A Fruitful-Headed Beast?: Rhyme in The Faerie Queene

This chapter explores The Faerie Queene’s Hydran beasts in analogy with its regenerating, stanza-outrunning rhymes. While the only actual hydras in The Faerie Queene are the ‘Spring-headed Hydres’ of the Idle Lake, a number of the poem’s monstrous beasts are compared directly to the Hydra, or are otherwise drawn into its imagistic ecology. This chapter shows how Spenser connects the threat of snaky generativity not just to the Hydra’s regenerative power, but also to the scourge of unruly writing and, in The Teares of the Muses, rhyme in particular. In The Teares of the Muses, Spenser’s metaphor of rhymes as ‘fruitfull spawne’ suggests a likeness between the proliferation of ‘vulgar’ rhyme in English verse and the generation of snaky beings in ‘ranke’ environments. Moving between The Faerie Queene’s snaky creatures, its ‘fruitfull’ rhymes, and the early modern contexts for each, this chapter tracks a structural homology between the poem’s rhymes and its Hydran beasts. It introduces new data on rhyme’s repetitions in The Faerie Queene (the Table of Run-on Rhymes in the appendix), revealing the poem’s rhyme to be not only ‘fruitfull-headed’, but recurrently in excess of the poem’s more consciously ‘artificial’ metrics.