In this paper, I will be looking at the classical schema of the tripartite soul, familiar to readers of The Faerie Queene, focusing in particular on the vegetal or vegetative soul. Spenser’s portrayal of the tripartite soul has been recently discussed in some detail by Garrett Sullivan, Jr., in his excellent study Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment, where he draws out the competing tendencies operating in discussions of this psychological model: one tendency is the vertical, which insists that we must rise above our vegetal and animal natures in the familiar gesture of human exceptionalism, and the other is the horizontal tendency, which insists on our connectedness with our fellow beings.[1] These two tendencies have, of course, ethical implications, and are of central interest in recent posthumanist approaches to the period and the poem: what are our relations and our ethical obligations to our fellow-creatures? I’m not going to go into a consideration of those issues in this paper, but that is the larger framework I’m interested in. Here, I’m interested in what Spenser’s portrayal of the vegetal soul might tell us about the reading process and in particular, about literature’s appeal to the vegetal soul. If The Faerie Queene is meant to function at least in part as ethical training, what role might the vegetal soul play in this training? If the vegetal soul does play a role in the reading process, does this add a new dimension to our understanding of the role of gardens in the poem as paradigmatic spaces of education or transformation?

In looking at the vegetal soul in The Faerie Queene, I’m going to be drawing on a less conventional account of the tripartite soul, but one that presumably was familiar to Spenser: that found in A Discourse of Civill Life by Lodowick Bryskett. Bryskett was Philip Sidney’s travelling companion on the continent and Spenser’s friend and fellow bureaucrat in Ireland, both in the service of Arthur, Lord Grey.[2] Some time after Grey’s recall in 1582, an event which would be prominently memorialized in The Faerie Queene, Bryskett writes the Discourse in the form of a dialogue between eight of his friends in Ireland, among whom is identified one ‘M. Edmond Spenser late your Lordships Secretary’.[3] The Discourse goes over much of the same ethical terrain of The Faerie Queene and with a similar purpose, ‘to frame a gentleman fit for civill conversation, and to set him in the direct way that leadeth him to his civill felicitie’ (6), echoing Spenser’s ‘Letter to Raleigh’. Indeed, in the convivial gathering portrayed in opening pages, Bryskett asks ‘Spenser’ to give them an overview of the ethical life, and Spenser declines, saying that he’ll treat of all of this in The Faerie Queene. Spenser suggests instead that Bryskett read to them from his translation of an Italian work, which begins with a consideration of the soul of man, moves to a scheme for the proper education of a gentleman, and finally offers an examination of the virtues. Bryskett obliges, with what is for the most part a translation and adaptation of Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio’s ‘Three Dialogues on the Civil Life’ (Tre Dialoghi della Vita Civile [1565]).[4]

In Bryskett’s Discourse, the three souls are labelled the vegetative, the sensitive and the intellective. As in the most common accounts of the schema, they are hierarchical and contained within each other. In his opening discussion of the tripartite soul, Bryskett emphasizes man’s shared nature with all creatures: ‘For we being participant of the nature of all things living, and those being devided into three kinds; it is necessary that man shold have some part of every of those three. There is then one base and inferiour kind of life of lesse estimation then the rest, and that is the life of trees and plants, and of all such things as have roote in the earth, which spring, grow, bloome, and bring forth fruite’ (34). Further on he elaborates that ‘the vegetative part of the soule, … in plants and in creatures sensible attendeth onely by nature, without counsell or election, to nourish, to increase, to procreate, and to preserve’ (88). The sensitive soul, which we share with animals, ‘hath in it by nature power to feele, and to move from place to place’ (35). And then, of course, we have the intellective soul: ‘that excellent and divine part of the soule, which bringeth with it the light of reason, containing within it the powers, faculties, or vertues of the other two. For it hath that life which proceedeth from plants; it hath sense or feeling, & motion from place to place, proper to the second kind; and it hath besides that other part, wherby it knoweth, understandeth, discourseth, consulteth, chuseth, and giveth it selfe to operation, and to contemplate things natural and divine: and this part is proper only to man’ (35). All of this is pretty standard in discussions of the tripartite soul.

Ethical training, says Bryskett, is necessary because of the affect or the affections that arise from the vegetative and the sensible souls, which much be controlled by the reason of the intellective soul. The principal affect that arises from our vegetative soul is concupiscence, whereas the chief affect associated with our sensible soul, according to Bryskett’s scheme, is irascibility. Spenser would appear to share this particular view; we perhaps see it illustrated in the two brothers Cymochles and Pyrochles in Book Two, the concupiscent and the irascible, corresponding to the vegetal and the animal. In assigning concupiscence to the vegetal soul, Bryskett veers from Aristotle, who, he acknowledges, ‘placeth in the sensible soule, both the concupiscible and the irascible appetites’ (39). ‘Contrariwise’, he says, Plato ‘distinguishes these two affects, into both these faculties of the soule, giving to the first the concupiscible, and the irascible to the other’. Since, he says, Plato ‘hath generally bin better allowed’ than Aristotle, he has decided to follow Plato (39). He says further that in the Platonic tradition, the three souls have different seats in the body: ‘To the vegetative (from which, as from a fountaine, they said, the concupiscible appetite doth flow) they appointed the Liver for her place’ (37-8). We should note here his resort to a garden metaphor, comparing the vegetative soul to a fountain, from whence flows the appetite. This makes sense for a plant-identified soul, but it also looks forward to the garden settings I will explore in a moment. This particular conjunction of the vegetative soul, concupiscence and the fountain will recur in Spenser’s most famous garden, the Bower of Bliss.[5]

In his overview of the proper education of a gentleman, Bryskett goes over the stages of growth and development, stages which are dominated by the development of the three different souls. The first age corresponds to the vegetative soul. In this section, Bryskett advances a theory as to why nurses sing to children to calm them: ‘the most effectuall reason is, that the vegetative power or facultie being of most force in that age, and it taking pleasure in things delightfull, and abhorring those that are displeasant and noisome; when with crying it findeth itself annoyed, it doth more willingly admit the nurses singing, and becometh calme and still by hearing the numbers and sweetnes of the voice delighting them. Thus then are children drawne from waywardnes to be stil, from crying to mirth, and become thereby the more lively and fuller of spirit, and stirred up to a better kind of life’ (43). This might stem from Plato’s comments in the Laws about calming infants with song, but Plato does not connect this calming effect to the vegetative soul.[6]

The idea that song appeals to the vegetative soul is an unusual and interesting one, echoing the tale of Orpheus summoning and charming the trees in the Metamorphoses (10.90-105), where he creates a locus amoenus not unlike Arlo Hill.[7] It’s not entirely clear why the vegetative soul takes pleasure in things delightful; elsewhere in the text, that would seem to be the province of the sensible soul, but this could be a matter of identifying what in particular the vegetative soul is delighting in, which might be different from what the sensual or intellective souls would respond to in song.[8] Bryskett specifically identifies the ‘the numbers and sweetnes of the voice’ as what delights the infant: that is, it is the pure musicality, the physical aspects of the song or the sound vibrations, that delight the vegetative soul, not the words or the images. Taking up Bryskett’s idea that the vegetative soul takes pleasure in the delight of song leads us in interesting directions with respect to Spenser. 

In Book II, where we most see clearly reflections of the tripartite soul, we get a parallel demonstration of the nurse charming the annoyed infant with song when we see Cymochles calmed on Phaedria’s floating Island. Like the figure of Life to which we will later turn in the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, Phaedria is decked in flowers: ‘gaudy girlonds,…fresh florets [and] rings of rushes’ around her neck (2.6.7.4-5). This floral garb suits her well, and perhaps identifies her with those descendants of Circe, Acrasia included, whose magical powers stem from a combination of plants and song, ‘words and weedes of wondrous might’ (2.1.52.3).[9] Phaedria lulls Cymochles out of his wrathfull state with false delights and pleasures vain; she lays him on a grassy plain, and ‘with a loue lay she … sweetly charm[s him]’ (14.9). The love lay encourages him to behold ‘The flowrs, the fields, and all that pleasaunt growes’ (15.1); to behold the ‘lilly, Lady of the flowring field’ (16.1) who in this version seems devoted entirely to concupiscence:

Loe loe how braue she decks her bounteous boure,
With silkin curtens and gold couerletts,
Therein to shrowd her sumptuous Belamoure,
Yet neither spinnes nor cards, ne cares nor fretts,
But to her mother Nature all her care she letts. (16.5-9)

In describing the lily, Phaedria is of course describing herself: she is the lily personified, devoted to her bounteous bower and to the pleasure it contains, and she urges Cymochles not just to take the flower as an example, but to embrace his vegetal nature and succumb to his concupiscent urges. Her urgings work, and he is ‘lulled fast a sleepe’ (6.18.1).

This episode is of course a forerunner to the similar vision of Verdant in the Bower of Bliss, another youthful knight who gives in to his concupiscent affections and becomes essentially vegetative in his blissful surrender in the arms of Acrasia, ‘Quite molten into lust and pleasure lewd’ (2.12.73.8). Verdant repeats the fate of Mortdant, who is similarly found ‘In chaines of lust and lewde desyres ybownd’ (2.1.54.3), devoid of reason or ‘his former skill’ (54.4). Neither Verdant nor Mortdant, it should be noted, assume an animal form. Although critics most often focus on the men who have been transformed into animals on Acrasia’s island, Bryskett reminds us that in the works of the ‘auncient Poets’, men were also transformed into plants: ‘some proposing to themselves only profite, some onely delight, without regard to reason and their owne proper good, had lost the excellent shape or forme of men, and were transformed into beasts or trees’ (140). We know this from The Faerie Queene as well, where one of the first metamorphosed figures we encounter is Fradubio, another youth transformed because of his concupiscence.[10]

Verdant’s name, ‘spring-giving’, recalls the characterization of Spring in the poem’s final pageant, and his vegetal nature is emphasized in the description of Acrasia’s embrace, where she is described as ‘greedily depasturing delight’, (73.4) or grazing upon him. Accompanying this vision of a lusty boy deckt with flowers is the second of the very few instances in the The Faerie Queene where we get the singing of a song (as opposed to the narrator telling us that someone is singing), and it occurs in precisely the same circumstances as on Phaedria’s island:

The whiles some one did chaunt this louely lay;
Ah see, who so fayre thing doest faine to see,
In springing flowre the image of thy day
…

So passeth, in the passing of a day,
Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre,
Ne more doth florish after first decay,
That earst was sought to deck both bed and bowre,
Of many a Lady and many a Paramowre
Gather therefore the Rose, whilest yet is prime (74.1.3, 75.1-6)

The familiar carpe diem motif here, gather the rosebuds while ye may, takes on added force when thinking about the vegetal soul. It becomes less of a metaphor, and more of a statement of a shared nature. The song is both part of what lulls Verdant into this vegetative state, part of the Bower’s appeal to surrender to our vegetal nature, as well as a commentary on it, and a rationale for it. And this is the case not just for the beauty of the words, but also for the song’s musicality, which is an extension and refinement of the music generated by the totality of the garden: ‘all that pleasing is to liuing eare, / Was there consorted in one harmonee, / Birdes, voices, instruments, windes, waters, all agree’ (2.12.70). The song, the music of the garden and the garden itself all work together to move Verdant and the reader towards a surrender to our vegetal nature.

There are a couple of other things to think about here. One is the frequent observation by Renaissance theorists of literature that poetry originates in song. When we think about how Spenser is using the Bower to critique the possible misuse of art to lead us astray, to get us to ignore the rational voice of our intellective soul in favour of the affections arising from our vegetal and sensible souls, the placement of this song is quite crucial: the Bower is one of key places where Spenser warns about the dangers of his own chosen artform. The alluring song is thus of piece with all that misleading visual art, like that seductive and concupiscent enamelled golden vine which:

Low his lasciuious armes adown did creepe,
That themselues dipping in the siluer dew,
Their fleecy flowres they fearfully did steepe
Which drops of Christall seemd for wantones to weep. (12.61.6-9)

Parallel to Sidney’s recognition of the possible uses and abuses of poetry, we have positive and negative examples of song affecting the vegetative soul: calming and pleasing it, in the case of the crying infant in Bryskett’s treatise, and seducing it, in the case of Verdant (and the reader) in the Bower of Bliss, and Cymochles on Phaedria’s island. Bryskett observes of its dual potential that ‘musike well used is a great help to moderate the disorderly affections of the minde; so being abused it expelleth all manly thoughts from the heart’ (109). As we noted above, in Bryskett’s discussion of the calming effects of song he uses the word ‘delight’, which of course shows up in the early modern version of the Horatian formula for the purpose of literature, to delight and instruct. From the perspective of the tripartite soul, we can speculate that the two appeals of delighting and instructing appeal to two different souls: the delighting to the vegetative (and the sensitive) and the instructing to the intellective. What’s interesting to note, in writers like Sidney and Spenser, is that neither have much faith in the appeal to reason: the delighting is necessary in order for the instruction to take hold. If there was, by contrast, a delight in instruction, a delight in the operation of reason, then surely philosophy would be superior to poesy as a teacher, but clearly for Sidney it isn’t: it is the delight that poetry offers that moves us to accept the lessons offered. Literature directs itself, in the first instance, to the vegetative soul, with the sweetness of its voice and numbers; its success or failure as moral instruction depends in part upon the success of the delight its musicality stirs in that soul, before any appeal to reason can take hold.

Poetry’s ultimate appeal to reason is, of course, important, and in Bryskett’s consideration of the potential dangers of poetry and of song, he singles out those contemporary songs in which the music overwhelms the words: ‘But since our musike is growen now to the fulnes of wanton and lascivious passions, and the words so confusedly mingled with the notes, that a man can discerne nothing but the sound and tunes of the voices, but sence or sentence he can understand none at all; even as it were the sundry birds chanting and chirping upon the boughs of trees; yong men are much better in the judgement of the wise, to abstaine from it altogether, then to spend their time about it’ (110-11). Bryskett’s Palmer-like moralizing about modern music evokes, in its negative metaphor, the terrain of both Phaedria’s island and the Bower, where birds singing in trees featured prominently. As with his earlier statement about the connection of music and the vegetal soul, the primary focus is the sound rather than the sense. The connection of bad songs to harmful gardens is the obverse of a frequent connection made by both Spenser and Sidney, where the process of reading is imagined as the traversal of a garden space. This is an extension of the very common connection in the period between poetry and gardens:

The waies, though which my weary steps I guyde,
In this delightfull land of Faery,
Are so exceeding spacious and wyde,
And sprinckled with such sweet variety,
Of all that pleasant is to eare or eye,
That I night rauisht with rare thoughts delight,
My tedious trauell doe forget thereby. (6.Proem.1.1-7)

It is hard not to hear in the proem to Book VI an echo to the garden space of the Bower of Bliss, which also was full of all that pleasant is to eare and eye; only here, the narrator is ravished with rare thoughts delight, rather than ravished by Acrasia. But in all of these cases, I would suggest, the pleasure is based on a communion with our vegetal nature, and certainly the pedagogical project of the Bower of Bliss episode depends upon the power of that appeal, if we remember the central placement of song in the Bower and on Phaedria’s floating island.

I want to turn, finally, to the Mutability cantos, and the final moments of the poem, where we get the image of Life as a ‘faire young lusty boy … deckt all with flowres’ (7.7.46.6, 9). This is the final figure in the final great pageant of The Faerie Queene, staged in the poem’s final locus amoenus. This moment offers a condensation of two key elements of the poem, gardens and art, and it offers a final commentary on the nature of art’s appeal to the beholder. The pageant is produced by the Titanesse Mutability, and its purpose is to persuade the goddess Nature of Mutability’s claim to rule over the heavens and the material world, since everything in the universe is subject to mutability and change. The pageant is produced in lieu of an argument or legal rhetoric; like many of the pageants in the Faerie Queene, it is meant to move a reader to believe something, and it depends upon the resources and the strategies of poetry, rather than rhetoric or oratory. It is thus, at least in part, a demonstration of the way that poetry moves us and it has as its culmination a representation of the vegetal soul.

In the pageant that functions as Mutability’s evidence, a parade of figures representing different schemes of time cross Arlo Hill: the seasons, the months, day and night. The final pair represents death and life. Death is first described as having a ‘most grim and griesly visage’ (7.7.46.2), but he is quickly reduced to invisibility: he’s just a ‘parting of the breath … . Vnbodied, vnsoul’d, vnheard, vnseene’ (46.3, 5). Significantly, there is no lively image of Death, no prosopopoeia bodying forth the concept. Life, on the other hand, is given a moving and lively presentation, and in contrast to death appears to be both embodied and ensouled:

But Life was like a faire young lusty boy,

Such as they faine Dan Cupid to have beene,
Full of delightfull health and liuely ioy,
Deckt all with flowres, and wings of gold fit to employ. (7.7.46.6-9)

These lines are rich in the schemes of meaning they draw on: The Ovidian reference to Cupid and his wings of gold, with its familiar Chaucerian touch: ‘Dan Cupid’. The reference to being decked with flowers reaches back to earlier figures in the pageant of time we have just witnessed, such as the figure of April, ‘full of lustyhed, / And wanton as a Kid’, (7.33.1.2) who rides a bull ‘garnished with garlonds goodly dight / Of all the fairest flowres and freshest buds’ (33.6-7). Spring, in a different part of the pageant, is ‘all dight in leaues of flowres / That freshly budded and new bloosmes did beare’ (7.28.2-3). In the parade, Spring carries a javelin, which associates him with Adonis, another lusty youth. And indeed, the Mutabilitie cantos’ image of Life as a lusty boy covered with flowers can be read as a compressed version of the allegory of material creation that we get in the Garden of Adonis, where Adonis, who is similarly a ‘wanton boy . . Lapped in flowres’, is the ‘Father of all forms’ (3.6.46.3, 5, 47.8). This figure, which combines youth, concupiscence and flowers, functions as a powerful image of the vegetal soul, which Bryskett calls ‘the soule of life‘ (39) itself. Here, Life figured as the vegetal soul is at the centre of creation, and the central figure in an appeal to all of creation.

Sullivan argues that the tripartite soul ‘assumes and enacts a relationship between forms of life’ [11] or in Bryskett’s words, the fact of the tripartite soul means that man is ‘participant of the nature of all things living’ (34). This final figuration of Life thus is a fitting conclusion and summation to all that has come before, and indeed, all that are witnessing it. As the final moving figure in a performance that works to move its audience, Life is also a figure for the appeal of art, for the song at the heart of Spenser’s poetry, and the primary physical appeal of this song to our vegetal nature. It signals an allegiance to life itself, and to the multitude of fellow creatures that gather for this pageant on Arlo Hill.

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