A picture of the damaging effects of secret slander and rumor, the Blatant Beast emerges in Book VI of The Faerie Queene as, apparently, the ultimate enemy of Spenser's epic project. But it is a figure of extreme ambivalence; its mode of damage is unsettlingly paradoxical. Spenser paints himself as the Beast's victim; but he also suggests that its poison inherits some of the central ambitions of his writing. Hence the difficulty of casting the Beast out, or marking it as wholly alien. The hermit who cures Timias and Serena of the festering wounds of the Beast (VI.6, 1-15) works, we are told, by orderly and "well-guided" words; but his speeches also point to an obscurely "inward" self in his patients that is at once the source of slander's poison and the final means of its cure. This hermit never really answers the question of why such a self is so strangely vulnerable to the wandering, external "noise" of slander, or why indeed it is the presence of slander that oddly helps to discover that self. In fact, this episode points to the radically ambiguous status of the energy which Spenser locates in the Beast-its paradoxical location at points of crossing between private and public knowledge, and its way of mirroring the arbitrary forms of human desire and fantasy. The Beast's appearance at the close of VI.xii re-situates such ambiguities within a more fully historical, even apocalyptic domain. Glimpsed as it sacrilegiously ravages through the monasteries, uncovering their hidden shames and corruptions (12.23-25), the "evil" Beast appears to mirror the work of violent, iconoclastic questers like Prince Arthur, even as it repeats the contaminated work of the "dissolution" which helped to found the dynasty of Elizabeth/Gloriana, and to place her at the head of an ecclesiastical state. As figured in such an episode, the moral labor of separating corruption and cure becomes at once necessary and unending. If there is any escape from mere ambivalence here, or from historical despair, it lies mainly in the extremity and risk of Spenser's fiction itself, and in the poet's ruthless, if covert, identification with the scandalous work of the Beast.
Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual (New York: AMS Press, Inc.), vol. XIII (1999), pp. 101-123.
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