Page 163 - Costellazioni 5

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

the house of Amoret’s cruel tormentor, Busirane, the disguised knight
and “martial maid” Britomart finds Cupid’s image with a “wounded
28
dragon” encircling its left foot (3. 11. 48. 5-9). In Book 5, Britomart,
on a quest to rescue her imprisoned betrothed, Arthegall, comes upon
a figure of the goddess Isis with a crocodile beneath, such “That with
her wreathed taile [Isis’s] middle [she] did enfold” (5. 7. 6. 8-9). That
night, the sculpted reptile comes alive in a dream that terrifies Brito-
mart. In it, Isis must use her powerful “rod” to beat the crocodile and
prevent her from being devoured; now humbled and submissive, the
crocodile soon “so neare her drewe” that “of his game she soon en-
wombed grewe, / And forth did bring a Lion of great might” (5. 7. 15.
9, 5. 7. 16. 5-7). Isis’s priest confidently assures the newly wakened and
emotionally distressed Britomart that, puzzling as the dream’s sym-
bolism and its former assignment of female gender may be, the croc-
odile signifies the “righteous Knight,” Arthegall, who is destined to
be her lover and father of her child (5.7.22.3-4). Bolstered with this
knowledge of her destiny, Britomart “was eased in her troublous
thought” and able to go on to rescue the beloved, whom she had
feared to be unfaithful to her. In each instance, feelings of wonder and
fear, violence, and ambiguously valenced sexuality are amplified by
mystery and enigmatic symbolism related to sacred se ings—all to-
gether providing a strong and growing network of complex textual,
experiential, and embodied memories, each in turn capable of being
networked with other memorial series.
Related to temples and idols, for instance, is a network of mon-
strous characters, including the fore-mentioned monster of Geryoneo’s
temple, a creature the heroic Prince Arthur slays on behalf of Queen
Belgae (an allegorical representative for Belgium, caught in a struggle
between Spain, England, and other European countries during the 1580s
and 1590s). Geryoneo’s monster is a female creature that, like the mon-
strous Errour and the Bla ant Beast, is an offspring of the half-woman

28 On the dragon’s connection to Minerva, chastity and to guardianship of
the golden fruit of the Hesperian tree, as well its now blinded condition sub-
ject to Cupid, see Hamilton’s note to 3. 11. 48, p. 396.

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