In the Proem to Book II, Spenser invokes two sets of referents to make a truth-claim for The Faerie Queene: recent geographical discoveries in the New World, and ironic metanarrative from Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516, 1532). Addressing the historical and literary registers in sequence, Spenser’s proem blurs the distinction between them, treating the fantastical and improbable as undiscovered country that could at any moment reveal its historical truth. In counterpart metanarratives, the English poet and his Italian predecessor set out distinct conceptions of poetic speech and of the conditions under which it can be construed to be “free.”

Spenser here adapts the proem to Canto 7 of the Furioso, which introduces one of the poem’s two allegorical episodes: Ruggiero’s encounter with the seductive sorceress Alcina—whose Spenserian counterpart Acrasia is the villain of Book II. (The second allegorical episode narrates Astolfo’s voyage to the moon, to which Spenser also alludes in the Proem to Book II.) Ariosto’s poet-figure decries the ignorance of the sciocco vulgo, the vulgar throng, who disbelieve the marvelous reports of travelers returned from faraway lands.¹ It is these skeptics, not the credulous, whom the narrator considers philistines—those whose paltry imagination makes them doubt the reality of all they cannot see and touch (se non le vede e tocca chiare e piane).² Only his elite readers, distinguished by the capacity to appreciate the “shining light of my discourse” (’l lume del discorso … chiaro), understand its truth-value—by which he means the possible truth of even its most improbable claims. As he resumes his tale, the Ariostan narrator adopts a posture of nonchalance, licensed to speak freely to his preferred audience and to ignore his detractors. Free speech, for him, is characterized by the prerogative to identify his “implied reader.”³ His selection criteria, which exclude the would-be-Othellos demanding ocular proof, mark the limited contexts in which that speech remains free.

In his adaptation, Spenser associates the fabulous with the textual genre of travel narratives, popular with early modern readers for the purported veracity of even their most incredible claims:

But let that man with better sence aduize,
  That of the world least part to vs is red:
  And dayly how through hardy enterprize,
  Many great Regions are discouered,
  Which to late age were neuer mentioned.
  Who euer heard of th’Indian Peru?
  Or who in venturous vessell measured
  The Amazons huge riuer now found trew?
Or fruitfullest Virginia who did euer vew?

 

Yet all these were, when no man did them know;
  Yet haue from wisest ages hidden beene:
  And later times things more vnknowne shall show.
  Why then should witlesse man so much misweene
  That nothing is, but that which he hath seene?
  What if within the Moones faire shining spheare?
  What if in euery other starre vnseene
  Of other worldes he happily should heare?
He wonder would much more: yet such to some appeare.
(2.pr.2–3)

The New World referents would have been conspicuous for early readers, as they are now: Virginia, named by the English for the Virgin Queen; Peru, possibly a Hispanicization of Birù, the Quechua name of a Panamanian chieftain; and the Amazon River, named for the tribe of warrior women of classical mythology.⁴ The following stanza adduces a yet-more-ambitious destination: the “Moones faire shining spheare”—connecting the Ariostan material to the second allegorical episode of the Furioso and to the conventional praise of Elizabeth as Diana.⁵ However fantastical such a voyage might sound, Spenser’s narrator insists, the lunar vista does in fact appear “to some”—an elite company who have traveled not overseas but through verse and myth. Poetic voyages to the moon—if perhaps the gate is not as wide and the way not as broad as in the familiar descent to hell—include those of Dante in the Paradiso, who reaches the heaven of the Moon in cantos 2–5, and Ariosto’s Astolfo, who seeks Orlando’s lost wits in a lunar junkyard. Spenser’s third stanza concludes with five lines of persistent questions, creating an increasingly urgent expectation of reply; but the Alexandrine responds with laconic, even maddening vagueness, as Spenser’s narrator declines to gloss the credibility of “some” or the nature of what might “appeare” to them.

While Ariosto’s poet-figure peevishly dismisses the skeptical reader—Claudius’s hasty summary judgment of Fortinbras comes to mind: “so much for him”—the Spenserian narrator seems instead to be dreamily seduced. Even the sages of “wisest ages,” for this narrator, are insensible of cosmic mysteries: the increasingly vague, pronominally defined “things more unknown,” “other worlds,” and finally and laconically, “such.” While both narrators repudiate an implied reader’s demands for “proof,” they substitute for these demands distinct visions of free speech. Ariosto’s poet-figure reserves for himself a full spectrum of imaginative possibilities, so long as his “free speech” addresses his preferred audience. Spenser’s narrator, on the other hand, recruits skeptical readers into oneiric uncertainty, translating their positivistic demands into speculative visions of a world whose “least part to us is red.” For both poets, free speech by the poet is contingent on the reader; while Ariosto’s speaker proceeds with blithe confidence that his chosen readers share his reality, Spenser recruits his readers into the work of imagination.

Thus recruited, our essayists for this issue offer a provocative range of perspectives on “Spenser and free speech.” Pasquale Toscano opens the conversation with “The Freedom of Falling Behind: Milton, Spenser, and Truth-Telling Today.” Building on key concepts in disability studies, Tosquano locates ethical authority in the “lagging” dwarf of The Faerie Queene’s first book. It’s the dwarf’s distinctive gait and pace, Toscano argues, that allow him unique insight into the dangers of Lucifera’s Castle. What ethical postures, he asks, might “lagging” afford in the context of rising authoritarianism, in which the physically vigorous specter of the Übermensch represents the triumph of the autocratic ideal?

In “Innocent Paper: Spenser’s Lyric Conspiracy,” Stephen A. Gregg explores another emblem of repudiated speech: the burned manuscript whose loss is both recorded and lamented in Amoretti 48. In a reading sensitive to liturgical patterning and histories of religious persecution, Gregg’s essay considers how the lyric space of the sonnet combines the willing bondage of erotic submission with the subversive potential of conspiratorial speech.

Free speech proves equally elusive in Sue Starke’s essay, “Malfont’s Tongue: Poetic Injustice at the Court of Mercilla.” In her reading of Duessa’s trial in Book V of The Faerie Queene, Starke contrasts the forensic rhetoric of logos and ethos with the pathos of Duessa’s performance. Appealing not to forensic but to dramatic sensibilities, Duessa’s trial stages the transformation of Bonfont into Malfont when poetic pathos threatens the ideal of judicial impartiality.

Michal Zechariah strains against this binary division of poetry into bon and mal in her essay “Reading by Candle-Lights: Truth and Falsehood in Areopagitica and The Faerie Queene.” Taking cues from Milton’s free-speech tract and Bacon’s “Of Truth,” Zechariah finds in Spenser’s poetry a deconstructive gravity, an intermixing of good and bad that lends itself neatly to allegorical representation—and that would belie the effectiveness of Bonfont’s rechristening.

In the final essay of this issue, “The bankes of Hellicon: Colin Clout and Spenser’s Speech,” Susanne Woods considers Spenser’s relatively late return to pastoral in Colin Clout’s Come Home Again, where the poet risks speaking freely in defense of Sir Walter Ralegh, its dedicatee, and in critique of the Elizabethan court. In the semi-protected space of pastoral convention, Woods argues, Spenser identifies and defines the prerogative of “liberty,” antecedent to contemporary understandings of “free speech,” as a contingent and institutionally conferred right, and obligation, to speak truth to power.

This issue of Spenser Review enters its final editorial phase over the weekend of July 4, 2025—the 249^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, announcing the secession of the “thirteen united states” from the political authority of Great Britain. As a rhetorical occasion for a journal issue on “free speech,” the moment is impossibly overdetermined: for scholars of Spenser, executor of brutal policies in colonial Ireland; for American history students attuned to the perennial irony and promise of “all men … created equal”; for university students, faculty, and staff in the United States whose safety and livelihood are under threat. But it is also, thankfully, an apt occasion for the pleasures and challenges of free inquiry, unbeholden intellectual work, a celebration of shared literary history, and an invitation to ongoing conversation.