A Response to “Companionable Bodies”

I t is certainly difficult to read Spenser without a companion. The labyrinthine narrative and multidimensional allegory seem to demand the presence of an accomplice who can help one navigate the glorious distractions the text engenders. And it can’t be just any companion; it must be the right kind of companion, one who can help distinguish true from false, distraction from destination. Perhaps this is why Spenser so frequently bestows a sidekick on the figures representing his virtues; like us, the virtues need someone to help them traverse the treacherous and volatile landscape Spenser brilliantly re-creates. My own first companion in reading Spenser exerted a powerful influence on the way I have gone on to read him and helped inspire my abiding appreciation for the strange and wonderful poetic textures of The Faerie Queene. I did not read the poem until graduate school, I am embarrassed to say, although I am not sure that my undergraduate self would have been able to appreciate fully the remarkable effects of Spenser’s verse. As a graduate student at Berkeley, I signed up for a class with Stephen Booth, the famously close reader of Shakespeare ’s sonnets, because I really wanted to take a course with him. It was incidental that this course happened to be onThe Faerie Queene; I took the class for the professor, not for the subject. I finished the semester an abiding admirer of both. While the class was supposedly devoted to reading