The Persistence of Morpheus: Redcrosse’s Carelessness

Book 1 of The Faerie Queene constitutes Spenser’s most searching study of morbid sadness, which he associates with a wish for “careless” rest and, ultimately, for death. His account of Redcrosse’s disease makes use of medieval conceptions of acedia and Renaissance ideas of melancholy, but it diverges from both, as well as from modern conceptions of depression. From the opening stanza Spenser suggests that there are two Redcrosse knights, the one consciously aggressive and eager for glory, the other “too solemn sad,” desiring escape from the cares of the world. Spenser embodies this second impulse in the House of Morpheus. In the early cantos the Morpheus impulse remains accessible only in dream, but as Redcrosse deteriorates it becomes more dominant and more conscious. It next appears as Sans Joy, who undermines Redcrosse’s attempts at self-glorification in the House of Pride and who (despite the young knight’s seeming victory) forces him to recognize the emptiness of the ambition imaged in Lucifera’s palace. Having humiliatingly fled the House of Pride, Redcrosse allows himself to be seduced by Duessa to distract himself from his incipient despair—a despair he voices in Orgoglio’s dungeon as a desire for death. Despaire is the deadliest embodiment of the Morpheus impulse, no longer inchoate feeling but articulate sin. But Redcrosse’s experiences in the House of Holiness and afterward suggest that he will never in life lose this weight of grief, which is part of the human condition. Spenser revisits these attacks of morbid sorrow in later episodes of his epic.