It seems to me that all of the possibilities you suggest are true,
because I'd argue that Archimago and Morpheus aren't fully separable
figures. They embody a similar tendency of mind. Archimago advertises
himself as a hermit who doesn't meddle with worldly things, and
Morpheus' house is a retreat from "care". Both of them are false
turnings away from a life of heroic effort--and what they play to is a
comparable impulse, of which he isn't yet conscious, in Redcrosse's
mind. I'd argue that the redundancy of the romance mode enables Spenser
to make Archimago a magician who works by the false images that are the
property of the fantasy and then, in a kind of riff on the idea of
Redcrosse's fantasy, to create Morpheus and his cave.
Hence the pastoral, erotic dream Redcrosse has with Una and Venus & Co.
isn't such an awful thing in itself--it's just not the right time for
fun and games. The dream is, however, curiously prophetic--both of the
pastoral moment in Canto 7 in which Redcrosse has sex with Duessa and of
the final pastoral betrothal scene with Una in 12, when the labors are
done, at least for the moment, and one can enjoy oneself without guilt.
I'm not quite sure what to do with this since Archimago is so clearly a
maker of false images, not true ones, but I'd like to see a divine irony
in it. God works through Archimago's falsehood to prophecy Redcrosse's
fall and his ultimate redemption.
Long afterward Pope wrote about sexualized fantasies "Dreadful as
Hermits Dreams in haunted Shades/ And bright as Visions of expiring
Maids" (Rape of the Lock IV.41-2). Douglas Patey has argued in a
wonderful article (Eighteenth Century Studies 1986 34-55) that The Rape
of the Lock is deeply influenced by the Despair canto, and I'd guess
that Pope read this scene carefully too. Bill Oram
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