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This article posits a connection between Spenser's Redcrosse knight and an incarnation of St. George which has been widely overlooked: the "George" of the tavern sign. This version of St George-shorn of both maiden and dragon, lacking an objective-meant that the saint himself was mocked as one who, as Henry Smith put it, "is alwaies on horsebacke, and neuer rides." This aspect of St. George has a particular resonance for the Redcrosse Knight's inability to progress in his quest. The static rather than the chivalric image of St. George alerts us to the way that discipleship in Book I of The Faerie Queene is enabled through the tangled skeins of Spenser's narrative: the multivalent stories, the constant end-stopped stanzas and the delaying actions created not by the hostile divinities of classical epic, but by the sinfulness of the "wandering knight" himself. Spenser's poetics of stasis gains additional power in his opening book through his choice of a tutelary saint proverbial for his inability to get anywhere.
MARY ELLEN LAMB HAS recently drawn welcome attention to the importance of the popular rather than the aristocratic St. George to Spenser's depiction of the Redcrosse Knight. However, she deals only fleetingly with one of his most widespread manifestations: the St. George of the ale house sign.1 Tavern signs evolved from the "bush" of the Roman taberna (a wreath of vine leaves signaling that new wine had been delivered) and when Richard II decreed that all inns had to display a sign, each establishment, keen to be identified by those who could not read as well as those who could, advertised themselves with a clear, recognizable picture.2 St. George-martial and patriotic-was a frequent image and the most popular saint. By the early seventeenth century there were at least five taverns of the name in London/'
Over time the saint of the tavern sign became separated from his traditional companions. In a show which welcomed Edward IV at Temple Cross in 1461 the whole St. George story was acted out: "There was Seynt George on horsbakke upon a tent fyghtyng with a dragon, and the kyng and the queen on high in a castell, and his daughter benethe with a lambe."4 In sixteenth-century depictions, however, the various parts of...