“Innocent paper”: Spenser’s Lyric Conspiracy

Spenser addresses Amoretti 48 to a sonnet that his beloved has thrown in the fire, and in the three quatrains he compares its end to that of a person tortured and executed.

Innocent paper whom too cruell hand
  Did make the matter to auenge her yre:
  and ere she could thy cause wel vnderstand,
  did sacrifize vnto the greedy fyre.
Well worthy thou to haue found better hyre,
  then so bad end for hereticks ordayned:
  yet heresy nor treason didst conspire,
  but plead thy maisters cause vniustly payned.
Whom she all carelesse of his griefe constrayned
  to vtter forth th’anguish of his hart:
  and would not heare, when he to her complayned,
  the piteous passion of his dying smart.
  (1-12)¹

There is a double torture here: the poet has been “constrayned” to confess as if under lethal torture, but once given the confession is not even received. The poem too has been burned at the stake, as “matter” of vengeance in a “cause” not understood, as if it were a heretic or traitor meriting condemnation, not a love note pleading for attention. By depicting his beloved’s resistance as a violent, authoritarian repression of free speech, Spenser is not offering a mere exaggerated image to highlight the lover’s immaturity, but is summoning us to consider the dangerous freedom at the heart of love: freedom for true communion, for the trust of mutual submission that is free from suspicion and danger, but also a questing, erotic freedom that can itself seem to be a danger to the spiritual and the political – can seem to be a heretic or a traitor.

Spenser’s poem narrates a dramatic moment in the sequences’s Petrarchan critique² when the beloved, whose “smyling lookes” he has accused of treason in sonnet 47, now rejects him with violence in the effort to guide him to something more honest. As William Johnson writes, “The poet struggles with his art […] and the lover wrestles with the kind of love appropriate to wooing and winning this most resolute and determined young woman […]. The penitent struggles with his own selfhood.”³ This contest about fitting style is of course enmeshed in broader schemes of growth, not only in the poet-lover’s relationship with the beloved, but in the “Neoplatonic paradigm of progressive love”⁴ or in liturgical patterns present in the sequence.⁵ Furthermore, though the rejection of the poem challenges the poet-lover to grow in serious ways, we also find here a playfulness in the clearly exaggerated comparison, a play between lover and beloved, or at least between poet and reader, an example of the “light touch” and “transforming humor” that Louis L. Martz sees in the sequence.⁶ But more than just conforming to a broader scheme, Amoretti 48 proposes a radical image of dangerous conflict in which the poet takes a strong stance. He concludes his address to the martyred poem, “Yet liue for euer, though against her will, / and speake her good, though she requite it ill.” He declares his definitive allegiance to his murdered poem, reprimands the error of the beloved, and rejoices (if quietly) in a victory: the poem lives on, and in this now-printed requiem for the burned manuscript his memorializing power as poet has surpassed her destructive efforts and can now hope to begin working on her will.⁷ The beloved may have thought she was just throwing something away, but the lover, by raising the stakes quite high, has made the action a dramatic moment, even if in play, channeling some of the era’s principal anxieties about religious and political crime into their relationship and hinting that lyric, given fair hearing, can be the place for souls to meet in free mutual submission, beyond suspicion and fear.

The poet figures the suppression of his voice as first of all religious, comparing his poem’s being cast into the fire to a heretic’s being burned at the stake. The recusant lover is not engaging the beloved in a theological debate on grace and justification;⁸ we should think rather of the broader scriptural matrix within which Spenser casts the Amoretti, specifically the psalms and lessons for the liturgical day (see Larsen 177–78). Spenser uses these intertexts freely throughout the sequence, deriving from them not an exact interpretive counterpoint but a verbal and thematic resonance, hoping to make connections in the beloved’s mind; that is to say, the sonnet’s persuasive ambitions remain foremost, even while the scriptural is not merely accidental. If we accept a consistent correspondence between the sonnet sequence and the consecutive dates of 1594 leading to the wedding day on June 11 (cf. Larsen 3–20), then Amoretti 48 substitutes for a destroyed sonnet for Monday, March 11, 1594, in the fourth week of Lent, the last before Passiontide and Holy Week. Looking to that day’s office, we can detect engagement especially with the psalms of morning prayer (Ps. 50–53)⁹ and with the New Testament lessons of both morning and evening prayer that day (Luke 22, 1 Thess. 2).

Psalm 50 presents God as coming in judgment with “consuming fire” (v. 3) against the ungodly who, he complains, “cast my words behind” them (v. 17), and this echo presents a threat to the beloved who has cast the poet’s words to the fire. The great penitential Psalm 51 implies a similar critique, meditating on sacrifice (vv. 16–19), saying to God, “But thou delightest not in burnt-offerings” but rather in “a broken and contrite heart.” Psalm 52 also is an excoriation of “thou tyrant” (v. 1). Thus the resonance between the daily psalter and the sonnet puts the poet in the place of the prophet speaking for God and the beloved in the place of the heretic attacking God’s word. The executed poem, in turn, represents the truly faithful one: a martyr who had hoped only to “speake her good” in loving evangelism. This role reversal, in which the beloved is the heretic and the loving victim the martyr, has force for a pious reader, and makes us think that the poet addresses his beloved as a pious person who has read the daily prayers. The implication is that, for the beloved, the prayed scriptures stand in contrast to the lover’s erotic pursuit, which seems dangerous to her, as dangerous as heresy to a religious authority; the lover’s case, however, is not simply a plea for erotic indulgence but an argument that his erotic quest for her is not opposed to the spiritual truth or her spiritual good. Instead, her resistance, the speaker implies, stands in opposition to God’s voice in Scripture. He challenges her with an analogy between the destroyed sonnet and God’s own word that she has prayed—an analogy, not merely an exaggerated image.

The Gospel lesson only confirms this reversed relationship, for the New Testament morning lesson, Luke 22, recounts Jesus’s betrayal. The sonnet speaks of the “piteous passion” of the speaker’s “dying smart” (vv. 8, 12), while the Gospel proclaims the treachery of Judas and Peter and the elders who stand in trial, condemning Jesus without really hearing him, as the beloved does to the poem. Judas betrays Christ “with a kisse” (22:48), an erotic, if not strictly sexual, gesture.¹⁰ The lover is like Christ and refusing to hear him is to reject a loving lord and friend who tries to “speak you good.” The epistle for evening prayer then shows the opposite of the rejection: explaining how he speaks and writes to them, Paul reminds the Thessalonians of how well they received his words, even though he spoke boldly, for “thus being affectioned towarde you, our good wil was to haue dealt vnto you, not the Gospel of God onely, but also our owne soules, because ye were dere vnto us” (1 Thess. 2:1, 8). The epistle presents the communication of the Gospel as the reception of words filled with the giver’s life itself, an exchange rooted in love. The reader who has this intertext in mind, like the beloved, could hear the lover claiming that his poem is a sort of gospel that enlivens by giving its life, not just an “innocent paper” but a precious gift.

The matrix of liturgical texts, then, shows that what the poet initially terms (with a charming coolness of exaggerated offense) an insult to an “innocent paper” is actually like rejecting God, making false sacrifice, betraying Christ, denying a friend and master, and refusing the generous gift of another’s own soul. To hint at such comparisons, even playfully, goes far beyond the mere “working of an infrequent conceit” (Larsen 177): the lover appeals to his beloved’s religious aspirations and aligns his cause with them while asserting his own Christ-like fidelity to her good, even in his (or his poem’s) death.

By raising the specter of heresy and treason, Spenser seeks not only to persuade his beloved with a daring conceit but also to invite her to join him in a free space of lyric, in which the lover can profess desire and fidelity and the beloved, free from the fearful need to interpret the lover as a danger, can attend and respond generously. Can love lyric be as threatening to the beloved as heresy and treason to the established order? The sequence indeed depicts a perhaps-not-innocent separation between the private love lyric and the big work of The Faerie Queene, as if love were a threat to the ruling order. In Amoretti 33, the poet plainly confesses a conflict between the two: “Great wrong I doe, I can it not deny, / to that most sacred Empresse my dear dred, / not finishing her Queene of faëry” (vv. 1–3). He then seeks agreement from his friend “lodwick” that until his proud beloved grants him rest, he will not have the “head,” “wit,” “spirite,” or “brest” to finish the poem of praise himself (vv. 7, 9, 12, 14) – the powers he needs for one task are absorbed in the other. In Amoretti 80, as he contemplates having finished the parts of FQ we know but not yet published them all, he asks for “leaue to rest [...] / and gather to my selfe new breathe awhile,” and in order to break out of his “prison” later, he now asks “leaue [...] in pleasant mew, / to sport my muse and sing my loues sweet praise.” With regard to the Queen’s praise, his love is a “prison” he must break out of; but from within the lyric, it is a “pleasant mew” in which to “sport his muse.” To the Queen, at least as he portrays the problem, his lyric time is a failing in praise, his love a subtraction of his head and heart from some due reverence; but for him it is the place in which to “sport his muse,” to practice so that his muse can reach to the epic heights. To his beloved too his love seems oppositional: the Queen misreads his love lyric, and his beloved misreads his love. He seeks to convince both audiences – with very different directness – that his love, given room, is what serves them best. His relationship with his beloved would not be dangerous to his sovereign, would not detract from her praise, if she attended to her subjects in a less suspicious, freer way.

The work of the love lyric thus contrasts and supports the work of the epic romance, as the poet juggles private and public praise while walking the tightrope of treason. For the private space of love is potentially dangerous: two whispering together make a third suspicious. This problem of suspicion becomes shockingly present in the volume when the poet imagines the moon as a spy at the window during the wedding night in Epithalamion 372ff., a “Cinthia” who may be not just the goddess invoked for conception but also the Queen, identified in sonnet 74, by name at least, with the poet’s wife and his mother. The lover and his poem conspire to a free relationship with the beloved, free from suspicion and free for communion of body and soul: when he commands his martyred sonnet to “liue for euer, though against her will, / and speake her good, though she requite it ill,” he is creating a conspiracy with his poem, a conspiracy for her good to which he invites her. Hence in the sequence that follows, he plays with the puzzle of two wills freely giving themselves to each other: “Sweet be the bands, the which true love doth tye, / without constraynt or dread of any ill,” a “brasen towre” for faith and “sacred bowre” for pleasure at the same time (Amoretti 65). The beloved’s tyrannical refusal threatens her own freedom, the poet implies, because she thereby refuses to join in free and mutual self-giving.

By commemorating his sonnet’s demise and printing the sequence, Spenser opens a third, mediating space connecting the public and the private, where we who submit to attend freely to his poem can experience its enduring life in the joy of lyric, where we can participate in the relationship of lover and beloved without intruding into or endangering it. Amoretti 48 presents itself as a playful requiem for an “innocent paper,” but the poet knows that binding people in “simple truth and mutuall good will” (Am. 65.11), as nice as it sounds, makes them also strong and harder to dominate, perhaps not innocent to those who want to rule over them, though sacred and spotless in their free submission to each other. Reading Amoretti 48 in light of the challenge to free speech and the loving interchange it always seeks reveals the stakes of the sequence and helps us hear the invitation to join the lovers’ conspiracy.