as a midwife to the children of the Hebrews! What then, and how great His love, since He Himself for little children was made a little child, and took upon Himself the filth of our infancy!26

The evidence presented is sufficient, I think, to show that Spenser had in mind and intended the reader to recognize the story of the bloody babe in Ezekiel 16 plus some version or versions of the Meleager epigram. Recognition of these two targets of allusion both sharpens and enriches interpretation. Needless to say, the ease with which the story of Bacchus meshes with that of the bloody babe attests to an imagination whose syncretic power challenges comparison with Dante's. The epigram provides needed explanations for two statements about Ruddy- mane (i.53.7; ii.2.2). The presence of the same classical epigram behind both parts of the episode-that in Canto i and that in Canto ii-helps to unify it, while the anticlimactic outcome of each part sets up a strong parallelism between them. They center, as does the epigram, around the uses of a nymph for drinking and for washing. Spenser finds her inade- quate in both roles, whether she symbolizes classical asceticism, as some aver, or the Old Law in its moral and its ceremonial aspects dealing with two corresponding aspects of original sin-concupiscence in a respon- sible adult and guilt in an innocent child (Cantos i and ii, respectively). Moreover, certain aspects of Guyon's and the Palmer's reactions to Ruddymane's story are also explained. The Palmer interprets it by way of a classical myth (ii.7-9) because it is modeled on a classical myth. The Palmer's interpretation is allegorical (6-1o), he and Guyon disagree (5), and Guyon is puzzled (3-4), partly because both the epigram and Ezekiel 16 are self-proclaimed allegories, meaning more than they say.

Third, these two bits of hard literary history help to select among the various interpretations the episode has received: Analogues as imprecise as the phoenix27 are pushed into the background. As I remarked above, recognition of Ezekiel 16 exalts the theological at the expense of the secular interpretations. Lewis I. Miller, for example, asserts rightly that the Palmer disagrees with Guyon's theological interpretation but

26 'En amorem Dei obstetricantis infantulos Hebraeorum: quis ergo, quantusque amor eius, cum ipse pro parvulis factus est parvulus, et sordes infantiae nostrae suscepit?' p. 1047.2.c on 16:6.

27 See critics in n. 9, above.

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wrongly that this precludes our following it.28 Equally erroneous, however, are those theological interpretations which affirm that the well has helped Ruddymane29 and especially those which see the linking of Bac- chus with the Nymph as some salutary resolution of opposites to be accomplished, if not here, at some later point in the book.30 To insist on reading in notes of optimism throughout just because one exists at the end destroys the progression of both episode and book. For, finally, the rather harsh picture of the deity given in the sources, the inversions of even their 'happy endings,' and the resulting denial of the possibility of temperance (Bacchus) and baptismal regeneration (the bloody babe) at once intensify that sense of mystery conveyed in Acrasia's enigmatic curse (i.55.4-6) and the Palmer's enigmatic prophecy (ii.io) and reinforce those Euripidean or Job-like doubts of God's justice voiced by Amavia (i.36.1-3; 37.7; 49.2; 50.3-4; 51.1) and Guyon (i.56.8; ii.2 and

4.3-5) which makes the episode in the fullest sense of the word a 'Tragedie' (ii.1.3). CORNELL UNIVERSITY

28 'A Secular Reading of the Faerie Queene, Book in,' ELH, 33 (1966), 155-158, reprinted in Essential Articles, pp. 300-302.

29 Fowler, 'Image,' p. 110o; Kellogg and Steele, p. 58. 30 Fowler, 'Emblems,' pp. 147-148, and Evans, Anatomy, pp. 113, 115-117, 120.

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