Nora Johnson:	Good afternoon. My name is Nora Johnson. I'm chair of the English Department, which means that I have the very great pleasure of introducing Eric Song this afternoon, so that he can give us the lecture that he promises to give. I want to say, before I begin the introduction properly, that absolutely anyone who would be introducing is met with an immediate and really daunting challenge. You'll recognize this if you know Eric. 
	I realize that no matter what I say about Eric, it's going to be met with some kind of incredibly witty and slightly self-deprecating riposte. But I have steeled myself. "If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all." Hamlet comes in handy for certain things. So let's let it be and hope for the best and I will forge ahead bravely. 
	Eric comes to us from Queens College University of New York where he taught for a couple of years before we were lucky enough to have him join our department. His Ph.D is from the University of Virginia. In 2013, last year, his first book was published with Cornell University Press. It's called, Dominion Undeserved, Milton and the Perils of Creation. That is a book that is well-known and beloved to the English Department. 
	It's a study of Milton's work, in terms of an anxiety about the parts of the created order, so that will be matter, chaos, women, Irish people. All near and dear to my heart, who are recalcitrant in the face of God's creating power. Eric does this amazing reading of those figures in Milton's work and the ways that they help Milton position himself theologically and as an author, and also politically. 
	In Eric's reading, all of that becomes an exploration of empire, of political sovereignty, of the spiritual destiny of the English people, of authority in marriage, and of Milton's own poetic career and political career. What we see in that first book, I think we're going to see again this afternoon in Eric's talk, is that ability to take concerns that could be read as narrowly literary, or even theological, and expand them out into a really deep and really rewarding engagement with history and politics. 
	Eric's current book in progress, from which we're going to hear a section today, is called Love Against Substitution. I guess you all saw that intriguing title. Politics, religion, and conjugal narratives in 17th century England. It's a study of a surprisingly fundamental question. When is it okay to think of people as interchangeable with one another, and when is it crucial to think of them as unique? Romantic love, being of course, one really central place to explore that set of issues. What we'll hear today, importantly, will do a lot to convey the sense of excitement about the relationship between literary forms and their relationship to history, that scholars like Eric have advanced in recent years.
	Because of the genuine depth and breath of Eric's scholarship, he's able to connect discourses about love, literature, and politics in ways that go far beyond that fascinating anecdote model that we were once so familiar with. The old joke about that form of historicist study was, "Two nuns arrive in the new world, cut to a Shakespeare play."
	We're going to hear something really different here. We're going to hear about an engagement with political theology and literature that really struggles to articulate how, an Edmund Spenser for instance, might have seen those issues himself connecting and failing to connect, and how it is that he is actually warping the thought on those subjects to address the slippages that he sees. 
	This study is going to repay our attention very richly and I'll let it commence in a moment. I just want to say this, "Some time ago, a student let it be known that he wished he could have Professor Song's mind." Now that seems very unrealistic to me. Swarthmore professors can be self-sacrificing, but I think there have to be limits. What we get instead of that imagine cerebral fungibility, will be the pleasure of conversation with Eric. Hearing Eric make connections between things that nobody else in the field really is connecting in exactly that same way.
	That pleasure is one of the many gifts that Eric has brought to this campus. In his classes, which are packed with students who are eager to exchange ideas with him. In our departmental conversations, where his insight and his constructive skepticism and yes, his wit, have been impossible to replace. We have over the last several years been privilege to enjoy a challenging and stimulating discussion. I have no doubt but that this afternoon will be the latest installment. So please join me in welcoming Eric Song. 
Eric Song:	Thank you Nora for that completely accurate introduction. 
Nora Johnson:	See I told you.
Eric Song:	Thanks to everyone for coming. It struck me as I was preparing for this that I have now, by this point, talked about this work in progress at several different occasions to different audiences, and now I feel like a traveling salesman, selling the same vacuum cleaner. If you've heard this before, not just thank you, but my apologies. 
	The title of my talk is borrowed from a line attributed to Oscar Wilde. The story goes that Wilde once bragged in company that he could extemporize a witty quip on any subject. When someone suggested the subject of the Queen, Wilde naturally responded, "The politics and theology of Edmund Spenser's matrimonial poetics." 
	The work that I'm presenting today is drawn from the first chapter of my current book project titled, Love Against Substitution. My talk will make the most sense in contest, so I'll sketch out my larger argument. In fact, the trajectory of this talk will mimic the patterns of a sabbatical year. I'll define the broad aims of my project, then I'll present a selective reading of Spenser's Amoretti, the sonnet sequence that celebrates his own marriage. 
	This will bring me into the point where I can articulate the real payoff of my entire chapter, What Spenser's Account of His Own Love Means for Our Understanding of the Fairy Queen; His Long, Unfinished, Allegorical Epic Celebrating the Unmarried Queen Elizabeth I. And this is exactly when I'll have run out of time and will end abruptly.
	With that caveat, we should begin. My book project revisits a very familiar historical narrative. In 17th century England, the meaning and practice of marriage began to change. What might have served to regulate reproduction and transfers of property and titles, came to be seen more and more as a personally and spiritually vital relationship. Historians have debated the precise nature and causes of this shift, demographic and economic changes, as well as developments in Protestant teaching. This historical narrative is, at the same time, a turning point in our standard literary history. Married life would eventually become a central literary topic, and the genre of the novel would become ascendent as it became suited to representing bourgeois domesticity.
	My project begins with either a intuition, a hunch, a conviction, whatever, that this historical narrative has not quite articulated something. Not something that's obscure, but rather something that's central but maybe hidden in plain site. That something is the full historical meaning behind the literary definition of marriage as they love for a unique, irreplaceable object. This definition pits conjugal love against a basic logic of substitution. The notion that one person can affectively assume the place of another, in the context of marriage, remarriage after death let's say, or in our culture, divorce. More generally upon death or retirement or graduation, whatever, and that we are thus, all replaceable.
	I assume that love, whatever it might be defined as, requires some fuzzy, but essential, conviction that the beloved is unique and irreplaceable. Love saves us from being merely fungible. But the definition of marriage, essentially about love, is completely historically contingent. As C.S. Lewis puts it, clearly overstating the case, "In the medieval period, marriage had nothing to do with love, and no nonsense about marriage was tolerated. All matches were matches of interest." At the most basic level, marriage governs substitution by regulating the reproduction of heirs, who can replace their parents. Yet in the 17th century, a wide range of authors give voice to a notion of conjugal love, as defined by the insistence on a irreplaceable object, as a rejection of substitutes. 
	Very basic questions arise. Is marriage an apparatus to replace mortal selves? Or is it the site of a unique, non-negotiable love? There's no strict contradiction here. The relationship between children and parents might be based on replacement, whereas the relationship between spouses may not be. But the affective tension between love and substitution allows literary texts to apply emotional pressure on the very idea of human replaceability, and this, I argue, becomes an important way that conjugal narratives can raise very large scale questions about religion and politics.
	We can enrich our sense of this tension as a historical formation by returning to two key definitions of marriage found in the Bible. The first comes from Genesis, immediately after Adam and Eve unite. "This is now bone of my bones, And flesh of my flesh; She shall be called Woman, Because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh." Here, marriage has everything to do with substitution. The organic fusion of two into one motivates an intergenerational transfer. 
	But this definition is doubly mysterious. The author of this chapter emphasizes the transition from one family unit to another, despite the fact that neither Adam nor Eve have parents. Clearly, the story of the first marriage, is meant to apply to future couples. But Eve's union with Adam is actually a reunion. The restoration of her flesh to its original source. What does it mean for actual husbands and wives to seek to become one flesh? Unlike Eve, an individual wife has not been created out of her would-be husband's side. People who seek to find the one flesh bound of marriage might slide from this original truth into the less clear world of something like metaphor.
	When Paul redefines marriage within the new religion that he works to establish, he heightens the mysterious aspects of conjugal love, rather than clarifying them. I'll give you guys a chance to read this on your own for 30 seconds. Paul does address what it means for husbands to love their wives as their own flesh, when this is not literally true. The husband should do so to emulate Christ's love for his bride, the church. But this answer raises new and different questions. Husbands and wives are now all a part of Christ's corporate body. Husbands experience being a part of Christ's communal bride, while at the same time, aiming to be lordly with respect to their individual wives. The question of why one particular husband, who is now neither Adam nor Christ, should seek to love one particular wife, who is neither the universal church nor a piece of his own body, still remains unclear.
	Paul also leaves unanswered the question of how wives should love and obey their husbands as if they were Christ. This simile promises to transform everyday life into a sign of a higher truth, but it does not undo the simple fact that husbands are very often not Christlike. What about marriages intergenerational function? What does legitimate reproduction have to do with Christ and the church? In retrospect, and this a difficult conceptual hook of my project, it's possible that this Pauline definition of marriage might replace one form of substitution, reproductive and intergenerational, with another, sacrificial. 
	In what sense Christ gives himself up for the church is perhaps the most fundamental mystery in Christian theology. In England, by the 17th century, a Protestant doctrine of penal atonement had assumed prominence, although certainly not an unchallenged prominence. According to such teachings, Christ takes upon himself the divine wrath that was due to sinners. Christ dies, in other words, as a substitute sacrifice. Somewhat paradoxically then, according to this kind of view of atonement, Christ sacrifices his own body to purify his church. His future bride and corporate body. This form of sacrifice, at once self-negation and a care for one's body, serves here as the higher spiritual meaning of marriage itself.
	The upshot being that marriage is called upon to hold together a cluster of dynamics; regulated reproduction, sacrifice, love, that do not fit together very neatly. This constellation is not only a religious and practical matter, but also a basic political concern. 
	My project focuses primarily on the way that royalist ideology relies on these different meanings of marriage to perpetuate sovereignty in different ways. At the literal level of course, marriage produces heirs, who should, theoretically, replace the monarch seamlessly upon death. At the metaphorical level, royalist ideology relies on marriage to strengthen the alignment of the monarch with Christ. In 1603, King James I, memorably declared before parliament, "What God hath conjoined then, let no man separate. I am the husband, and the whole island is my lawful wife."
	Ernst Kantorowicz quotes this declaration in The King's Two Bodies, a study in medieval political theology, one of the most influential works of scholarship across the humanities from the mid 20th century. Kantorowicz argues that James' metaphor borrows from the Corpus Mysticum, the whole union between Christ and his body, or in the terms of my argument, between Christ and his bride. This is an early moment in Kantorowicz's expansive claim for how the difference between an individual king, mortal, fallible, and the perpetual, undying body of the capital K king, is negotiated by adapting Christology to royalist theory. 
	Appeals to the King as being Christlike would however intensify. Precisely, when kingship itself was in jeopardy. In 1649, the unthinkable happened when after a series of civil wars, James' son King Charles I was publicly executed for treason. England was about to undergo an 11 year long experiment in non-monarchical government. 
	But this experiment would collapse in part, because the image of the king as a beloved martyr endured. This image was most famously promoted in the frontispiece to Eikon Basilike, the royal portrait rushed to publication days after Charles' execution. This book would become the runaway best sellar of the 17th century England, and it's this image of the King as suffering and Christlike before death, and not the image of King as Christlike husband, that would have the greatest and most enduring cultural effect in the century.
	Charles I actually marriage to a french Catholic Princess, those are bad things, had been a source of his political downfall. But the appeal of a Christlike monarch played an instrumental role in restoring birthright and hereditary monarchy. In 1660, as one scholar puts it, "Charles I as crucified Christ gave way to Charles II, as the resurrected Christ."
	I argue that during this tumultuous century, authors from a wide range of cultural positions defined marriage against substitution, as a way to test urgent religious and political ideas through their imaginative fictions. These developments in storytelling have been handed down to subsequent generations in ways that have shaped the ways we continue to narrate what marriage means. I won't belabor the obvious point, we continue to fight over the divided definitions of marriage that we have inherited. Whether it essentially concerns personal love, or sex and reproduction, or state regulation, or economics. 
	The ultimate motivation of derives from my belief that authors, ranging from Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Aphra Behn to name few, reshaped the link between marriage and literary form, in ways that continue to exert an indirect but traceable influence on us. Whether or not we have any particular interest in 17th century religion or politics, there's a history behind our politically-charged collective imaginations about what marriage fundamentally means. 
	In the case of Edmund Spenser, we look back to the end of the 16th century, rather than to the 17th, to the reign not of James I or his son Charles, but to Elizabeth I, whose most defining characteristic might have been her unmarried condition. The execution of Charles I in 1649 certainly could not have been foreseen in Spenser's time. But the reign of an aging queen with no immediate heir produced intense political anxieties, and even abortive attempts at coup d'etat. 
	Spenser had his more personal reasons to look into the religious, political, and personal meanings of marriage, as this very brief biographical sketch will suggest. All I want to really emphasize, just a couple of points, Spenser grew up humble and poor, through channels that we think we understand, but we're not 100% sure. He gets an excellent education and he attends Cambridge as a sizar. Sizar being, in our parlance, a work-study scholarship student. This being Elizabethan England, this is an intensely humiliating position. He basically had to do menial chores, that servants were expected to do, for his fellow students. 
	He does establish himself as very brilliant scholar, and he begins to make connections, and that's important. One thing that's very important for my talk, he has a first wife named Machabyas Childe, about whom we know very little. If history has taught us anything, it's that people with names like Machabyas Childe die. She dies, and that's important. So I'm going to talk about her second wedding. Spenser begins to make a name for himself and becomes a gentleman in Ireland. In part, he's I guess what we would consider a colonial administrator, and one who is perfectly happy using violence.
	This is important because he actually has a personal motivation for writing The Faerie Queene, his very elaborate praise of Queen Elizabeth I. His personal motivation is, get the queen's attention, get her favor, and get out of Ireland. He wants to go back home, to a certain degree. It doesn't really work. We don't know if Queen Elizabeth read The Faerie Queene, the first installment in 1590, but we know that she gave him some money for it. A lifetime pension of 50 pounds a year. But he would remain in Ireland.
	This is the key moment of the talk. June 11th, 1594. He marries a woman named Elizabeth Boyle. Just a few months later, he publishes the Amoretti, which culminates in the Epithalamion. This is the sonnet sequence that ends in the wedding poem that celebrates his own wedding, right here. The dates you don't have to remember, but are important for my talk. I should add, he then publishes the second and thank god last installment of The Faerie Queene. In 1559 he dies actually in England, and there's a little Ben Jonson quote, "The Irish robbed him and he died broke and poor."
	In Spenser's Amoretti, we have a very basic question. How might a sonnet sequence tell the story of a happy love culminating in marriage? I swear this is not a stupid question. It's not a stupid question in part just because sonnet sequences aren't supposed to end this way. They're supposed to end miserably, right? Or quasi-miserably. Of course, the sonnet sequence that started the big [inaudible 00:20:13] is Petrarch's. His problem is, he loves Laura, he can't talk to her, she doesn't love him back, she dies, he still loves her, and writes about her for decades and decades and years and years, right? I'm gonna return to this idea. Petrarch has a very last ditch solution. It's abandon this and love the Virgin Mary instead.
	Closer to the Amoretti's publication, Spenser is much more famous. More famous. Contemporary Philip Sidney, he publishes Astrophel and Stella. Astrophel is Sidney, right? Problem. He loves Stella, and we know who Stella is in real life. She's Penelope Rich, who happens to be married, right? After Philip's solution, there is no solution. He's just gonna complain. 
	This is not though just a matter of content and familiar content and generic expectation. There's a deeper reason that Petrarch's sonnet sequences aren't particularly well equipped to describing a fulfilling personal love of the specific individual in history, right? Petrarch's sonnet sequences actually foreground a basic poetic linguistic problem in doing this. The first problem is a problem of deixis. Deixis being that linguistic phenomenon where, this is why I have the little manicules up, where meaning is accrued by pointing at something and reference an immediate reference. What are you talking about? "That." Who are you talking about? "Her." 
	Once you detach that from a literal context and just free float it in language, it doesn't make as much sense. The very first line of Petrarch's very first sonnet plays with pronouns. You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound of those sighs, with which I nourish my heart during my first youthful error, when I was in part another man from what I am now. The joke being double, right? If Petrarch's gambit is to work, and he's going to become famous, this you is going to change. Whoever the you is. Of course, I don't think even Petrarch could have foreseen, in 2014, it will be a Korean guy from California. That's weird. 
	Of course the joke being, he also, has changed over the course of this sequence. Okay, that's fine. But what about loving a specific individual? Can't he say, "I love her?" Her being Laura. The joke of the sequence also seems to be, proper names are only of limited help. Because in this particular sequence, Petrarch says, "I love Laura." Well who's Laura? "Well the woman I'm writing about." Well who's that? "Laura." There's an additional pun. He keeps punning on the name of the laurel tree, which is the sign of poetic fame. Petrarch famously actually crowned himself poet Laurie. 
	Laura as a sign of the laurel tree. In fact, we have a great record of Petrarch's own friend writing to him and saying, "Does this Laura women who you're writing about actually exist?" It's a valid question. Is she just a pretext, or a real person? It's part of the mystery of this sonnet sequence.
	Perhaps the classic article in English, about Petrarch ... John Freccero  describes the kind of circular pattern about writing about Laura. Does she really or really not exist? Am I chasing her or am I chasing the poetic glory that comes from writing about her and how I can't have her. Right? This game, this poetic game. And Freccero describes this game as this self-enclosed language, and specifically as an idolatrous language that does not point to God, and Petrarch loves reading Augustine, so he wrote these fake dialogues that he has with Augustine, and Augustine says to him, "Petrarch, stop this, this is very simple." Right? But creates the speaker himself, Petrarch, the sinful lover, as the famous poet, and vice-versa. 
	As I mentioned before, Petrarch has a last-ditch solution, right? Forget about Laura. He calls her a Medusa at the end, and says, "I'm gonna love the Virgin Mary instead." Mary had gathered into herself three sweet names; Mother, Daughter, and Bride, Lady of that King, of God. Mary is even our goddess, if it is permitted and fitting to say it. Mary, in other words, is undeniably unique. We all know who we're talking about when we're talking about Mary.
	Okay. Spenser is a militant Protestant, happy to kill Catholics in Ireland, right? He does not want to turn to Mary at all; in fact, he's just going to celebrate marriage. But he has his own version of this poetic linguistic pablum that he inherits, right? Here's Amoretti, 74 lines from it. He in fact has three Elizabeths in his life, and I'll give you guys some time to read this on your own as I fix with my microphone.
	"Ye three Elizabeths forever live." Yet the previous lines make it clear that the third, Spenser's future wife, Elizabeth Boyle, is the decisively important one. Mother and Queen are linked verbally; the Mother gave the speaker his existence by kind, or nature, whereas Queen Elizabeth has proven most kind. The Queen seems to have bettered natural motherhood. The third Elizabeth, by contrast, allows the speaker to be born again, for through her, his spirit "out of dust was raised." This is beyond kind or nature; this is supernatural, and the speaker is like a second Adam. This makes sense, as a Christian husband should seek to be Christ-like. And yet, throughout the entire sequence, the speaker grapples with the knowledge that he is unworthy to fulfill this role. He is not exactly like Christ the triumphant bridegroom. 
	In Sonnet 66, Spenser describes his beloved as blessed by having in all things except in having her "love lent to so mean a one." "So mean a one" is himself, right? Mean is a word that repeats throughout the sequence, and Spenser's meanness derives from a combination of moral shortcomings and class anxieties. Right? I want to emphasize how important this is. The same Spenser who is a sizar constantly berates himself for being too low for his beloved, registering his class anxieties in these autobiographical poems.
	But the 66th Sonnet's place in the sequence suggests that theological meanings as well. I just mentioned that the precise date of Spenser's marriage to Elizabeth Boyle matters. This is because the Amoretti is a calendrical poem sequence with individual poems specifically aligned with dates in 1594, leading up to Spenser's wedding day. Amoretti 66, when he called himself mean, is a Good Friday poem. It anticipates the triumphant Easter poem, two poems later, Amoretti 68. 
	This one, I think I'm gonna do something funny, and I'm gonna ask us to read it out loud and recite in elementary school fashion because this is supposed to be a celebratory liturgical exercise, so I'm going to count to three and then we'll start and see how it sounds. One, two, three.
Entire room:	"Most glorious Lord of life, that on this day. Didst make thy triumph over death and sin. And having harrowed hell, didst bring away. Captivity thence captive, us to win. This joyous day, dear Lord, with joy begin. And grant that we for whom thou didest die. Being with thy dear blood clean washed from sin. May live forever in felicity. And that thy love we weighing worthily. May likewise love thee for the same again; And for thy sake, that all like dear didst buy. With love may one another entertain. So let us love, dear love, like as we ought, love is the lesson which the Lord us taught."
Eric Song:	We can see in this poem how Spenser's view of Christian salvation can help to alleviate his class anxieties. The last couplet, I think, turns the celebration of Easter into a holy pick up line. Christ taught us to love one another, so hey, let's love one another. But this punchline may be a fairly serious one. The poem begins by offering a palimpsest of theological ideas. The first four lines revolve around the old motif of Christ Harrowing Hell. Think of Christ as an active hero who rescues prisoners trapped in hell. That's what I think the idea is, the image is.
	The second quatrain, the second set of four lines, he was closer to Protestant doctrines of justification. This isn't necessarily Christ as a hero, but Christ dying on behalf of sinners, who are then cleansed by his blood. Spenser does not seem to highlight an incompatibility between these two sets of images, but rather, his point seems to be to allow them to blend into the logic of the third, quatrain, which articulates an economic model of Christian love, based on calculable merit. 
	Redemption becomes purchasing power. The implication is that Christ's merit weighs a certain amount, and his worth is commensurate with a price he had to redeem us. But only a collective price. As sinners, our collective value is in proportion to Christ, with the key distinction; our worth as individuals may be holy interchangeable. All Christians in this view are like deer, equally valuable. Spenser has effaced his personal meanness, his shortcomings, by an appeal to salvation imagined as whole sale purchasing power, and this gives him the confidence to turn to his beloved and invite her to love him.
	But notice that none of this answers the question of why this speaker should love this particular woman, and vice versa. Why not some other virtuous and well-to-do Christian woman? Why not some other virtuous and well-to-do Christian woman named Elizabeth since there seem to be a lot of them? There may ultimately be no satisfying answer to why we love this one particular person and not another. But Spenser explores this question by turning to a resource already embedded within the Petrarchan sonnet tradition; Ovidian poetry. 
	In Amoretti 35, so early in the sequence, the speaker describes his unfulfilled longing, and this poem then mysteriously repeats later in the sequence, after he's technically won over his beloved. These twin poems invoke the myth of Narcissus. I won't ask us to read this out loud, because that would be creepy.
	Petrarch, who's sonnet sequence is saturated with Ovid, had previously invoked Narcissus, mostly to accuse Laura of being a narcissist. She keeps looking at mirrors, at her own beauty. Here, Spenser seems far more honest. The male sonneteer is the real narcissist, except with a twist. "This rather enigmatic sonnet," one critic remarks, "leaves us wondering why the speaker thinks his situation is like that of Narcissus. After all, he is looking at another person. A real woman, not a reflection of himself. And why he cannot be satisfied with his view of the lady."
	I think that the key fact is that this poem is enigmatic in order to get us to ask these stupid questions. What is the object of the speaker's obsession? In the context of the sequence, it should be obvious, right? Her name is Elizabeth Boyle. But the poem is grammatically coy about this. All it offers is a self-referential series of pronoun. It is the thing that the speaker's eyes want. It. What does it refer to? The object. 
	But when do we learn that the speaker's eyes are like Narcissus? Doesn't this mean that the object should be the speaker's own reflection? The end of the poem reveals something we've known all along. The speaker is not strictly Narcissus-like, because his object is not himself, or even an it. But a she. In other words, to the question of why this particular object should be attractive to the point, that the rest of this world's glory seen with vain, this poem offers a vacuous answer. She is she, rather than he, or it.
	The queer theorist Michael Warner has described the conflation of gender difference with the self-other distinction as a "staggeringly primitive confusion." According to Warner, this confusion underwrites the alignment of homosexuality with pathological narcissism in psychoanalysis. If you love the same gender, that's basically loving yourself. Writing centuries before Freud, Spenser deploys this primitive confusion quite deliberately. The final word of Amoretti 35, "She," is completely predictable, and yet meant to be something like a small epiphany. One that saves the speaker from being male narcissist and allows him to be, instead, a lover who will eventually find success in marriage. 
	By the time Spenser was composing the Amoretti, he had already published the first three books of The Faerie Queene. The hero of the third book is Britomart, a young woman who sees her future love in a magical mirror, and then dresses up as a male knight to seek him. In other words, she is a female narcissist figure who finds her future husband by first resembling him. But this tale is never told to completion. As Linda Gregerson argues, "What is missing from The Faerie Queene is the notion of symmetrical reciprocity, as the ground and standard of erotic love. The mutual love of equals is not only missing, it is not meant to register as missing."
	Can heterosexual marriage, in other words, be something like a two-way fulfilling narcissism? I argue that this is the gap that the Amoretti explicitly works to mend. Even though the sequence is very much in the male-centered Petrarchan tradition, something approximating reciprocity must obtain, at least momentarily or fictionally, to serve as the origin of genuine love. A two-way desire that can fix the lovers' as unique subject and each other's unique object. 
	Spenser establishes this kind of two-way mutual desire in Amoretti 67. I guess I'll read this out loud because it's probably the most important poem in my presentation. "Like as a huntsman after weary chase, seeing the game from him escaped away, sits down to rest him in some shady place, with panting hounds beguiled of their prey. So after long pursuit and vain assay, when I all weary had the chase forsook, the gentle deer returned the self-same way, thinking to quench her thirst at the next brook. There she beholding me with milder look, sought not to fly, but fearless still did bide, till I in hand her yet half trembling took, and with her own goodwill her firmly tied. Strange thing me seemed to see a beast so wild, so goodly won with her own will beguiled."
	We should remember that the very next poem in the sequence is the Easter poem. Amoretti 67 prepares us for the "Hey, Christ told us to love each other, so let's love each other." by telling a surprising story. The speaker, or the hunter, surprisingly wins his beloved, or the deer. He ties her up as if with a net or a rope, but with her own good will. The first thing to emphasize here is that this is not how the story is supposed to go. This poem overturns precedent and expectation. Petrarch has a version of this poem, Canzoniere 190, and he just says, in line 1, without explanation, "A white doe on the green grass appeared to me." Petrarch can say this because he's weird, we guess what he means, right? 
	Eventually, he cannot do anything about this deer that he covets, because, "Let no one touch me, 'she bore written with diamonds and topazes around her lovely neck,' it has pleased my Caesar to make me free." And at the end of the poem, Petrarch's eyes are tired and he falls into a river. Thomas Wyatt's, that's what happened, english adaptation earlier in the 1500s is the more direct precedent. He begins, "Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind, but as for me, alas, I may no more. The vain travail hath wearied me so sore, There is written, her fair neck round about, noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am, and wild for to hold, though I seem tame."
	If we return to Spenser's sonnet, we see that the basic surprise, "Hey, why does the speaker actually win the wild deer? It surprises him." is conveyed through some more subtle poetic surprises. First, Spenser emphasizes that we're in the world of simile. He is like a huntsman. What we're really talking about is an erotic pursuit, not a deer hunt. In the second quatrain, the emphatic word "so," should signal the end of this simile. I'm not talking about that poetic hunter anymore, I'm talking about myself, Spenser, the would-be lover. The "I" that emerges in this poem contains some degree of meaning, through a negation. 
	Spenser's "I" is not that same conventional hunter that we've met in other poems before, as a result, this "I" is kind of an analog to the "She" that concludes Amoretti 35 and 83, the Narcissus sonnets. The actual content of this "I" and this "She" may remain uncertain, but they are brought in to sharp relief against the backdrop of what or who they are not. But the central joke of this poem, not that it's funny at all, lies in the obvious pun on deer. If the speaker is "I," rather than a conventional poetic hunter, is the object a deer, as in a precious, beloved person named Elizabeth Boyle? Or a deer, like the animal? In other words, if the male speaker has announced himself as an individual "I," who is not just a poetic trope, can the desired female object emerge as a human being who can reciprocate desire?
	This question becomes increasingly urgent by the end of the poem. Why does the deer give the speaker a milder look? What does it mean that the speaker ties her firmly, but with her own good will? Is this voluntary bondage, love is light as an [inaudible 00:38:04] fantasy? Or should we imagine that the speaker is using the deer's accidental misplaced good will against her, as if her own will were a rope or a net used to catch her.
	These questions are informed by another implied Ovidian allusion. This time, not to the figure of Narcissus, but to the related figure of Actaeon. About a hundred lines before telling the story of Narcissus, Book 3 of the Metamorphosis, opens with the story of Actaeon, the deer hunter who accidentally stumbles upon the goddess Diana, bathing naked with her nymphs. Enraged, Diana flings water in Actaeon's face and curses him. Actaeon eventually morphs into a deer, and his own hounds chase and then tear him apart. He tries to cry out, "I am Actaeon," but he finds he can't, he has no human voice. This is the story of the hunter becoming the hunted, the subject becoming the object, with the instruments of his own chase, his own hounds, turning against him. 
	Spenser signals a potential allusion to the Actaeon myth when he describes the huntsman's panting hounds, an image not present in Petrarch's or Wyatt's earlier versions of the sonnet, and the important of this possible allusion, is confirmed when the hounds disappear, but the word "beguiled" repeats as the very last word of the poem. 
	I want to spend a good amount of time on this word "beguiled" because I think it ties Spenser's poetic experiment with narrating a supposedly unique love, back into the larger framework of Christian belief. This is my gimmick, I'll show you how. Beguiled can refer either to the agent or to the victim of guile. In other words, if you're beguiled, you're either duped by someone else's deception, or you've concealed yourself under your own guile.
	Another complication, a beguiled victim, can be deluded either by someone else or by him or herself. In line four, it's pretty clear that the hounds of this hunt, this pursuit, have been the victim of the deer's elusiveness. But it remains unclear at the end, in what sense the deer has been beguiled. It's possible that she has been goodly won, because she has been tricked by her own stupid volition, when she choose to approach her pursuer instead of running away. But perhaps she has been beguiled with her own will, in the sense that she has concealed her own desires in a game of hard to get. She's beguiled herself with her own will. A game that beguiles the speaker into thinking he has accomplished a coop, when this is exactly what she secretly desired to. 
	The poem's ending reactivates the active allusion to Actaeon, to amplify the subject/object flip flopping involved in the erotic hunt. Is the male hunter really in control? Whereas Actaeon is torn apart by his hounds, the Spenserian speaker loses his hounds, they disappear. But he gains the beast, who may or may not have been inviting the hunt all along. If the deer might be the instrument of her own hunt, the osculation between the subject and the object of the hunt can end, surprisingly, in love. 
	But we need to remember that this is a Christian marriage we're anticipating, and it's almost Easter. Spenser's use of the word "beguiled" bridges the gap between an allusion to Actaeon and an allusion to Christ. More specifically, to Christ as depicted in the 14th century allegorical epic, Piers Plowman. A poem that Spenser studied and strategically echoes in The Faerie Queene. The 15th passage of Piers Plowman investigates how Christ's victory over the devil and over hell, might be understood in a way compatible with reason and legality. How can Christ save humanity, when the devil seems to have binding, contractual claim upon us after we fell freely?
	Lucifer shows up to agree that he owns humanity by right and by reason. But the solution lies in a righteous form of beguiling. Of beguiling the beguiler. Mercy argues, "And right as through guile, man was beguiled, so shall grace that began, make a good sleyght." God's grace is imagined as a good form of deception. When Christ arrives, he declares that it is good reason that the guiler be beguiled. To save humanity, Christ beguiles the guiler Satan. In Amoretti 67 I'm arguing, Spenser transforms this motif. Beguiling the beguiler is now not a matter of Christ tricking the devil, but a matter of the future husband beguiling his beloved, possibly because she beguiled first.
	This is how Spenser links his own erotic love with its higher spiritual meaning in anticipation of the Easter sonnet that follows immediately afterwords. All of this, in turn, has a very specific political resonance. If we return to the precedence for Amoretti 67, we recall that there had been a meddling Caesar in the way of previous, unhappy deer hunters. Petrarch's actually riffing on this legend. That Julius Caesar prevented other people from hunting his deer, and this command was so powerful, it endured for centuries after his death. What might this mean for Petrarch? Who was keeping Laura away? God as Caesar? Laura's otherwise absent husband as Caesar? The question seems deliberately obscure in a deliberately obscure poem. 
	Wyatt's adaptation of this sonnet renders the touch me not message much more fascinating in two ways. First, Wyatt uses the Latin phrase, noli me tangere, which echoes the words of Christ. In the Gospel of John, when the reformed sinner, possibly harlot, Mary Magdalene, is the first to approach the resurrected Christ. Jesus tells her, "Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to my Father." One of the most uncomfortable moments in the New Testament. "Don't touch me woman." What is this bit of Latin doing in Wyatt's poem? Is the deer saying, "Don't touch me, I'm like Christ, you're like Mary Magdalene." That doesn't seem quite right. Is the speaker like Christ? So that he must refrain from contact with the deer? That doesn't seem quite right either. 
	What makes this biblical allusion more tantalizingly weird is the presence of a Caesar. Wyatt actually, personally, served in the court of King Henry VIII. In fact, Wyatt wrote poems about Anne Boleyn and the execution of some of her lovers. Naturally, rumors about Wyatt's own dalliances with Anne Boleyn has persisted for centuries, although they remain just rumors. Is Henry VIII the English Caesar, who warns others not to touch his deer, Anne Boleyn? If so, it would seem that God and Caesar worked together by forbidding adulterous contact in the name of sanctity. 
	But the emotional tone of Wyatt's poem, he's weary, maybe resentful, maybe a little bit bitter, suggests another reading. Maybe Henry VIII, as the English Caesar, may have gone beyond the limits of propriety, failing to render unto God what belongs to God, and in the process, spoiling the speaker's own desire to hunt everyone else's. 
	Spenser succeeds where his predecessors have been frustrated, in part because there's no meddling Caesar to stop him from touching the yet-half trembling deer. Biographically, he's in Ireland, no one's going to stop him from marrying Elizabeth Boyle. A number of scholars have shown that the question of free choice versus fate in Amoretti 67, to what extent the free deer love turns freely to the speaker, and to what extent she is captured. Echoes theological questions concerning the role of human free will and salvation.
	The poem also implies that the meddling of an earthly Caesar would have hindered the limited but essential form of free will that allows love to take hold in a hunt. Otherwise in the Amoretti, Spenser is quite explicit about how his personal love competes with his dedication to his Queen. In the 23rd sonnet, Spenser declares to his friend that he's doing Queen Elizabeth a great disservice by taking time off from writing The Faerie Queene to write about Elizabeth Boyle instead. "Great wrong I do."
	In fact, in Book six of The Faerie Queene, published just a few years after the Amoretti, Spenser's poetic shepherd persona shows up and he starts singing of his own beloved woman, when the real hero of the book shows up, a mighty knight, and not a lowly shepherd, the celebratory vision evaporates. The poet himself then apologizes to the great queen of his poem for this distraction. This persistent tension between Spenser's personal love and his poetic allegiance, between Elizabeth Boyle and Elizabeth I, opens onto the next movement of my larger argument. 
	As I promised earlier, this is exactly when I've run out of time. But I'd like to close with just a glimpse of what happens when we turn from the Amoretti back to Spenser's celebration of the unmarried Queen Elizabeth I. The Faerie Queene is an allegory. We're not talking about characters as individuals, but figures who represent things. In book one, this is gonna make The Faerie Queene sound really bad, Redcrosse is the knight who learns to embody holiness, but he is also Saint George, the patron saint of England. Una is the one true Christian faith. The two are destined to be married, but one of the figures who stands in the way is the evil magician Archimago. In other words, the deceptions of Catholicism will try to thwart the union of English Protestantism and the one true faith from joining together.
	In reading this kind of poem, C.S. Lewis worries that "Some stupid person," that's his phrase, "might as too literally about these allegorical figures as if they were unique individuals." But more recently, critics have been willing to occupy the role labeled "As stupid" by Lewis. These critics have considered Redcrosse as a potential husband, and they point out that there's quite a bit of meaning in the way that he seems personally unfit to marry Una. 
	My own focus is on the interrupted marriage at the end of book one. Redcrosse, holiness, England, and Una, the truth, the church, do get married, but before their union is consummated, Redcrosse departs from his bride to serve Queen Gloriana, the glorious personification of Queen Elizabeth. From the standpoint of allegory, this makes perfect sense. England can't perfect religious truth within the poem, this perfection has to be differed so that the real Queen Elizabeth can, in the near future, finish the work that she started as a successful Protestant ruler. 
	But in the Amoretti, Spenser will go on to produce a poetic sequence that can, and does, end happily with marriage. Marriage allows the poetic and the real to converge, to converge on Spenser, to converge on Elizabeth Boyle, to converge on June 11th, 1594. This is in sharp contrast to The Faerie Queene, which cannot and does not end. The narrative closure that marriage provides, the happily ever after of England and truth together at least, can only be promised but deferred.
	This deferral does give Elizabeth a powerful role, she should bring the Christian truth and the English nation together. In a letter to Walter Raleigh, perhaps the single most important document concerning the allegory of The Faerie Queene, Spenser explains that eventually, he'll get around to describing how all of this started, when Queen Gloriana chose a tall, clownish young man, unfit through his rusticity, to be Una's knight. Una does not want this guy, she's like, "Can I have a better knight?" But Gloriana makes this choice. Fortunately, this man turns out to be Redcrosse.
	In the allegory, this means, that Elizabeth retroactively proves that England, as unfit as it might look, has been the proper husband of Protestant truth all along. But something funny happens when we turn from Spenser's letter back to the poem itself. At one point, the wicked Archimago, let's say the wicked forest of Catholicism, disguises himself as Redcrosse and steals Una away. And this is what he says. I would never have left you because you picked me, and choose me out of mere goodwill, right? So notice what he says. That's what he emphasizes. You choose me, out of your goodwill. Archimago as Redcrosse does not say Queen Gloriana made matchmaker. 
	In the Amoretti, Spenser talks about how he surprisingly won Elizabeth Boyle with her own goodwill, even though he himself was unworthy, and low, and poor, and all that other stuff. With her own goodwill in the absence of a meddling Caesar figure. After having read the Amoretti, the notion that marriage requires free love in the absence of political coercion, or meddling, seems to register strongly here, in book one of The Faerie Queene. But doesn't it matter that this is the wicked magician Archimago speaking? Isn't he lying as he always does? Shouldn't Spenser's letter to Raleigh be right? The queen plays a central role in pairing Redcrosse with Una. Maybe.
	But the key fact is that Una turns out, really likes what Archimago says. She praises his words and goes along with him. If Archimago distorts the truth, he offers even truth herself, a pleasing fantasy, of real, genuine personal free love and choice. A desire that continues to express itself in the ensuing books of The Faerie Queene, that can only be left unfulfilled. Thank you.