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the King's Men should have employed such an expert caligrapher as Crane a man who also had considerable experience with the law and had been intimately associated with the Privy Council. It is also of some significance that this very efficient company should have discharged such a well-equipped person for a younger man. Finally, if Crane served for a while as playhouse copyist— and surely he did-would not a careful study of his handwriting 8 be of some service to such students as Mr. J. Dover Wilson in their endeavor to arrive at the original text of certain plays owned by the King's Men in 1623 or earlier? Is it not quite possible that some of the plays of Shakspere were set up from the beautiful handwriting of Crane rather than from the somewhat difficult autograph-granting that Sir Maunde Thompson and others are right in their contentions regarding this autograph-of Shakspere himself? Such a question may deserve to be pronounced downright silly, but if anyone can prove it so by determining the exact relationship of Crane to the King's Men, then it has not been asked in vain.

The University of North Carolina.

8 Besides Demetrius and Enanthe, MS. Harleian 3357, dated December 1632 (see Dyce's ed. of Demetrius and Enanthe, pp. vii-viii), is in Crane's handwriting; as is perhaps also MS. Harleian 6930 (cf. Sir Sidney Lee in Dictionary Nat'l Biog. under "Crane").

See his ingenious study in Shakespeare's Hand in the Play of Sir Thomas More (Cambridge, 1923), pp. 113 ff.

THE ALLEGORY OF CHASTITY IN THE FAERIE QUEENE

BY FREDERICK M. PADELFORD

It is almost a commonplace among students of Spenser that with the third book of the Faerie Queene the poet renounced the severe architectonics which had governed the composition of the first two books and yielded to a looser structural method, weaving a wide-meshed romance of many strands and introducing so many characters and so many unresolved situations that the fourth and fifth books were mortgaged in advance. Whereas Books One and Two hold tenaciously to the affairs of the respective heroes and show the establishment of the knights, through discipline, in holiness and continence, in Book Three there is no progression of experience for the Knight of Chastity and she is even cavalierly dismissed in the fourth canto and not introduced again until the ninth, and then only to be dismissed afresh in canto ten. It is the aim of this paper to show that in reality Spenser did not depart from his original design in Book Three, that the book is admirably conceived to expound its virtue, chastity, and that it is unified and organic.

Why Spenser selected chastity for one of his twelve virtues, inasmuch as it was not included-save by a wrenching of termsin Aristotle's category of the virtues, and why, if included at all, it is given so early and conspicuous a place in the poem, have been the subject of more or less discussion.

As to Spenser's dependence upon the virtues as recognized and expounded in the Nicomachean Ethics, we are coming increasingly to appreciate that, while a careful student of Aristotle, he was widely read in the Latin and mediæval moralists and in the many Renaissance philosophers, theologians and students of society who, well versed in Aristotle as they were, yet took his ethics more as a point of departure than as a code. When in the introductory letter to Raleigh, Spenser announces that he was following "Aristotle and the rest," the rest certainly was meant to include such philosophers and theorists as Cicero, Boethius, Francesco Piccolomini, Alessandro Piccolomini, Cinthio, Jean Bodin, and Melanchthon, not to mention many another weighty scholar, and such elegant expositors of the deportment becoming gentlemen

and ladies and of the nobility of woman, as Castiglione, Agrippa, Capella and Domenichi.

Assuredly to one read in the graceful literature of conduct that emanated from those Italian courts where woman played so conspicuous a part, it would have been out of the question to omit that virtue which peculiarly distinguishes woman, and especially in poem directed to a sovereign who posed as the virgin queen and who encouraged her subjects to shield her amours with pirotechnic praises of her chastity.

There were at least two reasons for assigning chastity the particular place that it occupies in the poem. In the first place, if the three books were to be published initially in an effort to secure royal approval and financial assistance from the throne, clearly that book should be included which would embody the counterpart of "the most excellent and glorious person of our soveraine the Queene."

In the second place, the exposition of chastity logically follows that of continence (temperance), for chastity is continence in a particular province and is to all intents and purposes synonymous with continence when we think of that virtue in connection with women. It was always so treated by the Latin philosophers and by the philosophers of the Reformation. Thus, to give one illustration of many, Melanchthon, whose Enarrationes aliquot Librorum Ethicorum Aristotelis-very palpably known to Spenserseeks to relate Aristotle to the Hebraic law and the Pauline theology, links chastity with temperance in the following language:

DE TEMPERANTIA

Temperantia est virtus, quae mediocritatem efficit secundum rectam rationem in cibo et potu. Nam in his Latini proprie utuntur temperantiae nomine sed Aristoteles his addit mediocritatem in venereis, hanc usitate continentiam vocant nomine generis.

Prodest videre, quomodo in sermone apostolico virtutes nuncupentur, et ad quae praecepta decalogi referendae sint, ut supra contulimus christianam et philosophicam tolerantiam. Proprie autem christiana tolerantia primi praecepti virtus est, quia est obedientia in doloribus, quae immediate Deo praestatur, et cum spe auxilii divini coniuncta est. Fortitudo vero bellica ad praeceptum quintum, quod docet, quando sit pugnandum, quando non. Haec nominum et decalogi collatio admonet nos de mandatis Dei, et aliquid lucis addit huic toti doctrinae, et numerus virtutum, animadversa hac distributione aptius comprehendi potest. In sermone aposto

lico temperantia in cibo et potu vocatur sobrietas. Quod vero Latini proprie pudicitiam dicunt, Paulus alias ȧyvelav, alias sanctificationem. Vocabulum vero σwopoσúvn latius patet apud eum, et generaliter significat modestiam, id est, moderationem in omni gestu, sermone, incessu et voluptatibus quibuscunque plane, ut germanice dicimus zuchtig, et, ut Cicero de quarta virtute in officiis loquitur. Exempla passim obvia sunt: 1. Timoth. 2, (15) inquit: Mulieres salvas fieri per officia partus, si tamen manserint in fide, dilectione, sanctificatione et modestia. Apte virtutes maxime necessarias complectitur, fidem, quae est fons veri cultus Dei, et verae invocationis, dilectionem, id est, honesta officia erga maritum, liberos et caeteros gradus, sanctificationem, id est, pudicitiam, seu costitatem, seu fidem coniugalem. Huic addit deinde moderationem in omnibus voluptatibus, cibo, potu, gestu, ne sit temulenta, procax, insolens etc. Ita de pudicitia loquitur, 1. Thess. 4 (3. 4.): Haec est voluntas Dei, sanctificatio vestra, ut abstineatis a scortatione et sciat unusquisque vas suum possidere in sanctificatione, item ad Ebraeos (12, 14.); Retinete sanctificationem, sine qua nemo Deum videbit. In his locis proprie loquitur scriptura de castitate seu pudicitia. Pertinent autem hae virtutes, temperantia seu sobrietas, et pudicitia ad sextum praeceptum: Non moechaberis.

Since chastity is thus related to continence, the Knight of Chastity, must, like the Knight of Continence, be one who, in contradistinction to the temperate person, is of a positive and energetic spirit, capable of strong passions, and moderate in conduct only because rigorously self-disciplined in accordance with reason. The ideal woman, as defined by the Italian writers on conduct and as portrayed in the contemporary literature, is keenly aware of life, volitional and constructive, shrewd in interpreting character, tactful and versatile. In her judgment and resource, she has the equipment for protecting herself from evil design, and she has the ruddy and many-sided interests which, quite as much as immediate self-control, safeguard her from her passions.

Now it is just such a conception of the chaste woman-vigorous, well-balanced and soundly bred, that Spenser presents in the third book of his great romance, and the historical passages asidewhich are introduced, as in Book Two, primarily to compliment the Queen and to support the political allegory,—all of the episodes bear directly and vitally upon the theme.

I shall therefore attempt to expound Book Three without any reference to the history of the characters in the succeeding books or to the significance for Book Three of the information which these later books contain, and to consider the allegory of chastity

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as a unit in itself,-in short to recover the impression that it must have made upon its first publication in 1590.

It may be asked at the outset, why did not the poet in this book— after the manner of the preceding-show the gradual establishment of his heroine in the virtue which she celebrates. The answer must be apparent: to do so would be to make the character unconvincing. Chastity in itself is not a virtue of slow growth, emerging through a process of gradual education. So to present it would be ridiculous, for chastity is not relative; either a woman is chaste or she is not. The education comes in the building up of those accessory interests, activities, and knowledges which protect chastity and throw the physical claims of life into proper focus. But such education is more pleasantly and more effectively illustrated if several characters are employed, and Spenser knew this to be the case.

In accordance with his procedure at the beginning of the second book, the poet regards it as his first obligation to establish the relation of chastity to the virtues previously considered, holiness and temperance, and that other virtue, heavenly grace, which, by furnishing aid at critical stages, serves to synthesize all of the virtues. This he does in Canto One.

First the poet accomplishes the reconciliation of chastity and temperance. This is done through the conventional machinery of a passage at arms. At first blush chastity might be regarded as opposed to that golden mean exemplified in continence. But Spenser wishes to make it clear from the start that by chastity he does not mean the arid chastity of the self-appointed celibate, but the chastity of one who assigns to the body its legitimate claims.1 That the final reconciliation and alliance is achieved through the good offices of The Palmer and Prince Arthur-or Reason and Heavenly Grace, comprehending both the natural and the spiritual

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1 Cf. Susannah J. McMurphy, Spenser's Use of Ariosto for Allegory, University of Washington Publications in Language and Literature, vol. 2, 1924, p. 31: Chastity in Spenser is not the vowed celibacy of the mediaeval ascetic, but is synonymous with conjugal love in its purest form. This idea he holds in common with Ariosto's commentators [Fornari, Toscanella, and Porcacchi], who describe Bradamante, the model for Spenser's Britomart, as, successively, the chaste wife in contrast to the meretrix Alcina, the divine love in contrast to carnal love and in another phrase, Heavenly Grace."

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