The Bacchus Who Wouldn't Wash: Faerie Queene II.i-ii

Abstract

Few sources or targets of allusion have been adduced for the complex and tragic episode of the Nymph's Well early in Book II of Spenser's Faerie Queene; hence we lack that check on our interpretations and that isolation of the individual author's emphases which literary history can provide. Perhaps the only characterization of the episode which all Spenser critics would accept is that it is about acrasia and that it is extraordinarily rich in meanings—one of those which stand out, as Kermode remarked of the Mammon's Cave episode, from the generally thinner allegorical texture of its surroundings. Its resulting complexity and difficulty have divided its many recent critics into two main camps, the secular and the theological.

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