Mammon's Cave: An Architectural Digest

Spenser's depiction of Mammon in Book II, Canto 7 of The Faerie Queene is more than just an allegorical representation of greed, avarice, or materialism. By depicting Mammon as a contemporary goldsmith, Spenser levels a skillfully veiled critique at Queen Elizabeth and her regime.

I. The Cave

Critics and scholars of The Faerie Queene who refer to the house of Richesse, Mammon's house in Canto 7 of the Second Book, as a cave disregard the finer points of Spenser's sense of interior design. For those who read the poem as moral allegory, rather than political allegory or polemic, the misidentification of Mammon's abode is easy enough. As a cavernous underground dwelling, the setting, with its overtones of Hades and neo-Platonic philosophy, vindicates an exhaustive schooling in Greek, Latin, and medieval literature, and fits neatly within the interpretative formulas of scholars who think you have to know something of Orphic mysteries and Egyptian hieroglyphs to understand the poem.

The practice of reading the poem as moral allegory finds its precedent in no less an authority than the author himself. In his letter to Walter Raleigh accompanying the poem, Spenser calls his poem a "continued Allegory, or dark conceit" and states that its purpose is "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline" (Spenser, 737). He notes the models for his book: Homer, Virgil, Aristotle, Xenophone, Ariosto, Tasso. This didactic intention ushers forth many tropes and allusions in the poem from sources classical and Christian. Most of these have been so well documented in the scholarship on the poem since then that, if they were not conventional in the first firing of Spenser's imagination, they have come to seem so by this time.

Archetypal readings in this manner have remained viable because they originated in and perpetuated a battery of Christian or humanist values that most readers of Spenser used to share. For later readers, they have come to be convenient because they sanction a more internal analysis of the text for which history, a discipline of study often disconnected from literature, would not prove an obstacle. A. C. Hamilton, in the introduction to Book II in his edition of the text, comments that "it is the pattern of inner meaning expressed by the parallel structure of the first two books, rather than reducible historical background provided by the two orders of nature and grace, which reveals the perspective for an understanding of the two Books and the unity of the whole poem" (Spenser, 163). Possibilities for this kind of mosaic elaboration of the text abound. But is the meaning of the passage always contingent upon the extent to which the reader can recreate abstract textual structures and approximate the values of Spenser's putative moral perspective? Or is there a historical basis for understanding Spenser's depiction of Mammon? In other words, did petty political and personal interests shape Spenser's poem?

It is this last question that I shall address in looking at Book II, Canto 7 of The Faerie Queene. For I believe that the historical context helps to explain many of the details of Spenser's depiction of Mammon. It is difficult to maintain the assertion that matters contemporary to Spenser's composition, what Hamilton calls the reducible historical background, did not shape his allegorical representation. After all, during the period when Spenser was working on the first three books of The Faerie Queene, he had evolved from an ambitious twenty-something Cambridge graduate who had worked his way up to service under one of the most powerful courtiers in the country to a thirty-eight year-old state bureaucrat, stuck in a mid-level post in the Irish hinterland.[1] For a "poor scholar" graduate of the Merchant Taylors' School, ever eager to discover a kinship with some noble Spencers of the Midlands, lofty idealism had already struck a hard bargain with the mean accidents of reality.

I ought to note that allegory, as I intend to consider it in The Faerie Queene, involves more than just the personification of moral concepts. It includes the incarnation of concepts in a variety of representative forms. In referring to The Faerie Queene, the expression allegory might designate any detail or element in the poem which seems to have its source or reference in an idea or image more timely to Spenser's composition. These are the worldly and temporal details, an allusion to the debased value of the coin as much as the debased value of man. In the epochal shifts of Spenserian criticism, this line of inquiry recently has flourished and concentration has moved to the biographical details and clues in Spenser's works which betray a better sense of Spenser himself, his identity and his motives.[2]

At the intersection of historical background and poetic allegory - the Spenser who wrote The Faerie Queene and the Spenser whose identity is manifest in it - rests Spenser's letter to Walter Raleigh presenting his poem to his friend. His letter opens as a caveat towards "auoyding of gealous opinions and misconstructions." It is unlikely that Spenser fretted over Mammon being interpreted as an allegory of Spanish avarice or Philotime being construed as an object lesson on worldly vanity. Why then was Spenser concerned? The most natural reason would be that his allegory contained pointed contemporary references offensive to people in power. That is, his concern was not that his poem would be misconstructed, but that it will be too accurately constructed. This is part of my premise. My inquiry addresses the historical background and centers on the following questions: Why is Mammon's house a house and not a cave as so many critics have insisted on seeing it? And why is Spenser so particular in certain details of his depiction of it?

II. Where Is that Happy Land of Faery?

To dismiss the historical background as irrelevant or incidental to understanding Spenser's account of Guyon's encounter with Mammon runs counter to the admonition with which Book II opens. In the opening stanza of the proem Spenser writes:

Right well I wote most mighty Soueraine,

That all this famous antique history,

Of some th'aboundance of an idle braine

Will iudged be, and painted forgery,

Rather then matter of iust memory,

Sith none, that breatheth liuing aire, does know,

Where is that happy land of Faery;

Which I so much do vaunt, yet no where show,

But vouch antiquities, which no body can know. [II.proem.1]

It may be only a fortuitous chance of enjambment that the last three lines read as a question, if not a challenge, to the reader. Still, the preamble acknowledges the mystery of the poem's sense of place and initiates a riddle: Where is that happy land of the Faerie Queene? Spenser perches himself upon a narrow fence in answering the question. To say that it is nowhere and that his poem is utter fantasy would have undermined the serious artistic purpose with which he has conceived his poem and his enterprise as a poet. To say, on the other hand, that it is everywhere and that his poem is a literal account of those rarefied echelons of power to which Spenser aspired and had already some experience carried the threat of serious literal consequences. By the example vividly pictured in Book V in the figure of Malfont "whose tongue was for his tresspass vyle/ Nayld to a post, " it would seem that Spenser was sensitive to these consequences. (V.25.2-3) The proem nevertheless serves as a reminder that many parts of the poem may be reduced to their historical background.

To the question, where is this land of Faery, Spenser hazards an answer himself in fourth stanza the Book II proem:

Of Faerie lond yet if he more inquire,

By certaine signs here set in sundry place

He may it find; ne let him then admire

But yield his sence to be too blunt and bace,

That no'te without an hound fine footing trace.

And thou, O fairest Princesse vnder sky,

In this mirrhour maist behold thy face,

And thine owne realmes in lond of Faery,

And in this antique Image thy great auncestry. (II.proem.4)

Spenser suggests to his most mighty sovereign, whether princess or more ordinary reader, that attention to these certain signs of the poem's setting will assist an understanding of the poem. To make out these signs in Mammon's house necessitates a recognition of the historical background.

III. A Historical Reading

In his essay "Hunger of Gold: Guyon, Mammon's Cave, and the New World Treasure, " David Read provides an explicit analysis of the historical background of Spenser's depiction of Mammon's house. The shortcomings of Read's interpretation of the scene are in some way foreshadowed by the title. He repeats the common mistake of assuming that Mammon lives in a cave. The assumptions and reasons underlying his mistake, however, are entirely original. Indeed, his essay may be more useful because of its misidentification. For it provides an interesting vantage for trying to make sense of the canto through a more text-attentive interpretation.

Read begins with the second stanza of the proem of Book II in which Spenser compares the undiscovered sources of his allegory with recently discovered regions of the New World: Peru, the Amazon, and Virginia. Read notes, "There have been few attempts to deal with canto vii as a historical document, since the traditional view has been that the episode is, in Frank Kermode's words, without historical dimension.'" (Read, 211). He opts as his model for Greenblatt and cites Greenblatt's chapter on Spenser in Renaissance Self-Fashioning as his precedent in critiquing The Faerie Queene as "a major document in what is often termed the discourse of colonialism'" (Read, 210). For Read, Spenser's references to the New World represent more than a metaphor or conceit for insinuating a contemporary relevance in the details of the book. They adduce literal terms for identifying the colonial discourse which he believes forms the subtext to Guyon's tour of Mammon's underground facilities.

Following the lead provided by the references to the New World, Read examines works about the New World which may have served as contemporary sources for Spenser in his depiction of Mammon's lair. He fixes upon Richard Eden's collation of Peter Martyr's Decades de Orbo Novo. Read dates Eden's work within a period of time in which it might be reasonable to surmise that Spenser could have been susceptible in his composition of The Faerie Queene to its influence. A second edition of Eden's 1555 compilation of works about America had been issued in 1577 placing it within close proximity to the year 1579 which Hamilton marks as the latest that Spenser might have begun his poem. (Spenser, 2)

It is Martyr's work that bolsters Read's interpretation of Mammon's house as a cave. To Read, Mammon's underground complex does not resemble a cave because it evokes archetypal classical and Christian conceits of the underworld. It resembles a cave because Spenser's description of Mammon's underground complex parallels Martyr's description of New World mines. His scholarship may be fortuitous. His analysis seems partly misdirected.

The scene in which Guyon first encounters Mammon above-ground helps to condition Read's interpretation of the subsequent underground setting. Having stumbled upon Mammon in a gloomy glade, Guyon takes a moment to survey the scene:

And round about him lay on euery side

Great heapes of gold, that neuer could be spent::

Of which some were rude owre, not purifide

Of Mulcibers deuouring element;

Some others were new driuen, and distent

Into great Ingoes, and to wedges square;

Some in round plates withouten moniment;

But most were stampt, and in their metall bare

The antique shape of kings and kesars straunge and rare. (II.vii.5)

Read writes, "The image, for instance, of Mammon sitting on his horde acquires sharper definition when we view it as containing a parody of the process by which Spaniards acquired wealth in the New World. This stanza compresses the whole procedure for rendering gold into usable currency, a procedure which was almost the sole property of the Spaniards in the late sixteenth century" (Read, 212). He does note here some of the peculiar minutiae of the stanza: the ingots, the square wedges, the stamped and unstamped coins, and the heaps of gold withal. The arrangement of the details in a sequence corresponding to the different stages of commercial production seems a fair justification of the suggestion that the stanza partially parodies or compresses the procedure for converting mined gold to wealth. In fact, the stanza implies several procedures. Primary among these are: one, the extraction of the ore; two, the refinement of the ore into bullion; three, the minting of bullion into coin.

The delineation of these different procedures is important for a couple reasons. One, this scene here in the glade foregrounds the scenes and activities Mammon will reveal to Guyon underground. Mammon tells Guyon that he will show him the origin of his wealth. Read's essay prompts the question: which part of this process for creating wealth will be represented? Only the procedure of mining as Read argues? One of the other steps in the process? Some combination of steps? The entire process?

Two, Read's summation of this stanza raises a question regarding the source for the contemporary reference. Read concludes on the basis of his reading of Eden that the Spanish acquisition of wealth is the subject of Spenser's allegory and that the Spanish are the object of his parody. Is this accurate? In the proem, Spenser describes the book to his sovereign reader as a mirror to "thine owne realmes." It would admittedly be a quibble to contend that Spain as an independent state did not fall within the Queen's realm of interest. The menace of Spanish intervention in Ireland during the 1580s would have provided Spenser a keen appreciation of the overlap of Spanish and English interests. And English New World settlement was increasingly offered as a means for checking Spanish domination on both sides of the Atlantic.[3] Did anxiety about the Spanish absorb Spenser's interest and imagination to such an extent that it formed his conception of Guyon and Mammon? To answer this questions, it helps to look carefully at the text.

From the gloomy glade, Mammon and Guyon proceed underground. Following a highway that leads to "Plutoes griesly raine, " they arrive at the "gate of Hell." The gate opens into the house of Richesse. After Mammon has lead Guyon into the first room, Spenser describes the house's form as being "like an huge caue" (II.vii.28.1-2).[4] While the comparison extends to the whole complex, it is articulated only here in the first room. This does not deter Read. He comments, "The likelihood that Guyon is entering no mere cave but an actual mine has been little remarked, perhaps because it is so obvious" (Read, 221). The evidence he provides is tenuous and refers indiscriminately to details both inside Mammon's complex and outside in the glade. Read observes that "the cave is hewne' out of the rock; it is man-made" as perhaps a mine to an extent would be. (221) Read himself acknowledges that "most mining in the New World was in fact surface-mining, " but relies upon "the conventional notion of the mine as a subterranean fixture" (Read, 222, footnote 32). That it is man-made, however, seems to point out the contradictory fact that Guyon and Mammon are in a structure more carefully designed than a mine. It is called a house. It may even be a factory or manufacturing plant of a sort.

Read also takes the reference to Arachne spinning her web as evidence of activity. (221) Activity would be consistent with the operations of a mine. The reference to Arachne, however, seems more properly differentiated as a convention of classical allusion rather than a detail signaling the contemporary allegorical dimension. Tradition and reality are by no means exclusive sources for the imagery or themes in Spenser's poetry. They intermingle, alternately beautifying and complicating the allegory. It is not necessary to levy every detail of this section into the service of a strictly historical or moral interpretation. Therefore, it is satisfactory to accept that Arachne invokes Arachne in the classical sense. There is no special imperative to suggest that Arachne's spinning symbolizes mining, as Read's construction implies. Arachne typically spins a web when depicted. And there is, in any event, no other activity in the room.

It is not inconceivable that Spenser meant to elicit by these details a passing reference to mining. There is no further basis within this stanza, however, for associating these scant details with Spanish mining in particular. In his history of the Tudor coinage, C. E. Challis points out that Elizabeth's reign witnessed the first successful exploitation of mineral reserves on the British Isles. The more profitable ventures were in silver mining, but gold was sought out as well and a gold mining operation in Scotland in the late 1580s proved successful. (Challis, 153) Read acknowledges the fact of domestic mines in his article only, with some justice, to dismiss it. Nevertheless, Spenser's attention to mining seems altogether fleeting and these lines are the only ones which justify the suggestion that Mammon may be showing Guyon a mine.

The next stanza in fact illustrates the inactivity within that room in which Arachne spins:

Both roofe, and floore, and wals were all of gold,

But ouergrowne with dust and old decay,

And hid in darknesse, that none could behold

The hew thereof. (II.vii.29.1-4)

The room itself appears to serve an entirely different function. The next stanza indicates its function:

In all that rowme was nothing to be seene,

But huge great yron chests and coffers strong,

All bard with double bends, that none could weene

Them to enforce by violence or wrong;

On euery side they placed were along.

But all the ground with sculs was scattered,

And dead mens bones, which round about were flong,

Whose liues, it seemed, whilome there were shed,

And their vile carcases now left vnburied. (II.vii.30)

In the introductory chapter to her conventional analysis of the Faerie Queene as a Christian poem, M. Pauline Parker unwittingly offers one of the more astute interpretations of Mammon's house. She writes, "Guyon, to take a less-obvious example, is not led by Mammon into the cellars of a bank to do a little expert safe-breaking" (Parker, 22). While there are no safes in Mammon's cellar, yes, there are "great yron chests and coffers strongs, / All bard with double bends." Indeed, the room looks convincingly like a storehouse or treasury. To appreciate the implications in this detail, one must first realize that banking was not a wholly defined institution during the Elizabethan period.

Banking as a distinct institution was still a century away. It was the goldsmiths, as originators of the coin, who typically served as financial intermediaries. In London Clearing Houses, Edward Nevin and E. W. Davis note:

The beginning of the differentiation of the trade of goldsmithery into working goldsmiths' and exchanging goldsmiths' was probably discernible during the later years of Queen Elizabeth I's reign. The nobility of Elizabethan times had been accustomed to holding a large proportion of their ready money in the form of jewelry and plate. Under these condition goldsmiths had prospered and attained an increasing importance. Apart from their normal trade as working goldsmiths, their activities appear to have comprised mainly the exchanging and valuing of money and bullion, and the negotiation of bills drawn on places abroad. (Nevin and Davis, 15)

In the next century, goldsmiths would assume several of those functions associated with modern banking. They kept deposits, made loans, and maintained reserves. (Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 721) If they had not yet assumed these responsibilities in Spenser's age, their association with mercantile activity must still have been pronounced. Nevin and Davis observe that, at this time, large sums of cash held by merchants were in fact deposited in the Tower of London under the care of the Master of the Mint. (Nevin and Davis, 16) The significance of the Tower of London will be explored in greater detail shortly.

As for goldsmithery, Challis observes that the goldsmiths' shops were concentrated in two streets of London: Cheapside and Lombard Street. The multitude of craftsmen in the precious metals inspired one Italian visitor to London during the sixteenth century to write:

The most remarkable thing in London is the wonderful quantity of wrought silver In one single street, named the Strand [Cheapside], leading to St. Paul's, there are fifty-two goldsmith's shops, so rich and full of silver vessels, great and small, that in all the shops in Milan, Rome, Venice, and Florence put together, I do not think there would be found so many of the magnificence that are to be seen in London. (Challis, 156)

The abundance of goldsmiths' shop drew the notice, too, of members of the French embassy in 1547 and moved a visitor from Basel, Thomas Platter, in 1599 to record that in "one very long street called Cheapside dwell almost only goldsmiths and money changers on either hand, so that inexpressibly great treasures and vast amounts of money may be seen here" (Challis, 157). A native of London, Spenser was probably acquainted with the street, its great treasures and vast amounts of money, since his youth.

From this room full of chests and coffers, Mammon leads Guyon to an iron door behind which lays another chamber showing:

of richesse such exceeding store,

As eye of man did neuer see before;

Ne euer could within one place be found,

Though all the wealth, which is, or was of yore,

Could gathered be through all the world around,

And that aboue were added to that vnder ground. (II.vii.31.4-9)

Mammon again proffers the wealth to Guyon. Guyon proudly rejects him once again. The attitude of superiority and contempt registers in the summation of Guyon's:

But I in armes, and in atchieuements braue,

Do rather choose my flitting hours to spend,

And to be Lord of those, that riches haue,

Then them to haue my self, and be their seruile sclaue. (II.vii.33.6-9)

In his edition of the text, G. W. Kitchen remarked of these lines:

These reflections on the superiority of the knight to wealth (also of the "gentleman" to the merchant and trader) are quite in the highest style of the time. It must not be forgotten that these were the days in which, through their mines, etc., the Spaniards were essentially the "purse-proud" race, and duly hated by the English. Possibly, too, a little scorn for the burghers of Holland, who had but lately shown so little sense of Lord Leicester's splendour and blood, may have been working in Spenser's mind. (Spenser Variorum, 260)

Kitchen's comment detects the polemical aspect of Spenser's depiction of Mammon's complex. It also obliquely evokes Read's interpretation of the scene with its allusion to Spanish mines. However, Spanish wealth and mines for Kitchen serve only as a sidelight to the disdain Spenser reserved for the commercial classes. It is this last group which seems more pertinent to the sense of these lines. Spenser's antipathy for merchants and commerce may well be at the heart of the episode.

From this second treasure chamber, Mammon brings Guyon into a room of another sort. The chamber at first glance looks like a foundry:

Therein an hundred raunges weren pight,

And hundred fornaces all burning bright;

By euery fornace many feends did bide,

Deformed creatures, horrible in sight,

And euery feend his busie paines applide,

To melt the golden metall, ready to be tride. (II.vii.35.4-9)

Read comments, "In stanzas 35-37 Spenser has literalized the hellishness' of such contemporary descriptions of Spanish mines." However, there is little literal evidence for reading these lines as a description of a mine. The furnaces rather recall the original description of Mammon. It is one which makes more sense in light of the tour Mammon has provided for Guyon thus far. When Guyon first enters the gloomy glade, he finds Mammon:

sitting in secret shade

An vncouth, saluage, and vnciuile wight,

Of griesly hew, and fowle ill faurour'd sight;

His face with smoke was tand, and eyes were bleard,

His head and beard with sout were ill bedight,

His cole-black hands did seeme to haue beene seard

In smithes fire-spitting forge, and nayles like clawes appeard. (II.vii.3.3-9)

Perhaps the glade's gloominess and Mammon's swarthiness are literal illustrations of Bartholem de las Casas' Black Legend. It is not easy to overstate English aversion to and anxiety about the Spanish during the period. In his biography of Spenser, A. C. Judson writes that prior to the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, the fear of Spanish invasion in Ireland, Spenser's country of residence, "was constant" (Judson, 117). He goes on to point out that, with that pivotal battle, over twenty Spanish vessels would be wrecked off the Irish coast and thousands of Spanish corpses and prisoners washed up on the Irish shore. (Judson, 123) The Spanish were not wholly imaginary bogeymen.

Nevertheless, the operative terms in Mammon's description accounting for his "griesly hew" seem to be the smoke, soot, coal, and fire-spitting forge. He is a smith. And he looks like one. In fact, part of Spenser's description of his appearance recurs in Book IV for the figure of Care, who torments Sir Scoudamur in his sleep:

Full blacke and griesly did his face appeare,

Besmeard with smoke that nigh his eye-sight blent;

With rugged beard, and hoarie shagged heare,

That which he neuer wonte to combe, or comely sheare. (IV.v.34.6-9)

His name was Care; a blacksmith by his trade (IV.v.35.6)

Here Care is explicitly identified as a blacksmith. Mammon is a smith of a different type, a goldsmith. Charles Lamb long ago seems to have recognized his occupation with little difficulty in remarking, "the Money God appears first in the lowest form of a miser, is then a worker of metals, and becomes the god of all the treasures of the world" (Variorum, 249). The similarity between Care and Mammon is probably not accidental, an arbitrary correlation produced by a lapse in Spenser's power to creatively describe the one and the other. For Care and Mammon are united in the depiction of Mammon's house. Care serves Mammon. In stanza 25 of Book II, canto vii, it is this same Care who stands guard at the door to the house of Richesse.

It is after Mammon has taken Guyon through this chamber of furnaces that Guyon addresses him "thou Money God" (II.vii.39.1). It is more than an idle epithet. Furnaces were central to the manufacture of coin, and all money in the period was coin of one form or another. The royal mint during the 16th century, lodged in the Tower of London, housed its own furnaces. Officials of the royal mint, Challis notes, alternated between "sinecurist' courtiers" and "working' professionals" (Challis, 33). The working professionals were goldsmiths drawn from the goldsmiths' guild, which supplied most the labour for the mint operations. Within this inner chamber of furnaces to which Mammon has led Guyon, a general impression of metal-working is ineluctable. But is this simply a generic representation of a foundry worked by smiths? Or is does it present a more particular representation of goldsmiths and money-makers? Spenser's description of its operation follows:

One with great bellowes gathered filling aire,

And with forst wind the fewell did inflame;

Another did the dying bronds repaire

With yron toungs, and sprinckled oft the same

With liquid waues, fiers Vulcans rage to tame,

Who maistring them, renewd his former heat;

Some scumd the drosse, that from the metall came;

Some stird the molten owre with ladles great;

And euery one did swincke, and euery one did sweate. (II.vii.36)

Particular interest may be given to the expression "dying bronds" in line 3 of stanza 35. Hamilton in his edition glosses the word "bronds" as "embers" (Spenser, 230). This renders the sentence as rather incoherent, something in the way of: "Another smith revived the fading embers with iron tongs and sprinkled them with water." The word "toungs" may be the key. For the word is found in Benvenuto Cellini's "Treatise on Goldsmithing." Published in Florence in 1568, it is perhaps impossible to know what knowledge Spenser had of Cellini's Trattati. Three chapters in particular of this slim volume seem relevant. Chapters 14-16 address the subject of stamping coins and medals. Cellini gives special attention to the manner in which the dies for the stamping of these articles are created. The first published English translation of Cellini's work was not produced until 1888, when C. R. Ashbee offered a version. A passage at the end of Chapter 15, "About Medals, " he renders:

When your die is aglow, grip it carefully with tongs & quickly dip it into the water, and not holding it in one position but stirring it round, always keeping it under water till it hisses no longer and becomes cold. Then take it out & polish it up with powdered iron scale just as you did before with the coins. (Ashbee, 74)

This passage throws a new light on that curious line in Spenser. I find it illuminating for it seems that Spenser's line approximates Cellini's instructions here. Mammon's underling is tempering a minting die. This interpretation coheres more fully with Spenser's depiction of Mammon's money-smithing enterprise.

The philological evidence is suggestive if not conclusive. The bits used for stamping coins are known as dies. The Oxford English Dictionary defines die as "an engraved stamp used for impressing a design or figure upon some softer material, as in coining money, striking a medal, embossing paper, etc." (OED IV, 630). However, it does not cite the first usage of the word until 1699 and in fact quotes Spenser's line as an illustration of dying in the more common sense of "fading" (OED V, 5). The passage in Cellini seems to offer a reasonable justification for ascribing the term this particular sense relating to the dies used in coinage. Moreover, the origin of the oldest sense of the word die, as the marks made on small cubes for the purpose of gaming, carries with it the same principle. That Spenser would have been translating from the Italian himself perhaps offers additional credibility to the suggestion that he coined the word. Further, as Hamilton notes in his marginalia, this would not be the only term he coined in this book. Spenser mints new words almost as freely as Mammon mints coins. W. F. Bolton, Hamilton observes, claimed that Spenser originated new meanings or forms for eight words in stanza 10 alone. (Spenser, 225)

"Brond" is the archaic spelling of "brand." The OED dates the usage of the term as "the mark made by burning with a hot iron" to 1552. This sense is corollary to Spenser's usage. "Brond" here appears more aptly defined as the instrument for making the mark, as on a coin. Usage of the word in this sense is standard, but the earliest citation the OED records dates back only to 1828. Again, there seems to be a fair case for asserting the Spenser merely adapted that corollary sense related to the action of branding to the appellation of the object which marks the brand. Either familiarity with Cellini's "Treatise" or first-hand experience of the minting process - perhaps as a youth roaming Goldsmiths' Row, perhaps as an official of court under Leicester privileged to witness the inner operations of the royal mint at the Tower - may have suggested the expression.

In stanza 37, the "feends" working the furnaces notice Guyon:

But when as earthly wight they present saw,

Glistring in armes and battailous aray,

From their whot worke they did themselues withdraw

To wonder at the sight : for till that day,

They neuer creature saw, that came that way.

Their staring eyes sparckling with feruent fire,

And vgly shapes did nigh the man dismay,

That were it not for shame, he would retire,

Till that him thus bespake their soueraigne Lord and sire. (II.vii.37)

In conceiving the fiends as employees of Mammon, there is nothing amiss in these lines. Guyon's reaction to their appearance accords with the ignoble quality Spenser would want to attribute, for the reasons Kitchen notes, to their labors. Read compares Spenser's "feends" to natives toiling in Spanish mines as pictured by Martyr and de las Casas. His analogy clearly shows the length to which his reading struggles to realize its object:

These "feends" are innocents; they have never seen a man in armor before, and this accounts for their being dumbstruck. The vividness and foreigness of the scene lead P. C. Bayley in his edition of Book II to ask, "What can Spenser have seen of great furnaces and smelting like this? He seems to anticipate the Industrial Revolution." Spenser is not predicting the future but describing a present reality. He has not seen it himself, it is true, but sources of information about it are ready to hand. For instance Peter Martyr, in one of his more pessimistic moments, describes the forced labor in the New World mines as a kind of living death which reduces its native victims to the level of Spenser's "feends." (Read, 223)

There is little to suggest sympathy in Spenser's account of these "feends." Though they may be innocents, they are not innocent. For Read's interpolation of the Black Legend to serve here, he might expect a positive, or at least a pitiful representation of these labourers to be contrasted with the negative image of an exploitative Mammon. He might expect, too, some suggestion that their labour were involuntary. Rather, the "feends" at the furnace and Mammon seem to be aligned. Implications to the contrary, if tenable at all, require a very flexible and porous reading of the text.

As a historically sensitive reading of the text, Read's analysis is well-researched and internally cohesive. Placed within the context of his essay, the passages of The Faerie Queene he cites support neatly his interpretation of Mammon's dwelling. Placed within the context of the poem itself, his interpretation of these passages is more discordant. This may be a consequence of the external focus of his study: he gives as much attention to Eden and Martyr as he does Spenser. The strain of his interpretation is clearly evident when he is left to conclude that both Mammon and Guyon represent the Spanish: Mammon as the incarnation of Spanish villainy and Guyon as "a Spaniard immaculately conceived" (Read, 220).

IV. Philotime's Court

Guyon does not yield to the temptation of Mammon's wealth, nor is he impressed by the revelation of his industry. Mammon, however, has one more trap to bait and he leads Guyon from that room which looks suspiciously like a mint to a golden gate guarded by the titan Disdayne. Inside resides the court of Philotime. That it requires the mediation and influence of Mammon to enable Guyon to overcome the invincible Disdayne and penetrate the court is the first of many aspects of the scene which represent perhaps the vestige of personal experience.

In the figure of Philotime, Mammon challenges Guyon's temperance with more than the temptation of wealth. Philotime is the incarnation of the power wealth carries in court and by Guyon's response to her, it appears that she is meant to excite his lust as much as his avarice. Her depiction opens with an evocation of her "face right wondrous faire" and "her broad beauties beam" (II.vii.45.1-2). There is the implication of her own sensuous appetites in the attribution of her counterfeited appearance to a desire to call "thereby more louers unto her" (II.vii.45.6). In this respect, she forecasts the decadence and temptation vividly figured in Acrasia and the Bower of Bliss which closes Guyon's adventures in Book II.

On this occasion, Guyon resists the temptations of the flesh with much more tact and restraint. Perhaps it is because he recognizes the counterfeit in Philotime's beauty. Like those "great heapes of gold of which some were rude owre, not purifide" which Guyon descries in first encountering Mammon in the gloomy glade, Philotime's beauty is not pure. Closer scrutiny of this "woman gorgeous gay" reveals the dissimulation:

Her face right wondrous faire did seeme to bee,

That her broad beauties beam great brightnes threw

Through the dim shade , that all men might it see:

Yet was not that same her owne natiue hew,

But wrought by art and counterfetted shew,

Thereby more louers vnto her to call;

Nath'lesse most beauenly faire in deed and vew

She by creation was, till she did fall;

Thenceforth she sought for helps, to cloke her crime withall. (II.vii.45)

A "great gold chaine ylincked well" (II.vii.46.2) literalizes the connection between the "feends" Guyon had seen working the furnaces and Philotime's court. To state, as Greenblatt somewhere does, that Spenser worshipped power may expostulate a somewhat useful if immensely generalized rule for beginning to organize the disparate allegorical and polemical pulses which riddle The Faerie Queene. But to assert that The Faerie Queene "is wholly wedded to the autocratic ruler of the English state, " and that Spenser passionately worships imperialism, (Greenblatt, 174) overstates Spenser's patriotism. At the same time it underestimates his capacity to be critical of the monarch. Philotime's court marks a particular instance of this critical, even counteractive, aspect of Spenser and his poem.

The chain held by Philotime embodies the unworthy Ambition of the courtier. In terming every link "a step of dignity, " (II.vii.46.9) Spenser employs the word dignity with forceful irony. It is nearly satirical. But in representing the intense underhanded competition among the company in Philotime's court to scale these steps of dignity in the next stanza, Spenser eschews verbal irony:

Some thought to raise themselues to high degree,

By riches and vnrighteous reward,

Some by close shouldring, some by flatteree;

Others through friends, others for base regard;

And all by wrong wayes for themselues prepard.

Those that were vp themselues, kept others low,

Those that were low themselues, held others hard,

Ne suffred them to rise or greater grow,

But euery one did stiue his fellow downe to throw. (II.vii.47)

To the self-fashioning gentleman having arrived to court by a longer chain - which originated in the Merchant Taylor's School, where it is probable that Spenser, indigent in his youth, was admitted upon charity - the caprices and injustices court politics must have been particularly repugnant.

Spenser's portrait of Philotime's court antedates the frustration he experienced in 1590 when he was drawn away from his new Irish estate in Kilcolmon by Walter Raleigh and brought to Elizabeth's court where he unveiled the first three books of his fairy epic. After a protracted period of waiting, Spenser was eventually award a pension of 50 per annum by Elizabeth. (Judson, 153) But during the months he awaited this grant, the image of Philotime and her great gold chain must never have been far from his mind. Still, while the experience may have been a bitter vindication of his views in the Mammon canto, it was not their source.

For that, Spenser may have recalled his service under Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, as his confidential emissary in the year preceding his departure for Ireland. The period of his service was marked by intrigues and speculations surrounding Elizabeth's reception of Duke of Aleon, brother to the French King Charles IX. Ministers for the two royal parties were negotiating a marriage which would be useful in uniting the two nations as a check to Spanish dominance.

Leicester and his circle of influential Protestant nobility were obstinately opposed to the marriage of their sovereign to the Catholic foreigner. For Leicester, objections may have run deeper. He had been a long reigning favourite of the Queen. They were simultaneously incarcerated in the Tower of London for several weeks during the reign of Elizabeth's half-sister, Mary. (Wilson, 131) Upon her ascension, Elizabeth seriously entertained the idea of marrying the Earl. (Judson, 55) Leicester sponsored an assassination attempt on Jehan de Simier, Aleon's master of the wardrobe who had arrived in London in January of 1579 in advance of the Duke. Simier retaliated against Leicester by revealing to Elizabeth Leicester's unauthorized marriage to the Countess of Essex. Elizabeth was incensed and Leicester was obliged to abscond from court.

Spenser entered into Leicester's service in the midst of these upheavals and his peculiar entre into the intrigues of court and the caprices of Elizabeth's affection could only have hardened the austere attitude of one whose own upbringing held none of the same ease and privileges. It is true that Spenser made no small show of his devotion to the Queen. Even while he openly satirized court life in works such as his beast fable Mother Hubberds Tale, he adhered to those mores and expectations of court life necessary for survival and advancement under the Queen. In a milieu that demanded theatrical exhibitions of loyalty and affection, Spenser acquitted himself admirably in dedicating his great poem to Elizabeth. Yet his dedication and the many professions of devotion elsewhere in the poem are here erased in Philotime's court by the acidic reference to that face "wrought by art and counterfetted shew." Elizabeth would have been fast upon fifty years of age at the time Spenser was composing these lines. Her dependence upon the art and symbolism of cosmetology is preserved for us in several formal portraits. Spenser's portrait, with its representation not only of these artifices but of the crimes they "cloke withall, " seems dangerously bold.

Another peculiar detail of this anti-court is the word by which Spenser designates the room which houses Philotime and her minions. He characterizes the room as:

large and wide,

As it some Gyeld or solemne Temple weare. (II.vii.43.3-4)

The easiness with which Spenser offers to interchange guildhall with temple makes the apposition seem almost obvious. In fact, it is very far from obvious. In the relation of the two words with the Princess Philotime, he counterpoises the sacred with the profane. The association of the sovereign with divinity is inveterate. To set a princess in a guildhall is less conventional. The peculiarity, however, may have its historical precedent.

The royal mint, it will be remembered, was situated in the Tower of London. Spenser's familiarity with the Tower remain primarily a subject for historical conjecture. In A View of the Present State of Ireland, Irenius at one point bids Eudoxius to consult letter on record in the Tower in verification of a claim he has offered on the history of Ireland. Spenser writes:

This you may read plainely discovered by a letter written from the citizens of Cork out of Ireland, to the Earle of Shrewsbury then in England, and remaining yet upon record, both in the Towre of London, and also among the Chronicles of Ireland. (Spenser, A View, 67-8)

The line infers a certain level of intimacy with the Tower and its operations.

As far as Elizabeth's familiarity with the Tower, history is more informative. Until the reign of Elizabeth's grandfather, Henry VII, the Tower was the primary royal residence. For the embattled princes of England, the Tower offered a safe haven amid the chaos and conflict that continued in the aftermath of the War of Roses. But, as Derek Wilson notes in his history of the Tower, "By 1547, the palace at the Tower had become old-fashioned" (Wilson, 81). New standards in architecture provided the monarchy with more hospitable structures for dwelling. The Tower's other facilities, however, remained state-of-the-art, and its prison became an important instrument in the crown's hold on power. Elizabeth and her ministers made especially effective and sinister use of its facilities in imposing stability over the state. It is this fact, together with the Tower's ominous place in her own history, which perhaps explains Elizabeth's unease about the Tower. Wilson writes:

It is not surprising that Queen Elizabeth I should have disliked the Tower of London. She came there on 28 November to take possession of her fortress but did not remain until the coronation, leaving by water on 5 December with trumpets playing, and melody and joy and comfort to all true English men and women.' She came back on 12 January for the formalities preceding her coronation on the 15th. Throughout the rest of her long reign (1558-1603) she never again slept within the walls of the Tower. (Wilson, 134)

Yet for Spenser, rummaging among the charters and rolls of the Tower's archive for records of the Anglo-Irish, the Tower maintained its place as the unified center of English authority. He preserves the Tower in Mammon's complex as an image of focused national power. The house of Richesse fulfills three major functions commonly associated with the Tower as a palace, a dungeon, and a mint.

It is its latter function which Spenser emphasizes in the figure of Mammon, the goldsmith. Mammon's industry recalls one of the first priorities of Elizabeth's administration and registers the increasing influence of more modern financial technique in the economics of the government. For reformation of the coin was an early project of Elizabeth's administration. Undertaken shortly after Elizabeth's ascension, the success of the project marked an important achievement for the administration on three counts. One, it provided a much needed relief to the hideous monster of the base moneys' originating in the financial liberalities of earlier Tudor regimes. Two, it provided a "handsome profit in the region of 50, 000" to the financially strapped administration. Three, it provided a ubiquitous new symbol of Elizabeth's sovereign station. (Challis, 127)

For Spenser, the evolving significance of the mint within the finance, administration, and definition of the nation would have been a matter for more ambivalent reflections. As useful as the mint may have been to the crown, it was essential to the operation of the mercantile economy. In his book, The Breakdown of Money, Christopher Hollis summarizes role of the mint and the consequences of the growing money supply:

Silver and gold poured into England throughout the last half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century, and, as a result, prices rose. The crown got a small seigniorage on the minting of those precious metals, but substantially they remained the property of their owners. As a result the King's income was little greater than it had been at the beginning of the sixteenth century, while the purchasing power of the income was vastly less. (Hollis, 44)

The owners of these precious metals were primarily the merchant venturers, and the rise of the great English trading companies during the period testified to the expanding influence of this class in the affairs of state. The mint marked a point of intersection between the two powers, implying that for all intents and purposes the tie was indissoluble.

Spenser's property acquisitions in Ireland indicate the extent to which his notion of value clung to the traditional conception of wealth as land. For London merchants, wealth and its concomitant virtue, status, were increasingly quantified in the more abstract form of the currency. Mammon is the provenance of those "great heapes of gold, that neuer could be spent." The mint and its merchant suppliers created wealth in just this form. So far as honorable ends were involved, it could never be spent. Only exchanged.

Of course, all of this leads eventually to commodification and Verwertung. It will forestall anachronism to observe that Spenser was not a Marxist. But, ideologically, he was something of a feudal throwback. As Louis A. Montrose points out in his examination of Spenser's domestic domain, even while he exploited the new entrepreneurial modes of publication, Spenser celebrated the old-fashioned forms and values of the pastoral and epic. (Montrose, 97) A Protestant, he was not a conservative in the modern sense in which religious earnestness is the vehicle of reactionary politics. Compared with its rival the Catholic Church, Protestantism still possessed the freshness of something radical. Rather, it was in his sentimentalization of princes, knights, and shepherds that Spenser stood out as a conservative. An ideological conservative more than a political one. The mint, that other medieval institution, would be adaptable to the service of a transforming economic and social order. Spenser was less so.

Works Cited

Ashbee, C. R. The Treatises of Benvenuto Cellini on Goldsmithing and Sculpture. [Translation from the Italian] New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1967.

"Banks and Banking." Encyclopaedia Britannica. 1997 ed.

"Brand." Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989.

"Die." Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989.

"Dying." Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Self-Fashioning Gentlemen: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Judson, A. C. The Life of Edmund Spenser. Vol. 8 of The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition. Ed. Edwin Greenlaw et. al. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1933.

Montrose, Louise A. "Spenser's Domestic Domain: Poetry, Property, and the Early Modern Subject." Subject and object in Renaissance culture. Ed. Margreta de Grazia, et al. Cambridge, 1996.

Nevin, Edward and E. W. Davis. The London Clearing Banks. London: Elek Books, 1970.

Parker, M. Pauline. The Allegory of the Faerie Queene. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960.

Read, David T. "Hunger for Gold: Guyon, Mammon's Cave, and the New World Treasure." English Literary Renaissance 20 (1990): 209-232.

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Edited by A.C. Hamilton. New York: Longman Group Limited, 1995.

Spenser, Edmund. The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition. Ed. Edwin Greenlaw et. al. Vol. 2. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1933.

Wilson, Derek. The Tower: 1078-1978. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978.

[1] There is some dispute among Spenser scholars regarding the status of his transfer from Earl of Leicester's employ to the service of Lord Grey in Ireland. Views of the change in situation range from promotion to demotion to doesn't really matter in reading the poetry. I believe that it does matter and tend to see his relocation as a lateral move at best, probably a demotion insofar as it moved him away from the courtly center of power and patronage in London.

[2] For this reason, A View of the Present State of Ireland has found new relevance among Spenser critics. In his provocative chapter on Spenser in his book, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt set the trend. He united assumptions about Spenser's ideology based on details from A View to the representation of Guyon's depredation of Acrasia's Bower at the end of Book II in The Faerie Queene and presented Spenser the race-baiting misogynist, Spenser the working class upstart, and Spenser the power-monger of Elizabeth.

In his essay "Spenser's Domestic Domain: Poetry, Property, and the Early Modern Subject, " Louis A. Montrose assesses the philosophical dimension to talking or writing about an Edmund Spenser. Posited as a response to Foucault's nettlesome question, "What is an Author?" Montrose accepts Spenser as something between a dead poet, an epistemological assumption, and a textual convenience. He writes, "Any meaningful response to Foucault's provocative concept of the author-function' will commence, not by rejecting it, but rather by expanding and refining it, by giving greater historical and cultural specificity and variability both to the notion of Author and to the possible function it will serve" (Montrose, 92). On the philosophical question, I adopt his view.

[3] Justifications on this basis are found in several New World tracts in the Elizabethan era, including Eden's and Richard Hakluyt's Discourse of Western Planting of 1584. With his friend Walter Raleigh being one of the most outspoken promoters of New World settlement, . and a state official himself, Spenser could not have been indifferent to the implications of Spain's presence as a rival. In Book V, Artegall's chariot battle with Souldan (Canto viii) and Geryon (Canto x) marks two instances where this type of Spanish vilification figures more explicitly in the allegory.

[4] Hamilton notes in the marginalia of his edition of the text that "critics have consistently misnamed Mammon's dwelling a cave; it is explicitly named a house" (Spenser, 228).