At the heart of Book V of The Faerie Queene, in the temple of Osyris, we find an allegory within the allegory. “The warlike Maide” and knight of Book III, Britomart, “rests her heavy eyes” and begins to dream. Given Spenser’s intentions for the poem, firstly to “fashion a gentleman or noble person” and secondly to “conceive … of our soueraine the Queene,” and the fact that both purposes symbolically occur in the dream via the conception of the first “sonne” in the ancestry of Elizabeth, the case is closed: Spenser is assimilating the interpretation of dreams with the exegesis of allegory. In a theoretical space influenced by Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies, Saussurean linguistics, and Freudian psychoanalysis, I move through dream, history, law, identity, symbol, and—most importantly—structure, to trace the development of the Lacanian subject in Spenser’s allegory and explore what it can say about the concentric systems through which meaning can be—or fails to be—signified.
Jake X. Henson (Thu,) studied this question.