With the complementary instances of Britomart and Malbecco, Spenser has contrived to make a single argument: that the lover (good or bad) finds a vocation in the beloved and assumes a kind of authorial interest in the beloved's emerging identity. Moreover, I have argued, Spenser uses these paired erotic tales to illuminate the more general project of representation. In Britomart's progressive reformation of the figure that appears in a glass and imprints her heart, the poet works out an interpretive doctrine of images. In Malbecco's dyslexia, as in his allegorical transformations, the poet explicates the idolatrous collapse of the verbal figure. As a beholder, Malbecco treats likeness as identity (he cannot distinguish signs), and this incapacity translates into personal destiny: the narrative persona himself declines from likeness (a man named for a goat) to identity (an inhuman exemplum of “Gealosie”). In the stages of Malbecco's metamorphosis – the social and sexual and economic explication of literary topos, the dramaturgic unfolding of obsessive psychology, the narrative precipitation of emblem – Spenser anatomizes what are elsewhere in The Faerie Queene simultaneous strata of invention.

In Chapter 3, I have tried to trace these paradigms, as Spenser does, into the public realm. What happens when the specular process of subject formation is understood not simply as the expression and ground of psychic economy or interpersonal affiliation but as the expression and ground of social, religious, and political realms?