Let me concur in Harry Berger's sentiments, with thanks to all those who were stimulated by the query about that old article and Christopher Warley timely comments. I don't have a history in print to compare with Harry's, or with Anne Prescott's, but I've been thinking about the Mammon episode for years. If I ever develop something for public presentation or print, I will take advantage of what's been said on this thread to date, and whatever may be added before we reach the point of diminishing returns -- or swoon upon returning to the "vitall ayre," whichever comes first.
To Christopher Warley's question, "in what sense can Guyon be called aristocratic?" I would note that in the Letter to Ralegh Spenser declares his interest in (re)forming a "gentleman or noble person," and I think that he consistently blurs that distinction, regarding one status in the light of the other.
We often refer to Guyon as Sir, but how often does Spenser? He's armigerous, but his horse is stolen and he is typically seen on foot -- or recumbent, as in Phaedria's boat, after his escape from Mammon's cave, and when he creeps up to rescue Verdant. His status is that of a bachelor, and both in and out of the Palmer's company he can be defined primarily by his relationship to that older mentor. Mammon asks to be seen as the patron or benefactor who will take the young Guyon's future in hand, once he has finished (or bailed out of) his education.
Until he has married and produced an heir (with Philotime?), does Guyon have any place of his own in the social hierarchy?
Even with all the help that Harry Berger has furnished us, I've always found it difficult to parse the complexity of Spenser's attitude toward Guyon and the class interests that he represents. There's an analogue in Shakespeare's sonnet 94 (They that have power to hurt); Spenser's perspective seems to me both cooler and more deeply ambivalent.
Let's remember that the aristocracy as Spenser knew it contained a number of men who had risen from obscure origins. Ralegh, for one. For another, Sir Thomas Smith (1513-77), a farmer's son who became an academic, a civil servant, a diplomat, and (incidentally) a mentor / patron to Gabriel Harvey. He was instrumental in Elizabeth's efforts to stabilize the debased coinage, bring inflation under control, and rationalize trade with the continent. Smith's _Discourse of the Commonweal_ (published 1581) and _De Republica Anglorum_ (1583) both deserve study in relation to Spenser's perspectives on wealth (both landed and mercantile), power, monarchy, and parliament.
I would go so far as to suggest that Smith could be seen as a real-life instance of the traits and functions that Spenser gives to the Palmer. If any on the list have taken an interest in Smith's career and his writings, I'd love to hear from them.
Mammon is hard to place in Elizabethan society. Of course, if he's really a demon he's a total outsider, but I'd like to see him as no less human than Malbecco: a man so far gone in melancholia (and in what we would call schizophrenia, a disorder that must have existed in the 16th c.) that he thinks he's a demon. (Note the self-reflexiveness of 8.1, "God of the world and worldlings I me call.") Mammon is one of the poem's many irrational genius figures, antithetical (but also essential) to Spenser's interests as arch-poet.
Christopher Warley asks what kind of work the "feends" are doing in 35. Mammon's underworld has been linked to colonialism and the mines of the New World, and that's not inappropriate. But there was ugly exploitative mining going on nearer home, most notably in the tin mines of Cornwall, where Ralegh was Lord Warden of the Stannaries.
More to the point in Spenser's allegory of wealth creation, perhaps, was the accumulation of capital and the hard labor involved when Queen Elizabeth, on the advice of Thomas Smith, called in all the old currency (which her father and other predecessors had made unreliable by mixing in base metals), and had it melted down and reminted. This must have involved some sweaty labor by a crew of wage slaves!
Somewhere, years ago, I read that this reformation of the currency, which asserted and enhanced in a bold new way the power of the central government, was resisted by the most powerful of the old guilds, including the Merchant Taylors. It seems that under Elizabeth, whose reforms gave the Bank of England its early modern form, the guilds lost considerable wealth and influence.
I hope there are readers of this who are more knowledgeable than I am in the fields of Tudor history and economics; perhaps they will correct and add to what I've laid out here.
Cheers, Jon Quitslund (Geo. Washington Univ.)
|