Spenser’s Merlin Rehabilitated: In Memory of Darryl Gless

Abstract

The details provided in Book Ill, canto iii of The Faerie Queene seem to suggest that Spenser’s Merlin is simultaneously a demonic sorcerer and agent of divine Providence. Accordingly, previous studies of Merlin have at times become preoccupied with attempts to accommodate this problematic duality in a single figure. But demonic sorcery and Christian prophecy are irreconcilable pursuits. The preoccupation described results from the assumption that all details regarding Merlin set forth in this canto are meant to be read as authoritative and true. Yet the “demonic” details are confined to stanzas 7–13, and belong not to Spenser’s narrator, but to the late-medieval Merlin narratives with which Spenser’s readers were familiar. The content and implications of these texts brought Merlin under considerable moral and doctrinal scrutiny during the sixteenth century, and Spenser was therefore obliged to counteract Merlin’s unfavorable connotations if he wished this figure to appear in his poem. Therefore, the demonic details should be read as a description of all the things that Spenser’s Merlin is not. This essay will argue that Spenser sought to rehabilitate his Merlin to conform to Protestant doctrines so that this figure may facilitate uninhibited the genealogical encomium and celebration of Elizabeth as godly magistrate. To do so, Spenser needed to distance his Merlin from the demonic and implicitly Roman Catholic details of the late-medieval texts.

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