Recent criticism of The Faerie Queene has been preoccupied with two major issues: the poem's politics and its sexual politics. Both of these areas have generated problems for a modern liberal readership. The poem is often seen as a work which luxuriates in imperialism, and which celebrates the absolute authority of its Queen. It is also often seen as a poem which is founded on the dominance of the male, and which treats women with a ‘suspicion’ of a kind which should make its readers suspicious.1 On the face of it, these would seem to be indisputable features of the work. Its heroes spend much of their time conquering and destroying in a way that seems straighforwardly to indicate that they are attempting to expand the empire of Gloriana. Women, and particularly the lower parts of female bodies, are frequently associated with deception: Errour ends in snakey vileness (I. i. 14), and Duessa's guileful beauty is eventually shown to mask hideous nether deformity (I. ii. 41). At many points in the poem women are captured, and at some they are tortured, by men. Florimell spends most of the poem running away from potential captors: she escapes from the lusts of the witch's son only to fall into the hands of a libidinous fisherman, from whom she is rescued by Proteus, who, in turn, imprisons her. Her incarceration continues for more than a whole book, from III. viii to IV. xii. There are times, too, when the poem itself focuses a rapacious and imprisoning eye on its female characters. Its allegorical method often centres a complex array of qualities on a single person, and when these people are women its allegorical eye can become predatory and destructive. Amoret is plucked from a circle of virtues in the Temple of Venus by her husband-to-be Sir Scudamour, and is later discovered by Britomart imprisoned in the Castle of Busirane, forced daily to parade out in an allegorical masque of the God Cupid. After a string of personifications who represent the terrors of love, Amoret, just before the climactic centre of the masque, enters with her naked breast ‘Entrenched deepe with knife accursed keene’ (III. xii. 20). Serena is placed in an even less invitingly central position when she is seen surrounded by cannibals whose hungry eyes anatomize what they long to bite.