In Comic Spenser: Faith, Folly, and “The Faerie Queene,” Victoria Coldham-Fussell argues that bathos is key to understanding how humor fits into Edmund Spenser's Protestant moral vision. More than a catalog of amusing passages in The Faerie Queene, Coldham-Fussell's book is a demonstration of the ways Spenser uses humor to allegorize specifically Christian moral ideas. Within the “poem's wider economy of bathos,” Spenser does not just lower what is high but also elevates what is low (27) and thus instantiates a specifically Christian type of bathos. Coldham-Fussell links this to Erich Auerbach's ideas about the capacious sublimity of Christ's incarnation, which includes and connects the lowest with the highest: human flesh with divinity (73).

In the epilogue, Coldham-Fussell connects her arguments about humor to allegory, providing an allegorical interpretation of Faunus's laughter at Diana in the Mutabilitie Cantos: “the faun's laughter is a response not only to the gulf between eternal truth and the defective present, but also to the gulf between the defective present and the fictions that we tell ourselves to make that present seem bigger, better, and more ideal than it is” (202). Her comment applies equally well to the deflating quality of laughter in other episodes in the epic: not only are the foolish faun and his ilk laughable, but so are icons such as Diana, Prince Arthur, and, outside the story world of the poem, Queen Elizabeth herself, through her avatars in the poem. Human weakness and fallibility are such that the narrator compares the Well of Life favorably to “th'English Bath and eke the german Spau” (I.xi.30.7), thus “playfully remind[ing us] of the immeasurable difference between poetical anticipations of salvation and the thing itself” (109).

The first two substantive chapters on The Faerie Queene focus on the Red Crosse Knight: chapter 2 (“Humour and Heroism”) on the humor generated by the “imperfectly concealed clownishness behind Red Crosse's assumed heroic identity” (81) and chapter 3 (“Spenser's Bawdy; or, Red Crosse's Problem with Desire”) on sexual ethics in Book I. These chapters build on Kathryn Walls's ideas regarding Una's fallibility and Janet Adelman's attention to Red Crosse's shame—not lust—as the target of Spenser's satire. In brief, Coldham-Fussell finds in Book I a great deal of bathetic humor in the repeated deflations of the hero, Red Crosse, whose prideful belief in his own heroism and sexual virtue requires correction at both the literal and allegorical levels of the text. A secular view of heroism emphasizes the hero's own excellence, whereas Protestant heroism “involves total reliance on God and the conquest of the ego” (81), and Red Crosse learns these lessons through the encounters with Errour, Sansfoy, and Sansjoy. Whereas the humor regarding heroism points out the gulf between Protestant and secular moral values, the deflationary humor in Book I targeting sexual ethics pits the Protestant embrace of marital sexuality against the Catholic emphasis on celibacy.

In chapter 4, “Laughing at Love: The Faerie Queene III–IV,” Coldham-Fussell explores the ways that Spenser presents love both as conducive to laughter and as itself laughable (142). The foolishness of the men who chase Florimell, especially Prince Arthur's resemblance to Chaucer's Sir Thopas as he pursues her, humorously suggests the self-interest at the heart of chivalric romance conventions. Coldham-Fussell finds a similar degree of self-indulgence in Britomart's love pangs, aided and abetted by Glauce, whose “familiarity with classical stories of sexual deviance” and self-interested concern lest King Ryence should become angry about his daughter's love connect her to the long line of comic nurses in literature (156). Coldham-Fussell provides close readings of the gentle humor that Spenser levies at Arthur, Britomart, Florimell, and Satyrane. She argues that, although Spenser invites his readers to care about these figures’ love affairs, he sometimes creates the opportunity for comic distance, such that readers can see the ridiculousness or vanity of love in these figures . . . and perhaps then also experience a degree of “empathetic self-recognition” (167).

In chapter 5, “Parody and Panegyric,” Coldham-Fussell weighs in on the question of Spenser's treatment of Queen Elizabeth in The Faerie Queene, exploring the bathetic humor created by the gulf between the deifying panegyric of the proems, for example, and the parodic figures who may easily be read as caricatures critical of the queen, such as the nymphomaniacal Argante and the prideful Lucifera. The Faerie Queene, like so much of Spenser's work, evinces a strong interest in the value of poetry, and Coldham-Fussell considers both Elizabeth and Spenser's connections to the goddess Fame before moving to the farcical scene of Braggadocio's encounter with Belphoebe. She argues that, although the sharp contrast between Braggadochio's foolishness and Belphoebe's dignity might have appealed to Queen Elizabeth's sense of humor, the passage also humorously undercuts “the blasphemous effigy” of the idealized Belphoebe (187).

Coldham-Fussell's readings of The Faerie Queene are perceptive and persuasive, but the theoretical apparatus of the introduction and chapter 1 would have benefited from some additional revision. In chapter 1, “Spenser and the Comic Renaissance,” Coldham-Fussell seeks to anatomize the two main influences on Renaissance humor, classical humanism and medieval humor, focusing on numerous types and influences under each heading in such detail that the chapter begins to seem disconnected from the main thread of the book's argument. Whereas this chapter might have benefited from judicious cutting, the introduction needed more work to lay out more strongly what becomes the book's central thesis regarding bathos and Spenser's Christian humor. Coldham-Fussell summarizes three well-known theories of humor—the “superiority” theory associated with Thomas Hobbes, the “incongruity” theory of Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer, and the “repression” theory of Sigmund Freud—and then connects these to her own ideas about three more capacious concepts: reduction, ambiguity, and play, respectively. A fuller discussion in the introduction of the significance of bathos to the book's overall thesis would have benefited this reader.

Overall, the book provides a strong argument that a full understanding of Spenser's moral allegory requires greater attention to the role he envisions for humor and laughter in the epic.