In his essay “Of Truth” Francis Bacon reflects on why people love lies. What strikes Bacon is how falsehood seems paradoxically to season rather than spoil truth, its superior opposite: “A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure.”¹ The mixture of contraries produces a pleasing effect—while the light of truth is like “naked and open day-light,” it does not illuminate “half so stately and daintily as candle-lights,” which are mixed with shadows. And while the value of truth is like that of “a pearl, that sheweth best by day,” it is not as high as that of a precious stone “that sheweth best in varied lights” (Works 341). Mixing truth and falsehood is as useful as it is pleasing. Although Bacon affirms the superiority of truth in matters of philosophy and theology, he admits that in public affairs, the traditional realm of rhetoric, the “mixture of falsehood is like allay in coin of gold and silver, which may make the metal work the better, but it embaseth it” (Works 342). Bacon acknowledges that while the love of lies for their own sake is corrupt, mixing truth and falsehood increases aesthetic value by increasing charm and variety and enhances rhetoric by making arguments easier to work with, like adulterated metal. If poets and orators have long been accused of having little regard for the truth, Bacon does not help their defense, but he calls attention to the surprising ways in which truth and falsehood can interact.

Both Spenser and Milton were preoccupied with the dynamic of truth and falsehood, how they come into contact, how they are distinguished, and how they illuminate each other. These questions are especially urgent in Areopagitica, Milton’s defense of free speech. There, the blending of binary opposites poses a serious ethical difficulty but also provides Milton with the basis for his argument against the pre-licensing of books:

Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed on Psyche as an incessant labor to cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed.²

As Milton argues, the problem of moral epistemology is not within the purview of censorship; it is rather the continuous challenge faced by Christians in a fallen world in which truth and falsehood are so intimately mixed. We know that in Areopagitica Milton praised Spenser’s allegory of Guyon in the bower of bliss as a potent example of virtue triumphing over vice. Milton is drawn to Guyon’s ability to “see and know and yet abstain” (Areopagitica 939), a moral ability that would atrophy if censorship makes the false promise to eliminate all pernicious books. I am interested in how Milton also draws on allegory more broadly to keep truth and falsehood close yet separate, and how they nevertheless seem to blend together in The Faerie Queene, distancing poetic expression from the kind of judgment that limits or licenses speech in the first place.

Allegory enables Milton to bring opposites dangerously close to each other while maintaining their distinctions. Milton likens the knowledge of good and evil to “two twins cleaving together” (Areopagitica 939), an image that allows him to convey their extreme similarity and entanglement while still depicting them as two distinct entities. As Stephen Fallon writes, drawing on Angus Fletcher, division is a central function of allegory—by personifying different aspects of the self, “allegorical agents represent parts of a divided whole.”³ However much Milton wants to convey that the knowledge of good and the knowledge of evil are too intermixed for the heavy hand of censorship to differentiate them, it is equally important to him that they are essentially distinct opposites; his defense of free speech does not devolve into relativism. Yet the ability of allegory to maintain divisions can also be disturbingly self-undermining—allegorical agents can call to mind the whole from which they are divided, the state of discourse in which good may seem indistinguishable from evil. The troublesome possibility that division is only a literary trick is alive in Milton’s image. Nothing about the appearance or interrelation of the allegorical twins tells us which is the knowledge of good and which is the knowledge of evil; neither is beautiful or monstrous. The knowledges of good and evil are not only mixed (“cleaving”) but also physically identical. Only the names they are given reassures the reader that each of the twins stands for a different kind of knowledge. In this case, allegory supports the promise that good is ultimately distinct from evil and truth from falsehood while maintaining the general skepticism needed for Milton’s argumentative goal.

The argument for free speech depends on an imagined future in which confusion will be resolved and distinctions will become more stark. Indeed, the allegory intensifies and becomes even more Spenserian when Milton envisions Truth and Falsehood in “a free and open encounter” on the battlefield. He is certain that if they are given the space to “grapple,” unconstrained by censorship, Truth will prevail (Areopagitica 961). Truth and Falsehood are eventually sundered through combat, a fitting invention for Milton who often yearns for violent separation—in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce he even hails God’s “divorcing command,” the first and last command whereby “the world first rose out of chaos, nor can be renewed again out of confusion, but by the separating of unmeet consorts.”⁴ Unwelcome mixtures continue to trouble Milton in Paradise Lost. The Limbo of Vanity hosts “All the unaccomplished works of nature’s hand, / Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixed” (3.455–56, emphasis added), and Raphael invokes the disturbing possibility that “Destruction with creation might have mixed” had any of the fallen angels broken loose from hell during the creation of the world (8.236). When Milton describes mixture positively, he usually praises the sensual pleasure resulting from mixing similar, not contrary, qualities: the “gay enamelled colours mixed” of the fruits and blossoms on the trees of paradise (4.149), or the meal prepared by Eve, “contrived as not to mix / Tastes, not well joined, inelegant, but bring / Taste after taste upheld with kindliest change” (5.334–36). Like Bacon, Milton recognizes the aesthetic value of the variety that emerges from mixture, but only when the mixed elements are of the same kind. “Unkindly” mixtures are rejected in paradise, while the imagined unkindly mixture of truth and falsehood in the postlapsarian world allows Milton to argue for the freedom he cherishes. In Areopagitica, Milton uses allegorical moments to maintain distinctness and order alongside confusion and mixture, with the promise of a Guyon-like triumph of truth over falsehood in some undetermined future.

Yet the mixture of truth and falsehood in The Faerie Queene can be confusing as well. In the second canto of Book III, Britomart speaks with the Red Cross Knight about Artegall, whom at this point she has seen only in a magical looking glass. What happens then is unexpected. Britomart tells a lie, falsely accusing Artegall of having done her a “foule dishonour and reprochfull spight.”⁵ Britomart is immediately contrite, “reprenting so to haue missayd” (III.ii.9.2), but she is gratified when Red Cross contradicts her:

For thy great wonder were it, if such shame

Should euer enter in his bounteous thought,

Or euer doe, that mote deseruen blame:

The noble corage neuer weeneth ought,

That may vnworthy of it selfe be thought.

(III.ii.10.1–5)

Red Cross’s vehement defense of Artegall’s virtue is also a defense of the boundaries that structure allegory—nobility does not admit shame, contraries are mutually exclusive. The repetition illuminates the issue from two different angles, first from the perspective of a reader (“thy great wonder were it”) and second as an epigrammatic statement of a general truth (“The noble corage neuer weeneth ought”); if contraries were to be mixed, which they never would, that would cause one to wonder.

Yet hearing her beloved praised only prompts Britomart to double down on her false story in order to elicit even more praise from Red Cross, “to occasion him to further talke, / To feed her humor with his pleasing style” (III.ii.12.1–2), and she insists that Artegall has beguiled her “In shame of knighthood” (III.ii.12.9). We might imagine other ways for Britomart to achieve her goal, but the dynamic of falsehood taunting truth is the device chosen to drive the narrative forward. Falsehood calls forth and accentuates truth, and the more egregious the lie, the more eloquent and varied the truth that responds to it. Britomart’s secret joy “to heare her Loue so highly magnifyde” is augmented by her sense that she has contributed to his exaltation, like a mother who has waited nine months to see her “tender babe… safe appeare” (III.ii.11.2, 8). Her fantasies about Artegall have finally materialized in Red Cross’s description. The long gestation refers to the tribulations Britomart has endured before her conversation with Red Cross, but we may also think about Britomart as a kind of Socratic midwife who draws out the description of Artegall by provocative questioning. Responding to her, Red Cross elaborates his initially general answer with the themes of romance—Artegall is always adventuring abroad, he says, “Defending Ladies cause, and Orphans right,” and the need to counterweight Britomart’s false accusation raises Artegall’s honor “to heuens hight” (III.ii.14.6, 9). The impression is that Artegall emerges as though by Bacon’s candlelight, through the mutual dynamic of light and shadow.

The interaction of truth and falsehood itself seems important. Britomart does not reveal the lie or its purpose to Red Cross. Instead, the narration focuses on her interiority, where the interaction of warring contraries repeats itself affectively. Red Cross’s “feeling wordes” first soothe Britomart’s heartache with hope (III.ii.15.1), but she inwardly resists her newfound ease: “Yet list the same efforce with faind gainsay; / So dischord ofte in Musick makes the sweeter lay” (III.ii.15.8–9). Sweet discord shows how the intermixing of contraries can produce aesthetic and affective pleasure, a pleasing melody and the bittersweet taste of lovesickness, which combines pain and pleasure.⁶ Dwelling in Britomart’s willful inner contradiction may draw our attention to how her back and forth with Red Cross is itself pleasing—the surprise of the chaste Britomart telling a lie, the anticipation of conflict or resolution as the tension between the two knights builds, only to be suspended. Or it might make us less certain that the false accusation is as outrageous as it first seems. As the moment of inwardness opens up to relate the “straunge occasion” by which Britomart fell in love with Artegall (III.ii.18.1), we come to see that while Artegall hasn’t done anything dishonorable, the effect of his image on Britomart has been deeply painful, which may explain her resentment. Britomart’s one-sided encounter with Artegall is itself similar to reading an allegory—seeing his image in the looking glass without knowing what it means, she has to “feed on shadowes” that she does not understand (III.ii.44.3), moved by the “semblaunt pleasing most [her] minde” (III.ii.40.7) but unable to decipher its “darke conceit” (714).⁷ The conversation between Britomart and Red Cross enfolds questions about how binaries interact in the reading of allegory as an aesthetic as well as moral experience.

It is worth remembering that allegory at large involves a negotiation of contraries. For Quintilian, allegory is that “which people translate inversio, presents one thing by its words and either (1) a different or (2) sometimes even a contrary thing by its sense,” and it is closely associated with irony.⁸ In the sixteenth century, George Puttenham still found it important to demarcate allegory from other tropes relying on contradiction. Allegory is “the figure of false semblant,” he writes, and it is “when we do speak in a sense translative and wrested from the own [i.e. its own] signification, nevertheless applied to another not altogether contrary but having much conveniency with it.”⁹ Michael Murrin has investigated how a certain definition of allegory could include a range of tropes, so that “at the furthest remove one finds irony and its related forms.”¹⁰ Allegory, Murrin writes, “could indicate anything from analogy to contradiction” (Veil 59). The representation of contraries in allegory is therefore also a potential way of reflecting on its structure and how it ought to be read.

In the ninth canto of Book III Spenser tackles the subject head on. He is concerned that the ensuing story of Hellenore and Paridell’s adultery may offend his readers and that he himself may become the target of unjustified blame:

Redoubted knights, and honorable Dames,

To whom I leuell all my labours end,

Right sore I feare, least with vnworthie blames

This odious argument my rymes should shend,

Or ought your goodly patience offend,

While of a wanton Lady I doe write,

Which with her loose incontinence doth blend

The shyning glory of your soueraine light

And knighthood fowle defaced by a faithlesse knight.

(III.ix.1)

Spenser is worried about a censorious response to any ambiguity caused by vice. To “blend” is glossed as to dim or to conceal, Hellenore’s incontinence somehow blotting the virtue of the ladies reading the poem. But the word also means to mix, which is a possible effect of reading—letting in strange thoughts, emotions, and actions. If poetry leads to a mixture of vice and virtue and to the latter’s corruption, then it is open to allegations of harmfulness and therefore to censorship.

Spenser quickly denies that such a mixture can occur and reassures his readers that good and bad can never be confused:

But neuer let th’ensample of the bad

Offend the good: for good by paragone

Of euill, may more notably be rad,

As white seemes fayrer, macht with blacke attone

(III.ix.2.1–4)

This moment is similar to others in which Spenser inserts his authorial voice to clear up ambiguity and reestablish the boundaries between vice and virtue in order to avoid offense, such as his reassurance of the “Faire Ladies, that to loue captiued arre” that their “sweete affections” are unmarred by Malecasta’s lust (III.i.49.1, 3). Flattering the virtue of his readers, he seems to restore contraries to their distinct and obvious shapes—good and evil, black and white. But the reassurance is undercut by irony, since Spenser also means its opposite. The purpose of his poem and “all [his] labours end”—“to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline” (“Letter” 714)—implies that his audience still needs training in virtue and may not so easily discern “the bad” and “the good” within themselves. The stark distinction between good and bad, vice and virtue, truth and falseness is a false reassurance meant to avoid blame, whereas the poem continually undermines these divisions and provides additional opportunities for a more pleasing ambiguity. Spenser’s Malfont, the poet “whose tongue was for his trespasse vyle / Nayled to a post” (V.ix.25.2–3) shows the tension between the requirements of censorship and the qualities of poetry. Judgment dictates that the poet’s name be changed from Bonfont to Malfont, that is from good to bad. But the “purport of his sin” is written “In cyphers strange, that few could rightly read” (V.ix.26.2–3). It is unclear if Malfont is punished for the harmfulness of his “bold speaches” and “lewd poems” (V.ix.25.6–7), or because most people, like most readers of allegory, could not understand his poetry and misread it as pernicious. Spenser seems to imply that poetry requires greater license and room for ambiguity in order to give pleasure, which cannot be captured by the binary requirements of censorship.

In their thinking about contraries, Spenser and Milton seem to make opposite moves. Milton imagines the knowledge of good and evil (or truth and falsehood) as essentially distinct but perceptually indistinguishable. His practical argument is for tolerating mixture, but it relies on the conviction that “unkindly mixed” elements will be ultimately separated. Spenser, on the other hand, starts with seemingly obvious binaries, only to undermine their distinctness as he involves his readers in reflection on the pleasures of poetry, where truth and falsehood are intermixed.