Abstract
Mercy and its close kin, pity, make numerous appearances in The Faerie Queene: many a fallen knight or distressed lady pleads for mercy in the course of the story; virtuous characters frequently feel compassion for others, and the narrator sometimes describes his own intense feelings of pity as he observes the plight of victimized women. The virtue of mercy is personified in two allegorical figures: Mercy in Book I’s House of Holiness and Mercilla in Book V. Like most qualities explored in The Faerie Queene, mercy and pity are complex and nuanced, making Spenser’s treatment of them at times seem contradictory: he shows both the efficacy and the danger of human acts of mercy; he characterizes pity as both a sign of nobility and a fatal weakness. As always in The Faerie Queene, context is important. Mercy means one thing in the context of holiness and something different in the context of justice. But throughout The Faerie Queene, Spenser’s exploration of earthly mercy reflects many of the issues discussed in Chapter One: the concern that mercy renders the giver vulnerable, and the anxiety that a queen’s mercy, though the hallmark of a Christian monarch, might be an expression of effeminate weakness; the Protestant demand for more rigor, especially in matters of religion; the desire to praise mercy as a Christian virtue and avoid offending a queen who cherishes her reputation for clemency; and finally, the tension over whether a corporate masculine entity or the person of the female sovereign should be empowered to pardon or to punish.
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Notes
Colin Burrow, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 101.
See Darryl Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 156–57.
Carol V. Kaske reads this as an instance of the biblical poetics of contradiction, or equivocation. Spenser and Biblical Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 111–18.
See Graham Hough for the argument that the satyrs are governed by natural law alone, and natural law reveres the truth. A Preface to The Faerie Queene (New York: Norton, 1963), 150.
Richard Douglas Jordan argues for reading the satyrs as the Jews in “Una among the Satyrs: The Faerie Queene, 1.6,” Modern Language Quarterly 38.2 (June 1977): 123–31.
Andrew Hadfield, “The ‘Sacred Hunger of Ambitious Minds’: Spenser’s Savage Religion,” in Religion, Literature, and Politics in Post-Reformation England, 1540–1688, ed. Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 27–45. Hadfield links the savage nations of Books I and VI with the Irish; he finds a number of ironic reversals in both episodes that problematize the idea of a single and accessible truth. He connects the explanation of Ireland’s adherence to Catholicism offered by Irenius in the View to this episode: in both, the “savages” act in good faith and their mistaken belief is the result of ignorance, not evil (38). Todd Butler, in his excellent essay “That ‘Saluage Nation’: Contextualizing the Multitudes in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene,” reads this and other episodes from The Faerie Queene alongside religious commentary from the period and suggests that the satyrs’ behavior in their first encounter with true religion conforms to the way many zealous Protestants saw their fellow English Protestants: tepidly Protestant, failing to become enthusiastic and devoted in their faith. Spenser Studies 29 (2004): 104–8.
Jennifer Rust, “‘Image of Idolatryes’: Iconotropy and the Theo-Political Body in The Faerie Queene,” Religion and Literature 38.3 (Autumn 2006): 140–41.
Kathleen Williams, “Vision and Rhetoric: The Poet’s Voice in The Faerie Queene,” ELH 36. 1 (1969): 139.
Gerald Morgan, “The Idea of Temperance in the Second Book of The Faerie Queene,” Review of English Studies, n.s. 37 (February 1986): 32.
Mark Fortier addresses this question and reviews the various critical answers to it in The Culture of Equity in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 116–21.
See for instance Sean Kane, Spenser’s Moral Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 160.
Andrew Majeske, Equity in English Renaissance Literature: Thomas More and Edmund Spenser (New York: Routledge, 2006).
Critical readings of this episode abound, with most critics either explaining how Mercilla’s condemnation of Duessa befits her representation as Queen of Mercy, or explaining the cause of the rupture between her name and her actions. Several critics attribute the rupture to a decline in Spenser’s idealism; see for example Thomas H. Cain, Praise in The Faerie Queene (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), 141–46
Mihoko Suzuki, Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 193. Critics Rene Graziana and James Phillips have argued that Mercilla shows mercy toward her own people in protecting them from Duessa.
See James E. Phillips, “Renaissance Concepts of Justice and the Structure of The Faerie Queene, Book V,” in Essential Articles for the Study of Edmund Spenser, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1972), 482–83.
Rene Graziana, “Elizabeth at Isis Church,” PMLA 79 (1964): 376–89.
T. K. Dunseath argues that Mercilla represents the harmony between justice and mercy, and that mercy in her case means the suppression of wrath. See Spenser’s Allegory of Justice in Book V of The Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 216–18. I am less interested in whether or not Spenser endorses Mercilla’s judgment and more interested in the way the episode resonates with particular tensions about Elizabethan mercy and its representations. In Epic Romance, Colin Burrow does examine the episode partly in terms of tensions about Elizabethan mercy, though his understanding of Elizabethan mercy differs considerably from mine. Burrow reads Spenser as offering, throughout The Faerie Queene, a corrective to Elizabeth’s “wilfully random mode of supremacy,” 101. He says that, in the Mercilla episode, Spenser supplies a mode of pity less “impulsively arbitrary” than the queen’s, 132. I don’t think Elizabeth’s supposed capriciousness is the main problem Spenser grapples with in The Faerie Queene or in this episode, though I agree that how to represent the personal mercy of the sovereign is the central and problematic issue for Spenser.
Caroline McManus, Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the Reading of Women (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 19.
Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland, ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (London: Blackwell, 1997; rpt. 1988), 102.
William Nelson offers this and other examples of negatively connoted rusty swords in “Queen Elizabeth, Spenser’s Mercilla, and a Rusty Sword,” Renaissance News 18 (1965): 113–14.
A. N. McLaren,Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 225–26.
Louis Montrose, “Spenser and the Elizabethan Political Imaginary,” ELH 69 (2002): 936–37.
Douglas Northrop argues that the description of Mercilla’s court would lead contemporary readers to recognize Parliament, with Elizabeth/Mercilla presiding. “Mercilla’s Court as Parliament,” Huntington Library Quarterly 36 (February 1973): 153–58.
John D. Staines, “Pity and the Authority of Feminine Passions in Books V and VI of The Faerie Queene,” Spenser Studies 25 (2010): 131.
Patricia Wareh, “Competitions in Nobility and Courtesy: Nennio and the Reader’s Judgment in Book VI of The Faerie Queene,” Spenser Studies 24 (2012): 163–89. That a complex relationship exists between courtesy and nobility has long been recognized. Frank Whigham offers a succinct explanation of some of the complexities in his entry on the social code of courtesy in The Spenser Encyclopedia. Courtesy as a social code has been described as a way of trying to block upward mobility: prescribing a code of behavior that demarcates the true elite can unmask those who would pretend to a status they were not born to. On the other hand, the very act of codifying the rules and techniques that distinguish the noble from the common can serve the cause of upward mobility. Strategies such as those explained in The Courtier, if put into print, may be learned.
William Nelson, The Poetry of Edmund Spenser (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963; rpt 1965), 293.
Richard C. McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). See especially 133–49.
See for example Katherine Eggert, Showing Like a Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).
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© 2014 Mary Villeponteaux
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Villeponteaux, M. (2014). “The Sacred Pledge of Peace and Clemencie”: Elizabethan Mercy in The Faerie Queene. In: The Queen’s Mercy. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137371751_2
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