Architectural Rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser

Jennifer C. Vaught

• Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501513091
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Jennifer C. Vaught illustrates how architectural rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser provides a bridge between the human body and mind and the nonhuman world of stone and timber. The recurring figure of the body as a besieged castle in Shakespeare's drama and Spenser's allegory reveals that their works are mutually based on medieval architectural allegories exemplified by the morality play The Castle of Perseverance. Intertextual and analogous connections between the generically hybrid works of Shakespeare and Spenser demonstrate how they conceived of individuals not in isolation from the physical environment but in profound relation to it. This book approaches the interlacing of identity and place in terms of ecocriticism, posthumanism, cognitive theory, and Cicero's art of memory. Architectural Rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser examines figures of the permeable body as a fortified, yet vulnerable structure in Shakespeare's comedies, histories, tragedies, romances, and Sonnets and in Spenser's Faerie Queene and Complaints.

Chapter One Body-Building: The Besieged Castle in Books I and II of The Faerie Queene

The figure of a besieged castle prominent in medieval architectural allegories, such as the morality play The Castle of Perseverance, recurs throughout Books I and II of Spenser’s Faerie Queene and a variety of Shakespeare’s plays. In Book I Redcrosse is tricked at the House of Archimago, one of a number of episodes in the Legend of Holiness that represents the body as a building or other sort of dwelling. Redcrosse subsequently encounters Fradubio imprisoned in a tree and finds himself in devolving predicaments at the House of Pride, Orgoglio’s dungeon, and the cave of Despair. His adventures in Book I culminate with his purification at the House of Holiness and ascent up Mount Contemplation where he sees the walled city of New Jerusalem. He then rescues Una’s parents from the dragon besieging their castle. In the Legend of Holiness secular castles are subject to ruin and destruction, but sacred ones aspire beyond earthly space and time, illustrating the visionary power of the imagination. Both Shakespeare and Spenser turn to poetry to combat mutability and loss. They mutually demonstrate, albeit in unique ways, that imaginative writing ought to be used for ethical ends directed toward the benefit of the body politic in keeping with Sidney’s gloss of the Greek term architektonike as “well-doing and not of well-knowing only” in The Defence of Poesy (219). Nevertheless, Spenser in Book I of The Faerie Queene and Shakespeare in Macbeth and The Tempest are highly aware of the ambiguous potential of the imagination and its vulnerability to deception or misuse for unethical purposes. These works demonstrate how the imagination can be disfigured or distempered by the demonic or coercive magical arts.¹

Spenser in Books I and II of The Faerie Queene and Shakespeare in Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 depict the body and mind prone to intemperance as a castle or house besieged by vice. In the Legend of Holiness, Redcrosse is led astray from virtuous Una by wicked Archimago as if Redcrosse were Mankind in an allegorical morality play.² In the Legend of Temperance, Maleger and his “twelue troupes” of villains, who represent the Seven Deadly Sins and five vices attacking the senses, attempt to invade the Castle of Alma.³ Examining the Castle of Alma in relation to The Castle of Perseverance, which enacts the battle of virtues and vices for the soul in a spiritual contest indebted to that of Prudentius’s Psychomachia, highlights the dramatic aspect of this Spenserian episode.⁴ Several critics have called attention to intertextual connections between the Legend of Temperance and mystery cycles or morality plays still performed in England by 1580. Christopher Bond has linked the House of Mammon to the harrowing of hell in mystery plays, and Judith Anderson has compared his dwelling to that of Mundus, who represents the vices of the world and is situated on a scaffold opposite that of God in The Castle of Perseverance.⁵ Intertextual, analogical, and thematic connections between mystery and moral plays, Books I and II of The Faerie Queene, and Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 underscore the hybridity and cross-fertilization of the genres of allegory and drama.⁶

Spenser’s figure of Gluttony at the House of Pride in Book I, the episode of the Castle of Alma in Book II, and Shakespeare’s Falstaff exhibit mutual ties to a medieval and early modern visual, performative, and folk heritage. In Book II satirical episodes involving the fools Braggadocchio and Trompart – comedic characters in the spirit of Stephano and Trinculo in The Tempest – anticipate the braggart Falstaff and vainglorious Hotspur, whom Falstaff pretends to defeat in battle in I Henry IV.⁷ My juxtaposition of the Castle of Alma and Falstaff, a figure Shakespeare originally named Sir John Oldcastle, highlights the degree to which both are informed by grotesque realism and founded on the commonplace of the body as a building vulnerable to mutability and ruin.⁸ Though Spenser’s Alma didn’t necessarily influence Shakespeare’s Falstaff, examining these analogous figures together uncovers the earthy materialism of the former that is so prominent in the latter.⁹ The very name Oldcastle alludes linguistically to architecture and its decay over time. Memory, forgetting, and the imagination are central themes relevant to the episode of Alma and the character of Falstaff. Shakespeare’s carnivalesque trickster and popular icon, resurrected in The Merry Wives of Windsor, descends from the grotesque Vice in morality plays and from dramatic personae such as the World, accompanied by the allegorical sins of Pleasure and Folly, in The Castle of Perseverance. The moral interlude Youth, which was reprinted five times through 1562, recounts Youth’s temptation by Riot and his sidekick Pride but ultimate renouncement of them. Anticipating Falstaff, Riot steals purses to pay for his gluttonous and lecherous lifestyle at the tavern.¹⁰ Hal identifies Falstaff as “that reverend Vice,” and Sir John himself jests that he will beat the Prince with a “dagger of lath,” the traditional stage property for the Vice (II.iv.131, 441). Both the Castle of Alma and 1 Henry IV share features of morality plays, which were customarily performed at aristocratic estates like Alma’s.¹¹ In contrast to Spenser’s anti-Catholicism throughout The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s anti-Puritanism surfaces with his figure of Sir John Oldcastle, a mockery of the Protestant martyr and saint by that name in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments of Martyrs.¹²

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A castle in the air offers a useful architectural figure for ambiguous responses to flights of fancy among English Renaissance playwrights and poets. Both Shakespeare and Spenser exhibit literary and cultural awareness of the dangers of the imagination, a cognitive faculty which Archimago and Macbeth misuse for destructive ends. Books largely define Spenser’s parodic artist and magician Archimago and Shakespeare’s Prospero, who nonetheless promises to “drown” his magic “book” and “staff” by the end of The Tempest (V.i.54, 57). Spenser introduces his arch-image maker, or arch-magus, as “an aged Sire” who “by his belt his booke he hanging had” (I.i.29.2, 4). This demonic figure dwells in a “studie” or “hidden cell” (30.6). In the Middle Ages and Renaissance a monastic “cell” provided an architectural metaphor for a compartment of the brain.¹³ Archimago retreats to this “studie” amidst “his magicke books and artes of sundrie kindes” while his guests Redcrosse and Una are sleeping (36.7–8). These black magic “artes” portray him as a devilish trickster akin to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, who stars in a haunting play that influenced Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Ironically, Spenser’s unholy figure’s dwelling is situated near “an holy chappell edifyde” (34.5). The term “edifyde,” which means in the religious sense “strengthened in holiness,” befits the Anglican priest George Herbert’s The Temple, but is misplaced in relation to Archimago’s house where he “told of Saintes and Popes” and “strowd an Aue-Mary” in Spenser’s anti-Catholic poem (35.8–9). In Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI, performed by 1592, Queen Margaret scorns her husband Henry VI in derogatory, Catholic terms that are reminiscent of Spenser’s exposure of fraudulent Archimago in the Legend of Holiness. Margaret exclaims, “all his mind is bent to holiness / To number Ave-Maries on his beads” (I.iii.55–56).¹⁴ Such intertextual allusions and analogous situations suggest that Shakespeare was broadly familiar with Spenser’s Faerie Queene as well as Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.

At the House of Archimago, a besieged castle depicts the vulnerability of the imagination to deception. There, Archimago’s tricky rhetoric and “spelles” are as deceptive as the charms of the witches and their spell-binding discourse in Macbeth (37.3). It remains ambiguous whether Archimago spins fantasies that originate within or without Redcrosse’s mind. Does this trickster function independently, or as an extension, of the untested Knight’s imagination?¹⁵ In the Scottish play, Macbeth’s diabolical visions of the dagger and murdered Banquo at the banquet could be figments of the bloody usurper’s own fancy, or phenomena beyond his ken that the witches fabricate to manipulate and torture him.¹⁶ Such ambiguity has led to lively debate among directors and actors about making the ghost of dead Banquo visible or not to the audience.¹⁷ The uncertainty about whether these supernatural elements are perceptible to anyone other than Macbeth results in a blurring of interiority and exteriority. Archimago is a verbal and visual artist who “did verses frame,” a verb depicting him as an architect and carpenter as well as a poet. He possesses “store” of “pleasing wordes” and “well could file his tongue as smooth as glas,” phrases conveying the disingenuousness of his devilish rhetoric (35.6–7, 37.2). Building materials of timber with which a carpenter frames a house and polished glass needed for windows undergird Spenser’s imagining of this perverse maker of illusions (OED “frame,” trans. II. 4. a). Archimago invades Redcrosse’s mind with his Satanic arts while the Knight abides as a guest in his house; his diabolical aim is to “trouble sleepy minds” (36.9).

The House of Morpheus provides an architectural metaphor for Redcrosse’s mental faculties under attack by Archimago. When the fiend’s male sprite descends to the underworld while the Knight sleeps in his “litle house,” the traveler finds the mythological god asleep as well (35.1). There, the soporific sound of “drizling raine” leads to “carelesse Quiet” (41.3, 8). Inhabitants at the sleep-inducing House of Morpheus hear “no other noyse, nor peoples troublous cryes” that “are wont t’annoy the walled towne” (41.6–7).¹⁸ Redcrosse is the analogous dreamer and vulnerable houseguest figured as a walled town or castle under siege. Recalling Morpheus, the Knight is carelessly asleep at the House of Archimago and unaware of the impending assault upon his bodily senses and imagination. Northrop Frye points out that the assonance of “noyse” and “annoy” imitates “the mingling of mental impressions that precedes the coming of sleep.”¹⁹ Here Spenser’s verse refers audibly to the penetrable psyche of drowsy Redcrosse. Evoking the Knight’s state of mind while in bed, sleepy Morpheus resembles “one” who “is tost with troubled sights and fancies weake” (42.7–8). This phase describing the mythological dreamer prefigures Archimago’s sabotaging of Redcrosse’s powers of sight, a bodily sense vulnerable to misperception. He also assaults the Knight’s imagination, as illustrated by the poet’s implicit comparison of the god Morpheus to Redcrosse with his weakened “fancies.” Incidentally, Archimago’s male and female sprites and the witches haunting Macbeth in Shakespeare’s tragedy, including scenes most likely by Thomas Middleton, are similarly associated with “Hecate” (43.3). In Book I of The Faerie Queene and Macbeth demons and witches invade and trick the imagination, which is conceived as a building with vulnerable entrances and exits.²⁰

Archimago besieges the castle-like fortress of Redcrosse’s mind with a female sprite that he summons from the “deepe darknes dredd” of hell, one Archimago fashions into a pleasing shape as if he were the carver Pygmalion (38.1). Like this mythological artist, Spenser’s trickster “was nigh beguiled with so goodly sight” of his own creation (45.7). The phrase “fancies weake” portraying Morpheus and “weaker sence” depicting Redcrosse blur these two figures (42.8, 45.5). Recalling the House of Morpheus, the House of Archimago becomes a “prison darke” for the Knight as he sleeps like one “deuoide of careful carke,” with his “sences … straight benumbd and starke.” These phrases literally describe the god of the underworld during his “carelesse Quiet” but are figuratively descriptive of the unsuspecting houseguest “in carelesse sleepe” (44.2, 4–5, 53.4). Redcrosse’s sense of sight is deluded when Archimago’s female sprite, posing as Una, attempts to seduce him, enraging the Knight and tempting his hand to slay her. Archimago, whose demonic artistry is described as “waste wordes,” an “ydle dreame,” and “false shewes,” contrives spectacles that function as parodic versions of Spenser’s own verbal and visual artistry (42.2, 46.1, 4).

At his house Archimago preys on Redcrosse’s imagination in a coercive and deceitful fashion. He “made him dreame of loues and lustfull play,” compromising his freedom to think independently of his spell (47.4). Duessa, who exclaims to Redcrosse, “Ne let vaine feares procure your needlesse smart” at Archimago’s cell (54.4), foreshadows and parodies Una, “Ne let vaine words bewitch thy manly hart,” at Despair’s cave in a parallel set of lines in regular iambic pentameter with the same end-rhymes (I.ix.53.2).²¹ Not only Archimago’s but also Despair’s rhetoric is a disfigurement of Spenser’s own art.²² Like Despair, Archimago takes aim at Redcrosse separated from Una. Redcrosse’s “irkesome spright,” a disquieted mental state resulting from the “troublous dreame” that tosses his “braine,” and Archimago’s “misformed sprite” posing as Una intermingle his mind with the tricky fiend’s (55.5–6, 9). The poet’s blurring of Redcrosse with Archimago and the dreamer Morpheus suggests that the Knight’s imagination contributes to his doubting of Una. Such intermingling of inner and outer phenomena remains a hallmark of Spenser’s allegory and is a recurring aspect of Shakespearean drama. King Lear’s endurance of a “tempest in [his] mind” during the raging storm on the heath is a case in point (III.iv.12). This ecological metaphor denoting his psychological turmoil and frailty also provides a weather report, blending his interior state with the physical environment. Redcrosse’s disorientation leads him to become lost metaphorically in the architectural structure of a labyrinth when, “all in amaze,” he sees the false Una in bed with Archimago’s male sprite posing as her suitor (I.ii.5.1). Once Redcrosse’s “guilty sight” triggers his turbulent passions of “rage,” jealousy, and “griefe” to overcome “the eie of reason,” he abandons the true Una with “will … his guide,” indicating that despite Archimago’s coerciveness, he leaves her willfully (6.2, 5.7, 12.4). Without Una the Knight’s mighty fortress is easily invaded and overtaken.

Throughout Book I of The Faerie Queene ruined castles and houses serve as figures for the isolated and thus vulnerable body and mind. Metamorphosed into a tree, Fradubio laments that he is “now enclosd in wooden wals full faste,” a prison-like structure that Redcrosse compares to a “misformed hous” when he meets the tree man while the Knight is separated from Una and travelling with Duessa (I.ii.42.8, 43.2).²³ Her wicked artistry has reduced Fradubio to a prisoner and disfigured the divine image of his former self. Spenser compares the fall of Orgoglio later in Book I to the felling of “an aged tree,” a passage that imitates Virgil’s famous simile likening the fall of the walled city of Troy to the felling of an ancient ash (viii.22.5). After Redcrosse vanquishes Sans Foi prior to his error of joining up with Duessa, she witnesses Sans Foi “her champion fall, / Like the old ruines of a broken towre,” a motif that Spenser develops in terms of the collapse of Orgoglio (ii.20.1–2). This proud figure destroyed by illusions of exceptionalism is analogous to Rome doomed to fall because of the secular ambitions of its inhabitants.²⁴ When Arthur defeats ego-inflated Orgoglio in an effort to liberate Redcrosse from imprisonment in the giant’s dungeon, the poet likens his collapse to the ruination of a monumental edifice:

Or as a Castle reared high and round,

By subtile engins and malitious slight

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Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One Body-Building: The Besieged Castle in Books I and II of The Faerie Queene
• Chapter Two Castles in the Air: The Figurative Frame of Mind in Shakespeare’s Second Henriad
• Chapter Three Under Lock and Key: The Body as a House in Book III of The Faerie Queene
• Chapter Four Ruined Cities and Dividing Walls: Spenser’s Ruines of Rome, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Troilus and Cressida, and Coriolanus
• Chapter Five The Passionate Body as a Built Environment: Books IV–V of The Faerie Queene and Antony and Cleopatra
• Chapter Six The Architectural Place of the Mind: Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index