The commendatory sonnet by 'W. S.' appended to the first edition of The Faerie Queene hails Spenser as the 'Brittayne Orpheus,' and modern critics have thought the author was onto something. Thomas Cain in 1971 made the case that Spenser 'use [s]...the Orpheusfigure to assert and assess his own role as poet' across his works; more recently Patrick Cheney has talked about Spenser's 'Orphic career'. 1 In Spenser criticism at large, the idea that Spenser wants to present himself as another Orpheus is frequently mentioned, though rarely discussed in much detail. Given all this attention to the importance of Orpheus in Spenser's self-presentation, it is remarkable that an extremely curious feature of Spenser's treatment of the Orpheus-myth has received so little comment, and its implications for our understanding of Spenser's conception of his own role and powers remain unexplored. It concerns his treatment of Orpheus' greatest exploit, his katabasis in the attempt to recover his wife Eurydice from the Underworld. In the version best known today, the episode ends in tragic failure: though Orpheus with his enchanting song succeeds in charming the gods of the Underworld to consent to Eurydice's return, he breaks the condition imposed on him that he should not look back at her before they are both safely again in the upper world, and so loses her a second time, and irrevocably. Spenser refers to the myth several times across his works, but consistently presents Orpheus' attempt as successful, and Eurydice as restored to life. To list the most explicit examples, E.K.'s gloss to October 28 states in no uncertain terms that Orpheus 'by his excellent skil... recouered his wife Eurydice from hell'; in 'The Ruines of Time', the Muses are said simply to have sent Eurydice 'back againe to life' for Orpheus' sake (392); and in Book IV of The Faerie Queene Scudamour recalls how 'Orpheus did recoure / His Leman from the Stygian Princes boure'. (IV.x.58) The single exception to this rule, the only place where Spenser makes any reference to the supposed ultimate failure, is a telling one: it is in 'Virgils Gnat', Spenser's direct translation of the Culex, a poem from the Appendix Vergiliana which Spenser probably believed was (as his title presents it) an authentic work by Virgil.The exception is telling because it is in Virgil that we find the earliest known reference to Orpheus' supposed ultimate failure to recover Eurydice. The epyllion which concludes the fourth Georgic tells the now familiar story, in which Eurydice dies, stung by a serpent, as she flees attempted rape by Aristaeus, and Orpheus' attempt to rescue her from Hades is thwarted by his rash backward glance. The author of the Culex reproduces the backward glance and final loss from the Georgics as part of a multi-faceted pastiche of all three of Virgil's canonical works, to produce an ostentatiously-even parodically-Virgilian poem. 2 None of the earlier sources for this episode of the Orpheus myth make any reference to the supposed failure, all speaking as though he wa...
