Page 171 - Costellazioni 5

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

Intertextual Memory in The Faerie Queene

Textual memory has the capacity to extend beyond a literary text and
form networks with other narratives. Intertextual connections abound
in relation to the Faerie Queene, as the history of criticism and annota-
tions of modern editions easily show. Yet more is at work in intertex-
tual memories than mere allusion. What is imported into a text can be
more than just a word, a se ing, or character type; the memory
brought from another source can also be noetic, affective, and/or ki-
netic; and its ability to move from text to text would seem related to
the intensity and familiarity of the repeated element. Moreover, an in-
tertextual memory can be autobiographical in that it instantiates one’s
self as reader in both previously read and new narratives, and it can
be a basis for authors’ new intratextual memories based on reading of
other narratives.
Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso includes a passage that par-
37
allels Britomart’s experience in Malbecco’s castle. We cannot know
when or how Spenser read Orlando Furioso, but in a passage that close-
ly parallels Britomart’s delayed entry to Malbecco’s castle, which had
appeared in the 1590 edition of the Faerie Queene, Ariosto’s martial
maid Bradamante arrives at Tristram’s Tower to seek shelter from a
rising storm, only to discover the castellain’s custom of forcing late-
coming knights to joust with those within if there is lack of room. Since
in Ariosto’s fiction the Queen of Iceland and her three royal suitors
had just filled the lodging, Bradamante must meet and defeat each of
the three royal men to gain shelter. Having done so, Bradamante is
led inside the tower to an assembly of knights and ladies that sur-
round a warming fire. She disarms, with results in Harington’s 1591
translation that seem familiar to readers of Spenser:

Now when the Ladie did disarme her hed,
Off with her helmet came her li le call [cap?],

37 For Orlando Furioso’s influence on Spenser, see Lawrence, “Spenser and
Italian Literature,” 602-19.

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