How does the representation of movement in poetry move us? In her Atlas of Emotion, an exploration of “the proto-filmic construction of visual space in the moving topographies of Western culture,” film theorist Giuliana Bruno seeks to shift attention from the optic to the haptic, from the visual to the kinesthetic.¹ Whereas many film theorists focus on the purely visual dimensions of film, Bruno is interested in the way our body experiences space and how this might condition the viewing experience. For Bruno, the haptic or the sense of touch is the interface between our body and our physical environment, whereas the kinesthetic concerns the way our body experiences or senses movement through space. She explores a range of pre-cinematic forms that evoke the kinesthetic, including maps, panoramas, and pleasure gardens, to look at precursors to our dominant contemporary visual regime. In this essay I will use Bruno’s discussion of the kinesthetic to explore the role of movement in the process of reading The Faerie Queene. How does the affect that is generated by the representation of motion shape our experience as readers, as we move through the emotionally-charged spaces of the poem? How might the way that the poem narrativizes space be considered proto-filmic?

Bruno is interested in how cinema moves us in our engagement with its imagined geographies. Kinema, she points out, means movement in the original Greek (including the movement of the emotions), and cinema’s particular power, she argues, is to link motion and emotion. She writes that “Cinematic space moves not only through time and space or narrative development but through inner space. Film moves, and fundamentally ‘moves’ us” (Bruno 2002, 7). Here, she comes close to Philip Sidney’s theory of poetry, where representations of movement move us to do good in the world.

Early in the Defence Sidney famously defines poetry as “a speaking picture,” but as his argument unfolds it becomes clear that he is really interested in the power of the moving picture.² When addressing the power of poetry, his examples typically involve a body in motion, whether he is imagining the reading process as the traversal of a garden space (the poet “giveth so sweet a prospect into the way, as will entice any man to enter into it” [Sidney 1999, 358]), or reflecting on the power of particular images of movement to move us: “Who readeth Aeneas carrying old Anchises on his back, that wisheth not it were his fortune to perform so excellent an act?” (Sidney 1999, 359). These images of movement move our emotions, which is why in the trinity of delighting, teaching and moving, “moving is of a higher degree than teaching . . . it is well nigh both the cause and the effect of teaching. For who will be taught, if he be not moved with desire to be taught?” (Sidney 1999, 357). For Sidney, the emotions conjured through our traversal of poetry’s golden worlds are ultimately what move us to refashion ourselves as better people.

One key proto-filmic form in The Faerie Queene is the pleasure garden. In the proem to Book Six, the narrator compares his journey through the poem to the traversal of a garden:

The waies, through which my weary steps I guyde,

In this delightfull land of Faery,

Are so exceeding spacious and wyde,

And sprinckled with such sweet variety,

Of all that pleasant is to eare or eye,

That I night rauisht with rare thoughts delight,

My tedious travell doe forget thereby.

(VI.proem.1)³

Here we see Faery Land as a version of Sidney’s golden world, and the narrator’s movement through it stirs his emotions. Bruno describes the pleasure garden in terms that strikingly evoke the psychogeography of Faery Land: “A memory theatre of sensual pleasures, the garden was an exterior that put the spectator in ‘touch’ with inner space. As one moved through the space of the garden, a constant double movement connected external to internal topographies. The garden was thus an outside turned into an inside; but it was also the projection of an inner world onto the outer geography” (Bruno 2002, 203). Bruno is speaking in the first instance about the picturesque garden, but her description of the constant double movement of the progress through a garden captures well the reader’s experience of accompanying the knights through Faery Land, often encountering elements of inner worlds manifested outwardly as beings or places.

Bruno is interested in how we move through pleasure gardens, which often had a set itinerary that produced a narrative of some kind. But pleasure gardens were also used as the staging grounds for landscape entertainments, a different proto-filmic form that Bruno does not directly consider. The entertainments staged for Elizabeth’s progresses, and particularly the highly elaborate one staged at Kenilworth in 1575, constructed fully-realized fictional worlds that were activated by the movement of Elizabeth through them, and which were intended, in turn, to move her through both the moving spectacles she encountered and through the pleasure of her own motion. The landscape entertainments layered immersive fictional worlds onto real ones, and part of their power derived from the sensation of a real body occupying or moving simultaneously through real and imaginary spaces. The entertainments operate according to a proto-cinematic logic rather than a theatrical one because of the way they engage the spectator’s body, and the real or imagined experience of the narrativized (and allegorized) space they are moving through. As I argue at length elsewhere, Kenilworth provided both Sidney and Spenser with a potent example of the power of movement through a golden world.⁴

I’ll turn now to an episode in the poem that highlights some of the kinesthetic dimensions of the reader’s experience: the sea voyage that takes Guyon and the Palmer to the Bower of Bliss. This episode is marked by the double movement between external and internal geographies that Bruno identifies in the garden, and the journey itself is rendered in ways that evoke what has been called the cinema of attractions, which foregrounded the kinesthetic dimensions of film that interest Bruno. The cinema of attractions is Tom Gunning’s term for the early phase of cinema that was more interested in creating sensation than in constructing narrative, and this sensation was most often created by offering the spectator a thrilling experience of motion.⁵ “Attraction” is meant to both evoke Sergei Eisenstein’s goal of shocking or moving the spectator through montage, but also to remind us of the appeal of those early twentieth-century fairground attractions like the roller coaster. One key difference between the cinema of attractions and the narrative cinema that would follow, as Thomas Elsaesser notes, is that “spectacular set pieces were responsible for a discontinuous rather than a smooth visual experience,” which is not unlike the discontinuous way that journeys in The Faerie Queene tend to unfold.⁶ One prominent example of the cinema of attractions is the genre of film called the phantom ride, where a camera was mounted on the front of a train or a streetcar or a ship, and cinema goers would experience the thrill of moving through space while remaining seated, as in the Lumière Brothers’ Leaving Jerusalem by Railway (1896). In the narrative cinema that followed, this would become the tracking shot, which is still highly effective at generating emotion (and meaning) through movement.

Guyon’s voyage through a sea of allegorical spectacles offers something of a recap of the major themes and lessons of Book II, before the knight faces his final test in Acrasia’s pleasure garden. It is significant that whereas Guyon will actively traverse the Bower on foot accompanied by the Palmer, in the boat he is moving (or, to be more precise, being moved) through the landscape while he himself remains seated. He is, in multiple senses, transported, and in that, he resembles the reader or indeed the cinema goer, whom Bruno calls the “moving spectator.” In thinking of parallel early modern artforms, we might remember that the landscape entertainment at Kenilworth also featured sea battles and fantastical sea-creatures, as did other continental, water-based spectacles (Ellis 2023, 3-4). At Kenilworth, for example, Elizabeth met the Lady of Lake who floated up on a moveable island (Ellis 2023, 73); met “Tryton in likenesse of a Mermaide” as the queen was passing over a bridge (64); was serenaded by Protheus who rode on the back of a dolphin-shaped boat (65); and saw “very straunge and sundry kindez” of fireworks, including ones that dove into the water and flew back out again, that prompted fear and wonder in the audience (78).

Guyon’s voyage echoes these elements from Kenilworth and at the same time evokes early examples of the cinema of attractions, which thrilled the audience through the experience of movement, often conveyed via a tracking shot: in Lumière’s Boat Leaving the Port (1895) we accompany three men setting off in rough seas in a rowboat. The “raging surges” Guyon’s party encounters on the third day mirrors the vicarious thrill that early cinema goers experienced in Edison’s S. S. ‘Coptic’ Running Against the Storm (1898), where a side-mounted camera is exposed to the spray of huge waves bouncing a ship. The danger of the Gulfe of Greediness, which “deep engorgeth all this worldes pray” might comically be represented in James Williamson’s The Big Swallow (1901), where a man comes closer and closer to the camera until he appears to swallow it (and us). The beasts who roar in the distance are evoked by Lumière’s London Zoological Gardens (1896), in which a lion’s paw repeatedly swipes towards his keeper and the viewer; and the more fantastical beings the boatmen encounter could be represented by any number of supernatural beings in Georges Méliès’ films, such as the malevolent fairy that springs from a book in Bluebeard (1901), the sea monster in The Impossible Voyage (1904), or indeed the mermaid in La Siréne (1905). Bluebeard, incidentally, was described in a 1903 catalogue as “a great fairy drama, with spectacular tableaux,” which is not a bad description of this part of the poem, or indeed, the poem itself.⁷

The appeal of the sea voyage is partly the pleasure of movement across the seascape, beautifully registered in the close-up shot of the boat’s wake: “the hoare waters from his frigot ran, / And the light bubles daunced all along, / Whiles the salt brine out of the billowes sprong” (II.xii.9). The various tableaux, along with the boatman’s and the Palmer’s explications (“Behold th’ensamples in our sightes, / Of lustfull luxurie and thriftless wast” [II.xii.9]), remind us of how the Palmer and Guyon have frequently read and moralized the significance of scenes, such as when they look on the bodies of Amavia and Mortdant: “Old syre, / Behold the ymage of mortalitie” (II.i.57). A key difference here is that in the boat, Guyon is now a mobile spectator, reading and experiencing both his own movement and that of others towards or away from him; the voyage thus gives us a sense of how we, as readers, might experience the affect of the trip through Faery Land, sitting in our chairs, guided by someone who occasionally moralizes the experience for us: we become, like Guyon, “iolly Mariners,” as the narrator calls us at the end of Book I (I.xii.42).

It is notable that many of the perils encountered are illusions of one kind or another: they are projections, in other words, that pose no immediate physical danger. The huge waves are mysteriously accompanied by “not one puff of wind” (II.xii.22); the sea monsters turn out to be Acrasia’s conjurations. Sound, interestingly, plays a central role in amplifying the affect in this passage: the Gulfe of Greediness, for example, “Doth rore at them in vaine, and with great terrour raue” (II.xii.5); we hear the “yelling Meawes, with Seagulles hoars and bace” (II.xii.8); “the billowes rore / Outragiously” (II.xii.22); the sea monsters make “dreadfull noise, and hollow rombling rore” (II.xii.25); the rumbling drawing attention to the physical dimension of sound, like Dolby sound pounding our chest in the cinema. Even in the silent era, sound was an important part of the cinematic experience, whether through the musical accompaniment that underscored emotion, or the simulation of travel sounds in the phantom ride attractions of Hale’s Tours, where spectators watched films in an imitation railway car that rocked and shook, accompanied by wind machines and sound effects.⁸

But if the spectacles the boatmen encounter are illusions, the affect they generate is real: “all their senses filled with affright” (II.xii.2); “the three thereas woxe much afrayd” (II.xii.22); the sea-monsters “did the knight appall” (II.xii.25); the Palmer notes they are “fearfull shapes . . . to work us dread” (II.xii.26); with the appearance of fog the group “greatly were dismayd” (II.xii.35); the birds “fild their sayles with feare” (II.xii.37). These frightening illusions that pose no real danger prefigure what Tom Gunning identifies as cinema’s primal scene: the apocryphal story of the first viewers of Lumière’s Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895) who duck in fear as the train barrels towards them.⁹ This has always been a primary appeal of the cinema: being frightened by things we know not to be real.

As Guyon learns, not all dangers are scary: some are alluring, as we see in the penultimate episode of the voyage, the encounter with the mermaids. As with many of the encounters, it begins with sound: “a ruefull cry / Of one, that wayld and pittifully wept” (II.xii.27). This recalls the episode that began Guyon’s quest, when he first hears “a ruefull voyce, that dearnly cride / With piercing shriekes and many a dolefull lay” (II.i.35). Guyon wishes to intervene as before, but the Palmer warns him this is “womanish fine forgery” (II.xii.28), another of the journey’s illusions. As they sail closer, we approach the place where “those same Mermayds dwelt”: a bay between two hills, “That twixt them both a pleasaunt port they made, / And did like an halfe Theatre fulfill” (II.xii.30). It turns out this theatre contains not just one mermaid, but five: a mermaid multiplex. These mermaids, who will appear in the sequel as the maidens in the fountain, exemplify the narrator’s opening reminder that “Pleasure dwelles in sensuall delights, / Mongst thousand dangers” (II.xii.1). In the early modern context, this episode can be seen as a reflection of the anti-theatrical prejudice, as Tara E. Pedersen argues,¹⁰ as well as of Spenser’s anxieties about the dangerous power of aesthetic illusions. The early cinema provoked similar fears about film’s seductive and corrupting powers, and among the cinema of attractions was a surprising number of “blue” films, of about the same level of explicitness as what Guyon will soon encounter in the Bower.

When Guyon and the Palmer arrive on the shore, we are back to the more usual experience of accompanying the knight’s traversal of a terrain; Guyon is no longer a mobile spectator but an active quester. Guyon’s proto-filmic experience of being a mobile spectator, moving past and being moved by a series of tableaux, has perhaps, as Philip Sidney might hope, moved him (and even prepared him) to practice what he has learned, “For as Aristotle sayeth, it is not gnosis but praxis must be the fruit” (Sidney 1999, 357). Our experience is a bit different from Guyon’s. As readers of the poem, we have been offered an allegory of reading as mobile spectatorship that reminds us not only of the power of illusions, but more crucially, the power of represented motion to move the reader, in our engagement with this moving topography.

I’ll end with a couple of suggestions. Critics have drawn attention to the prominence of scopophilia in the Bower, a vice that film scholars would associate with the male gaze, and one that early modernists might see facilitated by the rhetorical figure of enargeia, or striking visuality. But what Bruno’s emphasis on kinesthetics should alert us to, is that what is most seductive in the Bower is the “forcibleness of energeia” (Sidney 1999, 385) or representations of activity and movement, which is to say the moving image; Joseph Campana argues that energeia, which mobilizes “the energy of affect,” is at the heart of Spenser’s poetics.¹¹ We see this conjunction of motion and emotion in the initial illusion of the movement of the “frothy billowes” in the ivory carving on the gates (II.xii.45), which recalls Guyon’s boat’s wake earlier on, or more provocatively in the playfully sensuous movements of the maidens in the fountain that ensnare Guyon’s gaze.

After the Palmer rebukes Guyon’s “wandring eyes” (II.xii.69), the narrator’s eyes and ours wander unaccompanied to the heart of the Bower. Navigating terrain unaccompanied by a knight is somewhat unusual for us, reenacting Guyon’s earlier separation from the Palmer, and perhaps serves as a test of what we have learned in our journey across the sea. As with the earlier encounter with the mermaids’ siren song, we are drawn by melodious sound to Acrasia’s secret shade. There we find the lovers in a lustful embrace, surrounded by fair ladies and lascivious boys; a song encourages us to give in to pleasure and seize the day. When the “lovely lay” is finished, the narrator returns (us) to the Palmer and Guyon, whom we now accompany via a tracking shot through “couert groues, and thickets close” (II.xii.76) until they reach the lovers as well. Here, we get the famous close-up of sweat trickling down Acrasia’s breast; it is likely the detail of the movement of the sweat, more so than the sight of her “snowy breast” itself, that is so provocative. Equally evocative is the characterization of Acrasia’s eyes:

her faire eyes sweet smyling in delight,

Moystened their fierie beames, with which she thrild

Fraile harts, yet quenched not; like starry light

Which sparckling on the silent waues, does seeme more bright.

(II.xii.78)

This description of Acrasia’s “fierie beames,” while drawing on the contemporary understanding of the physics of vision, fortuitously evokes the cinema’s projector beam, which thrilled the frail hearts of early cinema goers. The lively image of the starry lights sparkling on the silent waves recalls our earlier voyage across the sea, where, we may recall, Guyon and the Palmer were moved by illusions conjured by Acrasia from afar. In this culminating image, just prior to her capture, we might fancifully see Acrasia not just as the original screen siren, but perhaps as a figure for the screen as siren, or the dangerous allure of the moving image.