Coursers and Courses in The Faerie Queene

Abstract

This chapter is an exploration of horses in The Faerie Queene as coursers, animals which form various kinds of course as they journey across Spenser’s poetic landscape. If not quite constituting characters or agents, I argue that horses have a vital connection to the movement of the poem itself, enabling narrative progression and acting as sensitive registers of what Paul Ricoeur terms narrative ‘followability’. Spenser’s poem courses forwards in linear fashion, alongside its characters and readers, but it must also constitute a ‘course’—a course of action, or events—that is bounded and paced. While Spenser uses a variety of metaphors to think about coursing, horses reveal changes in speed and direction most subtly and effectively as agile creatures of versatile gait. Finally, they have a special relationship to the allegory of the poem, mediating between allegorical scenes while offering powerful models for the readerly pursuit of meaning. The essay first analyses Guyon’s horse Brigadore, and particularly his refusal ‘to tread in dew degree’ for Braggadocchio. It then turns to Florimell and her palfrey as they course so prominently through Book III, before thinking lastly about Britomart’s courser and the more temperate motion it allows her to accomplish.