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

while Redcrosse’s virtuous lady, Una, whom Sans loy had kidnapped
and is also present, expresses surprise and shame at her too-easy “mis-
feigning” the disguised sorcerer for “her true knight” (1. 3. 38. 5-6, 1.3.
40. 2-4). A reader, in turn, may assume the perspective of each onlook-
er’s surprise while retaining awareness that the narrator has already
disclosed Archimago’s disguise (1. 3. 24. 6).
Later episodes in this network of surprising revelations cluster
around Britomart, whose own narrative, as has often been observed,
33
involves a gradual self-awakening of identity, a sub-narrative where-
in, from Books 3 to 5, she gains increasing confidence as a questing war-
rior, as a woman, and, eventually, as a sovereign and founder of a pow-
erful dynasty. Her yet-to-be-born son, prophesied at the temple of
Venus, is to introduce a royal line that, we learn in Book 3, leads even-
tually to the “royall Virgin,” Queen Elizabeth (3.3.49.7). An innocent
young woman, Britomart earlier had looked into a “glassy globe” made
by Merlin, seeing there the image of a “comely knight,” the man with
whom “her life at last must linke” (3.2.21, 23.9, 24.2). Disguised as a
knight, she sets out from her father’s house to find the man (Arthegall)
whose image she held in memory until Book 4, when the two finally
meet, with the interlaced sub-narrative concerning her appearing in —
and lending coherence to — Books 3 through 5 of the 1596 edition. In
the first canto of Book 3, Britomart carefully maintains her disguise
when she encounters the temperate knight, Guyon, and she remains
within her protective armor even after the point of her phallic “en-
chaunted spear” (3. 1. 9. 9) has unhorsed him and after the narrator re-
veals to surprised readers — deceived by the narrator’s previous use
of male pronouns — her identity as a woman (3. 1. 8. 7). She maintains
her masked identity until the end of the canto, when she along with

33 Tracy Sedinger (“Women’s Friendship and the Refusal of Lesbian Desire
in The Faerie Queene,” Criticism 42, no. 1 [Winter 2000], 91-113), refers to David
Lee Miller on imitation and identification in Spenser’s rhetorical structures
and observes that the Faerie Queene “represents Britomart (and therefore the
reader) establishing resemblance or difference between herself and other im-
ages of women — reading the image, and its literal meaning (the allegorical
referent), and then incorporating or rejecting the image” (98).

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