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DANIEL T. LOCHMAN, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

despite the anticipated union of Prince Arthur and the Fairy Queen,
Gloriana, Sco ’s aesthetic offers insight into Spenser’s fondness for
entangled episodes, and it demonstrates the importance for readers
of the capacity to remember (or to page back to) threads forgo en dur-
ing long intervening “diversions” as well as their ability to find coher-
ence in those memories. The reader of such narratives must execute a
more extraordinary mental feat than the bartender in Andy Clark’s fa-
mous example of neural constructivism – the bartender’s brain must
“factor in the availability of differently shaped glasses to reduce mem-
ory load,” but the reader must identify cues and repetitions in order
to organize the many available narrative threads in the extended arti-
fact of the text, and the reader must do so while the mischievous mind
of the author keeps shifting the placement, appearance, and signifi-
5
cance of the threads. For Sco and for many readers, such challenges
were and are a source of pleasure.
Entangled romance narratives brought to the fore the problem
of remembering and making meaningful many narrative threads — a
problem for the author (Spenser several times confuses his own char-
acters’ names), for characters within the fictions, and for the readers
who strive to find meaning. As described in the le er to Walter
Raleigh, the Faerie Queene would present a challenging test for mem-
ory, a test that was further complicated by a shift in narrative align-
ment between the first three books, published in 1590, and the next
three books, added in 1596. The 1596 edition presented Spenser the
added challenge of integrating a narrative with hundreds of new char-
acters and dozens of new episodes while weakening what literary
scholar Elizabeth Jane Bellamy has described as the “tighter narrative
structure” of the 1590 edition. Disruption between the editions oc-
curred despite their shared numeric sequence, similar organizational
frame, ongoing episodes, and some recurring characters. The discon-
tinuity in tone and narrative is so significant that, according to Bel-
lamy, readers of the newly published 1596 edition might have been
forgiven if they were not “negotiating — recognizing even — the nar-

5 Andy Clark, Mindware, 2nd ed., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 180.

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