Spenser at Kalamazoo 2013

Paper abstract

Donald Stump, St. Louis University

Apocalypse on Hold: Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight and the Inconclusive Death of Two Dragons

In light of scholarship relating events in the Legend of Holiness to prophecies in the Book of Revelation, the sequence of events in Spenser’s poem is puzzling. Why are there two dragons rather than one, the first of which (Errour) is slain before the hero’s quest seems properly to have begun, and the second (the serpent he had set out to destroy in the first place) killed after much wandering and misdirection? Neither dragon aligns very well with the “old serpent,” or Satan, of St. John’s Apocalypse, and the Redcrosse Knight is utterly unlike the Rider on the White Horse (or Christ) who ultimately defeats Satan in the scriptural account.

Spenser’s hero acts as if he thinks that there is only one dragon. Once he has dispatched Errour, he seeks “new aduenture” and asks Archimago in the next episode if he “did know/ Of straunge aduentures, which abroad did pas.” After being deluded by the magician, abandoning Una, and setting out on his own, Redcrosse evinces no further interest in hunting down the dragon that is afflicting Una’s parents, the king and queen of “Eden.” Taking up with Duessa, he wanders off to the Palace of Pride, soon afterward falling victim to Orgoglio and Despair and having to be rescued and taken off for a thorough re-education at the House of Holiness. Through eight long cantos (ii-ix), Redcrosse gives no thought whatever to his quest. Only when the hermit Contemplation reminds him of his obligation to Una in Canto x, and she herself urges him “Of her aduenture myndfull for to bee,” does he set out to confront his second dragon.

Although, as I will show, the general plot of Book I lines up nicely with the sequence of events in Revelation 12-20, the specific correspondences are all strangely skewed in ways that emphasize, not the Christlikeness of the Redcrosse Knight, but his faithlessness and sinfulness. Just as a dragon appears at two points in the Apocalypse, so in the Legend of Holiness, and just as the two dragons of Revelation turn out to be representations of one reality, satanic evil, so perhaps here. Yet Spenser departs from scriptural prophecy by making his knight utterly unlike the Rider on the White Horse, and the killing of the second dragon anything but the final defeat of evil. After the monster has been slain, Duessa and Archimago continue their machinations far into the poem; the Redcrosse Knight’s work for Gloriana goes on; and his entanglement with Malecasta shows that he himself has not exactly succeeded in becoming holy. Even more tellingly, all the final prophecies of Revelation remain unfulfilled. No Last Judgment is anywhere in prospect, no creation of a New Heaven and a New Earth, no return to Eden of the sort envisioned by St. John.

For that reason, I propose that, though critics are right to regard Book I as shaped around scriptural prophecy, Spenser is not much interested in portraying his own age as the long-awaited End Times. Though he leaves open the possibility for the future, his appropriation of material from the Book of Revelation is actually directed at showing how very far from fulfilling St. John’s most glorious prophecies the England of his own day actually was. Unlike John Bale, John Foxe, and Henry Bullinger, with whom he has often been compared, he sets out to show the failings, not only of Roman Catholicism, but of its English opponents, who think that they have triumphed over evil when, in fact, their quest is only just beginning. Book I is as much a brotherly critique of contemporary Protestants who saw themselves as saints fully prepared for an imminent Battle of Armageddon as it is a reminder of the greater victory that is to be won by Christ himself at some climactic, but as yet unknown, moment in the future. If only the poet’s wiser and more sober view had prevailed in the turmoils of the next century.

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