Sequels typically represent attempts to extend, recoup, or dilate upon the charismatic impact of a celebrated original or some kind of ex post facto Part I. They trade upon the existence of this Part I, as in the second sally of Don Quixote, or the journey of the pilgrim’s widow Christiana in Bunyan’s sequel to The Pilgrim’s Progress. But this temporal structure can also be absorbed or incorporated into a single unified work, as in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Parts I and II, or the two installments of The Faerie Queene, divided between three private and three social virtues. Spenser’s earlier narrative transitions, as do others, to the later one at a median hinge: the hermaphrodite’s suppression at the end of Book III, and Ate’s emergence with Book IV; the falsehoods about Hal’s death spread by Rumour at the start of Henry IV Part II; the emergence of a fake rival as Quixote’s second sally starts. Allecto’s upsurgence signals the transition from Odyssean to Iliadic halves in Virgil’s Aeneid. The poet’s descent to earth marks Paradise Lost’s midpoint at Book VII’s invocation. Beginning their second halves, Milton and Virgil repeat “what cause?” That question started their first halves, too. Proust’s midpoint is more Spenserian: his essay on hermaphroditism begins the fourth of six books.

Sterne’s Tristram Shandy may find its epilogue in his subsequent Sentimental Journey; the latter can be read as an abbreviated, self-referential, and valedictory sequel to the former, with many inversions. Proust’s six novels are followed by an autobiographically heavy seventh. The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost are also followed by such a retrospective. The Mutabilitie Cantos and Paradise Regained each reflect the predecessor text in ironically reversed fashions. Spenser’s Two Cantos invert The Faerie Queene’s proportions microcosmically and macrocosmically. The Cantos expands the “core” canto of Book III—the philosophical argument of a “Lucretian Platonist” anticipated in the Gardens of Adonis now expanded to a two-canto debate. A plot upon the privacy of moon-goddess Cynthia and an insurrection against the rule of Cynthian-born Jove utterly supplant Arthur’s quest for his ineffable Fairy Queen. Milton’s “brief epic,” meanwhile, expands the temptation of the human subject from one book (Book Nine) of Paradise Lost to the four books of Paradise Regained. The forbidden fruit is pleasant to look upon, good to eat, and sufficient to make man wise, but the long tradition of a schematically parsed triple temptation based on these words—and correspondingly on world, flesh, and devil—is missing from Paradise Lost but is fundamental in the re-match between Satan and a new Adam.

Each sequel begins by gesturing towards recovering remains of the past. Spenser “will rehearse that whylome I heard say”—Mutability’s rebellion against the gods’ sovereignty—“But first . . . Her . . . lin[e]age ancient, / As I haue found it registred of old, / In Faery Land mongst records permanent.” ¹ Milton calls on the Spirit to let him “tell of deeds . . . in secret done, / And unrecorded left through many an age, / Worthy not to have remained so long unsung.” ² Spenser summons “the greater Muse” that “alone . . . Can tell things doen in heauen so long ygone; / So farre past memory of man that may be knowne” (VII.vii.1–2). These retrievals pair with acknowledgements of the anteriority of “records permanent” of the poet’s own magnum opus. Paradise Regained attaches itself to Paradise Lost explicitly, at its outset. The Two Cantos attach themselves to Spenser’s Queen, Elizabeth’s name being implicit in their last lines (VII.viii.2).

So, two very heavy alterswerk pendants. For each is weighted with the poet’s own lengthening autobiography: the Two Cantos’ Faunus and Molanna on Arlo link back to Colin Clout and Sir Calidore on Mount Acidale, and forward to the contemporary Ireland of Raleigh. Janus-like, Paradise Regained looks forward to Samson Agonistes and the Restoration, and back to Milton’s career as recapitulated in Jesus’ future ministry (see fig. 1).

Fig. 1: The structure of Paradise Regained alongside Milton’s Life and Career.

Paradise Regained presents a mirror of the author’s own life, retrospectively considered, through a semi-autobiographical fiction. Milton doubles this auto-biographical element with Samson Agonistes. Two testaments: Milton as a blundering and delinquent Old Testament outlier, and Milton as a prescient and sagacious New Testament quietist.

Why would this autobiographical component count in our comparison to the Mutabilitie Cantos? To begin with, Spenser’s and Milton’s sequels don’t try to recapture a charismatic original and reproduce and repeat it in a second sally, as does Part II of The Pilgrim’s Progress or a serial like those of Arthurian legend and chivalric romanzi. Our sequels revisit, reconsider, revamp, critique, revalue, and further explore or reverse or invert or undo or recoup or recompose, transcendentally or descendentally, the action and values of each’s altogether imposing predecessor—an epic romanzo and a diffuse epic. Each spells the end of its original, versus its continuation into further sequelae, in a mode plaintively proposed by Cervantes’ Sancho Panza. For them, as Cervantes’ Don cautions the proverb-loving Sancho in a final example, “there are no birds in last year’s nests.” ³ Ave atque vale.

Agonistic Sequelae

The Mutabilitie Cantos lack a chivalric hero—their protagonist is an anti-establishment anti-hero, a proud, determined, rebellious upstart. And there is no real temptation in Paradise Regained: only a contemptible, would-be tempter and the unmoved object of a vain attempt. For latter-day Satan—who previously had “won so much on Eve, / So little here, nay lost; but Eve was Eve”—finds Jesus “is far his overmatch”; Satan has not well “weighed / The strength he was to cope with, or his own” (4.5–9). The provocative object is not Eden’s taboo tree of knowledge, but Jesus himself. It’s Satan who’s tempted—to tempt God.

Let’s pursue this notion of a quasi-judicial debate controlling our texts, each poet writing an internal colloquy arguing against himself.

Temptations to which Jesus is immune are ones Milton succumbed to. Jesus doesn’t plan an epic poem about being tempted, but the susceptible Milton is a fallen double of his untempted subject. Satan molests even the privacy of his sleep, but his movement towards Jesus is also Jesus’ own movement towards a negative mirror-image—towards, so to speak, his silhouette, the space cut out of the world by the space he occupies in it. Satan tells Jesus that he’s been shadowing him all along, that he has been present on all the epiphanic occasions when the Son himself has come into public view. He attends the Nativity, like Matthias Grunëwald’s Lucifer, but not the wisemen who are the future Gentiles, but the wary stargazers endangered by becoming Herod’s spies. Satan has also made himself the negative image of Jesus among the doctors, or Satan among the groupies, seething to repossess the identity that he has lost to his idol, “God’s latest image,” ⁴ as Uriel quotes Satan on mankind. Or, longing to re-possess the birthright Esau deeded to his twin, Satan is a Doubting Thomas, licensed to doubt, like Thomas the Twin (John 20:24). ⁵

In the wilderness, Jesus is tested in gut, heart, and brain, representing the concupiscible, irascible, and intellectual faculties, as Spenser’s Mammon tempts Guyon with greed, honors, and curious knowledge. Like Herod and Pilate, Satan never really learns, from Messianic self-affirmation, who Jesus is.

The Sequels’ Art: I

Both texts evince a master’s craftsmanship in a self-balancing architectonic. For Paradise Regained, this can be represented as a ring-structure (see fig. 2):

Fig. 2: The Ring-structure of Paradise Regained.

This arrangement presents a triumph of Renaissance art in its design. But the breaking down of the goods and kingdoms temptations—into one vision and three speeches, followed by one speech and three visions—seems like a baroque rebalancing of the symmetry insisted on by the frame (see fig. 3):

Fig. 3. Schema of the goods and kingdoms temptations of Paradise Regained.

The one immediate good of the Banquet also compares to the three immediate thrones of the real kingdoms, while the three mediate goods of riches, power, and glory (means to the Kingdom), compare to the one mediate (or “allegoric”) kingdom of learning. If Jesus cannot expect a worldly throne, perhaps he will settle for being lord of the feast (Banquet). If he will not lay up his treasure in iron boxes, arms, and a glorious display, perhaps he can find it in books and libraries (Athens).

Starting from the offer of riches, we might characterize the three “mediate” goods of riches, power, and glory as Solomonic assumptions of divine prerogatives. And starting from the throne of Israel, we can call the three real kingdoms of Israel, Parthia, and Rome Herodian usurpations of the kingship of God. The arguments go beyond the first to implicate the remaining ones. Wealth is sought for empire’s sake, empire for glory’s. Israel’s throne cannot be maintained without league with Parthia, or conquest of it, to keep Rome at bay; Rome, in turn, enjoys power, but also wealth and renown—preferable to Parthia, it represents empire being sought for glory. The goods are presented by one immediate vision, the Banquet—the goods of sense—and three mediate verbal suggestions, the “means” of riches, power, and glory. The kingdoms are presented by one urgent verbal suggestion—to reign in Israel—and three immediate visions of opportune means to advance the Kingdom but usurp the kingship of God: Parthian arms, Roman domination, Athenian brain-power.

Milton frames the six temptations to assume royal prerogatives and encroach upon rival kingships with the preludal and postludal visions of the Banquet and Athens. This frame goes back to the dream-visions of Paris and Solomon. Reason is also choice: Paris’ choice of the Voluptuous Life (Venus), over Glory (Juno), or Wisdom (Minerva), is represented by the luxury of the masque. Solomon’s choice of wisdom is dissimulated by Athenian culture. Both the Banquet and Athens tempt Jesus to abdicate engagements with the Active Life. Banquet and symposium (Comus -like masque, Florence-like academy) frame the temptations of rival kingships. The first promises gratification without money, power, or glory. The last promises mastery without politics (Israel, Parthia, Rome): the Contemplative Life. Abjuring Albracca’s Siren-like Angelica and/or Rome’s whore of Babylon, Jesus might embrace intellectual Athens and study Greek at home: the whore of Mensa.

Dialectical Dramatization

Paradise Regained’s two nights offer an internally inclusive frame. Night One leaves Jesus alone with roaming wild beasts. He dreams of a modest meal to support a miraculous fast. Meanwhile, flown to the middle air, Satan plots as the Apostles fret. Night Two leaves Jesus alone with the storm precipitated as Satan fulminates. Outside these nocturnal visitations are temptations to precipitate miracles. The Greeks seek after wisdom and the Jews ask for a sign (1 Cor. 1:22–24).

Hardly tempting Jesus, Satan tries him for that sign—and the miraculous equipoise the pinnacle makes explicit. The macro-structure conveys the gyroscopic balance keeping Jesus focused on who he is, not who (or whose) Satan would tempt him to be or claim to be, or insult him as or for failing to be. The barrage epitomizes distractions from his authentic vocation: a prophetic ministry bearing God’s truth, his witness (see PL 9.32, “heroic martyrdom unsung” with PR 1.14–17, “so long unsung . . . deeds / Above heroic).

Satan presents a kind of shadow-self of Jesus; so Mutability of Nature. Mutability represents the phenomenal veil of mutable or ephemeral appearances cast over the noumenal and intrinsic character of the Great Goddess. Being a somewhat inadvertent dialectician, the more she wins, the more she loses, ultimately demonstrating the nature of change as a reliable constant. A Momus-like critic of the gods, Mutability would fall under her own critique, should she mutate into Nature herself, or would fall under the shadow of her critique’s failure, insofar as she becomes an element of the poem’s survival and not one of the ruins of its time—not, in other words, an old relic, like the ancien régime of an obsolete Olympian establishment or of an increasingly vulnerable Ptolemaic astronomy.

The intellectual stand-off twixt goddess and Titaness rules even in the Two Cantos’ two-stanza pendant. Mutability is put down by Nature, and Jove is confirmed in his imperial see; but Cynthia has been as good as driven out of her demesne in Ireland, and the poet himself, speaking at the end of the Two Cantos in the first person, cannot wholly decide who wins the argument between Olympian Jove and the insurgent offspring of Titan. The poet bethinks himself like adjudicative Nature but cannot put Earth’s daughter’s claims aside. In Paradise Regained, Satan is dismissed repeatedly, but the agon is nonetheless prolonged, like that of Hercules versus earth-born Antaeus.

Our two sequels will not repeat their originals but will rather reverse them. Both evince a similarity in the noumenal world’s reaction to the disruptive, novel, and sign-making event triggering the action’s remainder. The gods’ first reaction to Mutability’s beautiful stature is astonishment, consternation, and “hidden feares” (VII.vi.28). Jove accuses her of intending, “Through some vaine errour or inducement light / To see that mortall eyes haue neuer seene” (VII.vi.32—Mutability sins with the subplot’s Faunus). At Jesus’ divine recognition at the Jordan, in Milton’s narration, Satan is equally upset: “Nigh thunder-struck,” he surveys, “the exalted man . . . With wonder; then with envy fraught and rage . . . To council summons . . . A gloomy consistory”; “O ancient Powers of Air,” he begins, announcing the threat to “our old conquest . . . This universe and . . . wide World . . . [that] we have possessed” (Paradise Regained 1.35–49). He impresses the assembly with “much amazement” and leaves it “Distracted and surprised with deep dismay” (1.107–9). The Prince of the Power of the Air reads debacle in the new sign, even as Mutability’s lunar eclipse portends Elizabeth I’s mortality. Satan’s success in Paradise Lost, like Gloriana’s celebration in Spenser’s oeuvre, now must end.

The Sequels’ Art: II

Like Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained is cast in Virgilian epic books, with features of Vida’s, Sannazaro’s, and Maffeus Vegius’ humanist productions. Spenser’s sequel is written in cantos, like other Renaissance epic romances, and it is titled like Ariosto’s Cinque Canti. The Cantos’ form reflects The Faerie Queene itself, six legends in two parts, which the Two Cantos extend by one-sixth. They are themselves extended with Spenser’s first-person response in a two-part pendant of its own. The projected poem of twelve books was half-finished at six; one-sixth of one further book offers itself in place of the missing half of the larger massif. The Cantos’ procession of the twelve months epitomizes a zodiacal whole, as found additionally in the illustrated Shepheardes Calender, but this reminds us that Ovid’s Fasti, another poem on the months, is only half finished, while the Metamorphoses nearly begins in Jove’s suppression of the wolvish Lycaon, and nearly ends in Pythagoras’ speech on the universality of change, a speech from which (or from Montaigne’s version of which) ⁶ Mutability in fact takes much of her argument. Ovid ends upon Julius Caesar’s deification; the Mutabilitie Cantos end with the eternity of Elizabeth’s fame as Eli Sabbaoth. ⁷

The Cantos is/are organized by three large blocks: the first thirty-five stanzas have a cosmic venue: the moon and the gods’ celestial dwelling-place. The second thirty-five stanzas descend to Arlo and record Cynthia’s desertion of it at the end of the first canto and Nature’s visit to it at the start of the second. The third thirty-five stanza block records Mutability’s evidence for the supremacy of change (elemental, monthly, seasonal, diurnal, mortal, and cosmic). The stanza count tallies: thirty-five is five sevens, and the remaining seven stanzas are one more septimal and coda-like unit. These final stanzas close the case; they have Mutability questioning Jove’s own nativity and the reliability of astronomical calculation. Completing this coda, the plaintiff claims the day but then receives Nature’s summary judgment against her. The second canto’s twenty-stanza centerpiece on the months is flanked by nine stanzas on the elements and nine on Mutability’s rebuttal instancing the changeability of seven planetary gods. The central Arlo block lies athwart the Two Cantos. The overall scheme is:

Fig. 4. Schema of the three, thirty-five-stanza blocks of the Mutabilitie Cantos.

The disposition is highly regular, as if in denial of Mutability’s own claims and in support of Nature’s sergeant Order. The number of factors on which this analysis turns—five and seven—when added together, make twelve. Apposite enough, if referred to time-binding, epic-booking, and zodiacal wholes. Finally, the Irish epyllion occupies a sixth of the whole piece (15 of 114 stanzas), just as the Two Cantos comprise a sixth of a Spenserian legend.

The Autobiographical Alterswerk Revisited

Here we can pick up the dropped stitch of an extended fictionalized autobiographical narration that in effect forecloses further sequelae, just as the Acidale episode itself seemed to say no to any further installments of The Faerie Queene.

Authorial autobiography is a recognizable feature of Renaissance narrative from Boccaccio onwards. And from Skelton to Drayton, its key question is, “Who knows not Colin Clout?” which becomes, “Who knows not Arlo Hill?” More recognizable than Arlo’s denizens Molanna and Faunus is Raleigh’s Cynthia. In his Ocean to Cynthia, the aggrieved courtier dares imply that Elizabeth’s or Cynthia’s own high noon is no less over than his own, and that it is mainly the force of her devotee’s imagination and memory that is now keeping her bright. ⁸ Comparably, the mortal moon of the Two Cantos suffers eclipse in the shadow of the Titaness of Change. In the Cantos’ subplot, Molanna, disgraced by the queen-as-Cynthia, is a co-conspirator with Spenser-Faunus, scapegoated by the same unapproachable goddess who is so much the object of The Faerie Queene’s worship and purposes.

Once Faunus and Molanna are respectively identified with Spenser and Raleigh, the autobiographical strain shows plainly enough. Having benighted the moon, Mutability presses a claim to the remaining spheres. She submits her case to Nature, who convenes her court on a remote hilltop deep in the Irish countryside. In the subplot’s neighboring woods, Faunus gets himself caught spying on Cynthia’s toilette, when he laughs aloud at her “some-what” (VII.vi.46). Cynthia’s train menaces the malefactor with gelding; she deserts the territory forever. Replacing Colin, Faunus represents Spenser celebrating Elizabeth as a Diana-esque goddess of the woodlands; securing an audience, he botches the opportunity to advance his case—his views, his career—and is threatened by the court’s cutting off his pension. Deer-skinned and hounded out of the landscape, Faunus is mock-Acteonized; Spenser, a rising official of Elizabeth’s government in Cork, was driven from Ireland in the Munster rebellion. On his way out, he likely found refuge at Mallow Castle, to which Elizabeth once sent a christening-gift of deer. The fauna among which Spenser might have hidden range Mallow’s park today.

Raleigh’s story of over-reaching, self-betraying clienthood in his Ocean to Cynthia mirrors Faunus’, given Mollana’s accessory role in the crime, for hers is the name of a de-monasticized estate Elizabeth gave Raleigh. Using Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, we infer that Molanna-as-Raleigh used her/his position to aid Faunus-as-Spenser, who seized on the invitation to interview his Queen and said something over-familiar or over-critical about English rule in Ireland. Faunus’s name acknowledges he’d played the fool.

De Constantia

Satan should have known not to try Jesus, the Adversary having failed with Job, “Whose constant perseverance overcame” (Paradise Regained 1.148), and despite Jesus’ “dismal night,” and impending distress’ “ominous… sure foregoing sign” (4.452, 481-83). Mutability’s suppression is also under signs. Faerie Queene V has begun with Astraea deserting the earth, and the first of the Two Cantos ends with Cynthia abandoning Ireland to thieves and wolves, answering Nature’s disappearance from Arlo at the end of the second. It begins with the plaintiff “Alteration,” appealing to Nature’s “Bar” with her “large evidence” and concludes on the heavens moving the “Starres and Signes” in the orderly temporal progression of sign-bearing months, with a judgment “rightly wayd” (VII.vii.55, 58). In Faerie Queene V, Talus carries out the will of “Astraea … Mongst those twelue signs, which nightly we do see… And is the Virgin, sixth in her degree, / And next her selfe her righteous balance hanging bee” (V.i.11). Autumn’s equinox occurs on the first day the sun enters Libra, departing “the righteous Virgin,” the sign identified with Astraea who, when “Iustice was solde… left th’vnrighteous world” (VII.vii.37). September holds a harvester’s blade, but one that may also be identified as Saturn’s or Time’s scythe. His other hand holds equinoctial and equitable scales: “A paire of waights , with which he did assoyle / Both more and lesse, where it in doubt did stand, / And equall gaue to each as Iustice duly scann’d” (VII.vii.38). Twenty stanzas later, at Nature’s doom or judgment, these descriptives recur: the Arlo assembly, “Expecting th’end of this so doubt full case, / Did hang in long suspence what would ensue, / To whether side should fall the soueraigne place” (VII.vii.57), “all things being rightly wayd ” (VII.vii.58). Spenser’s final, pendant stanzas balance equally, for and against.

Whoever assigned the Two Cantos to a Legend of Constancy had large evidence, given the more earthy congener steadfast starting from Arcturus’ stedfast polestar (Faerie Queene I.ii.1). Faith, temperance, chastity, love, justice, and civility all acquire their visibility through sustaining, over time, steadfastness. The “stedfast rest of all things” (VII.viii.2) contrasts with the Irish lack of fixed places of residence and gives especial force to Nature, “Still moving, yet vnmoued from her sted” (VII.vii.13). Spenser’s legends typically end in some nagging triumph of mutability over the quest. Here, the ratio is reversed: Faunus barely survives his quest, while Mutability stages a very large triumph of Time. For Mutability avers that there is no steadfastness. Like the left-over Satan of Paradise Regained, this sequelist remains a relentlessly antagonistic Renaissance malcontent. A little like Mutability herself, the stedfast Spenser was no quitter; yet even Time, which takes survey of all the world, must needs yield to the triumph of Eternity.