Reformed Dragons: Bevis of Hampton, Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene

Abstract

����� ��� There is a missing dragon in book 1 of The Faerie Queene that reveals a lot about how Edmund Spenser adapted medieval romance for use in Protestant England. In Spenser’s direct source for the dragon fight, Bevis of Hampton, two Christian kings from southern Italy had been ceaselessly at war, destroying the land, until they were turned into battling dragons for their sins (Bevis of Hampton 2611–60). 1 One flees north, through Tuscany, Lombardy, Provence, and ultimately to Koln (Cologne) in Germany. There Bevis kills it in a three-day fight, in which he is providentially saved by a well whose virtue heals and protects him from the dragon’s poison. The other dragon, however, flies to Rome, where “he there rested his cursed bones, some say in a caue of stones, / men say he is there yet, enclosed with clearkes wit” (Bevis of Hampton f. 122r). 2 This origin for Bevis’s dragon establishes part of its symbolic significance: Bevis’s worst enemies are not the Saracens, but Christians whose rivalries and betrayals leave him vulnerable. It is no accident that the fight occurs just as Bevis crosses from Muslim to Christian lands and the plot shifts from fighting Saracens to finally revenging himself on his archenemy, the Emperor of Germany. After the Reformation, Spenser could have rendered highly topical the fortuitous details of two dragons in Germany and Rome, with the English killing the German dragon but the Roman dragon enduring, enclosed by clerics’ wit. That he took only one means that, however similar the details may be, Red Crosse’s dragon is a very different beast from Bevis’s. Because of their wide-ranging symbolic potential, dragons are especially useful in revealing Spenser’s techniques of reforming romance. Since the image of the dragon as adversary is familiar from the Bible, especially from Revelation, dragon fights in romance often crystallize ideas of evil. They are thus useful emblems of religious conflict, and religious conflict changed with the Reformation. Bevis’s dragon marks Bevis’s passage