AT TWO CRUCIAL moments in the Legend of Holiness, the narrative is iadvanced past a point of crisis, and given new impetus towards a happy conclusion, by means of the virtuous community's closing ranks against an individual it identifies as the source of evil and confusion in its midst. First Duessa (I.viii.45–49), and later Archimago (I.xii.34–36), are exposed as the rogue elements, the common enemy the community must expel in order to consolidate itself as a force for virtue. Of course, both characters are guilty parties. But only by a concerted revisionism can either of them, or both together, be made to carry the whole of the responsibility for the prior miscarrying of the quest: the “wicked will” of a Duessa or an Archimago (I.xii.32; cf. I.vii.49–50) serves as a conducting rod for blame, drawing off charges that otherwise would fall heavily on the hero himself.

The scenes are instances of what Northrop Frye describes as an archetypal episode, the expulsion of “the pharmakos or scapegoat”. The scapegoat's status in a given text may fall anywhere on a continuum from the innocent victim whose suffering elicits pity or horror, to the confirmed villain whose unambiguous evil facilitates our identification with the group meting out the punishment – an identification made either in earnest, or (as with the hissing audience of a pantomime) in exuberant play. Indeed the moral status of the whole event is sufficiently unstable that a complex version, as in the case of Shylock or Falstaff, may elude attempts to place it securely at any one point on the spectrum.