756 DAVID LEE MILLER

shepheard he mote dwelling share.' This chance remark reminds us that it was actually the sight of beauty that kept Calidore among the shep­herds: he saw Pastorella and he elected to stay. Soon the shepherds' world will disappear as the vision of the Graces disappeared. In each case Calidore stands before these creations of the imagination much as the reader stands before the work of art. If Colin is the poet and the dance is his poetry, Calidore represents ourselves, the readers, in our fumbling efforts to understand the incomprehensible and our insistence on pat answers.

The perceptive reader will recognize that this puts Spenser's audience uncomfortably close to Mirabella and the Salvage Nation, or to Amoret in the House of Busyrane. Like Calidore, these characters did not understand the nature of poetic truth. Their inability to understand metaphor is linked with Calidore's inability to comprehend the nature of the dance. Thus, not only is Spenser's own persona, Colin Clout, brought within the scope of the poem, but so are we. The Dance of the Graces is the most important statement of a persistent theme in Book VI, the relation between poetry and society. Behind that stand two other related themes: the nature of fiction and our response to art. Book VI is a poem talking about itself.

Though Calidore does appear to learn from his conversation with Colin Clout, his incursion on the Golden World of Mount Acidale destroys the vision. Not only must we recognize the limitations of Calidore in ourselves, but we must also understand that Calidore, all unwittingly, repeatedly does what the Beast does intentionally: he breaks in and destroys. Book VI is the only book the object of whose quest is all around us. We must travel to Canto XII to meet Acrasia or Grantorto, but the Blatant Beast races through the world of the Legend of Courtesy like an ever-present and vulgar philistinism-not merely outside us but within us all.

DA YID LEE MILLER

Spenser and the Gaze of Gloryt

For what hath all that goodly glorious gaze Like to one sight, which Calidore did vew?

-The Faerie Queene VI. x. 4

"Gaze" is both a noun and a verb. For Spenser, the noun refers not just to the act of looking but also to the thing looked at. The semantics of the word imply a continuity between the two, a phenomenology of spectacle in which things are not passively "there" but offer themselves actively to be seen, as in a theater. Spenser identifies this imaginary theater with the imperial splendor and pretentions of Elizabeth's royal court, to which he

t Revised by the author for the present volume. An earlier version of this essay was delivered at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, December 1990. Remarks on Spenser's "Loe" are adapted from "The Writing�" Diacritics 20.4 (Winter 1990): 17-29. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

will contrast the dance o - -however, in which "tha· _ directly, like a concrete pe-refers neither to a particula: but to the visual milieu � seen within which caner • space belongs to the ima_ allure in whatever image; real or fancied source of • of courtly glory, the fairi: q�_ .. __ __,,111111

found nowhere. In Ambition and Privil

as an arena haunted by thi e career, Louis Montrose a quest for public recognitio bethan England and the s,precisely because the Ga�e Our own history and critic themselves constructed as extent that we seek one ano but the ideologies that have the histories that have orie media of an imperial Gaze. have names like "England·· Enlightenment"-names th:! transhistorical theater of re � idealized presences of the pa: -memorialize the character in other and the world.

In apprehending Spenser. -enology of spectacle: an ima_. read. My purpose in this es a-literary emergence into the E"". _...:.__ how Spenser's emergence a will pursue this double pu that correspond to crucial rw-:-::i:=::: conclusion of his first publi beginning of his major work, I -of that work, the dance of the G x. The first two of these sho11Montrose and Helgerson descSpenser's yearning to withdraand nostalgic, Colin's vision :

country lass seems to offer an a:for a disclosure untainted by th: c::::=::-:4this episode is, I want to inq

I. Frank Whigham, Ambition and Pn

(Berkeley: U of California P, 1984). 2. See, e.g., the articles excerpted for