Artegall in The Faerie Queene reminds me of Buster Keaton in the 1924 movie Sherlock Jr. In itself this remark seems worthy of one sentence only. But the correspondence has become important to my understanding of both characters.

In the first shot of Sherlock Jr., Buster, a small-town projectionist, sits in a cinema seat reading a book called How to Be a Detective. The plot kicks in when Buster’s romantic rival frames him for stealing a watch from the young woman’s father. Buster is dismayed but resolves that he can figure this out with his detective skills. After a series of comic failures as a detective, Buster ends up back at the cinema where his job is to project a romance film called “Hearts and Pearls”.¹ He falls asleep at the film-reel and a dream version of him separates from his sleeping body, picks his dream hat off its dream peg, and turns to find that the on-screen lovers in “Hearts and Pearls” have morphed into his own girlfriend and her rival suitor. Outraged at the way the villain is treating his beloved, Buster rushes toward the screen, remonstrating with the cinema audience, which remains impassive (a wry nod, surely, to contemporary worries about the degrading effect of cinema). He leaps into the picture itself; his rival throws him back out into the cinema; he reenters to knock on the door of the house to no avail. When he turns to walk away he finds himself tumbling off an ornamental pillar in a rose garden. There follows a famous sequence in which every time Keaton makes a move the scene cuts, throwing him into a series of ludicrously dangerous situations: into a busy road, onto a rocky outcrop, between two lions, etc. Buster’s tumbling body becomes the only point of continuity as the plot gives way to one stunt after another.

The walled rose-garden, a romance trope, is the portal. When Buster falls back into it the film-in-film reverts to the dream version of “Hearts and Pearls,” in which another theft has taken place. Buster enters from within as “the world’s greatest detective, Sherlock Jr!” He proceeds to foil the evil suitor and his accomplice in a series of improbably brilliant stunts. He dives through a window casement in which he has hidden some clothing, emerging from that single motion in full disguise. In what for me is the funniest sequence of the film, he leaps onto the front of a policeman’s motorcycle and doesn’t notice when the driver falls off the back, somehow riding the handlebars of the driverless vehicle to exactly the spot where his girlfriend needs saving from gangsters. A car chase ends the film-in-film. In his one and only failure, Sherlock Jr. and his girlfriend end up swimming for their lives after his motorcar fails to transform into a sailing boat.

At this perilous juncture the drowning Buster awakes, jerkily, into his projectionist’s booth. His real love interest has by now discovered his innocence and rushes in to apologize. Unsure what to do, Buster follows the movements of the hero in “Hearts and Pearls” (the real film-in-film, not the dream version) as he takes his girlfriend by the shoulders, turns her around, and kisses her on the mouth. He may justifiably feel that the cinema got him this far, and it needs to carry him over the last hurdle. The camera cuts repeatedly from the movie screen to the projectionist’s window which frames Buster and his girlfriend. But the final cut of ‘Hearts and Pearls’ shows the lovers suddenly surrounded by their babies; Buster looks shocked. He wasn’t counting on that! As so often, the film pokes the ribs of an audience who can’t distinguish the mechanical leaps of cinema from the processes of life.

Both Artegall and Buster dramatize the comic experience of gaps between what we can imagine, what we are actually capable of, and what we want in any case. Artegall first appears in the epic-romance, to his destined spouse Britomart, as the visual image of a “portly” male in a magic mirror. He is doubly framed in this first sight of him: by the mirror as well as the “bright ventayle” of his helmet “lifted up on hye” which puts his “manly face” into a spotlit close-up (III.ii.24). The image inspires Britomart into action and leads towards a cinematic reversal. Soon it will be her face that shines through a cinematic “ventayle”, his that stares on in amazement.

Artegall first enters the poem in the flesh as a moss-covered knight “in quyent disguise” (IV.iv.39), crudely feminized by this double-entendre. He wants to take part in Satyrane’s interminable tournament (a contest of strength and beauty whose triviality is sent up by its outcome), and he is well on his way to victory before Britomart enters the fray incognito and at the last minute, defeating him and “full many others” (IV.iv.46). Artegall is unhorsed in a silly, perfunctory way.

[Britomart] at his entrance charg’d his powrefull speare

At Artegall, in middest of his pryde,

And therewith smote him on his Vmbriere

So sore, that tombling backe, he downe did slyde

Ouer his horses taile aboue a stryde;

Whence litle lust he had to rise againe.

Which Cambell seeing, much the same enuyde,

And ran at him with all his might and maine;

But shortly was likewise seene lying on the plaine.

(IV.iv.44) ²

A number of others follow suit in the next two stanzas and end up lying next to each other in what I imagine as a row of flattened men.³ This is a slapstick sequence. Artegall, puffed up with pride, tumbles over his horse’s hindparts in the same undignified way that the policeman falls off the back of his motorbike in Sherlock Jr. Buster continues his ride oblivious to the key absence behind him. Spenser’s skit is likewise based on a failure to look back. “Full many others at him likewise ran: / But all of them likewise dismounted were” (IV.iv.46). Nobody learns the lesson of the guy that went before. As in the dream-sequence of Sherlock Jr., some sort of narrative glue loses its force and the plot dissolves into disjunctive, episodic repetition. Judith Anderson points out that an obvious undertone of the comedy here is sexual, as it often is in slapstick. Artegall’s encounter with Britomart is “crudely put, a well-timed bucket of cold water”; it “suggests the meeting of a Typhonic passion with Diana’s formidable yet fertile purity”.⁴

Artegall can’t “withstand” Britomart’s victory. “But inly thought of that despightfull deede / Fit time t’awaite auenged for to bee (IV.iv.9). A few cantos later we learn that he’s been sitting in the forest ever since the tournament, awaiting his opportunity. Revenge against someone for beating you in a game is a motivation that operates at the level of farce. Artegall’s response is out of all proportion: winning a contest is hardly a “despightful deede” even if the contest seems a bit rigged. If revenge is really necessary, its own logic calls for punishment in kind: Artegall needs to win the next contest, not to exact violent retribution. When Britomart finally walks past (how long would he have waited, we wonder?), another knight, Scudamour, begs to charge first. He meets the same fate as all the other knights. Artegall tries again “and [finds] himselfe on ground in great amazement” (IV.vi.11). What on earth is there to be amazed about at this point? Why can’t these Don Quixotes anticipate their own failure?

This time however, Artegall manages to regain his feet and wound Britomart’s horse on the bottom (an innuendo, as Anderson observes, that is “even more obvious and violent than the first” (63)). That forces Britomart to fight him on foot without her magic spear, until the “ventayle” of her helmet flies up to reveal an angelic face.

And round about the same, her yellow heare

Having through stirring loosd their wonted band,

Like to a golden border did appeare,

Framed in goldsmith’s forge with cunning hand:

(IV.vi.20)

This is when Britomart supplants Artegall as the double-framed movie star in a close-up, backlit by her golden hair. Artegall becomes the pacified cinema audience, “His powerlesse arme benumbd with secret feare” (4.vi.21).⁵ An awkward rapprochement leads to their betrothal, at which point Artegall sets off to finish an important mission which he hasn’t mentioned until now, and which didn’t prevent him from lurking in the forest to wreak trivial revenge on his future girlfriend.

This is the last we hear of Artegall until Book V when he reenters the poem as someone quite different under the same name: a person, as Anderson observes, “whose love does not accompany him and is absent even as a memory during the first third of Book V” (63). I think this is where Artegall’s career as an Elizabethan Buster may end, but it is also where Sherlock Jr. comes into its own as a hermeneutic reference point.

To understand the loveless Artegall of Book V, we have to understand his formative experience with slapstick in Books III and IV. It has forced him to confront the possibility of his own meaningless failure by reducing him from an idol to one moving part in an episodic and silly narrative loop. He then looks on powerless as his tournament rival takes over his idealized, film-star status. Artegall is puffed up and deflated across these books in a way that mirrors the comic splitting of Buster between screens in Sherlock Jr.. The heroic man in the mirror and the repeatedly unhorsed “salvage knight” dressed in a vagina costume; the unfortunate projectionist and the world’s greatest on-screen detective.

Sherlock Jr. opens with two slides in a row. On the first is written,

There is an old Proverb which says:

Don’t try to do two things

at once and expect to do

justice to both.

(Keaton, 1924)

The next opens: “This is the story of a boy who tried it.” Broadly interpreted, this summarizes Buster Keaton’s jokes, in particular those that rely on the tension between mechanical and human action.⁶ In The General, for instance, he salutes passing soldiers robotically while kissing his girlfriend, both of them perched on his train locomotive’s coupling rod. (The joke, Burke Hilsabeck observes, is characteristically double-edged. By automating the salute Buster drains it of all meaning, but he also sends up the mechanizing function of social ritual, suggesting it never had meaning in the first place.) For us, the motto might point toward Book V’s problem with conveying justice itself as, on the one hand, the fulfillment of morality and, on the other, the enforcement of law. In Spenser’s Book V this problem will split Artegall into “an animation or personification of justice [...] an embodied abstraction” and “a private and sentient human being.” The former role “translates in practice and in human actuality to oversimplification, insensitivity, and simple inhumanity” (Anderson, 63). It is embodied by Talus, an “yron man” whom Hamilton describes as Artegall’s “robocop” (n. to V.i.12). Talus executes, massacres, and routs on behalf of justice. Finding him unstoppable, first Britomart and then Artegall must order him off the killing that he has begun on their behalf.

Talus is key to my understanding of mechanism, in relation to Artegall, not as a feature of industrialized, steam-powered life, as it was for Buster Keaton, but more fundamentally, as a form of displaced (and hence warped or alienated) human action. Mechanism comes from the ancient Greek μηχανή or “contrivance”, used to evoke links between human action and material contraptions. The Greek word was used to describe cranes for lifting weights, Poseidon’s trident, and Xerxes’s bridge of boats across the Hellespont. Thence it comes to encompass “shifts, devices, wiles” and “acts of violence”, a pretty neat summation of Buster, on the one hand, and Book V’s Artegall/Talus double-act, on the other.⁷ In its earliest English uses “mechanism” describes the workings of nature and the cosmos, two realms in which the human being is linked with–and potentially subsumed by–materiality of a different order. Mechanism raises questions across these realms of being: is a human hand so different from a crab’s claw?⁸ Used in this sense, then, mechanism precedes and underlies industrialization, naming one realm in which human action turns inward and sees itself as continuous with the action of the whole material universe.

Allegory is mechanical in this sense; Allegory is mechanical in this sense; it enhances the signifying capacities of the human figure by extending it into the animal, vegetable and mineral worlds.⁹ Munera’s golden hands and silver feet; the Egalitarian giant’s scales; Britomart’s “hebene” spear. In doing so, it contrives to “do two things at once”, and constitutively cannot do justice to both. But Talus, an agentive being made of iron, is a mechanical extension that has broken away from its human basis and in that sense become automatic. Hence he exhibits no intrinsic capacity to make the decision about when it is time to stop killing. In fact, as I’m sure I’m not the first to point out, Talus is arguably one of English literature’s earliest (grimly prophetic) depictions of an automatic weapon.

Justice can also be mechanical in the sense I’ve outlined insofar as it is founded on, but seeks to supersede, the human impulse to vengeance. The incessant Talus allegorizes the problem of a justice that claims an impersonal relationship with universal order. This is the form of justice that can instrumentalize middle men such as executioners who act as mechanical parts in a process. They have no particular stake in, and take on very little moral responsibility for, the killing of the criminal. Ironically, in instigating such gaps, justice also distances its criminals from their guilt and begins to look ever more arbitrary itself, dissolving backwards into the violence it seeks to control.

Artegall attempted to rectify a feeling of injustice with vengeance in Book IV, and failed. In Book V he claims the power to overcome such triviality, but this would be to split human from mechanism in the realm of justice (hence Talus), which comes at a cost. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote in a reflection on the trials that followed the end of Nazi occupation in France,

In renouncing vengeance, society gives up on concretely linking the crime to the punishment. So punishment appears to be but an arbitrarily imposed penalty. For the guilty party it is nothing but an atrocious accident. [Legal sanctions] are nothing but an empty form that only the plenitude of content could justify.¹⁰

If vengeance trivializes punishment in one way by rooting it in human subjectivity, this impersonal form of justice trivializes punishment in another way by mechanizing it. De Beauvoir’s suggestion of the unjustifiability of the “empty form” brings me back to Buster and his remarkable journey through the mechanisms of cinema from romantic failure to unjustly accused thief, through detective, to romantic success. In a serious drama this progression would have centered on the question of justice–who really stole the watch? In Keaton’s film that question is resolved off-handedly, a narrative problem at the sidelines of comic action which is concentrated in the discrepant overlap of humans and mechanisms. The difference between success and failure is accidental, not moral, in Keaton’s world.¹¹ This world ironically resembles the world that Artegall, because of his vigorous efforts to escape the triviality of Book IV, seems ironically doomed to create in Book V.¹² As slapstick exists to acknowledge, there’s a hair’s breadth and a whole world between comedy and violence.