Spenser's ethics: Empire, mutability, and moral philosophy in early modernity 9781526165442

Table of contents :
Front matter
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Emptying the virtuous middle in Elizabethan Ireland
Milton’s Spenser: An alternative virtue for a fallen world
Purposeful lives: Romance narrative and the generation of empires
Magnificence: Fashioning the imperial commonwealth
The metaphysics of moral being: Time, change, and flourishing in the Gardens of Adonis
Civility and government: Virtuous discipline in the mutable world
Immoderation and necessity: Spenser’s Machiavelli
Coda
References
Index

Citation preview

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Spenser’s ethics

THE MANCHESTER SPENSER

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The Manchester Spenser is a monograph and text series devoted to historical and textual approaches to Edmund Spenser –​to his life, times, places, works and contemporaries. A growing body of work in Spenser and Renaissance studies, fresh with confidence and curiosity, and based on solid historical research, is being written in response to a general sense that our ability to interpret texts is becoming limited without the excavation of further knowledge. So the importance of research in nearby disciplines is quickly being recognised, and interest renewed: history, archaeology, religious or theological history, book history, translation, lexicography, commentary and glossary –​these require treatment for and by students of Spenser. The Manchester Spenser, to feed, foster and build on these refreshed attitudes, aims to publish reference tools, critical, historical, biographical and archaeological monographs on or related to Spenser, from several disciplines, and to publish editions of primary sources and classroom texts of a more wide-​ranging scope. The Manchester Spenser consists of work with stamina, high standards of scholarship and research, adroit handling of evidence, rigour of argument, exposition and documentation. The series will encourage and assist research into, and develop the readership of, one of the richest and most complex writers of the early modern period. General Editors Joshua Reid, Kathryn Walls and Tamsin Badcoe Editorial Board Sukanta Chaudhuri, Helen Cooper, Thomas Herron, J. B. Lethbridge, James Nohrnberg and Brian Vickers Also available Literary and visual Ralegh  Christopher M. Armitage (ed.) Edmund Spenser and the romance of space  Tamsin Badcoe Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579): A facsimile edition Kenneth Borris (ed.)

The early Spenser, 1554–​80: ‘Minde on honour fixed’  Jean Brink The art of The Faerie Queene  Richard Danson Brown A Concordance to the Rhymes of The Faerie Queene  Richard Danson Brown and J.B. Lethbridge

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

ii

A Supplement of the Faery Queene: By Ralph Knevet  Christopher Burlinson and Andrew Zurcher (eds) English literary afterlives: Greene, Sidney, Donne and the evolution of posthumous fame Elisabeth Chaghafi A Companion to Pastoral Poetry of the English Renaissance  Sukanta Chaudhuri Pastoral poetry of the English Renaissance: An anthology  Sukanta Chaudhuri (ed.) Spenserian allegory and Elizabethan biblical exegesis: A context for  The Faerie Queene Margaret Christian Comic Spenser: Faith, folly, and  The Faerie Queene Victoria Coldham-​Fussell Monsters and the poetic imagination in The Faerie Queene: ‘Most ugly shapes and horrible aspects’  Maik Goth Celebrating Mutabilitie: Essays on Edmund Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos  Jane Grogan (ed.) John Derricke’s The Image of Irelande: with a Discoverie of Woodkarne: Essays on text and context  Thomas Herron, Denna Iammarino and Maryclaire Moroney (eds) Spenserian satire: A tradition of indirection  Rachel E. Hile Castles and Colonists: An archaeology of Elizabethan Ireland Eric Klingelhofer

Shakespeare and Spenser: Attractive opposites  J.B. Lethbridge (ed.) Dublin: Renaissance city of literature  Kathleen Miller and Crawford Gribben (eds) A Fig for Fortune by Anthony Copley: A Catholic response to The Faerie Queene Susannah Brietz Monta Spenser and Virgil: The pastoral poems  Syrithe Pugh The Burley manuscript Peter Redford (ed.) Renaissance psychologies: Spenser and Shakespeare Robert Lanier Reid Spenser and Donne: Thinking poets  Yulia Ryzhik (ed.) European erotic romance: Philhellene Protestantism, renaissance translation and English literary politics  Victor Skretkowicz Rereading Chaucer and Spenser: Dan Geffrey with the New Poete  Rachel Stenner, Tamsin Badcoe and Gareth Griffith (eds) The early modern English sonnet: Ever in motion  Ré​mi Vuillemin, Laetitia Sansonetti and Enrica Zanin (eds) God’s only daughter: Spenser’s Una as the invisible Church  Kathryn Walls William Shakespeare and John Donne: Stages of the soul in early modern English poetry  Angelika Zirker

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Spenser’s ethics Empire, mutability, and moral philosophy in early modernity Andrew Wadoski

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Andrew Wadoski 2022 The right of Andrew Wadoski to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 6543 5 hardback First published 2022 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

For Shaila

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: Emptying the virtuous middle in Elizabethan Ireland 1 Milton’s Spenser: An alternative virtue for a fallen world 2 Purposeful lives: Romance narrative and the generation of empires 3 Magnificence: Fashioning the imperial commonwealth 4 The metaphysics of moral being: Time, change, and flourishing in the Gardens of Adonis 5 Civility and government: Virtuous discipline in the mutable world 6 Immoderation and necessity: Spenser’s Machiavelli Coda References Index

page x

1 41 67 93 116 139 164 190 197 210

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Acknowledgements

If I might draw my own moral guidance from Edmund Spenser’s poetry, it is that our true flourishing takes shape in collaborative activity; no collaboration has been more instrumental to this book’s existence, and to creating the flourishing life within which I wrote this book, than the one I have undertaken with my wife, Shaila Mehra. Spenser, too, teaches us that writing uniquely serves to map and echo our life in time, and this book has indeed done that. The idea from which this book emerged took its first tentative steps along with Naya, our first child, during the summer she learned to walk. I began exploring those ideas on paper when Ishaani, our second child, was entering her last year of preschool and herself learning to write out letters. The book now enters the world with both girls in elementary school, in a new life on the other side of the country from where they were born, and every day inhabiting the world as boundlessly creative, curious, and vibrant exemplars of the good in its truest forms. As many readers of these words intimately know, academic books take years to research, develop, and write, and over this time a significant number of debts are accrued. My first acknowledgement is to the larger community of Spenser scholars who, from my very first conference presentation at Kalamazoo, graciously embraced me and helped to nurture my work. Among these, I especially thank Joe Campana, Jane Grogan, and Tiffany Werth for their wisdom, guidance, and support, not only with this project, but in the development of my career as a whole. Early, and often cast-​ aside, versions of the arguments that follow were aired at conferences such RSA and SCSC over the course of several years.

ix

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Acknowledgements

xi

It is perhaps no coincidence that the most formative moments for this project occurred at the ISS convention in Dublin and at the ISS symposium, Spenser, Poetry, and Performance at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. I am grateful for the many incisive, engaging, and thought-​provoking questions I received at these events. It is in such dialogue that books like this are able to coalesce. This book, too, exists thanks to numerous teachers and mentors with whom I have been fortunate to cross paths in my life and career. Principal among these is Edward Jones, whose judicious balancing of friendship with ‘sage and serious’ counsel has long helped me navigate the world of the professoriate, and in whose person is truly ‘ensampled’ a scholar, teacher, and an academic ­professional. I am particularly lucky that I was first introduced to the world of Elizabethan literature as an undergraduate at St. Lawrence University, under the tutelage of Sid Sondergard and the late Tom Berger. Later, at the University of Rochester, I first read The Faerie Queene in its entirety, and subsequently wrote a dissertation on Spenser, with Ken Gross, and my sense of Spenser remains powerfully inflected by that experience. While at Rochester, my scholarly interests and approaches, as well as my abiding sense of how to be in this profession, were likewise significantly shaped by the stewardship of Russell Peck and Tom Hahn. During those years, I regularly taught as an adjunct at SUNY Geneseo, where Richard Finkelstein selflessly offered his support and wisdom to guide my nascent career. I began my career at Oklahoma State University, and while there, profited greatly from the wisdom and support of friends and colleagues such as Andrew Doust, Cristina Cruz Gonzalez, Robert Mayer, and the late David Oberhelman. I am now beginning a new chapter of my professional life at Virginia Tech, and have been heartened by the support I have received from new colleagues, namely my chair Rebecca Weaver-​Hightower, and Dean Laura Belmonte, along with my fellow premodernists in the Department of English: Katharine Cleland, Tony Colaianne, Kenneth Hodges, Su Fang Ng, and David Radcliffe. Kathryn Walls’ early interest in the project brought it to Manchester University Press, and her careful response to the revised manuscript helped me clarify many points. Thanks, as well, to Joshua Reid and Matthew Frost for their support though the review and acquisition process. I am especially grateful to the two

newgenprepdf

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

xii

Acknowledgements

anonymous readers for MUP for their gracious enthusiasm, probing queries, and shrewd suggestions for revision. This is a vastly better book for their feedback. Long before I ever imagined I would earn my keep as a university professor, and before I had ever heard of Spenser, my parents Ken and Sue Wadoski created a home full of books where my sister, Sarah Caruso, and I were raised to value intellectual curiosity as a cardinal virtue. For this, and above all for their unyielding support and love, I am forever grateful. Sarah, along with her husband Milo and their children Audrie and Zac, showed me how to shape a life around beauty, creativity, and the imagination. With this turn to family, I close where I began, by dedicating this book to Shaila. It is with her that I have learned what it truly means to be eudaimon.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction: Emptying the virtuous middle in Elizabethan Ireland

How might we read Edmund Spenser as a moral theorist? Certainly, no Elizabethan poet took up the task of moral instruction as rigorously and complexly as did Edmund Spenser in his allegorical epic, The Faerie Queene. Yet for all the intensity with which Spenser adopted the role of poet-​moralist, his readers have long struggled to reconcile his ethical and poetic agendas. Indeed, recent scholarship foregrounds the ways The Faerie Queene’s poetics seem to contest, or even contradict, its ethical perspectives, depicting a poem that either fails to achieve, or even actively resists, its stated moralizing imperatives. Furthermore, the philosophical vocabularies on which Spenser chiefly draws in cultivating his moral vision are, at risk of being blunt, the equivalent of mounted knights charging across the battlefield in the days of gunpowder. In terms of moral philosophy’s historical development in the early modern era, The Faerie Queene is a poem built out around the moribund moral technology of Aristotle and Aquinas in an age of Machiavelli and Montaigne, its chivalric heroes often fruitlessly pursuing the ancient virtues on the cusp of a century that would give us the challenging moral visions of figures ranging from Descartes and Spinoza to Grotius and Hobbes. Read against this backdrop, Spenser’s mounted warriors cannot help but feel more bumbling than heroic, exemplars of a foolish nostalgia for an archaic moral code. Finally, this is a poem whose ultimate commitment to an alignment of heroic agency with coercive violence antagonizes elemental notions of Christian morality and of Aristotelian virtue. And yet, I would like to suggest, in these impasses we can begin to see the outlines and, indeed, the conceptual rigor, singularity, and clarity of Spenser’s moral vision. For here we are confronted with a poet who, as acutely as any of

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

2

Spenser’s ethics

his nearest contemporaries, including Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Donne, understands how the very contours of the moral universe he inhabits have shifted away from those normative paradigms drawn from ‘Aristotle and the rest’, paradigms on which he so often struggles to situate his poem’s vast social and historical mimesis, and to orient its instrumental political ambitions.1 While struggling to mediate the deeply internalized precepts and vocabularies of classical and humanist moral philosophy with the demands of establishing and maintaining the colonial state in Ireland, Edmund Spenser addressed, and helped to shape, an epochal cultural transformation of moral thought in the early modern era. There has been much interest of late in the ways early modern English literary culture grappled with the era’s erosion of humanist thought and, in Rhodri Lewis’s words, ‘came to find that humanist moral philosophy was deficient’, and thus turned their energies to pursuing either wholesale cultural critiques of humanist instruction, or nostalgically embracing old ideas to shield themselves against modernity’s discomfiting innovations.2 This book parts company from these arguments by considering how Spenser sought to reconstrue the scope and intention of his moral project in light of these understood deficiencies in humanism’s received conceptual vocabularies. Jane Grogan identifies a marked turn away from Aristotelian humanism in Spenser’s later writing, suggesting a detour from the imperatives of ethical instruction in the Legend of Courtesy’s embrace of emergent Italian models of comportment and self-​fashioning.3 I would like to suggest, however, that such a turn is less about abjuring an ethical imperative than it is a wholesale reconsideration of the ethical as a conceptual category. My Spenser, to recall an influential article on the topic, is not frozen in the face of ‘the failure of moral philosophy’.4 Rather, his critical appropriation and reinvention of various ethical modes sets out to imagine a form of moral life answerable to the realities of its ­cultural and historical moment. Such an argument revises a scholarly narrative describing Spenser’s ethical thinking as derivative, nostalgic, or inconsistent with one that contends him to be one of early modern England’s most original and incisive moral theorists, placing The Faerie Queene at the center of the contested discipline of moral philosophy as it engaged the social, political, and intellectual upheavals driving the unravelling of classical virtue ethics at the threshold of early modernity. I thus challenge accounts of

3

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

3

Spenser as a revanchist champion of an exhausted humanist tradition, or as someone whose frustrations with contemporary political life make him increasingly disenchanted with, even alienated from, the project of moral instruction. Rather, I depict a literary ethicist rigorously committed to discovering a politically and metaphysically viable account of moral life in an era that starkly reveals the ancient virtues’ conceptual and practical limitations. The book’s narrative bridges two concerns animating Spenser’s thinking and writing through the 1580s and 90s. The first was imagining a paradigm of heroic virtue keyed to the project of colonial empire-​building. The second was understanding the nature and scope of the human good in the metaphysically fallen world of the historical present, a world of which Ireland is both a synecdoche and the pivotal material instantiation. Named by Spenser ‘­mutability’, the realm of historical life is a general ontological frame of reference for the perils of human life universally considered. At the nexus of these problems emerges a poet whose deepest assumptions about a moral life’s origins and ends are shaped by an awareness that he lives in a ‘stonie age’ whose native modes of political action have rendered moot, at least in practical terms, ‘the antique use’ of virtue ‘which was of yore’ (V.pr.2–​3). In pursuing an account of Spenser’s ethics, my analyses do not align the poet’s moral vision with particular schools of thought, with schematic accounts of the virtues themselves, nor with the conception (or policing) of specific modes of conduct. Rather, I focus on the ways Spenser’s poetry eclectically reimagines the languages and concepts of received virtue ethics traditions to pursue moral agendas that often challenge the very bases of those ethical modes, while grappling with the broader ­cultural transformation of the category of the ethical itself in the late sixteenth century. As The Faerie Queene opportunistically deploys and adapts, while strategically reimagining, the inherited languages of moral philosophy to emergent circumstances, it explores the vast divide between the mimetic and imaginative frameworks of that ancient ethical tradition and a fundamentally divergent vision of moral agency enforced by new political realities and new ways of thinking about the work of selves in the world. Positioning Spenser’s moral allegory within this conceptual space resolves a longstanding problem in Spenser studies: the apparent conflict between the poet’s stated morality and his accounts of what he registers as

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

4

Spenser’s ethics

the corrupted moral universe that he actually inhabits. Spenser’s readers have long regarded The Faerie Queene as a poem at fundamental odds with itself. From Harry Berger Jr.’s seminal essays on the ironic postures of the Spenserian narrator to Jeff Dolven’s discussion of romance narrative’s resistance to the project of humanist instruction, modern scholarship has consistently foregrounded the ways The Faerie Queene’s poetics seem to contest, or even ­contradict, its ethical perspectives. When the conversation turns specifically to ethics, the argument generally falls into one of two camps, either depicting Spenser as a nostalgic supporter of culturally and historically passé ideologies, or as someone whose growing despair over contemporary political life drives him away from the project of moral instruction, a tendency most especially witnessed in his poem’s latter books. While the crucial recognition of modern Spenser scholarship has been to understand the centrality of tension and irresolution to this poet’s mimetic project, neither of these solutions to the question of the tensions within Spenser’s ­ethical agenda feels wholly persuasive to me. In the first case, while Spenser’s poetry certainly evinces a deep-​seated, almost reflexive fascination with the ancient, his archaism is nearly always critical and studied, and it is always inflected by deep awareness both of historical movement and of the idol-​making perils of anachronism.5 In the second, if Spenser increasingly feels set adrift from the curious morality, or perhaps disingenuous a-​morality, of courtly and political life in the 1596 Faerie Queene, it is not morality itself that is at risk in his poem, but rather the mimetic project of effectively construing and communicating virtues within that political framework. What reads as an abdication of moral or poetic purpose is, in fact, the attempt to render a more effective mode of behavior in a world whose modes of political organization have rendered the ancient paradigms of virtue moot. In Spenser’s poetry, we see a writer whose attempts to construe a viable model of political life in a colonialist enterprise, in the early modern nation-​state, in the shifted calculus of the self and society engendered by forces ranging from reformed theology’s newly privileged sense of individual agency to nascent capitalism, confronts the historical conditions driving and necessitating the decline of the virtue ethics tradition. As The Faerie Queene’s allegorical narratives move across this terrain, striving to synthesize

5

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

5

Faery’s vagaries into some coherent structure of meaning, Spenser’s knights, and his readers, find themselves in the midst of what David Wootton describes as the ‘intellectual and cultural revolution which still shapes our own understanding of the world: the replacement of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality by a new type of decision making which may be termed instrumental reasoning or cost-​benefit analysis’.6 More generally, to recall Alasdair MacIntyre’s foundational analyses of the historical evolution of moral philosophy, this poem stands on the cusp of a world ‘after virtue’, an emergent moral reality in which flourishing is defined in terms of the fulfillment of ‘external goods and not at all of internal goods in the context of practices’.7 Spenser, however, does not yet inhabit the world that MacIntyre describes as standing wholly ‘after virtue’. Indeed, if alternative models of ethical action and understanding were being developed with increasing rigor and sophistication over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they would not fully supplant virtue ethics’ dominance as the normative frame of reference for, or conceptual vocabulary of, moral thought for a century after Spenser’s death. The contours of this long and uncertain transition, however, were clearly starting to take shape in the latter half of the sixteenth century, variously emerging in reformed theology’s reconfigurations of the relation between self and authority; in emergent political and economic modalities; in a rapidly expanding canon of moral thought, ranging from newly revived ancient models such as the skepticism of Sextus Empiricus or Lucretian materialism, to the new moral visions of writers such as Machiavelli and Lipsius; and in new forms and genres of moral writing in the vernacular, including civility books, translations and paraphrases of Aristotle, and works like Montaigne’s Essais. A paradigmatic instance of this transition is recorded in the mid-​seventeenth-​century notebook of a Cambridge University student named John Balderston (c. 1660), who describes a lecture that ‘proposed a definition of virtue something like this, sc. that it is a constant disposition of the soul according to law, or, as defined by Aristotle elsewhere, the conscious habit [of choosing] the mean proper to us, which habit is perfected by right reason as limited by prudence’.8 If the latter definition looks firmly back to the virtue ethics tradition, that initial proposal anticipates the kind of reasoning that would coalesce in the duty-​oriented deontological

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

6

Spenser’s ethics

moral theories of philosophers like Immanuel Kant a century later.9 As J.B. Schneewind argues of this passage, imagining virtue as a means of organizing the subject in due relation to the law positions its ambivalent definition squarely in the developing structures of moral thought in early modern England, noting that the emergence and increasing ‘dominance of an act-​centered or legalistic account of morality is to be found in numerous Protestant writings, clerical as well as lay, throughout the period’, deeply conditioning and transforming ‘the way that Aristotle was read’.10 Balderston’s note, as Schneewind suggests, illustrates a pivotal moment in a conceptual genealogy that runs back through Elizabethan divines such as William Perkins, to Jean Calvin’s theories of obedience, to the legal imperatives of the secular state, while looking ahead to the Enlightenment.11 Yet, if its ultimate conclusion would be to break free of Aristotelian orthodoxy, that ancient language nevertheless remained the dominant medium of moral expression, and would continue to do so for over a century after Spenser’s death.12 Spenser’s presentation of ethics often feels deeply self-​contradictory. We might think, for instance, of the oft-​discussed questions of Guyon’s intemperate razing of the Bower of Bliss, or of Time’s destructive presence in the flourishing space of the Gardens of Adonis, as emblematic of this tendency and its afterlife in modern Spenser criticism. Moral paradoxes such as this, however, have less to do with the poet’s own ambivalence about the task of moral instruction than they do with his attempt to grapple with those tensions unfolding in contemporary moral thought between received moral heuristics and emergent forms of social practice. Charles Taylor’s account of this transformation offers a useful vocabulary with which to situate Spenser’s inhabitation of this moment in the most general terms. Taylor argues that in the early modern era, the ‘social imaginary’ –​the general frameworks by which collective social life and the good it seeks to produce are imagined –​was undergoing a radical transformation. Attempting to render both a politically and metaphysically adequate account of moral life within its broad social mimesis, Spenser’s Faerie Queene thus records, and intervenes in, a historical period when, we might say, ‘the ways people imagine their social existence’ radically diverged from ‘the deeper normative notions and images that underlie’ and make sense of this imaginary.13 In other words, what

7

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

7

we so often see in this poem are the tensions between an inherited conceptual framework, the social realities for which it attempts to offer a normative frame of reference, and the vocabulary of moral thought with which it finds itself in ever more imperfect alignment. Spenser’s political and literary lives were situated at the center of the key forces impelling the changing configurations of ethics in early modernity, including new sources of moral thought both ancient and modern; shifting confessional and geopolitical landscapes engendered by the Protestant reformation; and an emergent popular and vernacular moral discourse enabled by print technology and which fostered new discursive forms.14 As Spenser navigates the rapidly shifting terrain of moral-​philosophical discourse in the late sixteenth century, his ethical imagination is fundamentally conditioned by his understanding of Ireland –​precisely because, and not in spite, of its brutalities –​as a privileged venue for making evident both the problems of this philosophy and its possible reimagination. As he assimilates the Irish landscape and its standing political formations into the warp of his Faery land, and the project of colonial nation-​building into the weft of his chivalric narratives, Spenser’s persistent reflections on the ancient virtues’ historical decline illuminate how the material demands of establishing and maintaining the colonial state expose the practical and conceptual limits of classical and humanist moral philosophy. The violent and politically unsettled world of sixteenth-​century Ireland was fertile ground for hastening and amplifying this movement away from ancient moral paradigms. Both geographically and politically remote from the relatively stable center of the English polity, Tudor and Elizabethan Ireland became an incubator for charged debates about the nature and practice of social, moral, and political reformation. David Heffernan documents some 600 treatises devoted to the reformation of Ireland produced with increasing urgency and frequency over the course of the sixteenth century by a diverse array of actors, from Old English aristocrats to Elizabethan military officers, and in forms ranging from private letters to official policy statements and formal treatises.15 Heffernan’s catalogue reveals an exponential increase in this material in the 1580s and 90s, an increase directly corresponding to the aftermath of the Desmond rebellion and to the subsequent Tyrone rebellion, and wholly coinciding with Spenser’s time in

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

8

Spenser’s ethics

Ireland and his writing of The Faerie Queene and A View of the Present State of Ireland. Ciaran Brady argues that in this period, English colonial policy does an about-​face, shifting from various programs of attempted institutional reforms seeking to coordinate standing Irish political formations with English common law, to a program of violent erasure and replacement.16 A flourishing of written proposals for novel reform strategies was sparked by this shift in policy, and by the intensifying series of crises to which those policies reacted. Indeed, as Markku Peltonen notes, the ‘continual attempts to extend the English impact in Ireland and the equally continual failures provoked a number of those involved to compose new plans for the conquest as well as for its maintenance’.17 A letter written by Sir Henry Sidney to Arthur, Lord Grey in September 1580 reacts with skepticism to the evidently widespread practice among the ruling elite of the New English in Ireland of generating theory-​driven responses to this moment’s perils. While noting that changed circumstances demand changed ways of thinking about both the means and ends of political transformation, he argues the urgency of immediate action precludes the luxury of theorizing the situation: My thinks it is nowe owte of Seson to mak any Treatise or Discourse of a generall Reformacion, for that were like as if a Man seing his Howse on Fire, wold sette downe and drawe a Plotte for a newe, before he wold put his helpinge Hande to quenche the owlde ….[T]‌hen must you proceede in different Maner, from the Course which you must howled; if you aspire to a perfect Reformacion of that accursed Countrie.18

While Sidney dismisses such studied exercises in imagined political reform as impractical at best, and an endangering diversion at worst, his letter reminds us that his peers and underlings in the military and bureaucratic apparatus of the Elizabethan colonial state had no such qualms. Indeed, the written records they have left behind reveal vigorous interrogations of the underlying principles of political reformation. The particular demands imposed on New English colonists by Ireland’s political landscape in the 1580s and 90s, as Nicholas Canny suggests, forced these agents of a nascent empire, perhaps otherwise content with the commonplace platitudes of their humanist educations, ‘of necessity… to advance novel solutions’

9

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

9

in response to this land’s rapidly evolving challenges, including ‘radical programme[s]‌of reform which would involve the erection of a completely new commonwealth upon firm foundations’.19 The new challenges posed by this decentered and destabilizing moment in English colonial policy made it a crucial site for testing and proving ideas at the emerging forefront of European social and political theory, and the works of New English colonial administrators are amply stocked with ideas drawn from figures like Bodin, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Lipsius, among others.20 Within this context, Spenser stands out as an exemplary and singular ­theorist, recommended by his friend Lodowick Bryskett, in one of the more noteworthy treatises of moral reformation sparked by the English colonialist experience in Ireland, as ‘not onelie perfect in the Greek tongue, but also wel read in philosophie, both morall and natural’.21 And if the persistently heterodox voice Bryskett assigns the character Spenser in the ensuing dialogue reflects something of the real poet, the program of reading in philosophy he undertook in life ranged far and wide from the models of Aristotle, Cicero, and Aquinas.22 While Spenser had been trained in the classical and humanist traditions of moral philosophy since his grammar school days under Richard Mulcaster, his life and work in Ireland must have quickly dispelled the cozy idealisms that his humanist training instilled about the ‘private morall virtues’ and their relation to ‘the other parte of polliticke vertues’. The world of moral discourse into which Spenser was thrust is disturbingly reflected in the arguments on behalf of a program of radical violence proffered by his neighbor in Munster, Richard Beacon, in Solon his follie. So ‘much greater is the necessity thereof’, Beacon claims, when reformation is to be made of a common-​weale, gained by the sword and conquest, as also corrupted in manners; for that the people having here sustained many iniuries by force and violence, whereunto the conquerour is drawne oftentimes by their disobedience, maie not at anie time after with newe benefites, offices, and rewardes, be reconciled and pacified: neither shall we finde here profitable lawes, or any sufficient meanes to effect a reformation, without sufficient forces, to repell all daungers, and difficulties.23

Arguing that a sustained program of repressive violence is the only viable means of social reform in a nation both conquered by force

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

10

Spenser’s ethics

and beset by ‘corrupted manners’, Beacon’s analysis converses with the network of writers radically reconfiguring early modern civic humanism also shaping Spenser’s emergent moral vision.24 Centered in the political and historical writings of Machiavelli, his blunt assessment –​an unsubtle prefiguration of Kurtz’s cry to ‘exterminate all the brutes’ in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness –​ makes stark the enfolding of radical, genocidal violence into the civilization-​making project of early modern colonialism at its very moment of historical inception. And Spenser, by the time he composes Book V of The Faerie Queene and A View of the Present State of Ireland, had written his way to becoming the pre-​eminent theorist of this enfolding and its inscription into an overarching vision of moral agency. The question about whether or not Spenser’s most extreme positions in the View were either marginal or normative among his New English contemporaries is somewhat beside the point.25 More crucial is the fact that such arguments are among the range of possible ideas generated in response to, and thus made available by, the political challenges of maintaining a viable colony in Ireland. Catherine Nicholson suggests that the pivotal mimetic problem of Book V’s image of Ireland is making sense of crisis.26 Nicholson argues that the exigencies of colonialist policy forced Spenser to reconfigure the ruminative practices of his earlier allegorical mode towards a more expedient practice driven by, and responsive to, the demands of necessity. Most simply, Spenser’s reorientations of his readers’ critical habits towards such a reading practice reflects the poet’s general reorientation of humanist theory and practice in reaction to his Irish experiences. Along these lines, Gordon Teskey suggests that Ireland compels Spenser to think beyond the limits of stale orthodoxies defining the ‘arid theorizing and neoclassicism coming from his beloved Italy and France’; rather, as the ‘image of Ireland as he saw it through English, colonial eyes’ coalesces in Book V, it becomes ‘the brutal beating heart of the poem Spenser wanted to write’.27 Freeing the poet from the normative constraints of the classical virtues by the force of historically contingent necessity, Spenser’s Ireland thus becomes the crucial provocation to, and amplification of, what Teskey describes as Spenser’s defining intellectual habit of ‘open thinking’. ‘Open thinking’, Teskey argues ‘does not, so to speak, look back on what already exists and

11

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

11

strive to represent it in thought’. Rather, ‘it goes forward seeking those thoughts that are not yet in the world because they lie in the future of thinking, as coming moments of poetic truth’.28 The Faerie Queene’s instrumental and transformative imperatives converge with the sense that its romance narrative renders ‘what it feels like to live in history’. The poem thereby presents ‘a speculative project in which … ideas are continually changing as he writes’, and which represents ‘the appearance of history as something that is happening’ in the endlessly diffused ‘now’ of writing and reading.29 It is a mode of writing that is uniquely poised, that is, both to represent and reflect upon the evolution of concepts among the pressures imposed on them by the world, time, and experience, to identify new forms of understanding among the ruins and, as Spenser might say, the ‘moniments’ of ancient ideas. The opening stanzas of the proem to Book V of The Faerie Queene offer Spenser’s most explicit meditation on the historical fate of the virtues, their slow decline into irrelevance that J.B. Schneewind describes as the ‘misfortunes of virtue’ on the threshold of modernity:30 So oft as I with state of present time, The image of the antique world compare, When as mans age was in his freshest prime, And the first blossome of faire vertue bare, Such oddes I finde twixt those, and these which are, As that, through long continuance of his course, Me seemes the world is runne quite out of square, From the first point of his appointed sourse, And being once amisse growes daily wourse and wourse. For from the golden age, that first was named, It’s now at earst become a stonie one; And men themselues, the which at first were framed Of earthly mould, and form’d of flesh and bone, Are now transformed into hardest stone: Such as behind their backs (so backward bred) Were throwne by Pyrrha and Deucalione: And if then those may any worse be red, They into that ere long will be degendered. Let none then blame me, if in discipline Of vertue and of ciuill vses lore,

12

Spenser’s ethics

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

I doe not forme them to the common line Of present dayes, which are corrupted sore, But to the antique vse, which was of yore, When good was onely for it selfe desyred, And all men sought their owne, and none no more; When Iustice was not for most meed outhyred, But simple Truth did rayne, and was of all admyred. For that which all men then did vertue call, Is now cald vice; and that which vice was hight, Is now hight vertue, and so vs’d of all: Right now is wrong, and wrong that was is right, As all things else in time are chaunged quight. Ne wonder; for the heauens reuolution Is wandred farre from where it first was pight, And so doe make contrarie constitution Of all this lower world, toward his dissolution. (V.Pr.1–​4)

The lines’ pathos depends on their keen awareness that they depict a social reality in which the ancient virtues are simply deficient in providing either the poem’s heroes, or its readers, effective modes of conduct or judgment in managing not only the problems that world poses, but the construal of value and of selfhood among those problems. Their writer, however, does not simply lament the futility of trying to alter the course of things, but recognizes the historical inevitably of the way things currently are. Sorrowful though Spenser may be for a lost golden age, he is not a Don Quixote who will burrow into the ‘image of the antique world’ in a nostalgic quest for coherence and order. Having spent the last decade and a half grappling with the daily exigencies of instituting English rule in Ireland, this is not someone benighted enough to imagine he can wish the present world away though rendering a beautiful enough celebration of arrière garde values and forms of conduct. Spenser’s lamenting the ancient virtues’ fate in the political present of Elizabethan England’s colonial ambitions in Ireland echoes the language of the poet’s earlier account of himself in the ‘Letter of the Authours’. There, he describes himself as an ‘antique poet historicall’, continuing the traditions of Homer and Virgil, Ariosto and Tasso by depicting exemplary images of ancient heroes, their actions, and the private and public virtues those actions both

31

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

13

engender and embody. Gone, however, is the hopeful and anticipatory tone of the ‘Letter’. In retrospect, the task he initially set for himself in that letter some six years earlier, he suggests, seems futile; it is an exercise not in reformation or renewal, but one of simple anachronism in which the values underwriting the legends of old are not simply repudiated, but are utterly irrelevant to, the modern-​day world. He now finds himself comparing the contemporary political scene with ancient forms of ‘virtue and civill uses lore’, a contrast that reveals these ‘present dayes … corrupted sore … /​For that which men did virtue call, /​Is now cald vice; and that which vice was hight, /​Is now hight virtue, and so us’d of all’ (V.Pr.3–​4). Spenser describes an intertwined historical and metaphysical fall in which the inverted and corrupted moral and political orders that define human social interaction echo a breakdown in the very structures of nature and the cosmos. After invoking two classical myths of the fall of man –​the Hesiodic and Ovidian tales of the golden age –​Spenser adds a new ‘stonie’ age to complete its teleological account of the progressive ‘degendering’ of humankind. He gives contour to this vision by recalling Ovid’s story of Deucalion and Pyrrha, then turns his focus away from literary myth and towards natural philosophy by lamenting the Ptolemaic cosmos’s wandering Zodiacal constellations. It is an embodiment of worldly instability, reflecting a universe in which ‘all things in time are changed quight’, and where …the heavens revolution Is wandred farre from, where it first was pight, And so doe make contrarie constitution Of all this lower world, toward his dissolution. (V.Pr.4, lines 5–​9)

Linking these disparate frames of reference is the fact that all are tales of metamorphosis and mutability, of a progressively destabilized and decentered universe whose entropic energies run contrary to, and thus make impossible, the human need for organization and coherence. If there is some promise to be found in the fall from a primordial state of virtue, it is in the anticipation of apocalypse contained in that word ‘dissolution’ by which the vagaries of a mutable cosmos find teleological meaning and coherence. Lest we take

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

14

Spenser’s ethics

the golden age topos too seriously as an invocation of Spenser’s moral metaphysics, it is worth noting that, as Bart van Es reminds us, the ‘concept of universal decay was on the wane by the time Spenser was writing’; it was a topos so passé, van Es notes, it was even considered ‘offensive’.31 Likewise, besides the avowedly fictive mythic etiologies the poet invokes, the entire proem is couched in the language of fabling. The words ‘image’, ‘antique’, ‘lore’, and ‘it’s sayd’, and references to the soothsaying of ‘Aegyptian wisards’ and a zodiac whose fictive status the poet conspicuously amplifies organize this complaint, undercutting the claims to a viable reality of any nostalgic commitments to which these lines may point. Indeed, we might think of the image as a form of paradiastole (or inverted value) that, as Quentin Skinner argues, is something of a master trope not only of moral relativism, but of imagining the ways value itself is subject to the pressures of historical change in early modern English political writing.32 Spenser’s complaints are thus clearly inscribed within that distinctly ironic narrative strategy that Harry Berger, Jr. argues is the poet’s basic mimetic mode. ‘[I]‌nstead of merely reading the poem as a piece of storytelling’, Berger argues, we must ‘approach it as a poem that represents storytelling, and does so in a manner that isn’t innocent, a manner that interrogates the values and motives, the politics and ideology, embedded in the structure of storytelling’.33 The Faerie Queene, that is, represents, and thus holds up to critical scrutiny, the claims of that nostalgia-​driven voice; and the inverted world this proem describes itself reflects the imaginative inversions of irony. This proem was not Spenser’s first foray into the counterfactual image of the golden age. As the topos recurs over the course of his career, it reveals how Spenser’s Irish experience fundamentally alters his sense of the relationship between present-​ day actions and the normative ideals represented in images of a mythic past. Some fifteen years before these lines were likely composed, and in a letter written to the young Spenser shortly after the publication of The Shepheardes Calender in 1579, his friend and mentor, Gabriel Harvey, gently mocks his understudy’s un-​ironic embrace of the golden age topos as unbefitting his youth. Harvey suggests that Spenser’s ‘bill of compleynt … is as owlde as Adam and Eve, and full as stale as ye stalist fasshion that has been in fasshion since Noes fludd’.34 ‘Good Lord’, Harvey later chides, ‘you a gentleman,

51

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

15

a courtier, an yuthe, and go aboute to revive so owlde and stale a bookish opinion dead and buried many hundrid years before you or I knewe whether there any world or noe’.35 If this conceit still maintains a hold on Spenser’s imagination in the mid-​1590s, so too, do Harvey’s admonishments. In discouraging his young charge from being a tedious killjoy, Harvey’s overt intentions in the letter are distinctly Falstaffian. Yet by telling Spenser to match his actions to his age, he is also offering his young friend an important, and perhaps formative, lesson in how best to read the present as a part of history. Harvey’s argument notably proceeds from the French political theorist, Jean Bodin, whose early work on historiographical method offers one of the era’s most incisive critiques of the myth of the golden age (among other foundational presuppositions of Renaissance humanist critical practice): You suppose the first age was the goulde age. It was nothinge soe. Bodin defendith the goulde age to flourish nowe, and our first grandfathers to have rubbid thorowghe in the iron and brasen age at the beginninge when all thinges were rude and unperfitte in comparison of the exquisite finesse and delicacye, that we ar growen unto at these dayes.36

Harvey was likely in the midst of a sustained reading of Bodin’s Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1566) when this letter was written, for his entire argument over the course of several pages neatly tracks the French historiographer’s. Episodes such as the British histories Arthur reads in Alma’s castle suggest that Spenser did not follow Harvey in taking seriously Bodin’s positivist and progressive account of human history. A lesson that does take hold, however, is Bodin’s declaration that ‘those who think they can understand histories [and, implicitly, the structures of the political and historical present] without chronology are as much in error as those who wish to escape the windings of a labyrinth without a guide’.37 As a theorist of historical chronology, Bodin (or at least Bodin mediated through Harvey) would offer Spenser an evolutionary account of the historical lives of political and social forms. However, the model of historical evolution that Spenser construes in the ironies of Book V’s proem is significantly at odds with Bodin’s positivist vision.38 Instead, it offers something more akin to

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

16

Spenser’s ethics

the ways in which modern evolutionary biology understands these processes: contingent, provisional, and partial adaptive responses to external necessity, crisis, and peril. Confronted with the pressures of imagining a form of agency suited to the emergent project of colonial imperialism, Spenser’s poetry describes a mode of virtue in which actions and their moral import do not stand in their conformity to prior normative principles of judgment, but in the degree to which they fulfill a general moral understanding. Specifically, virtuous deeds are manifest in their effective articulation of forms of flourishing within that mutable world. And they do so in their capacity to function in adaptive and site-​specific ways to external threats impeding their path to teleological orientation. Read in light of the book that it prefaces, Spenser’s declaration that he intends to follow the ‘forme’ of the ancient virtues thus feels like an apology to himself, as the poet, like Artegall confronted with Talus’s execution of Munera, will look on his unfolding tale with resigned horror at the necessity of its challenging course: …Thence he her drew By the faire lockes, and fowly did array, Withouten pitty of her goodly hew, That Artegall him selfe her seemelesse plight did rew. (V.ii.25, lines 6–​9)

Throughout the poem, Spenser finds himself much like his own knight of justice who, sorrowful though he may be at the necessity of what he must perform, ‘Yet for no pitty would he change the course /​ Of Iustice, which in Talus hand did lye’ (V.ii.26, line 1). Richard McCabe addresses this blurred boundary between poet and poem by arguing that the Ireland of Book V ‘functions as a metonym for the accumulated failures of the poem’s idealism’.39 I would like to suggest, however, that what registers as failure in moments such as this actually cuts through the reductivism and restraint, the false nostalgias and fantasies, of idealism. In idealism’s place, the imagery of moral failure opens space for Spenser to imagine the form of an exigent alternative with which to engage the political realities of the ‘stonie age’ in which he finds himself. In a moment in which Spenser, through Artegall’s gaze, implicates his readers in an object lesson in Machiavellian realpolitik, what is at stake is

71

Introduction

17

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

an avowed rejection of those very ancient virtues around which Artegall’s deepest senses of self and vocation are framed: Who rudely hayld her forth without remorse, Still holding vp her suppliant hands on hye, And kneeling at his feete submissiuely. But he her suppliant hands, those hands of gold, And eke her feete, those feete of siluer trye, Which sought vnrighteousnesse, and iustice sold, Chopt off, and nayld on high, that all might the[m]‌behold. Her selfe then tooke he by the sclender wast, In vaine loud crying, and into the flood Ouer the Castle wall adowne her cast, And there her drowned in the durty mud: But the streame washt away her guilty blood. Thereafter all that mucky pelfe he tooke, The spoile of peoples euill gotten good, The which her sire had scrap’t by hooke and crooke; And burning all to ashes, powr’d it downe the brooke. (V.ii.26–​27)

Indeed, much like Artegall, the closer Spenser adheres to those ancient moral codes, the more urgently he feels their loss, while at the same time the more fully he accepts the necessity of their transformation. To whom, we must ask, does Spenser direct that sense of ‘blame’ registered in the proem’s apologia? The entire account of Munera’s punishment is explicitly framed as a rejection of the values of heroic poetry and the attendant ideologies and ethical imaginations of classical epic, chivalric romance, and Petrarchan lyric. If Artegall nominally seeks to preserve the sanctity of his knightly creed by standing aside while Talus does his dirty work, any perceived lack of agency on his part in this episode is simply a convenient fiction. He is just as much an agent of ‘rudeness’ as his ‘yron page’, Talus, and just as much as Talus does he act without remorse. In a gesture he will with no small irony forget in his later fight with, and subsequent defeat by, the Amazon queen, Radegund, he refuses to acknowledge the protected status of the suppliant, among the foundational gestures of ethical performance in classical epic.40 By staging Munera’s torture and execution as an anti-​blazon, he casts the entire moral apparatus of the chivalric tradition, along with her body, into the ‘durty mud’. Simply put,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

18

Spenser’s ethics

in a ‘stonie age’ where the relative values of virtue and vice are inverted, the hero must, perforce, act like the carle. The problems this passage raises concerning the nature and objectives of the virtues emblematize something fundamental to Spenser’s ethical vision as a whole. While Artegall and Talus abandon chivalry’s ancient moral codes, they do not see themselves (nor does Spenser want us to understand their actions) as decoupled from any guiding moral framework. Rather, they –​and we, as readers –​struggle to accommodate the actions their political reality compels, and thus deems just, to the deep-​rooted moral paradigms within whose framework justice is theorized in their world –​the long-​received tradition of virtue ethics as encoded in texts ranging from Aristotle’s moral treatises and ancient epics, to medieval and Renaissance chivalric romances and courtesy books. As Artegall grapples with this ‘stonie age’, attempting to mediate the values of an ancient ideal with the perils of present-​day political exigencies, he is accompanied by Talus, the proto-​robot ‘yron page’. Artegall and Talus are a wholly unique couple in The Faerie Queene. The Knight of Justice is the only one of Spenser’s heroes whose agency is, for the most part, effectuated in the world primarily by his traveling companion. For instance, Talus’s nearest analogue, the Palmer who accompanies Guyon through Book II, operates largely as an externalized emblem of conscience, a check on Guyon’s susceptibility to various forms of excess. The Palmer speaks and, during a particularly fraught encounter with two ‘wanton maidens’, puts his hand on Guyon’s shoulder, but he never really does much of anything save throwing a net on Acrasia. Talus, however, is all deed and action. And unlike the paired heroes of Book IV’s Legend of Friendship, these two are never represented as working towards that great renaissance metaphor of metaphysical rapprochement, concordia discors. In fact, they continually repudiate that vision, seeking concord only in the elimination of sites of civic discord. An ‘yron groome, [Artegall’s] gard and government’ (V.iv.3), Talus functions as a kind of golem animated solely for the purpose of doing works of justice that, for whatever reasons, elude Artegall’s capabilities. And as Artegall moves ever deeper into the perils of Book V’s ‘stony world’, Talus’s instrumental force becomes ever more potent in response: in V.ii, it is Talus who must ‘invent’ some method of breaching the gates of Pollente’s castle,

91

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

19

while as the legend unfolds, Talus becomes tasked with discharging ever more heightened forms of violence ranging from dismemberment and disfiguration to mass slaughter. Throughout, Talus embodies the material expression of juridical power. This iron man is the instrumental translation into worldly and practical agency of an otherwise abstract or conceptual authority of which Artegall is simply iconic. For all his knightly vigor, Artegall is notably static in the formal effectuation of justice. He renders judgement but cannot effectively enforce it himself. Indeed, it is only when Talus is shunted aside that Artegall has his most notable failure: his defeat by, and subjection to, the Amazon queen, Radegund. That episode, which I will consider at greater length in my closing chapter, offers a foundational story about the insufficiency of the ancient virtues in addressing the material challenges posed by Book V’s moral and political realities. In this moment, Artegall’s strictly adhered-​to code of chivalric conduct is made the root cause of his downfall. Having challenged the warrior queen to a single combat organized around terms and conditions that would have been as familiar to Homer’s warriors as they would be to Chretien’s knights or Tasso’s Crusaders, Artegall makes a basic error in understanding the situation in which he is engaged: that code of conduct is no longer sustained in the world serving as this contest’s stage. After knocking Radegund down, Artegall is struck by the pathos of her seeming helplessness, transformed from warrior to Petrarchan lover at the sight of a beauty both ethereal and vulnerable. Likewise, his chivalric and heroic ethos compels him to stay his hand at the asymmetry of power dividing him from a disarmed and fallen opponent. Confronted with this vision, which challenges his virtue-​ centric vision of self and action from two fronts, Artegall disarms himself and, without quite understanding what is going on, is captured by the suddenly revived Radegund. Among the interpretive keys to this scene is recognizing what is not there: Talus, who has been set to the side so that Artegall might perform the fiction of single combat with an equal opponent according to the ritualized forms and mores of heroic poetry. In his exclusion of Talus according to the rituals of the tiltyard, Artegall fails to understand two key facts. On the one hand, he needs Talus and is only really effective with Talus at his side. On the other, whatever mode of agency Talus represents –​one held discretely separate from,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

20

Spenser’s ethics

yet necessarily close to, Artegll –​such a form of agency remains present with Radegund. Unlike Artegall, indeed, it is fully internalized to her being. In casting Talus aside, Artegall ignores the realities of the world in which this fight takes place, blithely disregarding the fact that this fight is strictly theater, along with its decorums and its supposed underlying values. Certainly, Radegund is fully aware of the fictional status of this event. Indeed, what is her collapse but a studied performance of a kind of vulnerability carefully framed to take advantage of Artegall’s particular susceptibilities? Artegall, in other words, walks himself into a trap, one laid partly by Radegund, but just as much set out by his own basic inability to understand that such tourneys are but fictional retreats from the world of Book V’s image of the Irish colonial project. Within the world of Book V, Artegall is an avowed anachronism. A living embodiment of the tensions between the myth of an ideal past and an irredeemably fallen present, he is awkwardly thrust into a world that rejects the basic premises of the ancient virtue ethics. Here, the virtues are no longer sufficient for their own ends, but instrumentalized towards the establishment and maintenance of power and profit, ‘for most meed outhyred’ (V.Pr.3, line 8). Artegall remains as Astrea’s sole representative in a world turned upside down, attempting to render fit forms of justice in a space where, within the ancient moral vision, those values and actions that were once called virtue and vice are now inverted. If, to recall the persistent cosmic language of the proem, language amplified by Astrea’s escape to the heavens, Artegall is presented as something of a lodestar leading us towards an ancient ideal, he is also an expression of an irrecoverably lost virtue, embodying a set of values and practices that are no longer really useful in any practical way. It is thus that Artegall needs the iron Talus to mediate his way through a ‘stony world’, to translate, as it were, the idealized forms of justice into a mode of practical action conditioned by, and answerable to, the material realities of this space. Kenneth Gross makes the suggestive point that ‘Spenser may choose to hold apart the image of effective violence against rebellion in the person of Talus from the idealistic justification of violence personified by Arthegall’.41 It is worth, perhaps, pushing on this idea a bit harder and suggesting that, in deploying Talus as the actual agent of justice, Spenser attempts to

12

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

21

have it both ways, at once preserving something of those ancient ideals as a normative touchstone in the figure of Artegall, while holding them in safety until we arrive at a utopian futurity made possible by Talus’s eradications (and, perhaps, the elimination of Talus himself from the scene). Yet another way to read this pair is offered by Tiffany Jo Werth, who reveals how Talus complicates, nuances, and ultimately enlarges our very sense of what it means to be human and, by extension, what it means to be virtuous: The poem’s justice relies on Talus, who joins metallic physical hardness with an emotional obdurateness that entangles seemingly nonhuman metal with human bone. The seemingly nonhuman, a ‘stonie’ age and an iron man, plays as active a role in constructing human ethics and morality as do the ‘wights’ of Gloriana’s kingdom, thus widening the categorical bounds of what constitutes humanness, and for us, humanism.42

As Talus upends Aristotelian virtue ethics’ foundational assumptions of a privileged humanity, the figure reveals a fundamentally new way of orienting virtue in this obdurate age. The golden-​age nostalgia shaping Artegall’s moral reasoning articulates a longed-​for or nostalgically regarded ideal. Read, however, in relation to Talus’s absence as a corrective figure, it also highlights the futility, even danger, of attempting to conform real experience to ideals whose rules and assumptions are, like Astrea herself, wholly foreign to this new space of social inhabitation. Working alongside, and as an extension of, Artegall, Talus reveals a basic conceptual shortcoming in virtue ethics. That constitutive error of judgment, what we might call the golden age fallacy, imagines the material conditions of the world as simply a neutral background that can be conformed to pre-​existent values. The reality is, in fact, the other way around. The ‘degendered’ and ‘stony’ space described in the proem to Book V –​ which figures not only Ireland, but through Ireland, the wider historical and political present of the order of mutability –​engenders and necessitates its own forms of response and social organization, its own particular modes of human being and of the conceptions of virtue that emerge from a reoriented notion of being. Andrew Hadfield suggests that what is so disturbing about the image of English policy in Ireland in Book V of The Faerie Queene

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

22

Spenser’s ethics

is less the violence in and of itself, and more the fact that the book never really allows us to make certain determinations of right or wrong; its violence appears variously arbitrary and overdetermined, excessive and unmoored from the dialectical processes of rational discrimination.43 Book V depicts a world with no effective system of checks and balances in place to define, enforce, and sustain a properly Aristotelian code of moral conduct. In this space, Hadfield argues, ‘there is no middle ground, and the reaction of most readers has been horror as the state totters from one extreme to the other one, never solving anything’.44 Ireland makes stark for Spenser a truth about the insufficiency of the classical virtues, and justice in particular, in the political practices of the early modern state. For Spenser, that is, Ireland vitiates the crucial middle ground that is the conceptual core of Aristotelian virtue ethics. The point that is implicit, and perhaps wholly intuitive, in Spenser’s account of the ways an Aristotelian ethic and colonial polity are both destroyed when shoehorned together, is a fundamental critique of the liabilities and limits of the mean-​oriented conception of virtue itself in the early modern imperial endeavor. The point of critique that Spenser seems to be raising through the narrative arc of Book V, defined as it is by the ways the political conditions of the present ‘stonie age’ have forced Astrea, the goddess of that ancient mode of justice, to flee the world, is that the pursuit of the mean, the normative basis for the classical virtues, is a false and pointless objective in the processes defining political life in this historical environment. There is only right or wrong, only the wholesale abstention from injustice or the complete and unqualified adherence to justice’s precepts and demands. Balance is not found in an ideal mean, but rather in eliminating forces contrary to some normative sense of the common good. What remains of the mean is, to recall the opening lines of A View of the Present State of Ireland, the activity of reducing antitheses to the central, orienting principle of the political good of the commonwealth: Eudoxus:  But if that countrey of Ireland, whence you lately came, be of so goodly and commodious a soyl, as you report, I wonder that no course is taken for the turning thereof to good uses, and reducing that nation to a better government and civility.

32

Introduction

23

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Irenius:  Marry so there hav bin divers good plottes devised, and wise councels cast already about reformation of that realme, but they say, it is the fatall destiny of that land, that no purposes whatsoever which are meant for her good, will prosper or take good effect.45 How, Eudoxus wonders, is it possible that a land with so much promise has yielded so much failure? Eudoxus replies to Irenius’s despairing fatalism that it is ‘but a vaine conceipt of simple men’ to ‘judge things by their effects and not their causes’, and the bulk of the text that follows examines the causes of those failures, what Irenius recounts as a wholesale breakdown ‘both in the life and conditions of private men, as also in the managing of publicke affaires and pollicy’.46 The despairing questions posed at this moment shadow the work in oblique ways until they re-​emerge at the book’s end in an imagined futurity where perfected, and perfecting, political institutions and social structures ‘purpose to draw the Irish, from desire of warre and tumults, to the love of peace and civility’.47 Spenser fantasizes about a verdant land where market towns and pastoral spaces sustain one another in a productive superabundance, and ‘cause civility’ by enrichment, ‘for to them will all the people drawe and bring the fruites of their trades, aswell to make money of them, as to supply their needful uses; and the countrymen will also be more industrious in tillage, and rearing of all husbandry commodities, knowing that they shall have ready sale for them at those townes’.48 The View’s narrative arc follows the verb at the heart of Eudoxus’s opening query, ‘reduce’. How, Eudoxus asks, might we reduce Ireland? As he poses that question, we may recall Guyon’s levelling of the Bower of Bliss. As I argue in Chapter 5, if that deed answers to an ethic, it is certainly not an Aristotelian one. As many of Spenser’s recent readers remind us, the word, especially in the way that Spenser positions it as a synonym for ‘reformation’, is a basic expression of colonialist ideology. For Julia Reinhard Lupton, this pairing imagines Ireland’s levelling into a passive wasteland ripe for easy conquest, reflecting a ‘colonizing desire for spatial ­mastery’.49 Sarah Hogan likewise argues that this reductive reformation reflects a vision of colonialist practice as one of utter erasure and rebuilding.50 While both of these ideas are at play here, both readings also flatten the complexity of what Spenser means by the linking of reduction

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

24

Spenser’s ethics

to reformation, for in early modern English, the word ‘reduce’ was semantically far richer than it is in its modern iteration. Among the pertinent meanings listed in the Oxford English Dictionary: leading to (or from) a particular state or condition (6a); restoring from error or to faith (6b); to redress or make up for a wrong (6c); bringing around, persuading, or inducing to particular political or legal positions (10a,b); acquiring legally, to gain an estate (15); to convert or transform a substance (17a,b); to bring under or organize into (18a); to subject to order, arrangement, or rule (18b); to convert or transform so as to have a certain form or character (19); to render land fit for cultivation (23); and to subject to legal or political restraint, constriction, or enforced submission (25). The word captures the ideology of English plantation in Ireland in its full conceptual, legal, and practical complexities. Ambiguously poised between violent erasure and generative recuperation, and with each of these imperatives animating and sustaining one another, Spenser’s reformative ‘reduce’ becomes a particularly stark instance of what the mean became in the context of Elizabethan Ireland. If there is still some sort of balance struck between these poles, it is a balance far more qualified and complicated than those we see described in the Nicomachean Ethics. Likewise, while Spenser does not wholly eliminate any place for character, or for the privileged understanding of a moral agent, in the normative mechanisms of moral reasoning, his Legend of Justice nevertheless presents a serious critique of the Aristotelian notion that the innate instinct to moderate virtue provides a universal set of principles that can be applied to the infinite variety of juridical decisions that may be encountered in civil and political life. Indeed, Spenser’s criticisms hinge on the fact that, when confronted with Book V’s true moral crises, this image of moral agency simply leaves Artegall floundering for answers. What Artegall needs to manifest is a new basis and aim for the practice of justice, a new vision of the mean that orients his actions. Near the close of Book V, having been freed from enslavement at the hands of the Amazon, Radegund, and having defeated the giant Grantorto and liberated ‘faire Irena’, Artegall sets out on brutal political purge: And to her Kingdom’s Seat restore again; And all such Persons as did late maintain That Tyrant’s part, with close or open Aid,

52

Introduction

25

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

He sorely punished with heavy Pain; That in short space, whiles there with her he staid, Not one was left, that durst her once have disobey’d. (V.xii.25, lines 5–​9)

After the reconquest of Irena’s kingdom, a time of torture and execution is accompanied by a parallel moral re-​education of Artegall through which his juridical practices align themselves more closely with Talus’s actions than they had earlier in the book. Prior to this, Artegall had maintained a certain studied, if ultimately artificial, distance from Talus, stepping off to the side while his ‘Yron page’ did the dirty work of enforcement. Now, however, the two seem to be working in more overt coordination, and if they work in different spaces, they are linked at the hip of the stanza’s central, fifth line: During which time that he did there remaine, His studie was true Iustice how to deale, And day and night employ’d his busie paine How to reforme that ragged common-weale: And that same yron man which could reueal All hidden crimes, through all that realme he sent, To search out those that vsd to rob and steal, Or did rebell ‘gainst lawful gouvernment; On whom he did inflict most grieuous punishment. (V.xii.26)

Here is no temperate mean, nor is there a moderating balance between contrary imperatives. ‘true Iustice’ is not the reason of the virtuous agent, the wise, Solomonic judge endowed with infallible capacities of discrimination, but the reason of the state, of ‘lawfull gouvernment’. Such a shift is figured in the very image of Artegall; once the chivalric knight wielding the sword of justice, he is now transformed into something like Spenser the chancery clerk, a bureaucratic functionary poring over books and charts late at night in his study in his quest to ‘reform that ragged common-weale’. In these lines, the question of justice turns away from virtue and concerns itself with rigidly following and enforcing the law. And when faced with complex opposition, the readiest answer is simply to pursue its elimination. I have a sense that this critique of the basic limits of a virtue-​bound sense of justice as an effective means of instituting social order underlies what had been, up to this point in the poem, a clear divide between Artegall and Talus.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

26

Spenser’s ethics

It may have been an artificial split, something akin to the roles a judge and executioner assigned to the Church and civil authorities in the Inquisition, but it was a split nevertheless. Indeed, much like the Inquisition, it was one designed imaginatively to insulate the idealized source of judgement from the practices of juridical violence. Now, however, Artegall sits at ease in his labors and stripped of chivalric pretense. Nothing tempers the kinds of radical violence we see in Artegall’s authoritarian reformation of Ireland. Being just has nothing to do with the expression or instantiation of forms of just character. Justice depends rather, and by hook or by crook, if necessary, on following the dictates of reason as it has been determined by Artegall’s authority. There is something especially potent in repudiation of an Aristotelian principle of justice in the fact that Artegall is not acting out of full and inherent knowledge; the application of ‘true justice’ is not predicated on the heightened wisdom of a wholly virtuous moral actor, but on the capacity to decide what is simply permissible under the law, and in this shift in thinking about the normative grounds of justice, Spenser registers a distinctly heterodox account of the virtuous mean as those permissible acts that are poised between the bounds of right and wrong. In these closing stanzas of Book V, Spenser describes the idea of the permissible as a conceptual framework for organizing juridical action. Having been ‘called away’ from Irena’s court by force of ‘Necessity’ and the command of his Faery Queen, and interrupting his newfound ‘course of Justice’, Artegall arrives on his native ‘strand’ only to be met by ‘two old ill-​favour’d Hags’, Envy and Detraction. The scene is a lightly allegorized account of Lord Grey’s own recall to England after a fraught and violent tenure as governor of Ireland. Grey, as Spenser recalls in his contemporaneous View, was accused by his detractors at court of a basic failure of both chivalric and human virtue. Such is the charge laid on Artegall by these two figures come to meet him on the shore: Then th’ other comming near, gan him reuile, And fouly rayle, with all she could inuent; Saying, that he had with vnmanly guile, And foul abusion both his honour blent, And that bright sword, the sword of Iustice lent,

72

Introduction

27

Had stayned with reprochfull crueltie, In guiltlesse blood of many an innocent: As for Grandtorto, him with treacherie And traynes hauing surpriz’d, he fouly did to die.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

(V.xii.40)

These excessively violent, immoderate actions, as Envy and Detraction rightly claim, constitute an affront to a virtue-​centered account of justice, repudiating basic mores and norms of chivalric practice. They are, however, for Artegall and Talus perfectly justified within the constraints of a new mean: that which is permissible within the constraints, and towards the preservation, of the commonwealth. It is thus surprising when Artegall seemingly returns to his old ways and stays Talus’s iron hand at this moment: But Talus, hearing her so lewdly raile, And speake so ill of him thee well deserued, Would her have chastiz’d with his yron flaile, If her Sir Arthegall had not preserved, And him forbidden, who his heast obserued. So much the more at him still did she scold, And stones did cast, yet he for nought would swerue From his right course, but still the way did hold To Faery Court, where what him fell shall else be told. (V.xii.43)

What is crucial here is the way the command to stay on ‘his right course’ and return to ‘Faery Court’ supersedes any imperative to quash these two figures. Artegall’s refusal to engage or otherwise to do violence to these figures is no function of chivalric mercy, be it heroic or virtuous, naïve or ill-​considered, nor is it the kind of temperate moderation underpinning an Aristotelian account of moral agency. Hard as it may be, Artegall is simply trying to ignore them. While these figures indeed exist, and are doubtless a true nuisance, Artegall is compelled to blinker himself to their presence because that presence is irrelevant to the course he has been tasked to follow, the ‘heast’ orienting all his actions. In literary-​mimetic terms, Artegall refuses the invitation to detour from his due course and into the errancies of chivalric romance –​the poetic and formal embodiment of that ancient regime of virtue. This is moderation reconfigured as the bridle. The autonomous agent of the chivalric

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

28

Spenser’s ethics

romance –​a figure whose movements, deeds, and decisions are answerable to, and instantiate, his own innate moral compass –​is no more. The scope of Artegall’s actions and choices are defined by the permissible under the auspices of state command, a manifestation not of Artegall’s excellence, but the authority of Gloriana’s command. Simply put, this offers another perspective on the nature of what is permissible in this brave new world. What is permissible is, on the one hand, what is necessary for the maintenance of the commonwealth, and on the other (though it is really the obverse of the same coin), what falls within the bounds of obligation and of the commands to which our actions are answerable. As an allegory of a new form of justice, Artegall embodies the nexus of these two notions of the permissible: on the one hand, otherwise indefensible actions made justifiable by the fact that they are done in support of the commonwealth, and on the other hand, radical restraint when tempted to stray from externally-​compelled obligations. This point of convergence levies two basic moral claims, one political and public, the other ethical and private, and which neatly track the two forms of the permissible we see exemplified in Artegall and Talus in these closing moments of Book V. In the first instance, the language of moderation becomes an ideological fiction, offering a convenient veneer of reasoned respectability by which to justify radical forms of violence by clouding them over with a gauzy veil of sobriety. Such, for instance, are the representational imperatives underlying the georgic and agrarian imagery surrounding Talus’s violence, a recollection (though, perhaps, not wholly without irony) of the innocence-​making image of the English colonist as a humble plowman tilling recalcitrant Irish soil, and likewise the violent rooting out and suppression of political enemies we see after the reconquest of Irena’s castle.51 In the second case, this reorientation repudiates the notion that conceptions of the mean in any practical way refer to the coordination of the self and its actions with some latent, normative criterion of individual reasonableness. Recalling the proem with which Spenser opens this book, what is at stake is an understanding of the very nature of virtue itself in this world. What Artegall, and the proem, reads as a basic failure of virtue and a triumph of vice is, in the unfolding narrative arc of this quest, better understood as a failure of perspective. Much of Artegall and Talus’s journey

92

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

29

through Book V is about struggling to reconcile the often-​contrary imperatives of a virtue-​centered account of juridical action and the practical realities of imposing political will on a resistant populace. What Artegall comes to learn in his arrival at a doctrine of the permissible as an orienting pole of moral action, is that what registers in the proem as the upended values of virtue and vice is an interpretive red herring, and that what ultimately matters for the sake of the practice of reformative justice is simply consistently effective forms of agency within an inherently and irredeemably corrupted and fallen world. The analyses in this book, their methods of reading, and their governing sense of the relationship between allegory and rhetoric, work under the long shadow of Harry Berger, Jr.’s account of Spenser’s poetic method. It may seem counterintuitive to make such a claim, for it has been Berger, perhaps more so than any other of Spenser’s modern readers, who has alerted us to the perils of a moral reading of this poet. For Berger, this is a poem whose moral meaning, as such, is found in its contingencies, in its will to fragmentation, and in its ironic postures towards its own moral imperatives, and Spenser’s allegory is defined by an essential resistance to its own procedures, and to the moral and political ideologies to which such interpretive procedures are answerable.52 Such a mode reading, of course, seems to warn us off from the very task of a book like this. Indeed, the pivotal lesson that Berger has taught generations of Spenserians is that Spenser’s poem is not about any moral perspective, per se, but rather about the frames of mind that generate and grasp on to those perspectives. Furthermore, Berger reveals how Spenser’s poetry is governed by a strong dose of irony that highlights the liabilities and limits of regarding the world and the moral problems with which it confronts us from the vantage of those perspectives. However, while they disallow the progressivist reduction of dissonance to a unitary scheme –​the animating fantasy of so much Renaissance allegorical and moral theory, really their point of formal convergence –​what such a reading of Spenser’s mimetic method affords is a way of conceiving of his moral project that is not oriented towards conceptual synthesis, but which can eclectically and provisionally apply fragments of received moral discourse to problems that refuse conformity to a priori precepts.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

30

Spenser’s ethics

The kind of reading that Berger sought to challenge, and one of the major through lines of reading Spenser as a moral thinker, are approaches that read him as a conventional adherent to the mimetic norms of medieval and Renaissance allegorical theory (in premodern literary practice, of course, such norms were more often honored in the breach than the observance), and which thereby posit a rationalizing imperative in his poetry. For instance, Sean Kane’s account of Spenser’s essentially Augustinian ethical commitments describes a poet seeking to mediate a struggle between a ‘myth of human power’ and a ‘myth of sacred order’ and is paradigmatic of this interpretive mode.53 However, the problem Kane runs into are the tensions between the aestheticized and transcendent ‘Christian Humanism’ he posits for Spenser, and the poetry’s avowed embeddedness in the dross of politics, even chastising Spenser for being ‘unwilling to keep the allegory of justice where it belongs in the level of prophecy’.54 While my analyses both center Spenser’s (often times abhorrent) political commitments, and draw deeply for their method on Berger, I nevertheless draw on Kane’s identification of the fact that Berger’s mode of analysis has perhaps steeped our sense of Spenser too deeply in what Paul Ricouer once dubbed a hermeneutics of suspicion. Even as it confronts us with the internal tensions native to any representational system, critique must have a positive goal. If the figural complications, the multiple perspectives, the resistance to scheme and closure defining Spenser’s poetics have become, in modern Spenser criticism, those aspects of The Faerie Queene that signal its greatest resistance to its stated moral objectives, this book argues that these complications and ambiguities, in fact, manifest Spenser’s strongest commitment to, and realization of, the notion that poetry can both imagine and establish forms of moral life. A key move in the direction my analysis takes is found in Paul Cefalu’s Moral Identity in Early Modern England.55 Cefalu reads Spenser in the context of a broader culture of literary critique which reveals the basic tensions between a reformed theology of salvation and the possibility of a practical ethics. The logical problem for Cefalu’s Spenser is mediating equal commitments to both goals, balancing the notions of virtue as imputing sanctification by grace or perfection through habituating works. Ultimately, however, this is a Spenser who on the one hand, finds his answers in totalizing

13

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

31

moral codes –​in this case, recourse to the third term of Mosaic law as a means of squaring a logical circle –​and on the other, is notably a-​political, especially notable for the fact that the test case here is Guyon in Book II, a narrative as complexly implicated in the political as any in The Faerie Queene. The distinction I draw might be defined in methodological or interpretive terms as rejecting a deductively impelled quest to project theory onto experience in favor of the inductive attempt to construe the modes of rationality native to those experiences. Whereas Cefalu, following in the interpretive footsteps of critics like Kane, seeks a rationalizing imperative in Guyon’s legend, this book argues that Spenser is bringing various strands of moral thought to bear in partial, provisional, contingent, and improvisatory ways on what ultimately resolves itself into a set of fundamentally political questions raised by the perils of experience: how to incorporate figures such as Mammon and Acrasia both materially and conceptually into a political reality? How best to render an effective form of political agency against the insolubilia of those figures’ presences? How best to authorize and sustain the ideals of that polity through these encounters? Such questions focus Spenser’s moral method, and their possible answers reveal the specific shifts in early modern moral theory that his writing both identifies and instrumentally engages. Defining the classical virtue ethics project as Spenser receives it are categorical distinctions between the various spheres in which moral agency transpires and defines its nature and objectives, between, as Spenser himself says in the ‘Letter of the Authours’, ‘that part which they in philosophy call Ethice, or vertues of a private man … the other named Politice’. Spenser’s account in these lines is ambiguously poised between what David Lines usefully maps out as the two main schools of thought established in medieval moral theory about the relation of ethics to politics.56 On the one hand is the progressivist narrative structure that Spenser imagines for his poem in the ‘Letter’ prospectively figured in the accumulative progress of six, or perhaps twelve, or even twenty-​four books, which suggests something of the Thomist understanding of ethics, oeconomics, and politics standing as concentric spheres, with ethics holding the center and politics on the outside, gaining both in magnitude and importance as individual actions impact on ever more people. On the other hand, the movement charted can also be read to echo Albertus Magnus’s and

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

32

Spenser’s ethics

John Buridan’s understanding –​one recalled, for instance in Giraldi Cinthio’s account of moral growth that Spenser certainly read with his friend Lodowick Bryskett in Ireland in the early 1580s –​that ethics lays the foundation for politics. It is, of course, not news to anyone that Spenser’s narratives persistently trouble the schematic and programmatic image of the poem laid out in this letter. Indeed, it is a basic assumption of modern Spenser criticism, and one that I follow in this book, that The Faerie Queene works time and again to break down these very distinctions. Certainly, Aristotle himself was aware (most especially in the case of justice) that the differentiation of private virtue and public life was arbitrary, perhaps even something of a hypothetical or a thought experiment. Nevertheless, the distinction is constitutive of moral thought well into the early modern period. Indeed, works central to the development of Spenser’s own moral theory, such as Cinthio’s Tre dialoghi della Vita Civile, not only make the distinction a basic textual organizing principle, but deploy it within their arguments to differentiate the proper uses of poetic and philosophical discourse in the trajectory of a moral education.57 In persistently flattening the distinctions between public and private virtues, and by coordinating discourses conventionally associated with individual excellence towards a resolutely social theory of agency, Spenser is not simply being sloppy in his handling of Aristotelian theory. Rather, he identifies the cultural and historical shifts in early modernity that will effectively upend the received project of moral philosophy as it had been understood since the classical era. Spenser, of course, is not alone among his contemporaries in tracking this change. As Lines argues, for instance, the Florentine humanist, Bernardo Segni, significantly influenced by Machiavelli, publishes a vernacular commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics that fundamentally reorients received notions of the relation of ethics to politics in contemporary versions of Aristotelian thought.58 Closer to home, as Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton argue, Spenser’s friend and mentor, Gabriel Harvey, was engaged in a wholesale reconfiguration of the studia humanitas in his role as an advisor to key figures in the Elizabethan colonial enterprise, one that made not only reading, but the very virtues, ends not in and of themselves, but instrumental means only valuable to the extent to which they

33

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

33

could be oriented towards political activity.59 Likewise, as I argue in Chapters 2 and 3, in the 1560s and 70s, Sir Thomas Smith was proposing accounts of the coordination of political subjectivity and moral agency in the contexts of both colonialism and the English polity that overturn basic assumptions of Aristotelian virtue ethics.60 Spenser’s moral allegory, that is, resides squarely in that complexly evolving instrumentalization of moral thought beginning with Machiavelli’s reframing of virtue as the capacity to create and sustain effective political agency, and concluding with the emergence of moral modalities such as deontology and utilitarianism a century and a half after Spenser’s death. The book opens with general analysis of Spenser’s basic ethical assumptions through a reading of what remains the most pointed and vigorous claim for Spenser’s status as an innovator in moral theory: John Milton’s account of Spenser’s ethical poetics in Areopagitica. The image of Spenserian virtue advanced by Milton renders a broad-​strokes outline both of Spenser’s moral thought and its particular divergences from key norms and assumptions of the classical and humanist virtue-​ethics traditions, depicting Spenser as, above all, a theorist of the problem of virtue in a metaphysically fallen world. We see here an ethics centered in an agent that is necessarily imperfectible, thereby complicating virtue ethics’ foundational centering figure of the perfectible human character and instead making political action and association the normative points of reference for moral agency, life, and being. By construing the human not as a normative center, but as itself an object of speculation, and making social interaction and obligation the normative frame of reference for ethical action, Milton reveals how Spenser offers both a key departure from ancient ethical frameworks and, in turn, a crucial anticipation of modern moral philosophy. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 turn to this complicated category of the imperfectible human navigating the mutable world as the pivotal object of speculation in Spenserian ethics, examining how Spenser sets out to discover the moral possibilities of his agents’ boundedness in temporality, worldly change, and transformation. Here we see accounts of the mutable body itself as site of procreant expansion, and thus as a microcosm and animating engine of empire building. Linking Spenser’s romance narrative structures

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

34

Spenser’s ethics

to the formal patterns of colonialist expansion mapped out in Sir Thomas Smith’s 1572 pamphlet written in promotion of the Ulster plantation, Chapter 2 argues that Spenser renders a wholesale reorientation of received Aristotelian ways of thinking about meaning-​making aims and of the orienting purpose of a human life away from self-​perfecting character-​making and towards the articulation of collective, and expansive, political agendas. It is a moral framework, as Chapter 3 argues, which centers the expansive and transformative project of empire building as the privileged form of moral agency in a mutable world, a project Spenser assigns to the virtue, ‘magnificence’. Chapter 3 first traces a brief history of the ways in which Elizabethan vernacular and popular moral discourses align magnificence with specifically secular and political imperatives, while privileging the temporal and mutable body as the origin and end of magnificent activity. Such a shift constitutes a basic rift with received Aristotelian accounts of human excellence’s self-​transcending orientation, a rift modeled in the narratives of Redcrosse and Arthur. Both of their quests are organized by a recognition that the ultimate scope and teleological orientation of virtue is fundamentally concerned with establishing a politically viable mode of embodied life in historical time, one whose ultimate goal and material instantiation is the imperial commonwealth. Chapter 4’s analysis pivots towards the metaphysical questions such an account of virtue entails. It argues that Spenser’s central image of worldly flourishing, the Gardens of Adonis, describes the metaphysical crux of moral life as Spenser understands it –​rendering the good within the material facts of time, death, and decay. The Garden’s iconic exemplar of virtue is Adonis, who represents the instrumentalization of the organic body’s substance by embodying death’s conversion into the infinite potentiality of a form-​making life. The image of Adonis in the Garden describes how deathly and temporal bodies become procreant, generative, and expansive forms of life. I argue that such a body stands as the ethical core of this poem and its account of human flourishing. To extend the image beyond the poetic bounds of the Gardens of Adonis and into the critical agendas of the poem writ large, the scene’s images of mortality offer a crucial metaphor for understanding the ways

53

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

35

we productively inhabit the mutable world by figuring the point where our poetic, moral, and political lives shape and sustain one another in the task of carving out niches of civilization against the incursions of time and loss. While Spenser is firmly rooted in the virtue ethics premise that the telos of moral life is action oriented towards the production of flourishing, Chapters 5 and 6 offer an account of the often radically un-​Aristotelian shape this vision of flourishing assumes in Spenser’s ethics. Chapter 5 considers the disciplinary agendas of Spenser’s ethical imagination as a projection of the Garden of Adonis’s metaphysical concerns into the realm of political agency. Through readings of Neostoic thought in the ‘Mutability Cantos’, of Guyon’s destruction of the Bower of Bliss, and of the image of the colonial market town near the close of Spenser’s prose dialogue, A View of the Present State of Ireland, it examines the relationship of civility, the central marker of Spenserian political virtue alongside broader questions of moral subjectivity, of virtuous action, and of the possibility of a flourishing life in the mutable world. Spenser’s program of ‘vertuous and gentle discipline’ describes how structures of normative behavior and personal comportment are ultimately concerned with marshalling the mutable body, its needs, and its desires towards generating a social order within a disordered, and potentially disordering, world. My closing chapter returns to the question of the political and metaphysical insufficiency of the ancient virtues to the task of establishing colonial rule in Ireland. Focusing on Spenser’s engagements with the Florentine political theorist Machiavelli, it claims that if Spenser’s Irish experience exposes the political limitations of an Aristotelian understanding of virtuous action, then the View’s Machiavelli-​inflected account of Arthur, Lord Grey as an icon of virtue notably clarifies the scope, aims, and ambitions of what we might describe as a specifically Spenserian account of virtue. Spenser’s account of Grey’s violent tenure in Ireland, in which he upholds the massacre of Spanish troops at Smerwick as an exemplary action, defines virtue not as fulfillment of normative principles of excellence, but as the ability to respond in politically efficacious ways to various bad choices compelled by fortune and necessity.

36

Spenser’s ethics

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes 1 Edmund Spenser, ‘A Letter of the Authours’, in Spenser: The Faerie Queene, 2nd ed., ed. A.C. Hamilton (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007), p. 715. All future citations to The Faerie Queene and its various paratexts will be to this edition, with line references given in parentheses in the text. 2 Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). Also see Jeff Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007) and Katherine Eggert, Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 3 Jane Grogan, Exemplary Spenser: Visual and Poetic Pedagogy in The Faerie Queene (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 4 Elizabeth Fowler, ‘The Failure of Moral Philosophy in the Work of Edmund Spenser’, Representations 51 (1995), 47–​76. 5 Catherine Nicholson, Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene: Spenser and the Making of Literary Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), pp. 26–​ 49, and Anupam Basu and Joe Loewenstein, ‘Spenser’s Spell: Archaism Historical Stylometrics’, Spenser Studies 33 (2019), 63–​102. 6 David Wootton, Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), p. 5. 7 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 183. 8 Emmanuel College Library, Cambridge, MS. I. 4. 36, 23. Quoted in William T. Costello, S.J., The Scholastic Curriculum at Early Seventeenth-​Century Cambridge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 66. 9 On the tensions and continuities between an Aristotelian and a Kantian position on this very point, see Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 91–​108. 10 J.B. Schneewind, ‘The Misfortunes of Virtue’, in Virtue Ethics, ed. Roger Crisp and Michael Slote (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 178–​200, quote, pp. 181–​82. 11 J.B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 12 On the continuing centrality of Aristotle to the early modern university curriculum, see, in addition to Costello, Charles B. Schmitt, The Aristotelian Tradition and Renaissance Universities (London: Variorum

73

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

37

Reprints, 1984) and John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England (Kingston, ON: McGill-​Queens University Press, 1983); and Mordechai Feingold, ‘The Humanities’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 4, Seventeenth-​Century Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 211–​358. 13 Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 23. 14 Brian Copenhaver and Charles Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); David Lines, ‘Ethics, Politics and History in Bernardo Segni (1504–​1558): Machiavellianism and Anti-​Medicean Sentiment’, in Ethik und Politik des Aristoteles in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Christoph Strosetzki, Walter Mesch, and Christian Pietsch (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2016), pp. 45–​ 68; and David A. Lines and Jill Kraye, ‘Sources: The Expanding Canon’, in Rethinking Virtue, Reforming Society: New Directions in Renaissance Ethics, c. 1350–​1650, ed. David A. Lines and Sabrina Ebbersmeyer (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2013), pp. 29–​56. 15 David Heffernan, Debating Tudor Policy in Sixteenth-Century Ireland: ‘Reform’ Treatises and Political Discourse (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). Also, David Heffernan, ed., ‘Reform’ Treatises on Tudor Ireland (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2016). 16 Ciaran Brady, The Chief Governors: The Rise and Fall of Reform Government in Tudor Ireland 1536–​ 1588 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 17 Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–​ 1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 73. 18 Sir Henry Sidney to Arthur, Lord Grey, 27 September, 1580 in Letters and Memorials of State, vol. 1, ed. Arthur Collins (London, 1746), p. 281. 19 Nicholas Canny, ‘Edmund Spenser and the Development of an Anglo-​Irish Identity’, Yearbook of English Studies 13 (1983), 1–​19. 20 Especially fruitful general discussions of this deployment of ­emergent humanist thinkers among the New English can be found in D. B. Quinn, ‘Renaissance Influences in English Colonization: The Prothero Lecture’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 26 (1976), 73–​ 93; Andrew Hadfield, ‘Spenser, Ireland, and Sixteenth-​ Century Political Theory’, Modern Language Review 89.1 (1994), 1–​18; Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘ “Studied for action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past and Present 129 (1990), 30–​78; and Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

38

Spenser’s ethics

1 Lodowick Bryskett, A Discourse of Civill Life (London, 1606), p. 25. 2 22 Bryskett has Spenser voice the lines granted the character of Torquato in Giraldi Cinthio’s original dialogue. Among other things, this character argues for the mortality of the soul (271–​ 72) and cites the wisdom of ‘the Brachmani men of so great fame … in India’ –​against Stoic and Aristotelian ideas –​on the place of self-​knowledge in moral reformation (163–​64). Pagination refers to Bryskett, 1606. 23 Richard Beacon, Solon his follie or a politique discourse, touching the reformation of common-​weales conquered, declined or corrupted (Oxford, 1594), p. 42. 24 On the intellectual frameworks of Beacon’s argument, see Sydney Anglo, ‘A Machiavellian Solution to the Irish Problem: Richard Beacon’s Solon his Follie (1594)’, in England and the Continental Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J.B. Trapp, ed. Edward Chaney and Peter Mack (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1990), pp. 153–​64 and Peltonen, Classical Humanism, pp. 74–​100. 25 I refer to the debate surrounding Ciaran Brady’s arguments in ‘Spenser’s Irish Crisis: Humanism and Experience in the 1590s’, Past and Present 111 (May 1986), 17–​49. 26 Nicholson, Reading and Not Reading, pp. 176–​215. 27 Gordon Teskey, Spenserian Moments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), p. 108. 28 Teskey, Spenserian Moments, p. 3. 29 Teskey, Spenserian Moments, pp. 340–​41. 30 J.B. Schneewind, ‘The Misfortunes of Virtue’, in Virtue Ethics, ed. Roger Crisp and Michael Slote (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 178–​200. The essay is a response to Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. 31 Bart van Es, Spenser’s Forms of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 151. 32 Quentin Skinner, ‘Moral Ambiguity and the Renaissance Art of Eloquence’, Essays in Criticism 44.4 (1994), 267–​91. 33 Harry Berger, Jr., ‘Narrative as Rhetoric in The Faerie Queene’, ELR 21.1 (1991), 3–​48. 34 Gabriel Harvey, in Letter Book of Gabriel Harvey, A.D. 1573–​1580, ed. Edward John Long Scott (Westminster: Camden Society, 1884), pp. 82–​83. 35 Harvey, Letter Book, p. 86. 36 Ibid. 37 Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds (New York, NY: Octagon Books, 1966), p. 303.

93

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

39

38 For a different account of Spenser’s use of Bodin, see Andrew Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 72 ff., which focuses on the poet’s adoption of Bodin’s authoritarian account of justice in the View. 39 Richard A. McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 257. 40 I give an extended discussion of this topic in Chapter 7. For a recent discussion of the Renaissance adoption of this topos, see Leah Whittington, Renaissance Suppliants: Poetry, Antiquity, Reconciliation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 41 Kenneth Gross, Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, Magic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 89. 42 Tiffany Jo Werth, ‘ “Degendered”: Spenser’s “yron man” in a “stonie” age’, Spenser Studies 30 (2015), 393–​413. 43 Andrew Hadfield, ‘The Death of the Knight with the Scales and the Question of Justice in The Faerie Queene’, Essays in Criticism 65.1 (2015), 12–​29. 44 Hadfield, ‘Knight With the Scales’, p. 29. 45 Spenser, A View, p. 11. 46 Spenser, A View, pp. 11–​12. 47 Spenser, A View, p. 150. 48 Spenser, A View, pp. 156–​57. 49 Julia Reinhard Lupton, ‘Mapping Mutability: Or, Spenser’s Irish plot’, in Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–​ 1660, ed. Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield, and Willy Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 101. 50 Sarah Hogan ‘Utopia, Ireland, and the Tudor Shock Doctrine: Spenser’s Vision of Capitalist Imperialism’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42.2 (2012), 461–​86. 51 For the convergence of colonialist ideology and agrarian imagery in Elizabethan Ireland, see Thomas Herron, Spenser’s Irish Work: Poetry, Plantation, and Colonial Reformation (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), and Andrew McCrea, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 52 The essays in which Berger lays out these arguments are collected in Resisting Allegory: Interpretive Delirium in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, ed. David Lee Miller (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2020). 53 Sean Kane, Spenser’s Moral Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), p. x. 54 Kane, Moral Allegory, pp. 168–​69.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

40

Spenser’s ethics

55 Paul Cefalu, Moral Identity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 56 David A. Lines, ‘Sources and Authorities for Moral Philosophy in the Italian Renaissance: Thomas Aquinas and Jean Buridan on Aristotle’s Ethics’, in Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity, ed. Jill Kraye and Risto Saarinen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), pp. 7–​29, and Lines, ‘Ethics, Politics and History’, pp. 46–​47. Also, Jill Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. C.B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, and E. Kessler, and Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 303–​86. 57 Giovanbattista Giraldi Cinthio, Dialoghi della Vita Civile (1566). 58 Lines, ‘Ethics, Politics and History’. 59 Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘ “Studied for action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past and Present 129 (1990), 30–​78. 60 The texts of Smith’s to which I refer are A letter sent by I.B. Gentleman (London, 1572) and De Republica Anglorum (London, 1583).

1

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Milton’s Spenser: An alternative virtue for a fallen world

Edmund Spenser believed that poetry was uniquely endowed with moral possibility, naturalizing readers to virtuous action through the pleasures and uncertainties posed by the trials of imagination and interpretation. As he argues in the ‘Letter of the Authours’, The Faerie Queene’s privileged capacities to ‘fashion’ its readers depend on its images’ dual roles as, on the one hand, obscure and ‘clowdily enwrapped … Allegorical devices’, and, on the other, as viscerally ‘delightfull and pleasing to commune sense’.1 At the convergence of this seemingly contradictory pair of mimetic imperatives, Spenser suggests, is the possibility of imagining our moral and political lives in the world as an unfolding process of reformation, one not beholden to the unattainable ideals of the philosopher’s ‘as it should be’, but, rather, as a mode of being and understanding contoured to the experiences, and necessary constraints, of material reality. What poetry renders, that is, is a form of moral life ‘such as it might best be’ within the material and metaphysical limitations of a fallen world.2 Perhaps no one was better able to assess Spenser’s success in his moral-​poetic project, or to account for the particular scope and ambition of Spenserian ethics, than his great successor in English Protestant epic, John Milton, the poet nearest him in method, intention, and culture, and who reportedly claimed Spenser his ‘­original’.3 When Milton invokes ‘our sage and serious Poet Spencer’ as the ideal teacher of virtue in Areopagitica (1644), he asks his readers to act like Spenser’s knights and to behave as ‘­wayfaring Christians’ able to ‘apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain’. He thus presents The Faerie Queene not simply as a source of moral instruction but as something whose figures and fictions embody the very shape

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

42

Spenser’s ethics

of a moral life and the modes of reasoning that sustain it. As he circles around the question of how and why a poem might be a privileged vehicle for moral instruction, he moves his account of an ideal virtue through a sequence of paradigmatically Spenserian questions. What shape, Milton asks, does virtue assume when its actions and understandings are determined by our fallen status, by ‘the knowledge of good and evil’ that emerged ‘from out the rinde of one apple tasted’? What, more fundamentally, does human flourishing, virtue’s eudaimonic ambition and defining index, actually look like in the postlapsarian world? And how, finally, might the answers to these questions be found in a particular vision of social and political life that is native to, and which instantiates and sustains a vision of human flourishing within, the fallen world? Some answers to these questions might be discerned in that passage from Areopagitica in which Milton describes the shape and objectives of a moral life as they might be imagined in, and inculcated by, Spenser’s poetry. Milton here reveals Spenser not only as a singular ethicist of the problem of postlapsarian virtue, but also as an ethical theorist whose dogged exploration of the critical problem of fallen ethics pushed his thinking far away, indeed, from the deep-​rooted assumptions of the ossified traditions inherited from ancient moral philosophies: I can not praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness; which was the reason why our sage and serious poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas, describing true temperance under the person of Guion, brings him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon, and the bower of earthly bliss that he might see and know, and yet abstain. Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tracts, and hearing all manner of reason?4

34

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Milton’s Spenser

43

As Milton himself acknowledges, this is a ‘daring’ move. How might Spenser, a poet whose reflexive embrace of the monarchy puts him at significant ideological odds with Milton, be upheld as the privileged moralist of Milton’s republican project and the structures of ­intellectual and political liberty which undergird it? Indeed, Spenser’s own image of Error’s book and ink filled vomit is, at least in part, an image of the uncontainable perils of unlicensed words, and thus emblematizes a potent counterargument to this very tract. Simply put, why does Milton, at the moment in his life and writing that he is most radically committed to the idea of the republic as an instantiation of God’s will on earth, turn not to an authority of Roman republicanism such as Livy, or to a voice of Protestant resistance theory, but to Spenser as his moral guide? And, most particularly, why privilege this book and this hero of The Faerie Queene, who –​along with Artegall in Book V (also the subject of Milton’s interest) –​is among the poem’s most intolerant and inflexible agents of an aggressive absolutism? To recall Milton’s own language from a scathing poetic critique of moral and political tyranny written roughly two years after Areopagitica, is not the intemperate razing of the Bower of Bliss by Guyon, the nominal hero of Temperance, a radical ‘forcing of conscience’ by a ‘new Presbyter metamorphosed by the exercise of power into an ‘old Priest’?5 Within the local context of Areopagitica’s arguments about the respect of individual reasons, Milton’s recollection of Guyon’s journey through the ‘bower earthly of bliss’ pits Spenser’s poetry against the virtue ethics tradition writ large, ‘daringly’ offering up Spenser as a ‘better teacher than’ those paradigms of medieval Aristotelian moral philosophy, ‘Scotus or Aquinas’. The tensions that Milton identifies between Spenser and the classical virtue ethics traditions are those same ones that J.B. Schneewind has described as hastening the political undoing of the virtues in the seventeenth century, an account of the ways ‘virtue’s own weakness … brought its misfortunes down upon its own head’.6 For, in the context of the ideals of a Miltonic republicanism, virtue ethics cannot brook at the same time both the contest of reasons and an egalitarian respect for the other. Virtue theory, as Schneewind suggests, is ultimately inimical to a liberal polity for it must treat disagreement with the virtuous agent as showing a flaw of character, it discourages parties to a moral dispute from according even prima facie respect to differing points of view. It encourages each, rather, to impugn the character of the other rather than listen to the other’s case.7

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

44

Spenser’s ethics

Milton, rigorously committed to a republican politics and whose moral thought is inflected by figures like Hugo Grotius, is largely concerned with asking the key question posed by Schneewind’s modern ethicist: ‘how we are to handle serious disagreements among equals’?8 Spenser, however, holds no such political commitments. How, then, might we make sense of Milton’s marshalling of his ­predecessor as this argument’s moral buttress? A key part of the answer to these questions lies in the pointed juxtaposition of two distinct forms of moral life –​Spenserian virtue and the cloistered and ‘fugitive’ virtues of the scholastic theologians, Scotus and Aquinas –​through which Milton frames his argument in this passage. Unfortunately, what reads as the commonplace nature of the claim obscures its true conceptual force. Here, Milton gestures towards the foundational humanist repudiation of scholasticism in favor of poetic eloquence as the grounds of self-​improvement. Scotus and Aquinas can be read as straw men: stand-​ins for the methods, languages, and ideologies of scholasticism writ large. John Duns Scotus’s ugly Latin and logical high-​wire acts made him easy pickings for humanist critics, while Aquinas was the most prominent of the schoolmen, and his mediations of Aristotelian thought remained central to the university curriculum in early modern England. He was, no doubt, one of the banes and principle causes of the young Milton’s unhappy days at Cambridge. More simply, and nearer to the rhetorical demands of this aggressively polemical document, Milton opposes a political and doctrinal champion of the Reformation against two crucial voices of Catholic orthodoxy, thereby levying as loaded a charge against his political opponents as one could in England in 1644. The passage’s critique, however, runs far deeper than this toppling of targets made easy by culture and ideology. Rather, its opposition of Spenser to the scholastics levels a charge of inadequacy at the very heart of the ancient virtue ethics tradition that had been the dominant organizational model of moral thought from ancient Greece up to Milton’s own day. In rejecting ‘cloistered’ virtue as ‘excremental’ –​an ephemeral surface expression –​in favor of the seemingly paradoxical purity of a virtue that dirties itself with the temptations of the world, Milton

54

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Milton’s Spenser

45

explicitly inverts a foundational premise of Aristotelian ethics.9 In the Nicomachean Ethics 1.8, Aristotle differentiates the fully virtuous –​those who manifest perfect virtue, and are thus constitutionally incapable of feeling, thinking, or acting in error –​ whom he terms arete, from the merely continent, whom he terms enkrateia. This second class of moral agents are those who experience, but are nevertheless able to restrain, their baser or errant impulses. And for Aristotle, in the hierarchy of moral life, there is no uncertainty about the fact that those agents who exist in perfect virtue are morally superior to those whose virtuous behavior is simply an expression of learned, often difficult continence. Rooted in a Socratic account of self-​mastery and construed as the foundation of a life of askesis, or self-​formation in the virtues, the Aristotelian form of self-​refinement termed enkrateia becomes a central tenet of the virtue ethics tradition.10 Crucially, one of that tradition’s key figures, Aquinas, argues that [i]‌n this way continence has something of the nature of a virtue, in so far, to wit, as the reason stands firm in opposition to the passions, lest it be led astray by them: yet it does not attain to the perfect nature of a moral virtue, by which even the sensitive appetite is subject to reason so that vehement passions contrary to reason do not arise in the sensitive appetite. Hence the Philosopher [Aristotle] says (Ethic. iv, 9) that ‘continence is not a virtue but a mixture’, inasmuch as it has something of virtue, and somewhat falls short of virtue. (ST IIa iiae q. 155 a.1 co.)

When Milton offers Spenser’s Faerie Queene as a paradigm of moral life and action, he reverses this valuation. Those self-​ idealizing conceptions of arete here termed ‘cloistered virtue’ are merely ‘excremental’ shadows and traces of the real space of moral life that is limned out in the threshold concept of enkrateia. Milton’s deployment of Spenser to upend this basic premise of Aristotelian virtue ethics is neither an accident nor an unintended consequence of rejecting the authority of two medieval, Catholic schoolmen. The passage in which Milton describes Spenser as a paragon of moral instruction opens with a direct allusion to a passage in St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians. Invoking Paul’s metaphor of the runner pursuing, in Milton’s words, an ‘immortal garland’, Milton frames his account of human virtue in the context

46

Spenser’s ethics

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

of a scriptural vision of moral agency that explicitly hinges on the concept of enkrateia: Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain. And every man that striveth for the mastery [enkrateuetai /​ γκρατεύεται] is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible. I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air: But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway. (1 Cor. 9 24–​27)

True virtue is not to be found in perfection, but in the ongoing performance of self-​mastery that is sustained over the course of a human life. For Milton, this form of continence and aggressive self-​resistance constitutes the highest form of moral being. And at the heart of this continence is not simply the ‘knowledge of good and evil’, but the continual awareness of our own implication in that knowledge, and of that knowledge’s implication in us as fallen beings. This implication shapes us at every level of our existence, from mere being to poetic expression to modes of political association and identification. Moral life and knowledge, that is, depends on avowedly inhabiting our status as fallen creatures whose existence in its totality can be understood as having ‘sprung from the rinde of one apple tasted’. Mark D. Jordan suggests that Aquinas understood the achievement of virtue as bringing to fruition a project of transcending that fallen status, in which the moral-​formative project of reading the Summa is an endeavor organized around a sacramental imperative of ‘ritual reenactments’ that make Christ incarnate in human action while projecting human life into an eschatological framework.11 The image of virtue-​as-​continence that Milton construes initially through the example of Paul’s long-​distance runner, and then through Spenser’s wandering knights, moves in the opposite direction. Winning a footrace is not about transcending or escaping pain, but about accommodating oneself to that pain, and through the accumulated rigors of long hours of physical and mental training, being able to experience and absorb more bodily suffering than your competitors without collapsing before the finish line. Such a metaphor ultimately argues that virtue, as the foundation of moral being, is not simply a

74

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Milton’s Spenser

47

reaction to, but is built out of, those very aspects of our humanity that divide us, at an ontological level, from that ‘incorruptible’ crown we seek. Our virtue is inextricable from our frailty, our mutability, and our capacity for suffering. Rooted in our proclivities for intemperance, our fascination with false, even deleterious forms of pleasure, and the allures of respite from that race (lest we forget that the privileged icon of moral hazard in Spenser is pursuing respite from worldly ‘travail’), this form of virtue is not realized in the final elimination of these things from our consciousness, but in the ongoing activity of negotiating and productively containing their inescapable and inevitable presence. How, then, might this containment and negotiation occur? What, in other words, defines the self-​ regulatory mechanism of human reason that allows us to ‘see and know, and yet abstain’, the mechanism that finds its privileged image in the formal progress of Spenserian romance narrative? Risto Saarinen demonstrates that earlier Reformation theorists of the will similarly argued that ‘a state of enkrateia’ was the best that humans could achieve, and that only with the grace of God. In their insistence on grace as an aspect of moral reformation, however, Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli are closer to Aquinas than they are to both Milton and Spenser.12 Indeed, Milton’s sense of the regulatory work of reason conveyed in his reading of Spenser is distinctly secular, material, and temporal; its understandings are not simply decoupled from the interventions of grace but rooted in the very forms of knowledge that took shape in the human mind at the moment of the Fall. Certainly, Aquinas’s and Milton’s (and, likewise, Spenser’s) ethics converge on the notion that virtue, in its most basic sense, is defined as living in accord with reason. Likewise, the moral psychologies on which their respective understandings of such things as virtue and reason depend find basic concordance in their mutual acceptance of a broadly Augustinian account of the divided will –​the fallen will that, on the one hand, has a rational awareness that it should pursue divinely sanctioned forms of the good and yet, on the other, has intense proclivities to pursue lesser forms of the good. However, they diverge sharply on two key, and inter-​related, issues: first, their respective accounts of the nature and intention of that reason; and second, on their understandings of how virtue, as a manifestation of reason, can both recognize the good and thereby regulate our acratic tendencies.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

48

Spenser’s ethics

In the broadest terms, Aquinas understands the regulatory force of reason as a transformative mechanism. It is a means of conversion whereby we learn, through habituation to virtuous thought and action, first to recognize what is truly good, and then, as we master and naturalize ourselves to virtue, to recognize that all goods exist on (and are thus teleologically positioned within) a hierarchical path that leads directly to God. Rationally, and thus virtuously, inhabiting the world means regarding its forms and processes in terms of an essentially allegorical framework in which experiences are seen as structured by, and reflective of, a divinely rational system, an awareness to which we (ideally) eventually become fully naturalized as we achieve the full virtue of arete. The various goods of the world exist as such because of their orientation towards a rationally –​that is, divinely –​ordained end, a definitive and determinant aspect infused into all things and that, by definition, must ‘preexist in reason’ (ST 2a 2ae q. 47 a. 6). Aquinas, as Thomas Williams notes, holds that ‘the end of the moral virtues is established by certain self-​evident, naturally known principles of practical reason … precepts of the natural law’ that are a function of their objects’ status as divinely created and sanctioned.13 And these precepts, in turn, are knowable through an aspect of moral reasoning variously called synderesis or iudicum synteresis. This is a mental faculty which structures conscience by rooting it in the knowledge of first principles, ‘by which criterion all human deeds are examined … so that rectitude in human actions may be possible’.14 Aquinas recalls a tradition going back at least to St. Jerome, and transmitted to the later middle ages largely through the Sententiae of Peter Lombard, that construes synderesis as that last remaining trace of divine understanding remaining in us as after the Fall, working as the arbiter of universal principles of right and wrong and thus standing in our consciousness as the orienting point of human moral reason. In his allegoresis of Ezekiel’s vision of the four living creatures as aspects of the soul, Jerome gives the first recorded definition of the term as it would be used throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern era: And they posit a fourth part [of the soul] which is above and beyond these three [the rational, emotional, and appetitive parts], and this

94

Milton’s Spenser

49

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the Greeks call synteresin, which spark of conscience was not even extinguished from the breast of Cain after he was turned out of Paradise, and by which we discern that we sin when we are overcome by pleasures or by frenzy, and meanwhile mislead by an imitation of reason.15

Understood as the foundation of reason, and as the means by which we have the capacity to differentiate good from bad in some general sense through normative propositions such as ‘good is to be pursued’ or ‘evil is to be avoided’, synderesis maintained a privileged, even commonplace, status as term of art among early modern English theologians, preachers, and moral philosophers. The term was regularly used in sermons, biblical commentaries, and theological polemics on both sides of the Reformation, as well as treatises of moral instruction throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As a useful mechanism for attaching particular acts or events to broad general principles, the concept, as Abraham Stoll notes, was embraced in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with particular vigor by ‘the Protestant casuists’ who ‘make one last, very serious, effort to attach synteresis to conscience’.16 While, as Pierre de la Primaudaye notes in The Seconde Parte of the French Academy, there was some debate whether to ‘distinguish between Synteresis and conscience’ or whether to ‘take them for one and the same thing’, a broad point of agreement was that this faculty was the basis of human excellence.17 It was the place within the human mind that made possible that moral perfection that Aristotle had termed arete.18 A basic definition of the term can be found in William Ames’s theological treatise on the conscience: This Synteresis is termed a naturall habit in respect of the light, whereby the understanding of man is fitted to giue assent unto Naturall principles; it is likewise called an acquired habit, in regard of the Species, or of the fuller understanding of that whereunto the understanding is naturally inabled, and can (as it were) understand presently. This Synteresis differs onely in respect or apprehension from the Law of Nature, or from that Law of God, which is naturally written in the hearts of al men; for the law is the obiect, and Synteresis is the obiect apprehended, or the apprehension of the obiect.19

Ames was a Protestant divine and, at the time this was written, a professor of theology at Freibourg University. Ames’ account is

50

Spenser’s ethics

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

echoed in far more evocative and rhetorically charged language from across the confessional divide by the English Jesuit, James Sharpe: Frō the Dictamen of reason, and light of nature, which pricked forward by the synderesis of a good conscience, doth as a Preacher continually exhort and moue to a prosecution of good, and an auersion from euill; and as a Maister doth still direct and instruct vs how to behaue our selues in our combat against the law of sinne, and the Angell of Sathan, which make continuall opposition against it; all which, as a vigilant watchman, doe still watch at the superiour part of the soule, to wit, the Memory, Will, and Vnderstanding, eyther by an infused light, or by species, formed and framed in the phantasie, and do inwardly knocke, awake, admonish and incite our soule, to the knowledge of truth, & the operation of God.20

A similar account of this faculty appears in the writings of the Protestant minister, Nicholas Byfield, pointing to both the widespread appeal of the term itself and general consensus on its place in moral reasoning: Conscience iudgeth of the actions of men, by vertue of certain principles (as I said before) which it findeth in the vnderstanding, gathered either from the Law of Nature, or from experience of God’s prouidence, or from the Scriptures. Now, the manner how it proceeds in iudgement, is, in form of reasoning, as I said before: for, in the minde the Conscience findes, as it were, a Book of Law written, which is in the keeping of the faculty; they call it in schools, Synteresis: from hence the Conscience takes the ground of reasoning.21

Bridging ideological and confessional differences, these accounts of synderesis converge on the notion that it is a normative function rooted deep in the human mind, and which weighs all action, thought, and desire against a template of divinely inspired, universal principles of reason and judgment. Broadly shaped by an ethical tradition that is as much Aristotelian as it is Christian, these accounts also each reflect a hierarchical distinction between mere good behavior and, to recall Ames, a complete and habitual concordance between the ‘Law of nature’ as inscribed in the ‘object apprehended’ and ‘the Law of God’ which ultimately underwrites and authorizes our interpretive ‘apprehension of the object’ as something either to be pursued or shunned. The true nature of Milton’s daring, and avowedly unconventional, upholding of Spenser over the schoolmen starts coming

15

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Milton’s Spenser

51

into focus on this point. For all its widespread currency in contemporary theological and moral writings, Milton seems conspicuously to avoid the word synderesis throughout his life. He was doubtless aware that the word itself was a patristic corruption of the Greek word for conscience itself, sinteisis; certainly, it would not be uncharacteristic for him to reject it out of hand on that basis alone. More directly, in these accounts of synderesis as the normative basis of moral reasoning, we could not be much further from Milton’s image of a Spenserian knight moving through the world, testing and making trial of the ‘all manner of reason’ with which it confronts us. Through that figure, Milton describes human moral understanding not as the recovery of a lurking godliness, but as inhabiting the ambivalent space defined and interpretively shaped by our ‘knowledge’, as fallen beings moving uncertainly among the perils of the postlapsarian world, ‘of good and evil’. When Milton does get into the weeds of the technical vocabulary of Greek moral philosophy to reflect on the nature and function of self-​ regulation in moral reasoning, he makes an unusual and pointed choice of terms. In Of Education, a brief treatise on pedagogical theory written contemporaneously with Areopagitica, Milton turns to the word proairesis which, as John Huntley notes, was a term whose usage was as rare in Milton’s day as synderesis’ was common.22 In fact, Milton’s 1644 treatise appears to be the only printed instance of the word in its variant English transliterations recorded between 1473 and 1700, the chronological span of the Short Title Catalogue.23 Deriving from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, prohairesis is concerned with making rationally informed judgments or choices. It literally means putting one thing before another. In Of Education, Milton relies on this basic sense, using the term to mark out a crucial pivot in a student’s education which occurs roughly four years into a nine-​year course of study: By this time, years and good general precepts will have furnisht them more distinctly with that act of reason which in Ethics is call’d Proairesis: that they may with some judgement contemplate upon moral good and evil. Then will be requir’d a special reinforcement of constant and sound endoctrinating to set them right and firm, instructing them more amply in the knowledge of Vertue and the hatred of Vice.24

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

52

Spenser’s ethics

This treatise is a fitting adjunct to the far more ambitious Areopagitica, for both texts are about the education of a virtuous citizenry, and the predication of a fully just state –​one that both sustains and is sustained by individual virtue –​on the practice of rational judgment. In it, Milton imagines a curriculum whereby young men would be instructed in a civic virtue whose cause and confirmation was the art of deliberative reason. Drawing on the latest advances in contemporary educational theory and practice, including the works of Comenius, the treatise was also, as Barbara Lewalski argues, a pointed reaction against the educational practices and objectives of scholastic Aristotelianism.25 At the moment that the word prohairesis is introduced, Milton’s imagined students have just completed a foundational curriculum structured around grammar, exemplary narratives, and natural philosophy, all directed towards ‘inciting and inabling them hereafter to improve the tillage of their Country’. They are now ready to turn to a course of study structured around the tripartite division of Renaissance moral philosophy –​ethics, economics, and politics –​as they learn to direct this foundation of knowledge towards its ultimate telos in the creation of their moral personae as ‘stedfast pillars of the State’. The noticeable invocation of prohairesis lends credence to the possibility that Milton rejects the concept of synteresis on both ideological and philological grounds (and for Milton, there is often little difference between these two things), for in Aristotle’s account of moral reasoning in the Nicomachean Ethics, prohairesis carries much of the conceptual burden that would later be assumed by that patristic and scholastic innovation. However, rather than being organized around the recognition of metaphysically determined first principles, as is the scholastic synteresis, prohairesis is concerned with the transformation of deliberative judgment into moral agency. Thus, if there is a conspicuous rejection of scholastic Aristotelian moral psychology here, there is just as forceful a return to Aristotle himself in Milton’s choice of vocabulary. Indeed, in a foundational analysis of the word and its varied senses, Charles Chamberlain notes that in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defines moral virtue in a basic and elemental sense ‘as a “hexis prohairetike”, that is, a state which is “prohairetic” ’ and, furthermore, that prohairesis is ‘characterized as being the “decisive factor in virtue and character (ethos)” ’, while the Rhetoric argues that ‘acting in accordance

35

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Milton’s Spenser

53

with prohairesis is the distinguishing mark of the morally virtuous man’.26 Certainly, in going back to the origins of things and cutting through accreted histories of misreadings and distortions (while at the same time decisively displaying his philological acumen and his fluency with primary sources and original languages) Milton is putting his own sense of intellectual ethos on display. This choice of language is thus, in part, an early manifestation of the critical imperatives that will compel him to place his epic in the Garden of Eden. However, Aristotle’s account of prohairesis in very specific ways buttresses the basic premises of both Of Education’s and Areopagitica’s curricular and civic visions: Since ethical virtue is a state involving prohairesis, and since prohairesis is desire involving deliberation, therefore it is necessary that the reasoning be true and the desire correct, if in fact the prohairesis is to be spoudaia [ethically exemplary; fully developed or mature goodness; performed in accordance with civic duty]; that is, the logos [reason, deliberation] affirms and desire pursues the same things.27

As imagined by Aristotle, prohaireris exists at the confluence of desire and reason. Typically translated with the word ‘choice’, the concept, as Chamberlain argues, is better rendered as ‘commitment’. Aristotle’s concept of prohairesis is thus closely linked to his sense of moral education as habituation –​we commit to perform actions that we know are good but which may run against the grain of our initial inclinations. We do so with a reasoned, deliberative, and freely chosen commitment until those activities become naturalized to our sense of self, to our pleasures, and to our desires. In this model of moral education, prohairesis is both the process by which we slowly transition from a life of enkrateia to one of arete, and the fully ‘mature’ realization of that process. It is sustained by continual reward and reinforcement, as well as exposure to exemplary instances of true virtue, and is confirmed at the moment the agent becomes an exemplar of true virtue themselves. If much of this sounds like a paraphrase of Milton’s pedagogical vision, there are nevertheless key differences between the ways Milton and Aristotle define these basic terms, their scope of action, and their objectives. Milton’s image of Spenser’s knight presents a figure who is clearly an icon of the moral life understood as hexis prohairetike. As figured in this image, the basis of a virtuous

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

54

Spenser’s ethics

existence in Areopagitica is the capacity to ‘see and know, and yet abstain’. Aristotelian prohairesis both pursues, and is defined by, the convergence of reason and desire, and it is easy to see, at this point, how scholastic thought was so readily able to elide this word behind, and fold its intentions into, synteresis. Milton’s Spenserian virtue, in contrast, depends on maintaining a continued tension between these two things. The nature of this distinction, and its consequences for a broader theory of virtue, volition, and moral reasoning, becomes clearer if we recognize two further distinctions between their respective systems of thought. First, whereas for Aristotle, reason is unitary and (much like Aquinas’s later arguments about natural law and the perception of first principles) is something that emerges at the mind’s convergence with the reasons inherent in worldly life, Milton understands fallen, human reason as multiple, diffuse, endlessly transformative, and evanescent. He enjoins us to ‘read all manner of reason’ and to ‘make trial’ of it, asking us not to pursue a certain and fixed point of understanding but to continually weigh our options, to reconfigure and reorient our knowledge and judgments in light of new information and new ideas. Milton’s understanding of reason as partial, fragmentary, and provisional leads him to the second, and larger point at which epistemology bleeds more explicitly into metaphysics. What is posed here is the very question of our potential to engage with truth itself, and a basic challenge to the Aristotelian premise that forms of truth are accessible and thus knowable to human reason. In Areopagitica’s most extravagant metaphor –​nearly Spenserian in its mingling of allegory, etiology, esoteric learning, social satire, apocalypticism, and eschatology –​Milton offers an image of the fate of truth in the historical and political present that is, more largely, a synecdoche for the postlapsarian world as a whole: Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he ascended, and his Apostles after Him were laid asleep, then strait arose a wicked race of deceivers, who as that story goes of the Aegyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewd her lovely form into a thousand peeces, and scatter’d them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the carefull search that Isis made for the mangl’d body of Osiris, went up and down

55

Milton’s Spenser

55

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

gathering up limb by limb still as they could find them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and Commons, nor ever shall doe, till her Masters second comming; he shall bring together every joynt and member, and shall mould them into an immortall feature of lovelines and perfection.28

The image reflects a foundational commitment to an essentially Augustinian and Calvinist understanding of the fallen mind’s irrecoverable break from the deeper structures of truth in any absolute or universal sense. It is only through the interventions of grace, which will only occur at the end of human time, that we will be able to grasp this kind of understanding. Milton’s basic point is that no individual human, nor the collective wisdom of any human institution, has either privileged access to, or knowledge of, the truth in any absolute, final, or determinant sense, and thus cannot lay a valid claim to the licensing and regulation of books. Our truth, such as it is, is the basic recognition that we are fallen, mutable beings moving haphazardly through a fallen, mutable world, and seeking some form of accommodation, of eudaimonic flourishing within those inescapable ontological limitations. Ultimately, what is at stake in this image is a significant question about the critical and epistemological foundation on which virtuous citizenship is built. What, Milton invites us to ask, is the normative basis for ethical judgment in general, for the self-​regulatory deliberations of prohairesis? His answer is found in the particular legend singled out as paradigmatic of the process of moral reasoning, and of moral reasoning’s extension into a broader program of civic life: Guyon and the Palmer’s journeys through Book II of The Faerie Queene’s Legend of Temperance. Milton’s retelling of this story has long been something of a critical crux for his readers, for the poet simply gets a fundamental detail of Spenser’s narrative wrong. Spenser, of course, does not bring Guyon ‘in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon’. Rather, the Palmer is briefly waylaid by Phaedria –​a ‘wanton mayd’ who seduces men with song, liquor, and ‘merry tales’. The Palmer, ‘whom whyleare /​The wanton maide of passage had denied’, then spends the remainder of the time that Guyon is touring Mammon’s cave looking for the grotto’s back entrance (II.vii.3, 2–​3). They only reconnect after Guyon reemerges into the outside world and faints, the Palmer having been summoned by an angel and finding him ‘layd in swowne’ on the ground just

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

56

Spenser’s ethics

beyond the edge of Mammon’s cave (II.viii.3; II.arg.1). The Palmer is dour, implacable, and clad in black; perhaps, to recall Harold Bloom’s examination of this passage’s misreading of Spenser, he is a version of Spenser himself, the ‘sage and serious’ precursor poet guiding Milton’s youthful Guyon.29 The brevity of Milton’s presentation of this legend argues that he is more interested here in a broad strokes (perhaps overly impressionistic) account of what is, notably, the only one of Spenser’s legends in which the central hero is accompanied through the opening cantos by a teacher-​figure. In the context of this passage as a whole, it seems likely that Milton is reading the passage in two ways. It is offered up as both an image of moral life-​in-​action, as an exemplary instance of the form of the virtuous vita activa of which heroic poetry is a privileged expression; equally, and at the same time, it is presented allegorically as a kind of psychomachia, a schematic portrait of the individual moral consciousness and its internalized disciplinary checks shaping those actions as it grapples with the competing allures of virtue and vice. By exploring the connections and distinctions between reading this figure as an exemplary narrative or as an allegorical psychomachia, Milton represents the Palmer as a check on a potentially errant or wavering judgment, and thus the mechanism by which discernment finds its normative basis and by which it is translated into moral action. To recall Of Education’s account of the formation of moral subjects into a hexis prohairetike, this version of the Palmer embodies what Milton describes as ‘a special reinforcement of constant and sound endoctrinating to set them [moral novices] right and firm, instructing them more amply in the knowledge of Vertue and the hatred of Vice’. In each case, what is crucial for Milton is that the regulatory imperatives represented by the Palmer remain distinct from the forms of both agency and reasoning represented by Guyon as an icon of ‘true temperance’. In the first case, the Palmer perhaps anticipates the hierarchically positioned (and affirming) arbiter of communal reason that would become increasingly central to Milton’s thinking in the years following the release of Areopagitica, and which would find its fullest expression in the relationship of Adam to Eve in Paradise Lost; he is one of those well-​reasoning elect whose learning and piety allow them to serve as guides and correctives to their necessarily subordinate fellow citizens. In the immediate context of this work in 1644/​5, when Milton

75

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Milton’s Spenser

57

was still committed to a more fully egalitarian social vision, the regulatory and normative processes figured in the Palmer can also be read as a figure of something like the shape of civil debate itself. The Palmer brings Guyon into a space where he might ‘see and know, and yet abstain’ while encountering ‘all manner of reason’. In such a space, the strongest reason wins on its logical and rhetorical merits, and without prejudgment, becoming a new provisional guide as we work our way towards our next encounter with new and emergent forms of reason. Read, on the other hand, as an allegory of the moral consciousness, the Palmer’s corrective agency takes up the basic conceptions of moral anthropology that Reformation ethicists like Calvin and Zwingli developed from Paul and Augustine, a line of thought which understood the human will as essentially divided against itself and its better judgments. Recall Paul’s foundational account: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I. If then I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law that it is good. Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. (Romans 7: 15–​23)

Such a conceit would become central to the English devotional poets of the seventeenth century, shaping works like John Donne’s Holy Sonnets and much of George Herbert’s poetic oeuvre. Listen, for instance, to Donne’s account of the divided will: Oh, to vex me, contraryes meet in one: Inconstancy unnaturally hath begott A constant habit; that when I would not I change in vowes, and in devotione. As humorous is my contritione As my prophane Love, and as soon forgott:

58

Spenser’s ethics

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

As ridlingly distemper’d, cold and hott, As praying, as mute; as infinite, as none. I durst not view heaven yesterday; and to day In prayers and flattering speaches I court God: To morrow I quake with true feare of his rod. So my devout fitts come and go away Like a fantastique Ague; save that here Those are my best dayes, when I shake with feare.30

If we accept that Areopagitica’s image of Guyon and the Palmer assimilating and testing moral knowledge while moving through the world allegorizes the individual moral consciousness, we must acknowledge a crucial difference between these conventionally orthodox images of the divided will and Milton’s. Paul and Donne, and the lengthy tradition of speculation on volition and continence connecting them, depict human subjects as helplessly at war with themselves, fundamentally incapable of self-​regulation, and in need of divine intervention to pursue the path that they know in their heart-​of-​hearts is right. The irascible, acratic aspect of the will is simply too potent to be overcome by whatever combination of synteresis and learned biblical or ethical knowledge might reside in these incontinent souls’ rational faculties, leading to a state of ­perpetually conflicted self-​torment. No such angst exists in Milton’s Spenserian moral subject. While this knightly figure is not –​and never will be –​perfect in arete, he is nevertheless not overcome by the sense of moral helplessness and despair that we see in both Paul and Donne. What, then, does it mean ‘to see and know, and yet abstain’, and on what grounds do the judgments determining this abstention rest? A crucial clue is found in the fact that, unlike Guyon and his Palmer, the morally anxious subjects described by Paul and Donne stand in profound states of isolation. Harry Frankfurt’s account of the structures of volition and moral thought in his influential 1971 article, ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’, gives a possible name to the kind of moral anthropology Milton theorizes in the image of Guyon and the Palmer. Frankfurt argues that human consciousness is organized around a hierarchically arrayed division of the will into first and second order desires. First order desires are those impulses that we share with all creatures capable of choice. These basic forms of desire direct us to do, or to avoid doing, a particular thing (for

95

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Milton’s Spenser

59

instance, eating, sleeping, or performing some pleasurable activity, or, on the other hand, not doing some potentially dangerous or unpleasant activity). Second order desires, which Frankfurt argues are the human will’s definitive feature, are rooted in ‘the capacity for reflective self-​evaluation’; they are about people wanting to have a particular desire and, ultimately ‘wanting to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are’.31 In Frankfurt’s primary example, it is the drug addict’s desire to no longer be under the thrall of their addiction that leads them to pursue treatment. While an addict will, at the level of their individual psychological make-​up and its attendant impulses and attractions, always be an addict, a conspicuous and conscientious daily refusal of that attraction –​ seeing and knowing, and yet abstaining –​is maintained by a continual recourse to the second order desire to be different from the way they are, and thus guided to make better, more rational choices. Guyon’s interaction with the Palmer, in this model, is something like the relationship between first and second order desire. He is attracted to the imperiling and the irrational, yet able to abstain because of a self-​aware desire to not be attracted to those things. As with the Palmer to Guyon, there is something distinctly teacherly in this model of moral reasoning that asks us simultaneously to teach ourselves and to extend the courtesy of instruction to others –​a process, that, in turn affirms and reinforces in us the very shape and reality of that lesson. Likewise, his very virtue, or what Frankfurt would term his personhood, is predicated not on the elimination of a false desire, but on the fact of that resistance to an ongoing aspect of the self, and thus on a self-​aware choice to desire otherwise. Here, the Pauline and Augustinian divided will is transformed into a layered will, one which nevertheless both respects and maintains an awareness of fallen human nature’s essential imperfectability –​ an enkratic state of virtue is, by definition, the best it can achieve. Yet in so doing, it opens vistas of action and self-​transformation definitively foreclosed by the more orthodox account of the divided will we see in Milton’s antecedents. While Frankfurt’s overarching account of the self is far removed from those shaping the virtue ethics traditions to which Milton responds (and within which his own moral thinking remains firmly situated), both Shadi Bartsch and Christopher Gill have found Frankfurt’s model of the layered will that is ‘reflexively capable

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

60

Spenser’s ethics

of having desires about [its] own desires’ useful in illuminating aspects of ancient, virtue-​centered models of moral thought.32 In particular, they have adduced key parallels to Stoic models of personhood which make a distinctly self-​reflexive approach to choice, to prohairesis, the basis of moral reasoning and of the formation of a moral self.33 In Book 7 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle describes the relationship of prohairetic choice to continence as rooted in syllogistic reasoning. In Aristotle’s account, the morally wrong choices leading to incontinent behavior are largely the function of misguided understandings or a general lack of knowledge of one of the terms of the syllogisms shaping the activity of moral choice. However, in the Stoic enrichment and expansion of the term, which was largely undertaken by Epictetus, and on which Milton is certainly drawing, prohairesis is not concerned ‘with reason as such but with the practical application of reason in selecting … commitments’.34 The Stoics regard this process as the normative basis for moral judgment, understanding it as selecting commitments that are wholly within one’s control while avoiding those that are not, while making coherent and rational discriminations among the choices with which the world confronts us. For Milton, that commitment is to interpersonal imperatives of social life whose fullest manifestation is vigorous public debate. It is, likewise, a commitment that finds its normative bases not in individual excellence or the promise of individual perfectibility, but in the very rejection of those things by the subjection of one’s own reasons and desires to the scrutiny, correction, and modification of public debate. Virtue takes shape in the dialectical processes of a fully public life, its telos and point of eudaimonic flourishing found not in the perfected self but in extending the self out into the public structure of the commonwealth itself, a space where we discipline ourselves under the gaze of, and in relation to, others. Spenser, as I argue in Chapter 5, articulates these processes under the term ‘civility’, a term echoed in Milton’s expression of ‘those unwritt’n, or at least unconstraining laws of vertuous education, religious and civill nurture’, the internalized norming mechanisms which become ‘the bonds and ligaments of the Commonwealth, the pillars and the sustainers of every writt’n Statute’.35 Milton’s twin presentations of Spenser’s Legend of Temperance as both the narrative image of a moral life and an allegory of moral reasoning

16

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Milton’s Spenser

61

converge on this point. The struggles of reason and passion defining so much of Renaissance ethics are built on the foundations of contrasting doctrines of classical and humanist notions of human excellence and a Christian theology of the Fall which emphasizes that excellence’s very impossibility. Here, this contrast is transformed into a very different kind of struggle, one whose focal point and normative basis is less internal than it is external. By internalizing others’ regard for us as a normative point of behavioral regulation, moral selfhood and agency are no longer pinned on the irrational vagaries of our individual passions –​passions which have an uncomfortable tendency to bleed into and become undistinguishable from our reasons –​but on demonstrable and verifiable communal obligations concerning those things we ought to be doing. The internal struggle is not about deploying a rational sense of self-​ perfectibility to master and contain errant passions, but rather concerns the dialectical engagement of competing reasons organized around an understanding that the best rational choice is that which best sustains the collective imperatives of the public sphere. Likewise, the externally focused struggle makes the public sphere itself the locus of self-​control. Consider the Palmer’s injunction ‘to see and know, and yet abstain’ in relation to another of this oration’s pivotal arguments, the personifying account of books as living embodiments and extensions of individual human reasons: For Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet on the other hand, unlesse warinesse be us’d, as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, Gods Image; but hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason it selfe, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye.36

Milton’s account of abstinence, whether it is the refusal of dangerous attractions or the impulse to destroy ideas that challenge our own, reorients the very idea of human virtue, and of the temperate mean by which that virtue is both caused and confirmed. It is not primarily concerned with the regulation of passions per se, but with the modulation of passions amidst the dialogic navigation

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

62

Spenser’s ethics

of competing modes of reason –​reasons that are partial, imperfect, and, as aspects of fallen consciousnesses, inherently and inextricably entwined with the passions. At stake in this shift is a broader reorientation of the very object of moral philosophy. No longer is virtue primarily about the expression and confirmation of individual excellence, nor is it concerned with the movement towards individual self-​perfection. Rather, virtue is oriented around the project of collaborative self-​extension into a kind of collective reason that can overcome, at least partially and provisionally, the inherent limitations of any one individual’s reason. Along these lines, we can understand Milton’s seemingly paradoxical construal of Spenser’s romance narratives –​and particularly the tale of Guyon, a knight radically committed to the authoritarian extension of his own will in the destruction of contrary reasons –​as iconic of a resolutely republican subjectivity. Certainly, there is much in Spenser’s writing that yields itself up to republican thought. Indeed, the account of moral agency advocated for throughout A View of the Present State of Ireland is one in which autonomous agents move about a world of constant peril necessarily decoupled from centralized authority, working their self-​interest in ways that ultimately instantiate a greater corporate good; such a good, in turn, depends on the preservation of those autonomous agents’ capacities to move freely through that world and make independent rational choices. For Spenser, however, this is not at all republican in any way that Milton would understand it, but imperial, a mode of agency necessitated by the realities of life beyond the stable center of empire and on its emergent and transforming margins. However, there are crucial structural affinities between these imperial agents and Milton’s intellectual libertarian ones. As Milton would later argue in The Readie and Easie Way (1660), the deliberative space of collaborative moral reasoning that is the republican commonwealth is the privileged mode of political organization within the constraints of life in the fallen world, fashioned ‘with as much assurance as can be of human things, that they shall so continue’ to Christ’s return to earth.37 If the specifics of Milton’s politics do not align with Spenser’s, their divergent political visions share a common ethical premise –​virtuous action and its ends in human flourishing stand in a wholly and necessarily secular, temporal, and historical space: the mutable ontology of the

36

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Milton’s Spenser

63

postlapsarian present, the ‘earthly bower of bliss’ with its plurality of ‘all manner of reasons’. Recalling A.S.P. Woodhouse’s foundational essay on Books I and II of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, if it is the order of grace within which life is comprehensible in its metaphysical totality, it is, nevertheless, only within the order of nature within which human life happens and within which the societies and social forms created by humans take shape.38 These pointed transformations of the virtue ethics tradition that Milton identifies and unfolds in Spenser’s romance narratives coalesce around what the remainder of this book examines as the orienting conceptual problems of Spenser’s ethics: the ways we struggle to establish spaces of human flourishing in the mutable world, the ways humankind’s own mutability occludes the self-​knowledge necessary to constituting virtue, and the ways these abstract moral problems intersect with, and find their answers in, the activities of building an ideal society fit for, and conditioned by, the material realities of mutability. If Milton’s reading is hazy on the details, his broad-​ strokes vision of The Faerie Queene, I think, gets to the theoretical heart of Spenser’s poem. Milton’s Guyon illuminates the contours of that most basic concern of Spenser’s ethical imagination: the problem of moral agency in the fallen world that is, nevertheless, the order of being within which moral action is comprehensible and from which that action derives its governing rules and structures. Within the ontological and epistemological constraints of this space, classical ethics’ imperative to self-​knowledge is reoriented towards the social-​ constructive project of collaborative self-​ extension within that mutable world. And the proper response to this condition, the defining excellence of the human soul, the focal point around which the activities of a virtuous life both emerge from and accord themselves to, and the teleological orientation of a virtuous life, is found its capacity for ever heightened and expansive forms of constructive activity, be it poesis as such, moral self-​transformation, or the political activities of building commonwealths and empires. Milton’s reading of Spenser reveals that such an ethics manifests itself in the notion of virtue as practice rather than perfection; and in understanding continence not as the function of an inherent and self-​sufficient excellence, but as a wholly social process, a key anticipation of the undoing of the virtue ethics in early modernity.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

64

Spenser’s ethics

Our eudiamonia, the wholeness and summum bonum of moral life in this world, and inscribed within the constraints of our fallen modes of reasoning, is essentially proairetic and enkratic, its moral integrity dependent on social interaction rather than innate excellence, and its modes of reasoning and self-​reformation embodied in forms of action whose organizing ends are the forward-​moving generation and sustenance of the collective and social life of the commonwealth.

Notes 1 Spenser, ‘A Letter’, p. 716. 2 Ibid. 3 John Dryden, in Essays, 2 vols., ed. W.P. Ker (New York: Russell and Russell, 1961), vol. 2, p. 247. 4 John Milton, Areopagitica, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., ed. Douglas Bush, John S. Diekhoff, J. Milton French, et. al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953), vol. 2, pp. 480–​570, quote, p. 514. Hereafter CPW. 5 ‘On the Forcers of Conscience’, in The Complete Poetry of John Milton, ed. John T. Shawcross (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1971), pp. 211–​12. 6 J. B. Schneewind, ‘The Misfortunes of Virtue’, Ethics 101.1 (1990), 42–​63. 7 Schneewind, ‘Misfortunes’, 62. 8 Ibid. 9 The OED cites this passage as offering an instance of this second, obscure definition of excremental as an adjective describing the nature ‘of an outgrowth or excressence’. 10 For the classic study of the term’s transformation from something describing the control or mastery of external things to one describing internal self-​regulation and its emergence as a focal point of moral discourse in the school of Socrates, see Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Volume 2: In Search of the Divine Centre. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943), pp. 52–​57. Underlying my account of this topic is Pierre Hadot’s discussion of ancient philosophy as a form of life in Exercices Spirituels et Philosophie Antique, 2nd ed. (Revue Augustiniennes: Paris, 1987). 11 Mark D. Jordan, Teaching Bodies: Moral Formation in the Summa of Thomas Aquinas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), p. 48.

56

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Milton’s Spenser

65

12 Risto Saarinen, Weakness of Will in Renaissance and Reformation Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 200. 13 ‘Introduction’, in Thomas Aquinas, Disputed Questions on the Virtues, ed. and trans. E. M. Atkins, and ed. Thomas Williams (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. xix. 14 QDV q. 16 a.2, as quoted in Tobias Hoffman, ‘Conscience and Synderesis’, in Oxford Handbook of Aquinas, ed. Brian Davies and Eleonore Stump (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 256. 15 St. Jerome, ‘Commentary on Ezekiel 1.7’, in Conscience in Medieval Philosophy, ed. Timothy C. Potts (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 79. 16 Abraham Stoll, Conscience in Early Modern English Literature, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 115. 17 Pierre de La Primaudaye, The Seconde Parte of the French Academy (London, 1594), p. 576. 18 Aquinas, it should be noted, clearly distinguishes conscience from synteresis. 19 William Ames, Conscience with the Power and Cases thereof (London and Leiden, 1639), p. 6. 20 James Sharpe, S.J., The Triall of the Protestant Private Spirit. Wherein Their Doctrine, making the sayd Spirit the sole ground & meanes of their Beliefe, is confuted (St. Omer, 1630), pp. 72–​73. 21 Nicholas Byfield, A Commentary: or, Sermons Upon the Second Chapter of the First Epistle of Saint Peter (London, 1623), pp. 757–​58. 22 John F. Huntley, ‘Proairesis, Synteresis, and the Ethical Orientation of Milton’s Of Education’, Philological Quarterly 42.1 (1964), 40–​46. 23 https:// earlyprint.wustl.edu/ ​ t oolwebgrok.html?corpus=​ p laintext_​ reg&searchPattern= ​ p roairesis&startYear=​ 1 473&endYear=​ 1700&authors=​&titles=​&page=​1 24 ‘Of Education’, in CPW, vol. 2, p. 396. 25 Barbara K. Lewalski, ‘Milton and the Hartlib Circle: Educational Projects and Epic Paideia’, in Literary Milton: Text, Pretext, Context, ed. Diana Benet and Michael Lieb (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1994), pp. 202–​19. 26 Charles Chamberlain, ‘The Meaning of Prohairesis in Aristotle’s Ethics’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 114 (1984), 147–​157. 27 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. and ed. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1999), p. 87. All future citations will be to this translation unless otherwise noted. 28 Milton, Areopagitica, CPW, vol. 2, p. 549.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

66

Spenser’s ethics

29 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 127–​28. 30 The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, ed. Charles M. Coffin (New York: Random House, 2001), p. 266. 31 Harry G. Frankfurt, ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’, The Journal of Philosophy 68.1 (1971), 5–​20, quote, 7. 32 Shadi Bartsch, The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-​Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), esp. pp. 232–​39; Christopher Gill, Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy, and Philosophy: The Self in Dialogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) and The Structured Self in Hellenistic and Roman Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Gill, in particular, emphasizes the (perhaps irreconcilable) tensions between Frankfurt’s post-​Cartesian mental model and earlier traditions. 33 Gill, The Structured Self, p. 333. 34 Charles Kahn, ‘Discovering the Will: From Homer to Augustine’, in The Question of ‘Eclecticism’: Studies in Later Greek Philosophy, ed. John M. Dillon and A.A. Long (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 234–​59. Quoted passage is on page 253. 35 Milton, Areopagitica, CPW, vol. 2, p. 526. 36 Milton, Areopagitica, CPW, vol. 2, p. 492. 37 John Milton, ‘The Readie and Easie Way’, in CPW, vol. 7, p. 374. 38 A.S.P. Woodhouse, ‘Nature and Grace in The Faerie Queene’, ELH 16.3 (1949), 194–​228.

2

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Purposeful lives: Romance narrative and the generation of empires

When Milton pits Spenser against Scotus and Aquinas in Areopagitica, he depicts The Faerie Queene as a kind of coup de grâce in the ancient struggle between poets and philosophers, a war inaugurated for Western literary criticism by Plato when he exiled the poets from the ideal republic. Under the long shadow of Plato, the linked questions of whether a poem might effectively take up philosophy’s project of moral instruction, and of whether poetry’s fables and fictions hopelessly undermined any didactic claims it might levy on its readers, fundamentally shaped the ways poetry was written, and written about, in the intervening millennia. Indeed, The Faerie Queene stands as one of English poetry’s most extensive reflections on the risks and rewards of committing one’s moral understanding to poetry and to shaping one’s actions in poetry’s image. Central to Milton’s argument is the notion that the very shape of a poem is in some way analogous to the actual shape of a moral life, both in action and reasoning. Specifically, what Milton sees in Spenser’s forms of narrative progress and figural representation are images of the ways imperfect, and necessarily imperfectible, people might locate themselves as virtuous actors –​ both as individual agents and as participants within the collective project of political life –​within the temporal and contingent movements of the historical, postlapsarian world. The following chapter thus considers how Spenser’s poetic narratives seek to embody the very shape of human virtue as it stands in a fallen, but potentially reformable world. Centering this mode of agency is an account of moral life whose origins and ends are found in the translation of bodily imperatives to generation and procreation into the political action of infinite expansion. Such an instrumental bent

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

68

Spenser’s ethics

places Spenser’s ethics at distinct odds with the perfected reasons orienting more conventional virtue ethics. At stake in this shift is an understanding of the ways Spenser’s romance narratives give paradigmatic shape to, and are themselves governed by, English colonialism’s deepest senses of moral purpose. Spenser’s romance narrative forms, in other words, seek to imagine the structures of a uniquely imperial and colonialist form of moral agency bent on reshaping the world in the image of its own ideals. A paradigmatic instance of Spenser imagining his poem as not merely a site of instruction, but rather a formal embodiment of moral life inflected by an imperial ideology occurs in Book III, canto ii of The Faerie Queene, when the young Britomart’s prophetic vision of her destined husband, Artegall, is ‘[t]‌o her revealed in a mirrhour plaine’ (III.ii.17). The scene explicitly echoes Book III’s proem, which invites the poem’s ideal imagined reader, Queen Elizabeth, to regard the poem as a kind of refracting mirror in which to disentangle and hold up various aspects of the self for individual scrutiny. There, Spenser asks Elizabeth to view her two bodies, both the politic and the natural, in the poem’s ‘mirrours more than one her selfe to see … /​In th’one her rule, in th’other her rare chastitee’. Now, Spenser describes the mirror upon which the young Britomart has stumbled as an object which …vertue had, to shew in perfect sight, What ever thing was in the world contaynd, Betwixt the lowest earth and heavens hight, So that it to the looker appertaynd; What ever foe had wrought, or frend had faynd, Therein discovered was, ne ought mote pas, Ne ought in secret from the same remaynd; For thy it round and hollow shaped was, Like to the world it selfe, and seem’d a world of glas. (III.ii.19)

As with his conception of the poem itself, the mirror’s image links Britomart’s natural and political bodies, revealing a selfhood taking shape within, and finding meaning among, the perils of a life unfolding in society and across time. Spenser’s moral method in general, as Lauren Silberman argues, is defined by the ways his ‘characters flourish or fail according to their openness to risk’.1 In this particular moment, to extend this claim, Spenser presents moral knowledge as

96

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Purposeful lives

69

fundamentally implicated in erotic knowledge, and makes the activity of virtue manifest in putting oneself at risk in the wider world. A commonplace of Renaissance literary criticism imagines poems as epitomes of the world, and endowed with the power to describe the world’s forms in revelatory or clarifying ways. For Spenser’s nearest contemporary in Renaissance epic (and his greatest ideological and stylistic opposite), Torquato Tasso, poetic forms render a seemingly discordant world in its harmonious, divinely rational totality. As Tasso argues in his 1594 Discorsi, the godlike poet, who ‘resembles the supreme Artificer’ renders in verse ‘a little world. And if that is true, the art of composing a poem resembles the plan of the universe.’2 Likewise, Spenser’s nearest peer in Elizabethan literary theory, Sir Philip Sidney, argues that poetry’s capacity to hone in on the best of nature’s forms grants readers a golden world where fallen nature only gives us a brazen one. By coordinating the poet’s informing ‘idea, or fore-​conceit’ with the divine idea informing the created world itself, the poet is ‘lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature … not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely raunging within the Zodiack of his owne wit’.3 The revelatory power of Spenser’s ‘world of glas’, however, has a wholly different orientation than those posited by either Tasso or Sidney. The images we see in the poetic microcosm of Britomart’s mirror are bounded, on the one side, within the limits of the world itself and, on the other, by the subjectivity of the viewer, depicting ‘What ever thing was in the world contaynd … /​So that it to the looker appertaynd’ (III.ii.19, line 1). The distinction between these various images of the poetic microcosm illuminates the particularity of Spenser’s senses both of how a poem might work as a medium of moral instruction and, more fundamentally, of the scope and intention of such instruction as it seeks to locate moral subjects in the world and time. In the ‘Letter of the Authours’, Spenser juxtaposes the representational work of poets and philosophers in construing a moral reality, arguing that Xenophon is ‘preferred before Plato, for that the one, in the exquisite depth of his judgement, formed a commune welth such as it should be, but the other in the person of Cyrus and the Persians fashioned a governement, such as might best be’. Other early modern poet-​theorists typically defended poetry on Plato’s terms, arguing for its privileged mimetic capacity to render transcendent

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

70

Spenser’s ethics

and metaphysically perfect forms of the good ‘as it should be’. For instance, Tasso’s Discorsi describes the ways heroic poems paint ideal forms of virtue in their readers’ souls, while Sidney, likewise, posits the poet’s capacity to describe forms of the good unbounded by the mimetic constraints of a fallen nature.4 Spenser reorients the debate by arguing that fiction describes forms of moral life decoupled from the imperative of that ‘should’ and, rather, wholly defined by and conditioned to the world ‘such as it might best be’. Jeff Dolven argues that in this poem, the actions shaping and directing our very sense of the moral do not work towards the teleological fulfillment of a moral scheme. Rather, they call all such schemes into question by framing them against the exigencies of a lived complexity.5 Spenser’s poetry thus imagines the possible shapes of human action and interaction unfolding within, and actively shaping, the vagaries and contingencies of historical time, its visual exemplarity manifesting what Jane Grogan argues is The Faerie Queene’s singular rhetorical interest: compelling the reader to take ‘action beyond the text’.6 Grogan suggests that this instrumental orientation depends on the poem’s visual rhetoric. The very shape of the poem itself –​its expansive unfolding of analogously linked and progressively larger units moving ever outward and onward –​can thus be seen as part of this process. Merlin’s mirror is both an image of, and a solicitation to, intervention in the wider world; it confronts Britomart with an image of her entrance into history, and of the instrumental role that entrance will have in shaping civilization, writ large: For from thy wombe a famous Progenie Shall spring, out of the auncient Troian blood, Which shall revive the sleeping memorie Of those same antique Peres, the heavens brood, Which Greeke and Asian rivers stained with their blood. Renowmed kings, and sacred Emperours, Thy fruitfull Ofspring, shall from thee descend; Brave Captaines, and most mighty warriours, That shall their conquests through all lands extend, And their decayed kingdomes shall amend: The feeble Britons, broken with long warre, They shall upreare, and mightily defend Against their forrein foe, that comes from farre, Till universall peace compound all civill iarre. (III.iii.22–​23)

17

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Purposeful lives

71

A poetically realized, and realizable, ethics emerges in these lines’ account of a range of intertwined and intersecting imperatives: expansion and generation; memorialization and prophetic futurity; historical and political transformation; aggression and restoration; accumulation and cumulative progression; outward-​moving colonization and nationalist defensiveness; and decay and procreation. The mirror-​poem’s coordination of these various drives and goals in the young Britomart’s mortal body reveals her essential being and proper teleological orientation emerging within, and replicating, the very poetic mechanisms into which she has been inexorably drawn. Christopher Burlinson argues that Spenserian allegory is uniquely defined by its capacity to move ‘out into the world’, and thereby to construe material space in ideological terms.7 Reading the poem in this way, Burlinson argues, allows us to think about our mimetic engagements with materiality itself, and the ways these figural mediations transform the historical world into convenient or necessary political fictions. At stake in such a claim is the recognition that Spenser conceives of allegorical narrative, of the poem as an object, and the act of poesis, as formal embodiments and species of the imperial project itself. Contained with, and shaping, his ‘world of glas’ are the ethical modalities subtending the acts of empire-​building. At the outset of her life, the young Britomart appears to us –​and to herself –​as something like Virgil’s Camilla, a perpetually virginal warrior woman ‘trained up in warlike stowre’ and pledged to Diana. Her encounter with the mirror, however, fundamentally redirects the narrative of chastity through which she constitutes her basic sense of self and purpose. Now, Britomart’s procreant body organizes her new moral trajectory, becoming its originating impulse, its teleological ends, and manifesting the actions bridging those points: ‘For from thy wombe a famous Progenie /​Shall spring …’. Her body finds meaning through the mirror’s inscription of it into a revised ideology of chastity, one predicated not on virginity and rejecting the body’s organic materiality, but rather on a disciplining of the body’s organic life in time, its generative potential, towards the creation of a new society and a new history. David Lee Miller argues that Britomart’s journey, from its inception in front of Merlin’s mirror to the climactic vision in Isis Church in Book V, explores the tensions between the transcendent imperatives of allegory and the materialist ones of narrative, and

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

72

Spenser’s ethics

analogously between opposed commitments to virginal chastity and to procreation; Britomart’s visionary dream of Isis and Osiris is thereby ‘replacing a myth of virginal withdrawal with one of militant sexuality’.8 What emerges in the gap between these poles is not a positivist or progressive interpretive resolution of this tension into some transcendent ‘sabbaoth sight’, but rather the paradoxical construal of the simply material imperative to expansion, and thus the poetic extension of power into the geographical and historical world, as its own authorizing metaphysics. Britomart’s body is itself remade into an echo and extension of that ‘world of glas’ in which she discovers herself, translating poesis into an imperial and transhistorical vision of procreation. Her life moving forward is contoured to, and oriented towards, a social and political life bounded ‘Betwixt the lowest earth and heavens hight’ as it unfolds across time in processes of forward-​seeking and outward-​expanding generation. In form, function, and action, her embodied life is construed as a self-​and society-​constituting act of poesis. As Spenser seeks to render a paradigm of moral action within the order of mutability, that persistent coordination of poetic making, self-​fashioning, and imperial expansion within which he pursues that question finds its solution in the project of instrumentalizing the mutable body. He seeks to orient the body’s transformative potential, which might otherwise manifest itself in the inward-​turning motions of entropy and decay, towards the outward-​moving generative project of collaborative self-​extension and creation. The nominally Aristotelian moral project outlined in the ‘Letter’ was thus doomed from the start; The Faerie Queene persistently discards the ideal of a self-​sufficient and unitary virtue of the exemplary individual subject, making its privileged image of moral life –​ indeed the proper telos of the poem’s imagined whole –​the procreant married couple. If actual marriages are few and far between in this poem (and rudely disrupted when they do occur, as in the opening of Book 4), it is nevertheless the state of life and mode of being towards which all the poem’s quests invariably tend. Indeed, Guyon, a significant exception to the poem’s general interest in coordinating the chivalric quest with a culminating marriage, may not have marriage and procreation in his own future; however, inaugurated as it is in his encounter with a family destroyed by sexual intemperance, his

37

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Purposeful lives

73

quest is, at least in part, concerned with bolstering and restoring the institution of marriage as a whole. This is not to say that Spenser’s singular ethical or ideological commitment is to a vision of procreant heteronormativity per se. Indeed, the fields of queer and gender studies, affect studies, and posthuman studies, among recent interdisciplinary interventions in Spenser criticism, have done much to help us understand Spenser’s commitment to enlarging and making more capacious our sense of the scope and possibilities, and the moral ambitions and consequences, of the varieties of human intimacy, pleasure, and sexuality. In the wake of such readings, for instance, it is impossible to ignore the celebratory queerness of a scene like the Gardens of Adonis –​the metaphysical center of Britomart’s legend of chastity –​or to deny its repudiation of normative and hierarchizing binaries in the ethical shaping of human experience, creation, and relations. It is better, I think, to consider marriage as both one category among many modes of productive, generative, and conceptually (rather than narrowly definitional) procreant modes of social relation and, above all, as a foundational and organizing metaphor for the means by which our comportment in the world becomes productive. It is, for Spenser, a crystallizing figure for the instrumental orientation of the material, mutable body and its transformable and transformative life in time through which virtuous agents extend themselves out into the material and historical world.9 A pivotal instance of this figural extension of a procreant imperative into a broader structural account of human virtue occurs in the closing stanzas of the proem to Book VI, as Spenser first declares that ‘vertues seat is deepe within the mynd, /​And not in outward shows, but inward thoughts defynd’, before then locating that virtue’s cause and confirmation in an imaginative encounter with Queen Elizabeth, now herself imagined as a mirror, that closely echoes Britomart’s vision of Artegall in Merlin’s mirror: But where shall I in all Antiquity So faire a patterne finde, where may be seene The goodly praise of Princely curtesie, As in your selfe, O soueraine Lady Queene, In whose pure minde, as in a mirrour sheene It showes, and with her brightnesse doth inflame The eyes of all, which thereon fixed beene;

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

74

Spenser’s ethics But meriteth indeede an higher name: Yet so from low to high vplifted is your fame. Then pardon me, most dreaded Soueraine, That from your selfe I doe this vertue bring, And to your selfe doe it returne againe: So from the Ocean all riuers spring, And tribute backe repay as to their King. Right so from you all goodly vertues well Into the rest, which round about you ring, Faire Lords and Ladies, which about you dwell, And doe adorne your Court, where courtesies excell. (VI.Pr.5–​7)

The image of this dialectical, virtue generating and extending encounter of poet and monarch stands under the shadow of the proem’s earlier vision of ‘The sacred noursery /​Of vertue’. That ‘silver bowre’ is a Neoplatonic seed-​ bed planted ‘by the Gods with paine … /​in earth’, and nurturing perfected forms ‘hidden … /​From view of men, and wicked worlds disdaine’. In keeping with Neoplatonic mimetic and metaphysical conventions, the scene depends on the language of sexual generation, describing courtesy, the moral topic of Book VI, as a privileged form of virtue which ‘brancheth forth in braue nobilitie, /​And spreds it selfe through all ciuilitie’ and which was, as Spenser argues, …deriu’d at furst From heauenly seedes of bounty soueraine, And by them long with carefull labour nurst, Till it to ripenesse grew, and forth to honour burst. (VI.Pr.3, lines 6–​9)

Reconfigured at proem’s end in the image of her courtiers moving out across the sea to spread her fame and power, Spenser deploys the Neoplatonic conceit to ask and answer a basic political question about how the materially chaste body of the childless Elizabeth might fulfill its procreant obligations to the extension and temporal expansion of the commonwealth. Elizabeth, Spenser argues, successfully coordinates the relationship between her political and biological bodies in a metaphorically procreant way, enlarging herself and her empire in reciprocally animating and sustaining encounters with the subjects who are the actual agents of those activities. Britomart’s mirror reminds us that Spenser’s poetics are driven by the pursuit of forms that effectively contour themselves and their

57

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Purposeful lives

75

recognitions to the shape of the mutable world and its processes rather than imposing on them the arbitrary restraints of human invention. From the didactic imperatives shaping The Shepheardes Calender’s calendrical frame, to the cosmogonic mapping of Epithalamion, to the complex temporalities of the Spenserian stanza, Spenser directs his forms to situate readers in an experiential and inductive relation to the material world. As Milton argues in his account of Spenser’s moral vision, this is an inherently risky move, for it exposes us to threatening disorder. Indeed, had Britomart not consulted with Merlin and relied solely on Glauce’s sexually transgressive reading of the scene, she may have abandoned her ordained purpose before it even began. Yet such exposure to threat is necessary in constituting a moral life and its sustaining modes of judgement. Pinning the poem’s capacity to teach its readers on that which most imperils our pursuit of virtue and the good, Spenser’s Faerie Queene thus stands as both a culminating statement of the virtue ethics tradition and a crucial expression of its end; it thus reflects a fundamental and irreconcilable conflict between the priorities of material experience, on the one hand, and transcendent ambitions, on the other, that emerges in Aristotle’s ethics at many of their most significant interpretive cruces. This conflict emerges variously in Spenser’s accounts of the nature of the good itself, the human function, the relation of learning about virtue to actually achieving it, and moral judgment and reasoning. If Aristotle’s ethics are, on the one hand, rooted in the pursuit of normative explanatory principles that, of necessity, stand beyond and exclusive of humanity in any observable, definitional sense, they are also, and on the other, fundamentally species-​oriented and invested in maximizing and fulfilling the human-​qua-​human. And, in moments such as Britomart’s entrance into the political and historical world in front of Merlin’s mirror, it is just this tension that Spenser picks up on and amplifies.10 The seventh stanza of the proem to Book VI imagines individual agents circulating around the central figure of the queen and extending her virtue out into the world, thereby describing the relationship among individual moral lives, the political space of the court, and the empire writ-​large. As a microcosm of both this poem and its broader social ambitions, it reflects how The Faerie Queene’s mimetic body, its ‘world of glass,’ seeks to analogize the shapes and processes of a moral life ‘such as it might best be’. And the basic metaphoric vocabulary whereby he frames this account

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

76

Spenser’s ethics

of the moral life is that of chivalric romance, a representational medium through which Spenser’s ethical imagination explicitly converges with the project of plantation in Elizabethan Ireland and with the emergence of England’s imperial ambitions. The conventional historical account of chivalric practice and iconography in Elizabethan England, and especially as it relates to Spenser’s deployment of this imagery as iconic of both heroic subjectivity and political organization, has long been rooted in the notion that the Tudor and Elizabethan tiltyards reflected the neutering of the aristocratic, warrior class and its s­ ubsequent enfolding into the functional mechanisms of the bureaucratic, administrative, and centralized nation-​state. For instance, Richard McCoy describes Spenser’s images of knightly action as a ‘valedictory refrain’ for a practice that, by the 1580s and 1590s, was reduced to a resolutely ceremonial mechanism for mediating internecine political disputes.11 Richard Helgerson similarly links this imagery to Spenser’s political ties to figures like Essex and Sidney, seeing it in nearly reactionary terms as imagining a nostalgic return to a feudal version of the nation state, thus longingly expressing ‘a particular and partisan ideology, a Gothic ideology of renascent aristocratic power’.12 While this is doubtless a key part of the context behind Spenser’s imagery, it is only part of the story. Much of his interest in this imagery lies in these narratives’ structural resonance with emergent practices of English empire building in Ireland and which, in subsequent generations, would define the movements not only of England, but of Western powers more ­generally, out into the world.13 That is, the nascent structures of colonial military ­practice –​ and especially as it was practiced by those in Spenser’s orbit, such as Sir Thomas Smith, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Henry Sidney, and the Earl of Essex –​suggests another, more forward-​thinking, way of understanding this iconography and narrative pattern. For whatever commitments to a lost-​cause fantasy of a feudal aristocracy The Faerie Queene may reflect, the poem’s scenes of knights errant moving in loose orbits around the task-​ giving sovereign center offer a useful framework for describing the structural operations of English colonialism itself.14 In short, romance offers a conceptual vocabulary with which to theorize and celebrate the deeds of semi-​autonomous corporate freelancers and privateers, granted official charters tasking them to take ownership of a world construed

77

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Purposeful lives

77

as waste and wild, and with the furtherance of their own material advancement just as potent a motivation for their labors as the extension of the sovereign’s power and glory. Nicholas Canny argues that Spenser ‘set the agenda’ for English plantation in the decades after his death. However, it is more accurate to read this as a feedback loop, for the emergent practices of Tudor plantation in the 1570s and 80s shape both Spenser’s narratives and the theoretical accounts of agency, virtue, and flourishing they embody.15 Spenser’s ‘Letter of the Authours’ describes the young Redcrosse knight receiving his initial charge to go out into the world on Gloriana’s behalf in a way that calls to mind the kinds of petitions those second sons of the aristocracy and joint stock companies made to Queen Elizabeth when asking for their own charters to conquer and colonize: In the beginning of the feast, there presented him selfe a tall clownishe younge man, who falling before the Queen of Faries desired a boone (as the manner then was) which during that feast she might not refuse: which was that hee might have the atchievement of any adventure, which during that feaste should happen, that being graunted, he rested him on the floore, unfitte through his rusticity for a better place. Soone after entred a faire Ladye in mourning weedes, riding on a white Asse, with a dwarfe behind her leading a warlike steed, that bore the Armes of a knight, and his speare in the dwarfes hand. Shee falling before the Queene of Faeries, complayned that her father and mother an ancient King and Queene, had bene by an huge dragon many years shut up in a brasen Castle, who thence suffred them not to yssew: and therefore besought the Faery Queene to assygne her some one of her knightes to take on him that exployt. Presently that clownish person upstarting, desired that adventure: whereat the Queene much wondering, and the Lady much gainesaying, yet he earnestly importuned his desire. In the end the Lady told him that unlesse that armour which she brought, would serve him (that is the armour of a Christian man specified by Saint Paul v. Ephes.) that he could not succeed in that enterprise, which being forthwith put upon him with dewe furnitures thereunto, he seemed the goodliest man in al that company, and was well liked of the Lady. And eftsoones taking on him knighthood, and mounting on that straunge Courser, he went forth with her on that adventure: where beginneth the first booke, vz. A gentle knight was pricking on the playne. &c.16

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

78

Spenser’s ethics

Driven by his desire to prove, and thus advance, himself, the young knight is poised at this moment within that very ambiguity mapped out in Spenser’s declaration that he has written his poem ‘to fashion a gentleman’. Spenser seeks both to cultivate his readers’ moral lives, while also advancing his own social status through his poem. Similarly, Redcrosse balances his production of a general and abstracted civility –​here, figured in his assumption of ‘the armour of a Christian man specified by Saint Paul v. Ephes’ –​ with the material self-​improvement by which he transforms himself from ‘clownish … rusticity’ into ‘the goodliest man in al that company’. The passage mediates into the language of chivalric fantasy the motives and reasoning shaping the actions of those figures like Raleigh who beseeched their Queen to grant them charters to venture forth and deploy their self-​interested ends to the service of the empire. Spenser’s image of the young knight chasing adventures echoes many of the same ideologies, and their underlying visions of moral agency and its ends, shaping an early, and crucial, document in the history of Elizabethan plantation: the promotional pamphlet A Letter Sent by I.B. Gentleman written to build support for Sir Thomas Smith’s ultimately failed attempt to establish a colony in Ulster.17 While, as Thomas Herron notes, much of the pamphlet’s methods and outlooks make it ‘a quintessential northern European “Renaissance” endeavor’, it also showcases emergent modalities of ethical and political subjectivity taking shape within, and fundamentally challenging and reorienting, that very endeavor.18 At the time, Smith was trying to establish a foothold in the north of Ireland in a project aligned with a broader attempt in the 1560s and 70s to establish English power abroad through privately financed, corporate enterprises. As Hiram Morgan notes, ‘The novelty of the proposals made in these years lay not in the advocacy of large-​scale colonization per se, but in envisaging it as a private undertaking’.19 Morgan continues, ‘In theoretical terms, Smith’s justification of colonization is noteworthy … in that it linked the colonial impetus directly to changes in English society’ linked to ‘the development of capitalism and its ideological counterpart, political economy’. Likewise, David Beers Quinn concludes that what is most noteworthy about ‘Sir Thomas Smith’s ideas on colonial policy … is the conscious imperialism which lay behind the specific plans’ and the

97

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Purposeful lives

79

extent to which it establishes a paradigm for the English colonial project in the early modern era.20 The pamphlet addresses three primary audiences. First and foremost are Queen Elizabeth and the Privy Council, to whom this plan is presented as a means of enlarging the empire while insulating the state and the treasury from any real risk, promising to fashion a colony ‘without the Queenes pay, hir forces and expenses’.21 As Neil Murphy argues, Elizabethan officials, recalling earlier Tudor settlements in France and Ireland, were notably leery of the costs associated with wholly state-​funded colonial enterprises, and Smith bears these lessons in mind.22 Second are the potential investors in this scheme who are assured that its agents on the ground, motivated by their own personal and financial stakes in the endeavor, will ‘play the good husbande with the companies stocke, that it may reache far …. After which time there is no manner dont but the Countrey will yeld to serue our turne sufficiently, withoute any more leuying’.23 Finally, there are the would-​be colonists themselves, ambitious young men without real financial prospects in England who are promised status, inheritance, and a degree of opportunity unimaginable back home: for sith y• euery Souldiour is made Mayster and owner of his land, to him and to his heires for euer, will he not think you looke as well and as carefully to that, as hee would if hée had sixe pence sterling a day of the Quéenes Maiestie, whereof he should be sure not past for a yeer or there about, and then to go whither he would. Now if he keepe and desende this, hée is a Gentleman, a man of liuelyhode & of enheritaunce …. And if by his owne charges and costes he doo obteine it, and bring it to ciuilitie and good obedience to his Prince, how muche more fauour, grace, and renown dooth hée deserue at hir Maiesties hand, & as without her highnes charge, this he shal do, so as reason is, he hath it the better cheape, the larger estate in it, and the lesse incūbered.24

The letter notably anticipates the moral logic of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, assuming that the pursuit of individual profit and material enlargement not only has the potential to yield a net greater good for the commonwealth as a whole, but that such a motive is that greater good’s precondition and necessary engine. Phil Withington argues that that the corporatist vision shaping Smith’s Ulster project reflects a fundamental transformation in

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

80

Spenser’s ethics

understanding both the shape of society, and of the selves within that new form of association in early modern England, the corporate ‘monarchical republic’ (in Patrick Collinson’s influential phrase) not simply a novel or historically particular social structure but ‘central to’ and reflective of ‘the human condition’ itself.25 Inviting investors and young men to build vast fortunes far beyond what they could make back home, and to build an empire in the process, Smith offers up a vision of virtue in which material self-​interest not only coordinates with, but activates and sustains the collective good. This convergence of individual material enrichment with the well-​being of the empire is brought into focus in the closing exhortation to the reader, when Smith implores his audiences to [b]‌e of good courage therefore, & resolue your selfe to be a ­partaker with him in person. The enterprise is commendable, and not only to the encrease of his nation and honor of his countrey, but very profitable to them that are doers therein, if it be brought to good passe, which is assured, if reason may serue, or the like at any time (as before hath often bene séene) hath taken effecte, and the aduenture is small, not to the tenthe parte of the gaine.26

Henry Turner notes that arguments like this shape Smith’s entire career, creating a body of writing that ‘is remarkable for the ways it forges a new intellectual amalgam that can justify commercial profit’ as the mechanism that may best serve to shape an ideal, utopian society. Above all, Turner suggests, Smith exemplifies ‘a slow but perceptible shift in English culture from organic and mystical ideas of corporate unity toward contractual forms of corporate association’ as a ‘significant mode of collective identity and collective action’.27 In his essay, ‘The Divine Corporation and the History of Ethics’, J.B. Schneewind considers what happens to moral life in the early modern era when the model of the divine corporation as a normative framework for moral judgement and action falls apart and takes on a resolutely secular cast. How, he asks, is morality then binding on us in this new regime? ‘We are required’, he answers, ‘to make the world into a just moral community’ in which ‘rational agents can willingly participate’. The new ethics that emerges at this ­recognition ‘seems increasingly to treat the moral world as an historical task rather than as a metaphysical or religious assurance’.28 If  Schneewind’s mind is directed primarily to Kant’s account of

18

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Purposeful lives

81

virtue as interpersonal obligation, much of the impetus to moral action he describes is already at play in Smith’s account of the historical conditions that necessitate his particular vision of colonial agency. Smith’s depiction of human motivations, their proper orientation, and their instrumentalization in a wholly secular corporation working towards the converging ends of individual and collective well-​being is predicated less on notions of divine mandate than it is on an ideology of perpetual increase. And if increase is the goal of human life, and increase is what both necessitates and animates the colonial enterprise, then the conditions within which he imagines increase are specifically historical and material in nature. The justification for the colonial project he proposes is twofold. First, and in language that Spenser also deploys in the View, native mismanagement and failed social institutions have impeded this land’s productive capacity, necessitating a reformative intervention on the part of English settlers: And as for the present necessitie & lack of many commodities of the Countrey which are in Englande euery where, if you marke that hath bene heeretofore said in describing it, you can not say but the only default thereof is the vnciuilitie of the inhabitants, and lacke of good orders. Which assoone as he shal haue amended, by bringing this his attempt to good ende, and that it may be replenished with buildings, ciuill inhabitantes, and traffique with lawe, iustice, and good order, what shal let, that it be not also as pleasant and profitable, as any parte of England, especially when it shall be furnished with a companie of Gentlemen.29

Second, the lack of resources that Ireland faces, Smith argues, can only be fixed by England’s particular surplus, a surplus that, without a proper outlet in imperial expansion, will itself lead to a growing shortfall at home that, in turn, can only be cured by the outward expansion of empire-​building: England was neuer that can be heard of, fuller of people than it is at this day, and the dissolution of Abbayes hath done two things of importance heerin: It hath doubled the number of gentlemen and mariages, whereby commeth daily more increase of people: and suche yonger brothers as were wonte to be thruste into Abbayes, there to liue (an idle life) sith that is taken from them, must nowe séeke some other place to liue in. By thys meanes there are many lacke abode, and fewe dwellings emptie.30

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

82

Spenser’s ethics

With the veil of monkish idleness removed, Smith argues that post-​ Reformation England is primed to activate that Protestant ethic and its nascent spirit of capitalism. How then, he asks, might we make most efficient use of our resources –​human resources, in this case –​to extend and amplify our surplus into the world, and to rectify and reform shortfalls elsewhere in such a way that will, in turn, create new and wholly beneficial forms of surplus? In answering that question, Smith thus arrives at his particular vision of human flourishing. Plenitude, profit, and commodious enlargement serve as both impulse and normative guarantor of the historical endeavors of the New English hero as they sally forth into the world: I meane the whole countrey replenished with Englishe men, what profite that coulde be to the estate of Englande, hath sithens his returne tolde me diuers times, that he thought Irelande once inhabited with Englishe men, and polliced with Englishe lawes, would be as great commoditie to the Prince as the realme of England, the yerely rent and charges saued that is now laide out to maintaine a garrison therein, for there cannot be (sayeth he) a more fertile soile thorowe out the world for that climate than it is, a more pleasant, healthful, ful of springs, riuers, great fresh lakes, fishe, and foule, and of moste commodious herbers.31

Smith’s image of young Englishmen eager to acquire wealth and status going out into the world with the net effect of the empire’s furtherance, of self-​ interested agents contractually coordinated into mutual endeavor, and the labors of moral life construed as a specifically historically and materially determined set of activities offers a paradigm for understanding the mimetic underpinnings of Spenserian romance, and of the ideologies that its general structures of action embody. Both Smith’s imagined colonist and Spenser’s basic narrative structure reflect what Charles Taylor describes as a social imaginary: ‘the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’.32 Mediated into a fictional iconography such as a chivalric romance narrative, the social imaginary offers an account of who one can become and what kind of society those newly ‘fashioned in vertuous and gentle discipline’ can create if they

38

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Purposeful lives

83

undertake a particular task such as colonizing Ireland. Smith’s expository claims and Spenser’s romance forms thus embody what Taylor terms a ‘moral order,’ the whys and wherefores that establish the shape and purpose of a social life and whose principles are discovered inductively through those forms of social organization and the systems of value both knitting them together and towards which they work. The analogous tension between Smith’s Renaissance humanist language and his proto-​ capitalist account of human agency and motivation, and between Spenser’s deployment of a medieval iconography to express a wholly novel form of military organization, reflects the broadening cultural rift between inherited vocabularies of the social imaginary and emergent moral orders. Smith locates this transition’s crux in a problem at the very heart of the virtue ethics tradition: that of human function. In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics 1.4, the premise that the human good, eudaimonia, is the true goal of life is described as both a widely held truth and a subject of significant disagreement, because the specific nature of happiness and the good itself is uncertain (1095a15–​20). In 1.7, Aristotle proposes that we might discover a plausible sense of the good ‘if we first grasp the function [ergon] of a human being’ (1097b24), concluding that ‘the human good proves to be the activity of the soul in accord with virtue’ (1098a15–​ 17). Aristotle’s function, to adapt Taylor’s schematic model, offers the moral order underlying a social imaginary, in turn, an image of the human good, of the fulfillment of the function-​as-​ moral order. In this case, as Smith notes, a particular vision of society, and thus of the human good, has effectively collapsed in the wake of the Reformation: the three estates and what was understood as their divinely ordered distribution of functions across, and in maintenance of, society. Such a society was understood as a unitary whole reflective of a divinely mandated order. Specifically, his argument identifies the historical breakdown of the functional premise of this social imaginary in ‘the dissolution of Abbayes’.33 The collapse of that institution, Smith reminds his readers, has left a whole class of humans functionless and adrift, and seemingly without a proper end and with no ‘place to liue in. By thys meanes there are many lacke abode, and fewe dwellings emptie’.34 Smith’s image of those excluded from the very possibility of the good as it had been construed for centuries reveals the historically

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

84

Spenser’s ethics

contingent and wholly human mechanisms that sustained and confirmed a particular vision of the moral order. No longer can they be construed as reflecting the natural, created shape of things. The processes of historical transformation and shifting material conditions thus force a reckoning not only with an economic and political problem, but with the conceptual and metaphysical bases of moral life itself. At stake in the issue of economic and social dispossession are fundamental questions about both human function and the form of flourishing towards which a newly construed sense of function directs itself. For Aristotle, the basis of a specifically human function is reason. Reason’s virtuous expression, and thus the path to a flourishing good, ‘is the activity of the soul in accord with reason or requiring reason’ (1098a8). The ultimate normative point of reference for the rational, according to Aristotle, is the sense that we humans are closest among creatures to God, and that we might transcend our creaturely status and aspire to a kind of godliness. As he argues in 10.7, the ultimate form of virtue is discovered when we seek ‘to understand what is fine and divine, by being itself either divine or the most divine element in us’ (1177a15–​16). Neither Smith’s appeal to his audience, however, nor his sense of the energies that both animate, and are instantiated by, that audience’s virtuous deeds, have anything to do with reason as Aristotle would understand it. Indeed, the appeal to profit; the vision of growth and enlargement; of cultivating what a colonialist ideology necessarily construes as a fallow Irish landscape; and of finding a place in the inheritance economy for the younger sons of England constellate around the very things that those pillars of the virtue ethics tradition understands as irrational: economic self-​interest, simply material forms of enlargement, and procreation. Nevertheless, Smith’s argument is rooted in the teleological reasoning underpinning Aristotle’s function argument. How, Smith asks, might we harness these impulses and orient them towards a broader sense of fulfillment? Thus, his challenge is making sense of the human function and its ends within a social order whose main impediment and main promise are one and the same thing: biological growth. According to the logic of the function argument, the bad, the unethical, or any failure to flourish in general is the result of an impediment being interposed between us and our natural course to our proper ends. Our proper ends are determined

58

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Purposeful lives

85

by our inherent being. For Aristotle, this is broadly understood as the rejection of rational choices for irrational ones; Thomas Aquinas understands this as not recognizing God as the orientation of all that can be construed as the good. In Smith’s account of both England and Ireland, the impasses blocking the good are impediments to natural growth imposed by failed civic institutions. In the case of Ireland, these impediments are the archaic feudal ties that engender ‘Dearth … in the Cuntry’ through a society organized around an aimless and anti-​social model of acquisition that makes every common inhabitant ‘the first starued, not béeing Maister of his owne’.35 In the case of England, it is the failure to find a suitable replacement for an abandoned model of social organization; without a suitable institutional replacement to effectively harness and orient the energies of natural population increase in a sustainable way, England, Smith suggests, finds itself in an effectively parallel situation to what he finds in Ireland. Rather than tenants starved through dispossession and unjust forms of extraction, however, its particular form of surfeit is caused by the burden of an excess of young men left by historical progress without adequate means of provision, and whose continued growth is putting an ever-​greater strain on an ever-​diminishing supply of finite resources. In both cases, the answer to these social and moral ills is found in the formation of civic institutions that are both predicated on, and work to sustain, the natural course of growth and generation. Smith, as Phil Withington notes, focuses on ‘the transposition of English corporate practices’ into Ireland, thereby extending the profit-​generating and profit-​driven structures of the corporation that are coming to define the ‘practices of association’ in English social life into a space that may properly accommodate those ever-​expanding imperatives.36 Enabling such a transposition of corporate practices into social life as a whole are certain assumptions about the essential purpose of a human life. Julia Annas argues that Aristotle’s function argument is undercut by an inherent internal contradiction. Its basic logic is organized around a biological, material, and mechanistic sense of being. Nevertheless, it is directed towards an idealized sense of a truer, fully rational humanity that lies wholly beyond, and even abjures, these things defining humanity in essential and elemental ways.37 Linking the human good to the task of increase and to the material fact of generation, Smith’s account

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

86

Spenser’s ethics

of human function, and of the form of the good towards which that function works, resolves this contradiction. He posits a rationalized and instrumentalized mode of organic, material existence as the objective basis and ultimate aim of human action. The sense of a moral order that Smith’s pamphlet hints at, and which organizes much of the mimetic and conceptual task of Spenser’s chivalric romance, thus constitutes a fundamental challenge to virtue ethics’ assumptions that a privileged, incorporeal rationality stands as the normative basis and orienting ambition of moral action. Even if this kind of ethical thinking does not orient the human good around an incorporeal and contemplative sense of rationality, it nevertheless remains reflexively teleological in its commitments. Simply put, neither Smith nor Spenser can conceive of a notion of humanity decoupled from an overarching sense of purpose, nor can they imagine an ethics decoupled from the premise that the human good is about the fulfillment of purpose. We have a function in this world and that function stems from and fulfills our very being; in turn, the activity of fulfilling that function is what defines a morally coherent, and thus ontologically viable expression of our life. Like Aristotle’s, the ethical theory linking Smith with Spenser here understands human functionality as the transit from ontological origins to meaning-​making ends. A key part of the answer to the problem of how Smith and Spenser formulate and navigate this resolutely material vision of the human telos might be found in the Aristotelian tradition itself, in the ethical naturalism that emerges in a range of Hellenistic and Roman Aristotelianisms inflecting this tradition’s renaissance reception. The basic problem these moral philosophers addressed, Brad Inwood argues, is the fact that ‘Aristotle’s dominant position on the matter, that happiness is an activity in accordance with the excellence of the rational aspect of the soul, doesn’t leave a clear intrinsic role for … natural goods’.38 As Spenser’s ethical thinking assimilates the corporate vision of the Elizabethan colonial project into the mimetic structures of chivalric romance, its particular mode of ethical naturalism centers material goods in its eudaimonist aims.39 Here, Spenser echoes what Sir Keith Thomas describes as a larger cultural transformation of the ways the shape of a life was understood. Thomas argues that it was specifically a shifting conception of our ends, the summum bonum or the definition of eudaimonia, that became the primary site of

78

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Purposeful lives

87

contestation in the early modern transformation of the virtues as, for instance, a concept such as work lost the taint of original sin and became valued for its own sake. To continue with Inwood, such an ethics is oriented around the idea that virtuous action and the achievement of the good depend on our giving due ‘attention to the continuities between’ ourselves and the natural world, in particular nature’s ‘dynamic and developmental character’ as it manifests in the ‘human drive for activity’.40 A survey of concordance entries for Spenser’s use of the word ‘virtue’ and its cognates reveals the poet’s utter commitment to the idea of virtue as a latent and inherent potential, and of virtuous action as the expression and end-​directed actualization of that potential. The telos of human action, the purpose of human functionality, is articulating a social space defined by, and enabling the fulfillment of, something essential about the human condition. The human function is the productive, rational expression of our mutable condition towards that flourishing end, and The Faerie Queene’s mimetic task is explicating the formal, structural, and operational links between these two points. It is along that transit that the poem construes its account of life and ‘governement such as it might best be’.41 As it works to imagine the particularly teleological character of a human life among the vagaries of the mutable world, the moral universe of Spenser’s chivalric romance is shaped within the tension between two kinds of motion: the linear, forward motion that works inexorably from the inauguration of the quest to its completion, and the errant digressions interposed against that progress. Or, as Spenser describes it in the ‘ Letter’, the poem stands in tension between narrative moments ‘intermedled, but rather as Accidents, then intendments’ and ‘the whole intention of the conceit’.42 Read in isolation, that overarching forward motion reflects a central claim in the Nicomachean Ethics in which Aristotle argues that ‘the goal [of motion] appears in accordance with the kind of man’ in motion, revealing whether a man, informed by his ‘natural faculty … will judge well and choose what is really and truly good’ (3.5 1114a31). To imagine a paradigmatic version of the chivalric quest, the knight’s motion not only actualizes their inner potential as an exemplar of virtue, but in so doing, reveals that virtue’s essential character. Errancy, on the other hand, is the image of a knight being impeded from their natural path to ontological fulfillment, a forced

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

88

Spenser’s ethics

movement away from their functional purpose that Aristotle’s Physics describes as an object’s encounter with something para phusin –​contrary to its nature. In the world these physics describe, the straighter a line something follows, the more rationally its potential works toward the actualization of its particular nature. Aristotelian motion is essentially linear, seeking a perceptible and thus analyzable shift in orientation in space and time. Such shifts, in turn, reveal the ways objects and people operate as essential beings within a system of determinant causes, thereby creating a system in which errancy is merely symptomatic of something being impeded from its natural path to ontological fulfillment. As Aristotle argues in his Physics, this imagined endpoint in space and time is where ‘form, mover, and telos … coincide’ (198a25).43 Unlike Aristotle, however, who pins the human function on a definitionally extra-​human mode of reason, Spenser locates this point of coincidence in the procreant, generative human body. This, of course, confronts Spenser with the essential problem of definition at the center of Aristotle’s function argument, for generation and procreation are not specifically human purposes. Aristotle argues that our function defines our good. Humankind’s proper function, and thus the criteria by which virtue is measured and its specific mode of flourishing is understood, is that particular thing differentiating humanity from all other forms of life. Indeed, as the Lucretian hymn to Venus in Book IV makes clear, the imperative to generation buttresses a universalized virtue that effaces all creaturely distinctions and bridges all categories of kind. Here, procreation is imagined as a universal mode of flourishing, all worldly life forms’ origins and ends: Then doth the dædale earth throw forth to thee Out of her fruitfull lap aboundant flowres, And then all liuing wights, soone as they see The spring breake forth out of his lusty bowres, They all doe learne to play the Paramours; First doe the merry birds, thy prety pages Priuily pricked with thy lustfull powres, Chirpe loud to thee out of their leauy cages, And thee their mother call to coole their kindly rages. Then doe the saluage beasts begin to play Their pleasant friskes, and loath their wonted food;

98

Purposeful lives

89

The Lyons rore, the Tygres loudly bray, The raging Buls rebellow through the wood, And breaking forth, dare tempt the deepest flood, To come where thou doest draw them with desire: So all things else, that nourish vitall blood, Soone as with fury thou doest them inspire, In generation seeke to quench their inward fire.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

(IV.x.46–​47)

An answer, if an oblique one, to the problem of a specifically human vision of generation is arrived at in the following canto of Book IV, in the chorographic mythography-​cum-​epic catalogue imaging the marriage of the Medway and the Thames. In simplest terms, this is an allegorical pageant celebrating the English landscape as the physical, political, and spiritual center of the world. In the terms I have thus far laid out, it might furthermore be read as an image of the corporate commonwealth organized around the principle of procreation and outward-​ seeking self-​ extension, its collation of English and Irish (and, indeed, world) rivers and waterways describes the structural relations of independent agents that both make meaningful, and find their ultimate meaning in, their relationship to the organizing center of the Thames, yet who, in the cause and confirmation of this very meaning, are always impelled outward to ‘enrich and bewtifie’ the earth. It is an imperial fantasy of a geographically and politically unified British Isles mapped onto the very medium of early modern imperial expansion that, in turn, finds a more focused articulation in a passage we have already briefly touched on, the closing stanzas of the proem to Book VI and its image of virtue’s transit between Queen Elizabeth and her most heroic subjects: Then pardon me, most dreaded Soueraine, That from your selfe I doe this vertue bring, And to your selfe doe it returne againe: So from the Ocean all riuers spring, And tribute backe repay as to their King. Right so from you all goodly vertues well Into the rest, which round about you ring, Faire Lords and Ladies, which about you dwell, And doe adorne your Court, where courtesies excell. (VI.Pr.7)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

90

Spenser’s ethics

There may be no more succinct a rendering of the ideologies of early modern colonial expansion than in this simile which maps the idea of virtue, its origins and ends, and the practices that link those poles, onto the very medium of empire building in the early modern era. The image gives shape to the phrase ‘virtues seat is deep within the mind’, finally telling us what, for Spenser, virtue actually is. Virtue, as construed in these lines, is an interpretive orientation towards a locus of generative desire. What is at question in the definition of virtue is how we engage that figure, that other that is also our icon of self-​constitution in the mirror that is the poem. Do we, as with those falsifying courtiers, regard her in a way that is entropic and reductive? Do we circle around her like the cannibals with Serena at Book VI’s close? Or, alternatively, do we regard her, like Colin Clout and Gloriana on Mt. Acidale, within a process of mutually sustaining reciprocity? Do we, in other words, instrumentally deploy that relationship as the engine driving our outward extension into a conquerable world?

Notes 1 Lauren Silberman, Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of The Faerie Queene (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), p. 141. 2 Torquato Tasso, Discourses on the Heroic Poem, Michela Cavalchini and Irene Samuel (eds., trans.), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 78. 3 Sir Philip Sidney, ‘The Defense of Poesy’, in The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 216. 4 Tasso, Discourses, p. 171. 5 Jeff Dolven, ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900 57.1 (2017), 1–​22. 6 Grogan, Exemplary Spenser, p. 108. 7 Christopher Burlinson, Allegory, Space and the Material World in the Writings of Edmund Spenser (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2006), p. 7. 8 David Lee Miller, ‘Gender, Justice, and the Gods in The Faerie Queene Book 5’, in Reading Renaissance Ethics, ed. Marshall Grossman (New York, NY and London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 19–​37, quote, p. 19. 9 A useful analogue, albeit directed towards very different ends, are the opening poems of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

19

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Purposeful lives

91

10 It is worth noting, as an aside, that he does so at just the historical moment that, as Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben have variously argued, the biological body itself emerges as the focal point and organizing principle of political life. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–​1979 (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008). 11 Richard C. McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 127–​62. 12 Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 59. 13 On the ways small-​scale, private ventures became the backbone and dominant paradigm of Western colonial expansion in the early modern era (and a wholesale challenge to the military revolution theory of western hegemony), see J.C. Sharman, Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). 14 My argument thus diverges from Rory Rapple, Martial Power and Elizabethan Political Culture: Military Men in England and Ireland, 1558–​1594 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), who argues that Ireland offered a place to enact a revanchist form of chivalric political life that had been decisively foreclosed on in England itself. 15 Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–​1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 1–​58. Phil Withington makes a similar claim in his essay, ‘Plantation and Civil Society’ cited below. 16 Spenser, ‘A Letter’, p. 717. 17 Sir Thomas Smith, A Letter sent by I.B. Gentleman (London, 1572). 18 Thomas Herron, Spenser’s Irish Work: Poetry, Plantation and Colonial Reformation (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), p. 49. 19 Hiram Morgan, ‘The Colonial Venture of Sir Thomas Smith in Ulster, 1571–​1575’, The Historical Journal 28.2 (1985), 261–​78. 20 David Beers Quinn, ‘Sir Thomas Smith (1513–​ 1577) and the Beginnings of English Colonial Theory’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 89.4 (1945), 543–​60. 21 Smith, A Letter, p. 13. 22 Neil Murphy, The Tudor Occupation of Boulogne: Conquest, Colonisation and Imperial Monarchy, 1544–​ 1550 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

92

Spenser’s ethics

3 Smith, A Letter, p. 41. 2 24 Smith, A Letter, p. 22. 25 Phil Withington, ‘Plantation and Civil Society’, in The Plantation of Ulster: Ideology and Practice, ed. Éamonn Ó Ciardha, and Micheál Ó Siochrú (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), pp. 55–​77. 26 Smith, A Letter, p. 50. 27 Henry S. Turner, The Corporate Commonwealth: Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516–​ 1651 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), p. 38. 28 J.B. Schneewind, ‘The Divine Corporation and the History of Ethics’, in Essays on the History of Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 149–​69; quote, pp. 168–​69. 29 Smith, A Letter, p. 48. 30 Smith, A Letter, p. 25. 31 Smith, A Letter, p. 11. 32 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 23. 33 Smith, A Letter, p. 25. 34 Ibid. 35 Smith, A Letter, p. 32. 36 Withington, ‘Plantation and Civil Society’, 56–​57. 37 Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Her critique of the function argument appears in Chapters 3–​4. 38 Brad Inwood, Ethics After Aristotle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 28. 39 Sir Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 40 Inwood, Ethics, pp. 68–​69. 41 Spenser, ‘A Letter’, p. 716. 42 Spenser, ‘A Letter’, p. 718. 43 In the context of motion and intentionality in the mapping of ethical agency, David Furley’s classic essay, ‘Self-​Movers’ identifies an analogous and closely related problem to the one I examine in the function argument –​namely, that animals move with intention. See David J. Furley, ‘Self-​ Movers’, in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amélie Oksenberg-​Rorty (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 55–​68.

3

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Magnificence: Fashioning the imperial commonwealth

In the ‘Letter of the Authours’, Spenser argues that magnificence stands as the ‘perfection’ of all the other virtues: So in the person of Prince Arthure I sette forth magnificence in particular, which vertue, for that (according to Aristotle and the rest) it is the perfection of all the rest, and conteineth in it them all, therefore in the whole course I mention the deedes of Arthure applyable to that vertue which I write of in that booke.1

Of course, Spenser, as is often noted, gets his Aristotle wrong here –​ it is magnanimity, not magnificence, to which Aristotle gives pride of place among the virtues. However, Spenser’s structuring of the virtues is less a mistake than it is an accident of the historical vagaries of reception, assimilation, and critical repurposing and reinvention. It is, in other words, a manifestation of the long and complex history of cultural processes that are encoded in that seemingly innocuous phrase, ‘and the rest’. For Aristotle, magnanimity is the crown of the virtues because its actions are the formal and material manifestations of what he regards as the basic set and predication of human excellence: great souledness. Spenser’s magnificence functions in an analogous way. Working out of a basic etymological understanding of magna facere, which entails the doing or making, as well as the fashioning or figuring, of great things, Spenser’s magnificence is, most simply, the activity of rendering the human good in the world. Orienting and confirming all other forms of virtuous activity, Spenserian magnificence unsettles received notions of the category of virtue itself, for it is less a perfectible aspect of human character than it is an external objective towards which human agency is directed.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

94

Spenser’s ethics

For Spenser, the contours of this virtue take shape, at least in part, in the lecture halls and disputations of Pembroke College.2 In these spaces, just as they had been for much of his reception history in medieval and renaissance Europe, Aristotle’s ethics were mediated through, and fundamentally conditioned by, Cicero and Aquinas, both of whom describe the cardinal virtue not as magnanimity (megalopsychia) as did Aristotle, but as magnificentia, or m ­ agnificence. In what remains the most detailed account of the intellectual history of this passage in Spenser’s ‘Letter’, Hugh Maclachlan surveys the post-​Aristotelian, and particularly Ciceronian, modulations of the concept of magnificence within the scheme of the virtues as it would have been received in early modern England.3 Maclachlan pushes back on Thomist interpretations of the term centered in the term’s etymological roots which emphasize physical production and generation, in favor of Ciceronian and Stoic mediations of the term which regard it ‘as the doing of great deeds for the sake of glory’.4 Spenser certainly lacked both Maclachlan’s philological sophistication and the access to the material resources –​namely, a modern research library amply stocked with accurate critical editions and concordances –​to have a clear sense of the divergent lines of filiation and modulation traced in this essay’s incisive disentangling of Thomist, Ciceronian, Stoic, and Aristotelian stances on magnificence. However, the essay establishes a key framework for understanding Spenser’s deployment of the term in his letter: the sheer complexity and ambiguity accruing to the concept over the course of the two millennia dividing Aristotle in fourth century B.C. Athens and Spenser in Kilcolman, Ireland in 1589. Through the mediation of both his classroom encounters with these ideas, as well as their incorporation into the popular, vernacular moral treatises providing a key generic framework for The Faerie Queene itself, Spenser brings the full weight of the term’s inherited meanings, and their divergent imperatives, to bear on his overarching sense of virtue writ large. As Aquinas reminds us, magnum facere is the performance of greatness or great deeds: It belongs to magnificence to do something great, as its name implies. Now ‘facere’ may be taken in two ways, in a strict sense, and in a broad sense. Strictly ‘facere’ means to work something in external matter, for instance to make a house, or something of the kind; in

59

Magnificence

95

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

a broad sense ‘facere’ is employed to denote any action, whether it passes into external matter, as to burn or cut, or remain in the agent, as to understand or will. Accordingly, if magnificence be taken to denote the doing of something great, the doing [factio] being understood in the strict sense, it is then a special virtue. For the work done is produced by act: in the use of which it is possible to consider a special aspect of goodness, namely that the work produced [factum] by the act is something great, namely in quantity, value, or dignity, and this is what ­magnificence does. On this way magnificence is a special virtue. If, on the other hand, magnificence take its name from doing something great, the doing [facere] being understood in a broad sense, it is not a special virtue. (ST 2.2 q. 134 a. 2)

Whereas Aristotle understands magnificence as a wholly secular virtue linked to material largesse, and which thus operates as a secondary aspect of what he regards as the primary virtue, magnanimity, Aquinas understands magnificence as the link between human action and God’s grandeur. Aquinas’s key distinction hinges on an ambiguity in the word facere, which can mean either to act or to do; this distinction, in turn echoes and amplifies the philosophical distinction between an act and an action, between something performed for its own sake and something performed for an end external to itself. In Christine Korsgaard’s words, ‘the action includes both the act and the end or aim for the sake of which the act is done’.5 That end, for Aquinas, is God. While Spenser certainly has a providentialist outlook, and a sense that human action is only meaningful when organized under the rubric of a sacred vocation, he is not a Dante. Indeed, as Redcrosse discovers while being led upwards by Contemplation near the close of Book I, canto x of The Faerie Queene, heroic action is avowedly circumscribed within the bounds of human agency; its ends are not found in the City of God, but in the City of Man. A crucial holdover Spenser retains from the Thomist sense of magnificence is the idea that virtue in general, and the virtuous exercise and pursuit of greatness, in particular, is not self-​sufficient. Rather, it only attains its true meaning when oriented towards objectives external to itself. What is different, however, is a resolutely secular sense of virtue’s scope and intentions.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

96

Spenser’s ethics

A second major strain of the evolving thinking about this virtue emerges in Florentine civic humanism in the fifteenth century. In the works of preachers and humanist philosophers, it becomes the particular virtue displayed by builders of civic edifices and institutions, as well as patrons of the arts. The Florentine vision of magnificence has long been read as a wholly self-​interested phenomenon, one rooted strictly in the humanist recovery of Aristotle through Leonardo Bruni’s edition and translation of the Nicomachean Ethics.6 In A.D. Frasier Jenkins’ influential account, contemporary responses to Cosimo de’ Medici’s program of building reflects an emergent cultural embrace of ‘ostentation and the use of wealth to produce some personal monument’.7 As Peter Howard argues, however, these Florentine accounts of magnificence were themselves developed largely from Aquinas in the sermons of Dominican preachers decades before the Bruni’s translation of Aristotle’s Ethics and Maffei’s writing of his defense of the virtue.8 Rooted in a Thomist modulation of the Ciceronian and Aristotelian understandings of the virtue, its sense of teleologically-​ oriented action is focused on the material project of extending personal wealth into the realm of public works. Two crucial ideas emerge from this Italian Renaissance development of the term. The first makes magnificence a privileged virtue because it can be cultivated and developed. It is an aspirational and competitive virtue rooted in material self-​interest. Its end is a target that always shifts as someone builds something newer and greater, yet which is always a tangible goalpost toward which to orient action. The second, emerging from this first notion, is the idea that magnificence’s actions are fundamentally governed by an ideology of perpetual expansion, generation, and enlargement. New boundaries are not fixed limits, but instead establish a new horizon of possibility to look beyond. Both the Thomist and the Florentine understandings of magnificence would have been available to Spenser both directly, through his university education, and indirectly through the broad assimilation and mediation of those ideas into contemporary, popular printed texts. And, as Peter Mack argues, this loosely defined body of emergent, vernacular genres framed an ‘informal ethics’ that, due to its decentering nature both in its production and its capacity to disseminate ideas beyond the confines of universities and courts, drove some of the most significant transformations in early modern moral thought.9 The culture of vernacular moral-​didactic treatises,

79

Magnificence

97

of which Spenser’s poem is itself among the most notable examples, thus offers a crucial context within which to read The Faerie Queene’s intervention in moral philosophy’s evolution. Within this loosely defined genre, the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter, a text whose language was doubtless second nature for Spenser, renders the concept in its basic Thomist sense:10

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Psalm xcv: God alone, is magnificent And eke aboue all other gods, a kyng omnipotent. […] Sing this as xxi psalme: The voyce of God is of great force, and wondrous excellent: It is most mighty in effect, and much magnificent.11

A nearly contemporaneous account of the virtue in the sense inherited from the Italian Renaissance can be found in William Painter’s 1566 Delectable demaundes, and pleasaunt questions. Painter’s depiction of magnificence encompasses the broad range of its implications by moving the reader dialectically through a civic and political account of this particular virtue: ¶ What is Magnificence? It is a vertue proper onely to princes: because it consisteth in greate and harde thinges, and great expences, ¶ Is there anye difference betwene liberalitie and magnanimitie? Great difference: although they seme to be but one. He that is liberall, oughte to haue respect howe muche he doeth spende, what that thinge is worthe that he buyeth, and aboue all thinges that he doe not excede in ex|pence of his Reuenue. The magnanimouse and honorable withoute anye care for publicke expence, hath respecte onelye howe he may do some great and valiaunt enterpryse. ¶ What is the chiefe ende of magnificence? To gette Frendes. ¶ Why were Caeseres giftes beste estemed, although they were lesse then others? Bicause he gaue them with a good will, and with his owne hande. Uoluntarie giftes do engendre more fauor towards him that geueth them: and bindeth him more that receiueth them. ¶ In what thing is magnificence most apparaunt, eyther in building and repayring of condues and mines, or in Sepulchers, Temples, Steples, Labyrinthes, or Libraries? I thinke the building and foundation of Cities: for it acquireth and winneth vnto man great reputacion,

98

Spenser’s ethics

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

and the memorie therof is more then for euer. As appeareth by the fame of Tyton the father of Mannon, Semyramis quene of Babilon, Smirra the quene of the Amazones, Philotidas Nelius, [A]‌thamantes, Teucer, Antiochus, Perseus, Alexandre, Augustus Caesar, Marcellus, Titus, Labienus, Liuius, Mutuis, Pompelius, Cornelius, Sempronius, and other builders of Cities. 12

Here, the virtue’s teleological aims are wholly political, giving a clear sense of why it might have been so attractive to Spenser as a means of centering and defining the specific social ambitions of The Faerie Queene. Painter depicts magnificence as the engine of public works. It is thus a medium through which social bonds are formed, affirmed, and consolidated; political hierarchies are established and maintained; and through which cities and empires are not only built, but given both material longevity and the more elusive but more significant (because it is time and place-​transcending) durability of ‘reputacion … memorie … [and] fame’. Such fame redounds to both civic sites and their builders, projecting them into fame’s historical memory. The virtue’s political stakes come into further focus in Richard Mulcaster’s Positions (1581), in which Spenser’s own grammar school master at Merchant Taylors’ argues that this virtue allows a nation to extend its political will into the wider world: Such as are sent abroad to warre for the countrie, though foorth of the countrie, he holdes for no trauellers, as being still of, and in the state: the cause of their absence continuing their presence, and the  place of their abyding, not altering the nature of their being. And the like rekening he maketh of those solemne embassadors, which they sent to communicate in sacrifice with their neighbours, at Delphi, to Apollo, in Olympus, to Iupiter, at Nemea to Hercules, in Isthmos to Neptune: where he appointed the pacificque, and friendly Embassages to be furnished out of the most, the best, and brauest citisens, which with their port, their presence, their magnificence, might honest, and honour their countrie most.13

Mulcaster notably describes magnificence as inoculating against what Spenser himself comes to register as the singular threat of colonial empire building: the capacity for one’s essential being to be altered by contact with the wider world, specifically, with the colonized Other. Furthermore, Mulcaster decouples the virtue from a strictly monarchical and singular form of action, arguing that it is through the individual practice and embodiment of magnificence by

99

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Magnificence

99

numerous of the ‘brauest citisens’ that the nations’ collective power is brought out into the world; likewise, that outward-​moving practice serves to animate and confirm that central power in a sort of reciprocal motion that Spenser himself renders in the closing stanzas of the proem to Book VI. Magnificence’s evolving life in Elizabethan vernacular moral discourse is further illustrated in two passages from Robert Copland’s Shephardes Kalender (1570), which describes magnificence in the language of chivalric romance. It first appears in a homely stanza describing the particular virtues of knights: O ye knightes refulgent in fortitude With labour and trauell to get love nobly Fight for the pore commons that be poore and rude And if nede be, for the church thou die Loue truth, hate wronge and vilany Apeace the people, by thy magnificence And vnto women be shelde of defence. 14

Copland’s boilerplate summary of chivalric romance conventions again decouples magnificence both from a strictly monarchical context, and from strict orientations towards either material largesse (as in Aristotle) or explicitly sanctified modes of grandeur (as in Aquinas). Rather, he describes it as a means by which individual knights are able to bring about peaceful order in an otherwise chaotic society, and generally to redress social ills. Magnificence is both a state of mind and a form of action, both a will to do justice and the practical imposition of social order. Copland develops his account of magnificence as an order-​making virtue at the center of a short essay on the virtues associated with the exercise of political ‘force’: Of Force: Force or for to haue a sure and stedfaste courage amonge the aduersities of labours and perils that may happen to come, or in to the which a person may fal. And the branches be these. Magnificence, Confidence, Tollerance, Rest, Stablenesse, Perseuerance and Reason. Magnificence is a ioyous clerenesse of courage, administringe thinges laudable and magnificenciall, that is to say, hye or great.15

Answering to explicitly coercive and instrumental imperatives, Copland imagines magnificent action as both the cause and confirmation of political power in a general sense. Its laudable deeds reflect a laudable polity, instantiating the highness and greatness of

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

100

Spenser’s ethics

the political power authorizing them. Copland’s brief descriptions of magnificent agency place it at the center of the two basic interests governing Spenser’s moral allegory in The Faerie Queene. First, that paradigmatic agent of the knightly estate and the more abstracted agent of political force seeking to fashion rectified forms of civil life in a fallen world, beset by and reorganizing ‘the aduersities of labours and perils’ and acting (in language that overlaps with Spenser’s own vocabulary of chivalric action) with ‘labour and trauell’. Adversity, peril, labor, and the pun, travel/​travail, describe a world that is both metaphysically fallen and politically corrupted. They are not, however, threatening antitheses to magnificence, but its foundation and animating principle. Second, magnificence is about going out into the world and generating a mode of civil life that modulates more overt forms of coercion into ‘appeasement’ and ‘administration’, and in so doing, amplifying and extending that polity out into that world defined by ‘the aduersities of labours and perils’. In each case, this virtue is organized around, and directs in its actions towards, a body moving through a world of political crisis and historical time, rendering contingent and provisional forms of well-​being within that world’s material and temporal constraints. These various accounts of magnificent agency converge in Spenser’s description of the young Redcrosse knight charging across the ‘plaine’ on his warhorse, with his lady and his dwarf left far behind. When we first see him, he is magnificent in an orthodox Thomist sense of the virtue, clad ‘in mightie armes and siluer shielde’ emblazoned with ‘a bloudie Crosse … /​The deare remembrance of his dying Lord’ (I.i.1–​2). However, very next stanza complicates this image by describing another kind of mission, the secular militancy of Mulcaster and Copland: Vpon a great aduenture he was bond, That greatest Gloriana to him gaue, That greatest Glorious Queene of Faerie lond, To winne him worship, and her grace to haue, Which of all earthly things he most did craue; And euer as he rode, his hart did earne To proue his puissance in battell braue Vpon his foe, and his new force to learne; Vpon his foe, a Dragon horrible and stearne. (I.i.3)

101

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Magnificence

101

Adventure. Fame and adulation. The love of the maiden. Proving martial prowess. Gaining skills and defeating enemies. At the stanza’s midpoint is the word ‘crave’, around which circulates a set of verbs heightening the quest’s distinctly self-​ serving and desire-​ bound imperatives: win, have, earn, prove. Redcrosse’s assumption of this mandate is oriented towards both the sacred and the secular. Impelled by the young warrior’s dual services to God and Gloriana, and his twinned desires to win martial glory and instantiate God’s kingdom on earth, it stands in the very tensions and contradictions shaping the Elizabethan vision of magnificence. Redcrosse’s ­subsequent downfalls –​from abandoning Una in Archimago’s hermitage, to taking up with Duessa and being captured by Orgoglio, to the climatic encounter with Despair –​hinge on his failure to reconcile these seemingly contradictory positions, his inability, that is, to understand the links between those secular cravings and his providentially ordained imperatives. The structure of these links is revealed to Redcrosse at the House of Holiness, where he receives a paradoxical lesson in the moral necessity of the mutable body and its secular life. ‘What man is he’, asks Spenser rhetorically as he leads us into this space, ‘that boasts of fleshly might, /​And vaine assurance of mortality’ (I.x.1). It is not a rejection of the body per se, but of an ideology of magnificence that refuses to acknowledge the body’s susceptibility to pain and peril, a rejoinder echoed in that ‘godly Matrone’, Holinesse’s address to Redcrosse as ‘thou man of earth’ (I.x.52, 2).16 This space offers an object lesson that Max Weber describes as Luther’s revolutionary ‘valuation of the fulfillment of duty in worldly affairs as the highest form of moral activity which the individual could assume’.17 The episode’s culminating moment is the knight’s ascent with Contemplation to view the ‘new Hierusalem, that God has built /​For those to dwell in, that are chosen his, /​His chosen people purg’d from sinfull guilt’. Imaginatively juxtaposed against Redcrosse’s recollection of Cleopolis, this far-​away city is a place of wonder: Till now, said then the knight, I weened well, That great Cleopolis, where I haue beene, In which that fairest Faerie Queene doth dwell, The fairest Citie was, that might be seene; And that bright towre all built of christall cleene,

102

Spenser’s ethics

Panthea, seemd the brightest thing, that was: But now by proofe all otherwise I weene; For this great Citie that does far surpas, And this bright Angels towre quite dims that towre of glas.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

(I.x.58)

Beautiful as it may be, New Jerusalem is inaccessible. The ‘holy aged man’ who serves as Redcrosse’s guide informs him that ‘Cleopolis’ exists wholly for, and its moral forms limited to, the ‘earthly frame’. While he will, indeed, return one day to this heavenly city, that return will occur only after he has fulfilled his worldly obligations to Gloriana and removed his armor, ‘the suit of earthly conquest’. Emblazoned though it may be with a ‘bloudie Crosse … /​The deare remembrance of his dying Lord’, that armor grounds the knight’s agency strictly within the confines –​both material and metaphysical –​of the ‘bloudy field’ of worldly deeds. Recognizing that his way of life exposes him to the perils of ‘guilt … /​For bloud can nought but sin, & wars but sorrowes yield’, Redcrosse implores his guide to allow him to leave his wonted path. However, the knight is told that he must go back down the mountain and resume his quest. Redcrosse’s moral dilemma here is neither new nor unique. As Richard Kaeuper argues, the attempt to mediate such a tension was, in fact, at the core of chivalric ideology. ‘The problem arose’ Kaeuper argues when religious ideals threatened to invert or negate chivalry as a fierce warrior code. For the medieval European elite –​both lay and clerical –​the central question such inversion raised was stark: What had the religion of Christ to do with the worship of the demigod prowess in chivalric ideology? What result obtains when prowess confronts Christian caritas? Could broadswords –​even if directed by clerical voices –​carve a rough world into the shape described by the Beatitudes?18

Many of the individual knights Kaeuper describes in his study confront the exact kinds of self-​negating moral-​existential crises to which Redcrosse succumbs in the latter half of this book, practicing extreme forms of mortification and of renouncing the very body that is prowess’s material sign. Certainly, the individual fame and reward earned by the exercise of prowess is what drives Redcrosse from the outset, and in this he is not unlike

301

Magnificence

103

… all knights of noble name, That couet in th’immortall booke of fame To be eternized, that same to haunt, And doen their seruice to that soueraigne Dame, That glorie does to them for guerdon graunt:

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

(I.x.59, 4–​8)

While Redcrosse’s actions may seek to restore the Edenic frame, however, they are wholly secular in intention. The knight’s deeds are not oriented and authorized by a typological imagination of individual prowess as a repetition of Christ’s own militant incarnations (i.e. the Christ-​ as-​ jouster tradition taken up by Langland), but rather by his commanded and communal obligation to Gloriana, and by his very status as a mutable, embodied being determined by the vagaries of time and historical change. In a crucial moment for this story of secular agency, Redcrosse learns of his origins as he nears the end of his lesson in the House of Holiness, and just before descending from the mountain of contemplation: For well I wote, thou springst from ancient race Of Saxon kings, that haue with mightie hand And many bloudie battailes fought in place High reard their royall throne in Britane land, And vanquisht them, vnable to withstand: From thence a Faerie thee vnweeting reft, There as thou slepst in tender swadling band, And her base Elfin brood there for thee left. Such men do Chaungelings call, so chaungd by Faeries theft. Thence she thee brought into this Faerie lond, And in an heaped furrow did thee hyde, Where thee a Ploughman all vnweeting fond, As he his toylesome teme that way did guyde, And brought thee vp in ploughmans state to byde, Whereof Georgos he thee gaue to name; Till prickt with courage, and thy forces pryde, To Faery court thou cam’st to seeke for fame, And proue thy puissaunt armes, as seemes thee best became. (I.x.65–​66)

The product of historical tumult –​really, an icon of the transience of worldly goods and power, and of the conceptual and material

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

104

Spenser’s ethics

limits of the achievements of prowess –​Redcrosse is a changeling in both the technical and metaphysical senses. He is both a functional instance of the fairytale plot device of the human child stolen by fairies, and, more importantly, someone whose being is, in its every aspect, defined by change, decay, and the general condition of mutability. Establishing the paradigm of knightly action and identity that underwrites the rest of the poem, he is Georgos, of the earth, and that earth is the defining core of his ethos and sets the scope, intentions, and parameters of his moral agency. To recall the account of St. George in Spenser’s primary source, Caxton’s English translation of Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, it is the inhabitation of the mutable body in a condition of perpetual trial and labor that defines the conditions of moral life: ‘George is said of geos, which is as much to say as earth, and orge that is tilling. So George is to say as tilling the earth, that is his flesh’. At this moment of naming, Redcrosse learns something basic to the moral agenda of The Faerie Queene as a whole: the order of mutability –​life in its most basic, urgently felt biological realities and imperatives –​is our moral ontology. It is, in other words, the normative frame of reference by which moral action is comprehensible as such, and the very mode of existence within whose structures and processes the category of the moral as such, at least as we can understand, manifest, and experience it, is possible. Moral life, he is told, is a function of our labors and struggles in, and our pilgrimage through, the order of mutability. It is the mutable world –​both the tumultuous political present of human history and the metaphysically fallen timeframe of the postlapsarian era –​within which virtue takes shape, within whose parameters moral action can be understood as such, and from which, paradoxically, it derives its governing rules, principles, and imperatives. What holds true for individual moral actors also hold for the societies they fashion amongst themselves, a relation undergirding the poem’s basic imagination of magnificence. Before turning to Spenser’s exemplary agent of magnificence, Arthur, I would like to consider one more Elizabethan analogue which, if it does not explicitly name magnificence, nevertheless offers a crucial reflection on the political backdrop on which this account of virtue was unfolding: Sir Thomas Smith’s 1565 treatise De Republica Anglorum. This text, unpublished until 1583, is a study of English political life whose claims to offer a straightforwardly descriptive

501

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Magnificence

105

account of the political and juridical institutions of contemporary England are belied by the text’s incisive grappling with the theoretical foundations of civil life. Rather than shoehorning its image of the English commonwealth into an axiomatic image of philosophically or theologically derived first principles, Smith’s work took a rigorously and uniquely inductive accounting of its topic, rendering a vision of a polity whose underlying assumptions and normative principles were not shaped by metaphysically transcendent ideas, but driven by historically conditioned motivations and the material processes of social change. Although the text remained unpublished until a half decade after Spenser had left for Ireland, it nevertheless circulated in manuscript in the interim years, and, as a gloss to the ‘January’ eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender attests, found its way into Spenser’s hands at some point in the 1570s. That note pointedly recalls Spenser having discovered an obscure word in ‘the worthy Sir Tho. Smith in his booke of government: whereof I have perfect copie in wryting, lent me by his kinseman, and my verye singular good freend, M. Gabriel Harvey’.19 This book, as Smith was well aware, constituted a singular advance in the methodologies of what would one day come to be called the discipline of political science, avowedly departing from the proscriptive analytical model paradigmatic of so many contemporary humanist discourses on civil life. Instead, Smith sought to approach the present state of Tudor political life and organization in a rigorously descriptive manner. ‘I have declared summarily as it were in a chart or mappe’, he claims, ‘the forme and manner of the governement of Englande’, offering an account of contemporary governance that is in kind wholly unlike the ‘feigned common wealths such as never was nor never shall be’ of Plato, Xenophon, or More.20 Those works, he continues, are simply ‘vaine imaginations, phantasies of Philosophers’, and fashioned more ‘to occupy the time and exercise their wittes’ than to instruct their readers. In contrast to this model, he proposes to have given his readers an image of England as it ‘standeth and is governed at this day the xxviij of March Anno 1565’ (118).21 An exercise in ‘vaine imagination’ though his own poem may indeed be, Spenser seems to have imported some of this mimetic sensibility into his own construal of the commonwealth in The Faerie Queene. Writing to Sir Walter Raleigh, he argues that his poem embodies an image of government that does not, as it

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

106

Spenser’s ethics

does with the philosophers, stand in the unrealizable normativity of a utopia ‘as it should be’, but rather, whose mimesis’s imaginative and conceptual life stands in the commonwealth’s possible, achievable forms ‘as it might best be’.22 If Smith is avowedly a-​theoretical, or even antitheoretical, in his professed critical commitments, his account is nevertheless underwritten by a recurrent interest in the broader network of material causes shaping the forms of his political world. This explanatory imperative finds a particularly urgent etiological expression in his twentieth chapter, ‘Of Gentlemen’, in a passage whose imagery is suggestive of the image of the young Redcrosse being fashioned into a knight in the ‘Letter’: But as other common wealthes were faine to doe, so must all princes necessarily followe, that is, where vertue is to honour it: and although vertue of auncient race be earlier to be obtained, aswell by the example of the progenitors, which encourageth, as also through habilitie of education and bringing vp, which enableth, and the lastly enraced loue of tenāts & neybors to such noblemen and gentlemen, of whom they holde and by whom they doe dwell, which pricketh forward to ensue in their fathers steps. So it all this doe faile (as it were great pitie it should) yet such is the nature of all humaine thinges, and so the world is subiect to mutability, that it doth many times faile: but whē it doth, the prince and common wealth haue the same power that their predecessors had, and as the husbandmā hath to plant a new tree where the olde fayleth, so hath the prince to honour vertue where he doth finde it, to make gentlemen, esquiers, knights, barons, earles marquises & dukes, where he seeth vertue able to beare that honour or merits, and deserues it, & so it hath alwayes bin vsed among vs. But ordinarily the king doth only make knights and create barons or higher degrees: for as for gentlemen, they be made good cheape in England. For whosoeuer studieth the lawes of the realme, who studieth in the vniuersities, who professed liberall sciences, and to be shorte, who can liue idly and without manuall labour, and will beare the port, charge and countenaunce of a gentleman, he shall be called master, for that is the title which men giue to esquires and other gentlemen, and shall be taken for a gentleman.23

Such an account of the creation of new orders of gentlemen must have registered in significant ways with a poet whose professed ambition is to ‘fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous

701

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Magnificence

107

and gentle discipline’. Indeed, the lines could describe the carefully modulated ambiguity at the heart of Spenser’s claim about his poem’s ‘generall end’ by which the poet, through his poem, seeks not only to fashion a renewed class of virtuous civic agents, but to fashion himself a gentleman through a work he positions as fulfilling a lifetime of civic-​minded study and intellectual production. The passage’s attempt to explain the historical and metaphysical whys and wherefores of England’s unique system of making and unmaking the gentleman-​class redounds significantly to The Faerie Queene’s account of the creation of moral agency and to its confirmation in virtuous action –​be it in the poem’s images of knightly conquest in in the poem’s own material status as an instance, and icon, of its maker’s own productive civic life. The phenomenon that Smith describes is a manifestation of what has been basic grist for the twentieth-​century historiography of Tudor England. It is an icon variously of those social upheavals that Lawrence Stone described as a crisis of the aristocracy; and which Mervyn James documented in his account of the Henrician neutering of the hereditary system of honor; and which were reflected in that broader mode of political organization that Patrick Collinson termed the Tudor monarchical republic.24 Smith, unlike his modern successors in historiographical method, intuits a metaphysical explanation for the newfound fluidity in social hierarchy and civic agency, and in the state’s authority wholly to reconstitute an aristocratic class if the standing one, based in a hereditary ‘vertue of auncient race’, is failing in its civic obligations. The world, Smith reminds us, is subject to mutability, and so too are the social orders and systems that take shape within its confines. The image relies on a basic Boethian premise: the world and its inhabitants are helplessly subject to the fickle, ultimately mindless vagaries of the rota fortunae. Smith, however, diverges from that medieval Christian modulation of Stoic thought, which argues for a passive embrace of the buffeting of a seemingly irrational world, a world whose changes, in turn, are read as enigmatic signs of a generally inscrutable divine providence. Rather, for Smith, worldly mutability becomes an instigation to active, transformative action –​an instigation, that is, to what Spenser might describe as the practice of magnificence. The active, reformative civic agency that Smith describes is not the province of one individual, but rather is diffused across

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

108

Spenser’s ethics

the commonwealth among those who actively participate in, and advance, civil life and the general welfare. Confronted with failure, decay, and general instability in the social order, the commonwealth is endowed, through this binding principle of magnificence, with the capacity to generate a new civic class with which to sustain itself. The ‘prince and common wealth haue’, Smith argues, the power to identify those who are virtuous not by dint of birth –​a failed guarantor –​but by dint of their actions. In the process of reconstituting the social order, the prince works ‘to honour vertue where he doth finde it, to make gentlemen, esquiers, knights, barons, earles marquises & dukes, where he seeth vertue able to beare that honour or merits, and deserues it’.25 Such a prince, notably, is as much a synecdoche for the commonwealth as he is an independent agent in his own right. Smith organizes this account of the commonwealth’s transformative political agency around the image of the husbandsman and his well-​tended garden or orchard. In this figure, Smith depicts the renewable and renewed corporate body of the commonwealth endowed with a poetic capacity of creation, and the complex interactions between individual political agents and the collective body of the commonwealth.26 Shadowing its image of idealized pastoral innocence, of course, would be both the memory of the Henrician reconstitution of the aristocratic orders in the aftermath of the Wars of the Roses, and the present tensions in the upper echelons of English society between the ancient families and the more newly fashioned nobility. The garden metaphor thus articulates a basic presumption that what animates and necessitates, defines and authorizes political agency is the ontological condition of worldly mutability. Political order, and the agency that sustains it, is imagined as a process of ongoing resistance to the inevitable incursions of death, decay, entropy, and negative transformation imposed by a mode of existence defined by a tendency towards ruin. Smith’s analysis of the interactions of political orders and political action, of societies and the virtuous agents sustaining them, does not bemoan this mutable condition, nor does it attempt to imagine a social order that will eventually efface or transcend such perilous change. Rather, the transformations compelled by ‘the nature of all humaine thinges’ play crucial roles in the essential functions of civil life: shaping forms of social organization, determining and

901

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Magnificence

109

authorizing virtuous agency, activating the discriminations that allow us to make basic judgements between good and bad, and orienting the ends and ambitions of moral action and judgement. The passage raises questions aligning closely with Spenser’s critical project. How might we discover a normative moral order within a mutable world? How should we organize a moral life around principles that do not depend on effacing or ignoring the structures of life as it is, but which, in fact, derive their structuring principles from that very mode of being? And how might we define that life as good or whole in ways that are not dependent on structures that are inherently alien to its own native mode of being mutability itself a normative principle for human action and social organization? Among these very questions, The Faerie Queene sets out to construe mutability as a reference point for moral order, not in strictly negative terms as something to be resisted, overcome, or transcended, but as the very metaphysical foundation of human sociability. These questions center the legend of magnificence, a legend that Spenser does not give its own book, but which, in the person of Arthur, he allows to percolate through and across all the other legends, knitting them together in the conceptual trajectory mapped out in the ‘Letter of the Authours’, where Spenser claims that magnificence stands as the perfection of all the other virtues. This legend’s pivotal allegorical vision occurs in Book II.x when Arthur reads ‘a chronicle of Briton kings’ in Alma’s castle. Drawn largely from the historiographies of Holinshed, Monmouth, Hardyng, and Stow, it runs from a prehistory when Britain ‘was savage wildernesse, /​ Unpeopled, umannurd, unproud, unpraysd’ to the rise of Arthur’s father, Uther Pendragon. The interim between these two points is not smooth and untroubled, but riven with factionalism, internal strife, uncertainties of succession, and the inevitability of bad heirs. Painful as this history may appear, it does not qualify or repudiate the account’s underlying providentialist vision. Indeed, Spenser’s providentialism asserts itself in the fact that this is a narrative of perpetual struggle. Likewise, Arthur’s delighted response closely rewrites a pivotal moment in Virgil’s Aeneid, when Aeneas reads Rome’s future history of political strife on his new shield. Bolstering the claim in Spenser’s chronicle of Trojan descent, the allusion also positions Spenser as quite literally picking up where Virgil left off, imagining how the ethos –​both that of an empire and of an

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

110

Spenser’s ethics

individual agent of that empire –​is cultivated through a process of continued encounters with peril and adversity. And, as a retrospective response to Virgil, Arthur’s imperial vision is shadowed by the prospect of its own eventual failure and replacement. Alma’s chronicle describes historical emergence as a series of continual regressions back to, and upwellings of, that originary state of ‘savage wildernesse’ in the continually emergent social order of Britain. As am emblem of this process, the book itself closes mid-​story, a broken object in need of restoration. Stopping at the historical present, it reveals to Arthur the premise that such a breakdown is correctible only by the continuation of historical, nation-​building deeds: After him Vther, which Pendragon hight, Succeeding There abruptly it did end, Without full point, or other Cesure right, As if the rest some wicked hand did rend, Or th’Authour selfe could not at least attend To finish it: that so vntimely breach The Prince him selfe halfe seemeth to offend, Yet secret pleasure did offence empeach, And wonder of antiquitie long stopt his speach (II.x.68)

I imagine the antiquarian Spenser himself at this moment in a squint bit of self-​reflection on the reader and transcriber of ancient manuscripts who sadly, and with heightened longing, ponders the fate in time of so many texts now lost to the ‘untimely breach’ of bad scribes, exhausted authors, vandals, bookworms, rot, or fire –​to the vagaries of human and worldly mutability.27 Bart Van Es notes of that broken-​off narrative that just as ‘we exchange the mass of Stonehenge for a collection of papers’ and ‘the historical substance of both eludes us’, so, too, the wish-​fulfilling story proposed in that ‘ancient booke, hight Briton moniments’ of factious ‘regiments … reduced … to one mans governements’ falls apart under the strain of historical narrative and its account of the shape of human society under the regime of mutability (II.ix. 59 lines 6–​9).28 It is thus also easy to imagine Spenser writing these lines and pondering the fate of British history as a whole from the vantage point of the mid to late 1580s. England at the time is under constant threat from Spain, and Ireland is in a state of irresolvable crisis. Meanwhile, an ageing

111

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Magnificence

111

monarch without a clear heir is surrounded by an elderly and fast-​dying Privy Council, as tensions over questions of succession, international politics, and church authority intersect with an emergent power vacuum to create the factional rivalries that will soon be fully exposed in those coming years that Patrick Collinson termed the ‘nasty nineties’.29 Geographically and socially removed as he may have been from the heart of these crises, Spenser, even while writing his celebration of a providential Pax Elizabethiana, is too well aware of the history of states, and of the history of the Tudor monarchy itself, to be unaware of the fragility and contingency, the time-​boundedness and ultimate ephemerality, of his poem’s subject. These moments ask a basic question about the relationship between man-​made political orders and worldly mutability: in what ways do our social formations, and the actions bringing them into being, work variously to resist or accommodate the forces of time and change, the inevitability of loss, death, and decay? If the creation and expansion of empires is driven, as both Virgil and Ovid remind us, by a longing for an eternal political order, a dream of political life as an eternizing process, so the course of historical events never lets us forget the ways this is ultimately an exercise in wish-​fulfillment. Such concerns shaped a central line of Renaissance historiographical thought, and were taken up by Spenser in his Ruins of Time and his translation of du Bellay, Ruines of Rome. The answer that Spenser gleans from du Bellay’s Antiquitez in the Ruines of Rome –​as Thomas Greene argues, the animating conceit of Renaissance aesthetics writ-​large –​ is found in the notion of creative revivification.30 In this model of poesis, new poets (and the empires of which their works stand as both celebrations and confirmations) emerge, Phoenix-​like, from the ashes of old poets and those old poets empires, drawing both light and energy from the burning remains of the ancient world. Spenser’s engagement with this problem, however, gets to a question far more fundamental, for he considers the very basis of ethical life in the civil structures carved out within the residue of time’s inexorable work. How, he asks, might we render spaces of human flourishing in the mutable world? The eudaimonic icons of The Faerie Queene can thus be read as establishing a kind of continuum of human response to the conditions of change. On the one side are those places fatalistically yielding to it. Such, for instance, is the Bower of Bliss with its

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

112

Spenser’s ethics

illusory retreat into a perpetual springtime, or Proserpina’s garden with its suicidal hastening of time’s effects. On the other side are those sites shaped by a generative and productive engagement with time and change. Among these is the ‘verdant gras’ where Arthur has his dream of Gloriana, which drives him forth into the mutable world ‘with labor, and long tyne’ to fulfill his procreant destiny (I ix.14–​15); the postlapsarian Garden of Eden where Redcrosse battles the dragon, not to eliminate sin from the world, but to open space for him ‘to serve againe his soveraine Elfin Queene’ (II.i.1, 6); and above all, the Gardens of Adonis, that paradise haunted by a deathly agent of time. Each of these moments reflects a broad attempt to render something like an ethics –​and a general vision of moral agency and of civil life –​that pursues its normative senses of order, paradoxically, in the processes and energies of mutability. All are organized around the notion that sites of death, loss, and decay –​be it a broken-​off manuscript, or the human body, or a civilization –​are not absolute breaks and endpoints, but rather are instigations, sites of renewal, and sources of energy. Arthur does not regard the ‘untimely breach’ confronting him at the end of the British chronicle as a source of despair. Rather, it provokes in him a ‘secret pleasure’ in the ‘wonder of antiquity’ visible in these pages. He is ‘ravisht with delight’ to learn of the ‘commun breath and nouriture’ that has given him all his good and all he has. The moment explicitly echoes Arthur’s recollection to Una of his dream encounter with Gloriana in Book I. Each of these definitional moments in Arthur’s journey towards magnificence deploy the same language of affective and physical response, share an interrupted ending, and inspire the compulsion to keep moving forward in the face of that interruption. Awaking and finding ‘her place deuoyd, /​And nought but pressed gras, where she had lyen’, he …sorrowed all so much, as earst I ioyd, And washed all her place with watry eyen. From that day forth I lou’d that face diuine; From that day forth I cast in carefull mind, To seeke her out with labour, and long tyne, And neuer vow to rest, till her I find, Nine monethes I seeke in vaine yet ni’ll that vow vnbind. (I.ix.15)

311

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Magnificence

113

As the convergence of Arthur’s ‘labour, and long tyne’ with a nine-​month quest to find his lover reminds us, the minimal unit of moral life in The Faerie Queene is the procreant couple. In that pairing, the expansive and generative process of procreation reveals itself as an aspect of, and metaphor for, imperial expansion. It is the smallest, yet in many ways the most pressing, fundamental, and necessary expression of what Spenser understands as magnificence: the intersection of ethical, poetic, and political imperatives to collaborative self-​extension into generative and expansive communities across historical time and geographic place.

Notes 1 Spenser, ‘A Letter’, p. 716. 2 See Schmitt, The Aristotelian Tradition and John Case and Aristotelianism, and Feingold, ‘The Humanities’. 3 Hugh Maclachlan, ‘ “In the Person of Prince Arthur”: Spenserian Magnificence and the Ciceronian Tradition’, University of Toronto Quarterly 46.2 (1977), 125–​46. 4 Maclachlan, ‘In the Person’, p. 141. 5 Christine M. Korsgaard, ‘Aristotle’s Function Argument’, in The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reason and Moral 50; Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 129–​ quote, p. 147. 6 Sir Ernst Gombrich, ‘The Early Medici as Patrons of Art’, in Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1966), pp. 35–​57. 7 A.D. Fraser Jenkins, ‘Cosimo de’ Medici’s Patronage of Architecture and the Theory of Magnificence’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 33 (1970), 162–​170, quote, 162. 8 Peter Howard, ‘Preaching Magnificence in Renaissance Florence’, Renaissance Quarterly 61.2 (2008), 325–​69 and Creating Magnificence in Renaissance Florence (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). 9 Mack, ‘Informal Ethics’, pp. 189–​214. 10 Beth Quitslund, The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–​1603, St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008) offers the essential account of the general cultural significance of the Sternhold Hopkins Psalter in Tudor England, and especially its role in shaping the cultures of Elizabethan Protestantism.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

114

Spenser’s ethics

11 Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins, et. al., The whole booke of psalms (London: 1565), p. 10 and p. 49. 12 William Painter, Delectable demaundes, and pleasaunt questions, with their seuerall aunswers, in matters of loue, naturall causes, with morall and politique deuises (London, 1566), pp. 83–​89. 13 Richard Mulcaster, Positions wherin those primitiue circumstances be examined, which are necessarie for the training up of children, either for skill in their booke, or health in their bodie (London, 1581), p. 216. 14 Robert Copland, Shepardes Kalendar, p. 113. (London, 1570). 15 Copland, Shepardes Kalendar, p. 120. 16 On Redcrosse’s emergent recognition of bodily vulnerability as a centering locus of moral awareness, see Joseph Campana, The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2012), pp. 47–​74. 17 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner & Sons, 1958), p. 80. 18 Richard Kaeuper, Holy Warriors: The Religious Ideology of Chivalry (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), p. 6. 19 Edmund Spenser, ‘January’, in Edmund Spenser: The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard A. McCabe (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 38. 20 Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum (London, 1583), p. 118. 21 Smith, De Republica, p. 118. 22 Spenser, ‘A Letter’, p. 716. 23 Smith, De Republica, p. 27. 24 Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–​ 1641 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965); Mervyn James, ‘English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485–​ 1642’, in Society, Politics, and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 308–​ 415; Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, in Elizabethan Essays (London: The Hambledon Press, 1994), pp. 31–​57. 25 Smith, De Republica, p. 27. 26 On Smith and the idea of corporation, see Henry Turner, Corporate Commonwealth and Phil Withington, ‘Plantation and Civil Society’ cited in Chapter 2. 27 Spenser explicitly locates himself in such a moment in the Mutability Cantos when he invites the reader to seek out Alain de Lille’s De Planctu Naturae, the lost-​to-​Spenser source of his own source in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowles. 28 Bart van Es, Spenser’s Forms of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 47.

511

Magnificence

115

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

29 On factional politics in the latter years of Elizabeth’s reign, see Hammer, Polarisation, and Alexandra Gadja, The Earl of Essex and Late Elizabethan Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 30 Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

4 The metaphysics of moral being: Time, change, and flourishing in the Gardens of Adonis The Faerie Queene’s pivotal account of human flourishing, the Gardens of Adonis, is where magnificence finds its home, and in this space, Spenser offers readers an image of that virtue’s deepest metaphysical underpinnings and material ambitions. Here, Spenser gives us his fullest imagination of the mimetic body of this poem writ large, a densely figured vision of the sphere of human action in historical time, a site of infinitely expansive generation both animated by, and imaginatively resisting, the depredations of time and historical progress. This space, in which perpetually entangled cycles of growth and decay fuel a ceaseless plenitude of expansive and outwardly mobile forms, construes as its central object of moral analysis an understanding of the ways mortal bodies within the order of mutability might become instrumentalized as moral agents. It is a vision of the formal transactions between being itself and moral agency most explicitly rendered in the cycles of material becoming which find their iconic myth in the closing vision of Adonis, the ‘father of all forms’. The Gardens of Adonis offer an idiosyncratic and enigmatic rehearsal of the locus amoenus topos. Whereas more conventional garden retreats temporarily suspend the knowledge of death, Spenser’s earthly paradise explicitly confronts its inhabitants with the inescapable fact of their mortality. Rather than offering an escape from the burdens of temporality, it is a place where all things go to die. Haunting this Garden is that ‘great enimy’, …wicked Tyme: who, with his scyth addrest, Does mow the flowring herbes and goodly things, And all their glory to the ground downe flings,

711

The metaphysics of moral being

117

Where they do wither, and are fowly mard: He flyes about, and with his flaggy winges, Beats down both leaues and buds without regard, Ne ever pitty may relent his malice hard.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

(III.vi.39)

‘But were it not’, Spenser continues, making conditional the Garden’s eudaimonic vision, ‘that Time their troubler is, /​All that in this delightful Gardin grows, /​Should happy bee, and have immortall Bliss’ (III.vi.41). And yet this space, without any sort of irony, guile, or pretense, offers itself up as a cosmography and metaphysics of the human good. Indeed, at the very moment Spenser undercuts one notion of flourishing as counterfactual fantasy, he offers an alternative, and quite literal image of flourishing, as we are shown flowers invested with a form of eternal life that stands within this Garden’s cycle of decay and renewal: There is continuall Spring, and haruest there Continuall, both meeting at one tyme: For both the boughes do laughing blossoms beare, And with fresh colours deck the wanton Pryme, And eke at once the heavenly trees they clyme, Which seeme to labour under their fruites lode: The whiles the ioyous birdes make their pastyme Emongst the shady leaues, their sweet abode, And their trew loues without suspition tell abrode. (III.vi.42)

The temporal convergence imagined in this vision of trees inhabiting the complete and coextensive cycle of generation, simultaneously flowering and bearing ripened fruit, is rhetorically highlighted by the chiasmus that is enjambed across the stanza’s opening two lines, as well as the paratactic construction (‘there is … and … both … For both … And with … And eke … The whiles … And their’) in which all logical and temporal priority is suspended. In both constructions, Spenser effaces the temporal flow of the stanza’s unfolding, collapsing it into a unitary time-​ scheme where we can imagine all its temporal, spatial, and conceptual oppositions ‘meeting at one time’. Of course, all of this is a kind of rhetorical trompe l’oeil, an illusion within the insistent and complex structure of temporality that this stanzaic form unfolds. The drama and conceptual force of this moment stands in this tension between a

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

118

Spenser’s ethics

rhetorical illusion and the actual movement of words and lines, between a fiction of timelessness and the expressive medium into which it is projected, a stanzaic form that is as potent an index of poetry’s temporal life as has ever been conceived.1 The tensions between fictions of transcendence and an ontology defined by temporal and material boundedness playing out in this stanza’s formal workings are echoed in its vision of a perpetual cycle of abundance in which the generation of flowers extends itself into the erotic and procreant life of birds. Those birds’ suspicion-​free amours obliquely figure an ideal form of human courtship and courtiership which is overlaid onto, and its mythography thus only comprehensible in terms of, a garden whose flowers are mowed down by Time’s scythe. The vision’s attendant spirit –​Flora, Venus Generatrix –​stands helpless before a force more real and more vital than she. In her fictionality, in the ways she is simply a personified fantasy of a perfected form of natural existence, Venus’s agency is wholly constrained, ‘For all that liues is subiect to that law: /​All things decay in time, and to their end doe draw’ (III.vi.40, 8–​9). Spenser, in one of his characteristic representational strategies, offers two alternative perspectives from which to regard the same basic problem. On the one hand is the vision of this life-​cycle from the perspective of an idealizing myth, which sees only death, decay, and destruction. On the other is the perspective afforded by the point of view from within the processes of generation, which sees a radical superabundance. The focal point out of which these two perspectives unfold and back onto which they thus always converge is a pit of generation and destruction underlying and animating the Garden: For in the wide wombe of the world there lyes, In hateful darknes, and in deep horrore, An huge eternal Chaos, which supplyes The substaunces of natures fruitfull progenyes. All things from thence doe their first being fetch, And borrow matter, whereof they are made; Which, whenas forme and feature it does ketch, Becomes a body, and doth then inuade The state of life, out of the griesly shade That substaunce is eterne, and bideth so; Ne when the life decayes, and forme does fade,

911

The metaphysics of moral being

119

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Doth it consume, and into nothing goe, But chaunged is, and often altred to and froe. The substaunce is not chaungd, nor altered, But th’ only forme and outward fashion; For every substaunce is conditioned To chaunge her hew, and sondry formes to don, Meet for her temper and complexion. For formes are variable and decay By course of kinde, and by occasion; And that fair flowre of beautie fades away, As doth the lilly fresh before the sunny ray. (III.vi.36–​38)

While much has been said about the philosophical and theological sources of these lines, their ultimate metaphysical significance rests in a more basic and material fact: this allegorization of the idea of matter is a compost pit. And, as Spenser reminds us, all gardens and all materialized forms of the good life ultimately depend on compost. In a letter first published in 1643, one of Spenser’s earliest interpreters, Sir Kenelm Digby, regretfully noted that this was a poet who, although ‘thoroughly verst in the Mathematicall Sciences, in Philosophy, and in Divinity’, generally shied away from overt metaphysical speculations, and who would only occasionally ‘glance at the profoundest notions that any Science can deliver us, and then on a sudden (as it were) recalling himself out of an Enthusiasme, he returns to the gentle Relation of the Allegoricall History’.2 For Digby, these key departures into Platonizing metaphysics were the few moments when the poem turned its attention away from earthly concerns and towards transcendent visions of immutable forms. Those moments Digby privileges are, in fact the actual aberrations from the poem’s truest metaphysical vision which finds its fullest articulation in these stanzas describing the generative core of the Gardens of Adonis. In simplest terms, Spenser here describes the matter out of which this place is made, how that matter becomes form, the ends towards which those forms are directed, and, most importantly, the inter-​relations between matter, forms, and ends. As the Garden generates its ‘infinite shapes’, its constructive process does not graft its forms onto a matter generated ex nihilo, but one which is pre-​existent and eternal. The matter out of which all

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

120

Spenser’s ethics

bodies are created when it collides with forms is simply borrowed by those forms as they pass by, in provisional and transitory fashion, into ‘state of life’; in death, the matter out of which bodies are made does not fade away into nothingness, but is broken down into its most basic and elemental substance. This substance provides an eternal and inalterable set of materials that constitute the foundations of new life and new forms. Spenser’s language here is broadly Aristotelian, drawing on his account of the relationship of ‘first matter’ to nature in Book 5 of Metaphysics. If the vocabulary framing this pit of form’s encounter with substance is generally Aristotelian, however, this is not to say that he presents a doctrinaire account of Aristotelian thought. Indeed, Spenser’s handling of the technical vocabulary here is notoriously imprecise. On the one hand, this is broadly in keeping with his poetic practice. He is simply no Dante or Cavalcanti, Donne or Milton when it comes to making effective poetic hay out of rigorous interrogations of philosophical concepts. On the other hand, Spenser’s seeming confusion on the specific natures and various interactions of matter, substance, and form simply reflects the often-​ divergent, even contradictory ways in which Aristotle himself discussed these topics. These confusions were only amplified in the late classical, medieval, and renaissance responses and commentaries through which Aristotle was synthesized and mediated in subsequent centuries and which fundamentally shaped Spenser’s encounter with Aristotelian thought during his time at Cambridge. Indeed, much of Spenser’s handling of moments like this may be read as a product of this university culture, and of the ways half-​heard or half-​interested-​in snippets getting transcribed into a commonplace book or lodged, perhaps faultily, into the memory and were dredged up for later use. Yet this assimilative process was not something of which Spenser was unconscious. If anything, Spenser would have recognized and embraced this aspect of his formal education as an incarnation and instance of the kind of aesthetics of copiousness, layered allusion, and dilation that shapes his entire ouvre from The Shepheardes Calender to the View to The Faerie Queene itself.3 The play of philosophical terminology in these stanzas reflects the kind of textual and conceptual bricolage that for Spenser embodies the very history of ideas and texts out of

121

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The metaphysics of moral being

121

which his poem is built. Here, often competing versions of Aristotle and his later mediations are not harmoniously synthesized, but eclectically intermixed with bits of Lucretian materialism, various Neoplatonisms, and the ideas of St. Augustine, among others. Far more so than any particular school of thought, individual author, or specific metaphysical idea, the eclecticism is the point. The image self-​ reflexively figures on the ways this poem appropriates and marshals its own sources, the ‘fruitfull soyle of old’ from which its forms emerge. It extends the metaphor of the compost pit from the poem’s relationship to its source material to Spenser’s own temporal relationship, as a poet, to the line of ‘antique poets historicall’ listed in the ‘Letter of the Authours’. As Spenser delves deeper into this space’s inner workings, his descriptive vocabulary seems to shift between different accounts of the relationship between matter, form, body, and substance. Initially, he appears to follow the model established in Aristotle’s account in Metaphysics which holds that substance is a synthesis of matter with form.4 Yet this notion is rejected by Spenser’s declaration that such a synthesis does not produce substance, but bodies. Spenser clarifies himself in the next line: in his metaphysics, matter and substance are synonymous, and both are ways of describing what Spenser terms ‘first being’, while, indeed, it is the body that is the product of matter’s encounter with form. Bodies, in turn, are animated and made meaningful by substance, just as they give an otherwise inert substance instrumental agency in the world. The imaginative articulation of substance we see here is rooted in the Greek, ousia, or being, as ‘All things from thence’, both the space as a whole but also substance itself, ‘do their first being fetch’; it is also, and in the most literal way possible, a reflection of the word substance’s Latin etymology as something that exists beneath or below. If, however, forms stand above substance in terms of spatial orientation, in the hierarchical continuum of metaphysical being Spenser establishes, forms are subordinate to substance. Unlike substance, which is here endowed with eternal and immutable existence, Spenser’s forms are not the perfected conceptual entities imagined by Plato. Emblematized in the final two lines’ rehearsal of that basic poetic conceit of temporal loss and fading form, the dying flower, they are ‘variable and decay’.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

122

Spenser’s ethics

Spenser describes his life-​giving substance as ‘first being’, both a universal source and an ontology in its most elemental form. Importantly, Spenser explicitly rejects the idea that this is either the unitary prime matter postulated in post-​Aristotelian commentary on Metaphysics or the atoms of Lucretian matter. Rather, Spenserian substance is infinitely multiple and its endless variations are themselves subject to assuming a variety of forms. Lucretius offers an instructive analogy, for Spenser is clearly thinking about the Roman materialist when constructing this space where meaning and vitality are, indeed, imagined as an upwelling from the depths of matter. In Book V of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius describes a crucial antecedent to Spenser’s imagination of this space: …whatever the earth feeds and grows Is restored to earth. And since she surely is The womb of all things and their common grave, Earth must dwindle, you see, and take on growth again.5

While Spenser invokes the same surface-​level mechanics and the same imagery as his Roman predecessor in poetic cosmogony, the underlying conception of this space’s material life is radically different than Lucretius’s.6 Lucretius imagines the womb-​world’s life and death cycle occurring among essentially inert atoms, all comprised of the same stuff, all colliding in accidental ways to create organizations of stuff whose meanings are arbitrary beyond the (ultimately contingent and temporary) formal coherence they manifest. These structures, in turn, can be broken down and reformulated in any number of ways that have no formal or causal relation to those individual atoms. While Spenser’s substance is itself immutable and eternal, it is radically unlike Lucretius’s in two specific ways. ‘For every substaunce is conditioned’, Spenser argues in the first case, ‘To chaunge her hew, and sondry formes to don, /​Meet for her temper and complexion’ (III.vi.38). That ‘every’ is no accident; if Spenser tends to be philosophically imprecise, this is not one of those instances –​even if he had only been paying partial attention during those lectures on metaphysics at Cambridge, the question of the unity or diversity of substance would not have escaped notice. Spenser’s substance is clearly diverse. The second crucial point of departure from Lucretius –​and here he closely adheres to an Aristotelian position –​rests in Spenser’s argument

321

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The metaphysics of moral being

123

that these substances are endowed with individual reasons and essences that seek expression in form. They are ‘conditioned’ to express themselves in particular varieties of forms. Forms, in turn, are articulations of the essential nature or meaning of a substance. Matter is meaningful, and so are the cycles of decay and generation sustained within it. Indeed, Spenser’s account of a pit of unitary, singular, and arbitrary matter –​the gold mine in Mammon’s grotto in Book II of The Faerie Queene –​construes such an ideal as frozen, deathly, static, and entropic. What, then, is the occulted meaning of this mobile, transformative, and endlessly expansive matter? A basic answer to this question can be found by venturing for a spell beyond the organic life-​cycle myth of the Gardens of Adonis, and into the accounts of decay and generation occurring in Spenser’s images of rivers and floods. Spenser’s muddy, ‘rutty’ river bank in Prothalamion is an emblem of time, life, and art converging and sustaining one another within the order of mutability. This mythic image of the Thames makes the river a site of generative promise which not only sustained the growth of his own Cleopolis, London, but which carries its nation-​building heroes like Essex out into the world on imperial conquests. While the Thames’ brackish tidal waters may not sustain plants, they offered the poet an allegorically heightened image of what the fertile flood plains of the rivers that fed into the Thames upriver symbolized (an image that stands as the central mythic tableaux of Book IV of The Faerie Queene): imperial fruitfulness, of a nascent English empire and its living agents teeming and emerging from the riverbank, coalescing into common cause, and following its tide out into the wide world beyond so ‘great Elisae’s glorious name may ring /​Through al the world’.7 Early in the Gardens of Adonis canto, Spenser imagines just such a riverbank, one located more squarely in the provinces of myth and fiction than in the historical and political present of a marriage procession of a sought-​after patron’s children on the Thames: Miraculous may seeme to him, that reades So straunge ensample of conception; But reason teacheth that the fruitful seades Of all things living, thro impression Of the sunbeames in moist complexion, Do life conceive, and quickned are by kynd:

124

Spenser’s ethics

So after Nilus’ inundation, Infinite shapes of creatures men do fynd, Informed in the mud, on which the Sunne hath shynd.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

(III.vi.8)

If Spenser is thinking about the Nile as a kind of prefiguration of the Thames, it is perhaps in terms of Herodotus, whose Histories describe the Nile and its annual flood as the source and continued sustenance of the Egyptian civilization. Herodotus, as Richard McCabe suggests, informs much of Spenser’s thinking about the inter-​relations of history and culture (and specifically, about cultural difference in the context of Ireland).8 In Herodotus’s account, that gift is at one and the same time both the physical matter of alluvial deposits, and the civilization and culture built on and sustained by that fertile ground of which the flood is a kind of metonymy. Any particular engagements with the historical Nile, however, are governed by mythopoetic imperatives, and any reading of Herodotus here is chiefly run though the myth-​making filter of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, the first book of which describes that ancient river as a site of primal generation. Inflecting Spenser’s sense of the Nile as the historical and natural foundation of an imperial civilization is the account of the Nile as an icon of biogenesis in its most primal form. Ovid’s image offers, perhaps, the central intertext for the entire image of the Garden. In Arthur Golding’s Elizabethan translation (printed in 1567) of the passage into English fourteeners, Ovid’s Latin hexameters sound as follows: The lustie earth of owne accorde soone after forth did bring, According to their sundrie shapes eche other living thing, Assoone as that the moysture once caught heate against the Sunne, And that the fat and slimie mud in moorish groundes begunne To swell through warmth of Phebus beames, and that the fruitfull seede Of things well cherisht in the fat and lively soyle indeede, As in their mothers wombe, began in length of time too grow, To one or other kinde of shape wherein themselves to show. Even so when that the seven mouthed Nile the watrie fieldes forsooke, And to his auncient chanell eft his bridled streames betooke, So that the Sunne did heate the mud, the which he left behinde, The husbandmen that tilde the ground, among the cloddes did finde, Of sundrie creatures sundrie shapes: of which they spied some Even in the instant of their birth but newly then begonne,

521

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The metaphysics of moral being

125

And some unperfect wanting brest or shoulders in such wise, That in one bodie oftentymes appeared to the eyes One halfe thereof alyve too bee, and all the rest beside Both voyde of lyfe and seemely shape, starke earth to still abyde. For when that moysture with the heate is tempred equally, They doe conceyve, and of them twaine engender by and by All kinde of things. For though that fire with water aye debateth Yet moysture mixt with equall heate all living things createth. And so those discordes in their kinde, one striving with the other, In generation doe agree and make one perfect mother. And therefore when the mirie earth bespred with slimie mud Brought over all but late before by violence of the flud, Caught heate by warmnesse of the Sunne and culmenesse of the skie: Things out of number in the worlde, forthwith it did applie. Whereof in part the like before in former times had bene, And some so straunge and ougly shapes as never erst were sene.9

Golding’s conversational-​sounding English lines anticipate Spenser not only in tone, but also in its vocabulary, animating the processes of creation with verbs like ‘caught’, ‘accord’, and ‘tempered’. Yet Spenser is also clearly drawing on the conceptual richness and metaphysical rigor of Ovid’s poetry which Golding’s translation simply cannot replicate. Ovid, of course, is in explicit conversation both with Lucretius and a wider range of Greek materialist philosophies (and Herodotus), and it is through the lens of Ovid’s account, and its metaphysically specific language, that Spenser’s image of the teeming Nile is linked to the Garden of Adonis’s centering womb. The Latin poem describes the river in terms that are unmistakably echoed in Spenser’s pit of substance: it is a ‘semina rerum’ and ‘matris’ in which both ancient and never-​before-​seen are engendered, ‘partimque figuras /​rettulit antiquas, partim nova monstra creavit’ (Met. 1, 419–​37). Crucially, and in the context of how Spenser would have received these lines through the filter of the tradition of allegorizing mythographic commentary, this is the story of a second, post-​deluvian creation. It was a commonplace in this interpretive tradition to link Ovid’s tale to the story of Noah’s flood in the book of Genesis. Golding himself reminds his readers of the connection when, in introducing the tale of Deucalion and Phyrra from which this image develops, he suggests the ‘Poet … in fablying wyse dooth make /​It happen in Deucalions tyme, who reignd in Thessaly /​Eyght hundred winters since Noyes flood’

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

126

Spenser’s ethics

(Epistle, 498–​502). An echo of Noah’s flood itself, in Golding’s words, the ‘universall flood’, Spenser’s Nile imagines the reconstitution of life and society in some redemptive form after the (second) Fall. This is a paradise not fashioned for an originary blessed state, but one suited for life as it stands in the fallen present; it concerns the nature of flourishing not in its ideal forms but ‘as it might best be’ in our mutable reality.10 The word ‘complexion’ links these two accounts of a generative superabundance emerging out of decaying, organic muck as the organizing principle of a mutable-​yet-​flourishing life. Spenser does not use the word ‘complexion’ very often in his poetry, yet he is putting real pressure on it in the Gardens of Adonis, for the ‘moist complexion’ of these lines, which bears the primary sense of humoral mixture, is echoed in that pit of substance in which ‘every substaunce is conditioned /​To chaunge her hew, and sondry formes to don, /​Meet for her temper and complexion’, in which the word takes on a distinctly ethical cast as substance’s character, its innate quality or temperament seeking actualization in form. Echoing off this new and enlarged sense of ‘complexion’, form is depicted as the expression and material fulfillment of an intrinsic quality, the character or excellence of classical virtue ethics. Yet the ethical story the lines construe is ambiguously doubled, even self-​contradictory. On the one hand, if we read the lines as arguing that the temper and complexion of substance finds its true expression in the act of metamorphosis itself, we get something like a metaphysics of the protean ethos of the Renaissance courtesy book. On the other hand, the phrase ‘Meet for her temper and complexion’ also imagines a mode of disciplining, tempering, and interpreting substances which would otherwise be wild, inchoate, and obscure. The Latin complexio, as a simple descriptor, conveys something essential of the formal and mimetic structure not only of these lines, in particular, but also of Spenser’s poem as a whole –​it means enfolded, intertwined, encircled, and interlaced. Furthermore, the word ‘complexion’ would have a distinctly rhetorical resonance for Spenser. Complexio is described by Puttenham (who uses its Greek name, symploke) as the backwards-​glancing and self-​reflexive ‘figure of replie’, a figure by which a poem generates itself anew out of the residue of its own prior moments.11 Complexio, as such, can be read as something like the master trope of the entire episode.

721

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The metaphysics of moral being

127

Such doubling is picked up in the copula, ‘is’ in the line ‘For every substaunce is conditioned’, which shapes a characteristically Spenserian ambiguity. An allegory is typically construed as arraying its meanings in hierarchical fashion along a vertical axis with layered accretions of formally analogous significance (such as Dante describes in his letter to Cangrande, or medieval exegetical practices in general). However, the polysemy of Spenserian allegory often as not works across a horizontal axis and is activated not by formal analogy or symmetry but by grammatical ambiguity. To evoke an image from Spenserian narrative, the poet deploys grammar (and often in tension with stanzaic form –​line breaks, caesuras, enjambments, etc.) to render a fork in the forest path. However, these forks do not take us down wholly divergent roads, but, in their very structuring of difference from a common point of origin, reveal how these ostensibly discrete ideas or entities lend shape, support, and semantic clarity to one another. This is one of those moments. On the one hand, the line’s ‘is’ can mean that part of the substance’s pre-​existent temper. In this sense, its teleologically oriented makeup finds expression both in specific forms and in the very capacity for formal change. On the other, it can mean that within the agental force and the shaping interventions of this womb, inert substance is worked in such a way that it is prepared to assume new form, and made capable, as well, of a kind of generative and recuperative mutability. In teasing out the distinction between the substance’s inherent condition and the conditioning it undergoes within the womb, Spenser’s metaphysics engage with the doctrine of seminal reasons. This is a theory of the meaning of matter, and of reconciling the evident mutability and evolutionary qualities of worldly matter with the doctrine of divine creation and perfection. With roots in ancient Stoicism and Neoplatonism, the idea flourished in Christian metaphysics’ interest in the dialectical relation of Word to world, manifested in both the originary and complete moment at the inauguration of time and as allegorically occulted Word-​ world inter-​relation unfolding in the emergence of historical time. In simplest terms, seminal reasons are the lingering traces of divine creative agency and intelligence that remain in the material world. All matter, as divinely created and as an aspect of divine will and reasoning, is endowed in some way with these traces. These traces,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

128

Spenser’s ethics

or seeds (logos spermatokos in Greek, and semina ratione in Latin), are potentialities –​they are the germs of forms that are, as yet, unknown. In the emergence and evolution of these new forms, God’s creative agency is made legible. Spenser’s garden of seminal reasons follows a line of thought through Sts. Bonaventure and Aquinas back to Augustine which regards the evolutionary and emergent process of forms in the mutable world as a kind of allegorical exfoliation of God’s organizing providential plan. The image thus serves as a kind of poetic self-​corrective, hearkening back to and granting a redemptive perspective on, an earlier invocation of that same Nile flood: As when old father Nilus gins to swell With timely pride above the Aegyptian vale, His fattie waves do fertile slime outwell, And overflow each plaine and lowly dale: But when his later spring gins to avale, Huge heapes of mudd he leaves, wherein there breed Ten thousand kindes of creatures, partly male And partly female of his fruitfull seed; Such ugly monstrous shapes elsewhere may no man reed. (I.i.21)

These lines describe the monster-​breeding gore spilling from Error’s corpse after she is slain by Redcrosse early in Book I. At this moment, Redcrosse unwittingly assumes error as his basic interpretive stance, and the simile, if we read it retrospectively through its repetition in the Gardens of Adonis, is iconic of a basic interpretive error. It is a misreading of mutability as monstrosity, as well as of the very idea of monstrosity and the grotesque, for it forgets St. Augustine’s reminder that monsters (monstra) are demonstrations (monstrare) of God’s creative power.12 William Oram notes that Spenser’s ‘poem tends to develop its philosophic materials through mythic tableaux, not reasoned argument’ and, indeed, the Gardens of Adonis gives us this structural account of the generative encounter of form and substance with its explicatory myth several stanzas later in the emblematic account of Venus hovering over the body of Adonis:13 There wont fair Venus often to enioy Her dear Adonis ioyous company, And reape sweet pleasure of the wanton boy;

921

The metaphysics of moral being

129

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

There yet, some say, in secret he does ly, Lapped in flowres and pretious spycery, By her hid from the world, and from the skill Of Stygian Gods, which doe her loue enuy; But she her selfe, when euer that she will, Possesseth him, and of his sweetnesse takes her fill. And sooth it seemes they say: for he may not For ever dye, and ever buried bee In balefull night, where all thinges are forgot; All be he subiect to mortalitie, Yet is eterne in mutabilitie, And by succession made perpetuall Transformed oft, and chaunged diuerslie: For him the Father of all formes they call; Therefore needs mote he liue, that liuing giues to all. (III.vi.46–​47)

C.S. Lewis was pained by Spenser’s ‘defiance of all tradition’ in identifying Venus with form and Adonis with matter, rather than the other way around, and attempts to solve the paradox with his own pained dive into sources and analogues.14 I think, however, that Spenser’s answer is rather more straightforward in its defiance than Lewis allows in his attempting to reconcile the circle of Spenser’s poem with the normative square of intellectual history. Spenser’s initial gambit has to do with the idea of poetic representation itself. It is worth recalling two crucial moments in his ‘Letter of the Authours’. First is the idea that Spenser’s allegory is intentionally obscurantist –​things are ‘clowdily enwrapped’ in its ‘darke conceit’. By this, I think he means something along the lines of what the Russian formalists would later describe as the effects of ‘roughening’ or ‘defamiliarization’ that poetic metaphor has on language. Spenser is, indeed, trying to unsettle our sense of the familiar here. But to what end? Part of the answer to that question, I believe, lies in Spenser’s argument that poetry’s moral efficacy –​and its superiority as a mechanism of ethical instruction over philosophy –​depends on its capacity to describe things ‘as they might best be’ rather than, as in philosophy, ‘as they should be’. For what else is Spenser describing in this Garden but forms of life as they might best be within the temporal constraints of the mutable world? What is he trying to imagine, that is, but a form of flourishing that understands the very notion of ‘should’ in all its static and normative idealism as an illusory and pain-​inducing counterfactual?

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

130

Spenser’s ethics

Spenser’s inversion of mythographic convention may initially seek to jolt us out of the too-​ easy consolations of our mythic reveries. His ambitions, however, are much larger than this, for he is ultimately creating a new kind of myth and new kind of explanatory fiction in order to describe the essential crux of moral life as he understands it –​rendering forms of flourishing within the material facts of time, death, and decay. Adonis, in some basic way, represents the instrumentalization of the organic body’s substance; he depicts death’s conversion into the infinite potentiality of a form-​making life. And the question of the instrumental life of the body –​how bodies, in their deathly and temporal status become procreant, generative, and expansive forms of life –​stands as the ethical core of this poem and its account of human flourishing in the broadest sense. This question of the mortal body’s agency animates the Gardens of Adonis’s most significant ethical paradox. In a poem whose ostensible objective is the celebration of a militant, masculinist, and aggressive form of political life, Adonis, a passive and disarmed man, one uniquely and necessarily vulnerable to his own mortality, and susceptible to his own physiological weaknesses, is a paradoxical center animating the poem’s foundational image of the human good. Joseph Campana argues that Adonis, as such, is the culminating emblem of an ethics which makes ‘vulnerability –​an openness to sensation and affect that implies an ethical openness to others –​the poem’s governing ideal’.15 How, though, might this recognition of a common human vulnerability translate into an account of moral action within the broad sweep of a poem whose basic sense of virtue is ultimately oriented towards (and fundamentally conditioned by Spenser’s participation in) the violent conquest of Ireland, a conquest that, as the View makes clear, depends on effacing the pathos of human suffering? It is necessary, therefore, to qualify and redirect Campana’s observation that Spenser’s Adonis, who embodies ‘the shape of masculinity in the suspension of violent conflict’, participates in a broader mythographic dialogue through which Spenser aims to supplant and ‘replace Mars, the figure of temporarily pacified violence’ from his moral vision.16 As Spenser’s return to this image at the close of his later pastoral, Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591/​1595), suggests, the Garden affords the poet a key counterfactual throughout his career, a utopian

131

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The metaphysics of moral being

131

‘but were it not’ standing against, and in imaginative retreat from, the depredations of the worlds of courtly politicking and heroic masculinity. However, the Garden’s counterfactual status, just as it stages a retreat from that martial world, also provides a key critical opening onto its underlying energies and imperatives.17 Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that the counterfactual is a kind of ‘useful fiction’, a simplified departure from the literal truth that allows us better to understand and manage the otherwise unapproachable complexities of reality.18 By dint of the narrative’s and the verse’s linear unfolding in time, the alternate or virtual reality staged in the garden gives a respite from an ideology ‘disembodying, hierarchical violence’ which shapes Spenser’s image in the View of the ghost-​like victims of Lord Grey’s policy of enforced starvation, and, indeed, Guyon’s wrath in the Bower of Bliss.19 It is a reality, however, that has not disappeared, but rather has simply receded to the margins. To put it another way, the Gardens of Adonis still exist just as they are, always have been, and always will be when we read about them in III.vi, at those moments when Guyon is razing the Bower of Bliss in II.xii, and when Artegall and Talus are torturing and massacring their foes in Book V. I would like to suggest –​and especially if we read this scene proleptically in the context of an expanded 1596 Faerie Queene –​that what Spenser is doing here is pulling back the veil on the chivalric fiction, revealing something fundamental about what underlies and shapes an ethos that is still directed towards a vision of moral being as militia. The figure of Adonis is an icon of the moral energies underlying and animating the martial activities of The Faerie Queene. If the chivalric fiction and its images of martial activity are formal actualizations of the poem’s account of moral life, being, and action, then the body’s inhabitation of the order of mutability, as well as the body’s own essential conditions of mutability, is the substantial condition that organizes and defines those formal manifestations of virtue in human action. Agency, in turn, mediates the energies imagined in myths like the Gardens of Adonis into tangible form. As a mythic emblem of the forces out of which the legal, political, and cultural structures of empire emerge, the allegorical tableaux of Venus and Adonis imagines the material and ontological undersong of all human activity. They reflect a consciousness, a way of seeing, and a form of describing and creatively intervening in, the world.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

132

Spenser’s ethics

The episode describes us as driven by the imperative to render some form of a specifically human good within the confines of worldly mutability. The story it tells is of the teleological contours of a life whose point of origin and ontological foundations stand in its capacity to change and decay, revealing the expansionist ideology latent in the injunction that vital forms must exist ‘eterne in mutability’. The answer to change and decay is generation and expansion. Read through the prism of the Gardens of Adonis, the poem’s moral imperative is revealed as an essentially biological imperative, one in which human activity, no matter how civilized in scope and form it may be, is essentially oriented around elemental questions of survival and sustainability. Within this space, the convergences of our embodied, vulnerable selves are about reimagining the frailties of the human body as its very source of strength and vitality. This account of rectified human mutability as a means of creating the conditions of sustainability within change receives its fullest imagining in the ‘fruitful soil of old’ animating the Gardens of Adonis. There, compost’s transformative work allegorizes poesis’s metaphysical underpinnings and moral imperatives, organizing the poem’s varied accounts of the good life between the escapist nostalgias offered by dead monuments on which present forms are built, and the seeming perils of the time-​bound life. Extending the image beyond the poetic bounds of the Gardens of Adonis and into the critical agendas of the poem writ large, the compost pit it represents becomes a crucial metaphor for understanding human bodies’ political lives and the biological bases and imperatives of political action. Jonathan Goldberg, describing the ethical and political stakes of this Garden’s image of humankind’s collective implication in matter, argues that Spenser thereby imagines a mode of life beyond individuality, a state of shared experience in which we are all homo, all at home in the world. Insofar as we are all made of the same material, although never in precisely the same way, we are all the same and have a part in a life that exceeds our own, one that we share with rocks and soil.20

Goldberg depicts the ethical as essentially interpersonal in scope and intention. Primarily concerned with, and oriented towards, the recognition and subsequent preservation of the other-​as-​other, Goldberg argues that Spenser’s is an ethics that transpires in the mutual

331

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The metaphysics of moral being

133

recognition of, and coming together in relation to, the frail and mutable body. This basic sense of Spenserian virtue as interpersonal in its intentions is a key recognition, insofar as it registers a sharp distinction from the basic assumptions of the classical virtue ethics tradition which tend to regard our encounters with others not as ends in and of themselves, but as the means of activating, perfecting, and confirming aspects of our own individual excellences (such as our temperance, prudence, or magnanimity). However, what needs elaboration are the practical stakes of this idea (and to differentiate this vision of interpersonal relation from a Kantian categorical imperative). What, in other words, does a specifically Spenserian ethics rooted in our sense of human relation look like when translated from principle to practice? My argument, in brief, is that the interpersonal human bond that Goldberg identifies as central to Spenser’s basic sense of the ethical is concerned less with fellow feeling, or with care of the self (metonymically via care of the other –​i.e. a proto-​Kantian form of virtue, a respect for the sanctity of the autonomous will of the other that is a key aspect of the categorical imperative), than it is with the teleological orientation of our generative potential into processes of collaborative self-​extension culminating in the project of building an imperially oriented commonwealth. While creating a privileged space for our embodied status itself within the orienting assumptions of human virtue –​a space that draws on and reorients the moral anthropologies of Aristotelian naturalism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism –​its telos is far more instrumental than we find either in these classical sources (and their early modern revivals) or in Goldberg’s revisionary reading of a Spenserian ethic rooted in the materialism of collective embodiment. For Spenser, the minimal unit of this ethic of collaborative self-​extension of the mutable body into the mutable world is the procreant couple. They are a pair who converge for the project of generation whereby they enlarge the scope of themselves in the now and project it into the future, their sexual union the generative mechanism whereby mortal body becomes ‘eterne in mutability’. As with linked pairs of bodies, so it goes with the larger assemblages created among those pairs and their offspring, the procreant pairing now the basic building block of imperial expansion and of a mode of empire building that will stand until ‘that sabbaoth sight’ at the effacement of time and change and of the world’s projection into the providential eternal.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

134

Spenser’s ethics

To do virtue, in other words, is to engage in the collaborative and self-​extensive project of sustaining life, and through the sustaining of life, sustaining civilization. As Venus hovers over Adonis’s body, each sustains one another –​he her with the generation of mythic forms, she him with the capacity, through the collaborative project of form-​making, to overgo the restraints mortality would impose on his body in isolation. As understood by Spenser, sustainability is a concept which –​as with our own use of the word –​has valences linking the ecological and the political. However, Spenser’s deployment of the term is inverse to our own.​ He is not concerned with how we may sustain the world and its resources, but rather with how we may be sustained by and within that world. More broadly, he is concerned with how that world –​ to which we are intimately linked as both created and as subject to mortal change –​sustains and underwrites virtuous agency, political action, and the commonwealths that emerge at the convergence of individual moral actors. In Spenser’s poetry, the word ‘sustain’ and its cognates, ‘sustained’ and ‘sustenance,’ occurs 40 times, notably clustering in Books II and VI of The Faerie Queene and in the Amoretti. Recurring in the legends of Temperance and Courtesy, and a Petrarchan sonnet sequence, it thus centers poetic moments specifically concerned with the ways self-​regulation of irrational desire –​be it for excessive forms of the good, a self-​regard that undermines the greater good, or sexual pleasure –​sustains the interpersonal relations on which political orders are predicated. Collectively, Spenser’s use of the word charts a course from the basic, biological demands of life toward the imperatives of political action, offering a vision of the civilizing process that is not about the effacement, but rather the productive orientation, of the natural body, its animating imperatives, and its governing inclinations. Reading the concordance entries collectively, we can discern in Spenser’s deployment of the word a continuum of, for want of a better term, biopolitical life. In a less critically loaded way, we could say Spenser is describing the implications of our material being and political orders in one another. ‘Sustain’ describes the back and forth transfer between the processes of human life, on the one side, and the forms and mechanisms of political power, on the other. For Spenser, the circuit across which this transfer occurs is the constructive, generative, and ultimately poetic activity of human

531

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The metaphysics of moral being

135

agency. It begins with the means by which bodies are sustained in a strictly material sense; strong bodies can thus sustain a fight; bodies sustained in heroic endeavor can, in turn, sustain the obligations of governance; a well governed state can sustain its citizens; and so, the circle of sustainability continues. In some basic way, the verb ‘sustain’, for Spenser, is about the ways we productively –​that is, poetically, ethically, and politically –​inhabit our embodied state, working within mutability to carve out niches of civilization, figuring the point where our poetic, moral, and political lives bleed into one another in the field of –​and because of –​the materiality of our lives in the mutable world. As Spenser gives metaphoric life to a basic philosophical concept, placing it in dynamic motion, both through the narrative and figural movements of verse and the emblematic archive of myth, he configures the mutable body as the site of a particular vision of ethical potential. In its capacity to generate new forms, this body is infinitely productive in its organic materiality. In this recasting of an ancient myth, Spenser discovers a power latent in worldly transformations that Venus, from her immutable, Olympian perspective is incapable of seeing. Venus’s mournful declaration that ‘all things decay in time, and to their end do draw’ offers a more complex teleology than it might initially seem, for Venus does not catch the essential ambiguity in that word, ‘end’. While it is an implication that will only be teased out by Nature in the ‘Mutability Cantos’, that end is not simply the silencing finality and closure of death, but actually (and especially in the context of a providential time-​scheme, as well as in ethical action) a moment of generation, renewal, and enlargement, one providential in direction and expansive in its forward progress. In that later episode, Spenser’s Natura will argue I well consider all that ye haue sayd, And find that all things stedfastnes doe hate And changed be: yet being rightly wayd They are not changed from their first estate; But by their change their being doe dilate: And turning to themselues at length againe, Doe worke their owne perfection so by fate: Then ouer them Change doth not rule and raigne; But they raigne ouer change, and doe their states maintaine. (VII.vii.58)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

136

Spenser’s ethics

The consolatory and metaphysical declaration that Adonis enjoys a paradoxical kind of everlasting life-​in-​death ‘eterne in Mutability, /​ And by Succession made perpetual’ is revealed as a distinctly imperial injunction, perpetual and inter-​generational conquest understood as the destiny and perfection of dying yet procreant bodies. The image of a supine Adonis hovering in a suspended state of life-​giving death thus renders the basic ethical imperative organizing Spenser’s account of heroic action. An image of virtue made manifest in poesis, Adonis is an icon of the very metaphysics of that central Spenserian virtue, magnificence –​the virtue of form-​making and generation, of building cities and civic orders. For all its pastoral and elegaic innocence, such a vision informs Spenser’s depiction of the mythic couple, Venus and Adonis, in the midst of a field of flowers at once allegorically signifying, and organically fed by, the bodies of dead youths now legible, perhaps, as a myth of martial self-​sacrifice: And all about grew euery sort of flowre, To which sad louers were transformde of yore Fresh Hyacinthus, Phoebus paramour And dearest loue; Foolish Narciss, that likes the watry shore; Sad Amaranthus, made a flowre but late, Sad Amaranthus, in whose purple Gore Me seemes I see Amintas wretched fate, To whom sweet Poets verse hath giuen endlesse date. (III.vi.45)

In the midst of this floral knot, Spenser’s Venus is also the Venus at the close of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, while his Adonis is also the empire-​breeding body of the dead Julius Caesar borne up by Venus, and Spenser himself becomes the prophetic-​poetic voice of a providentially mandated emergent global empire rising out of the chaotic transformations of historical time’s political and social upheavals.

Notes 1 On the ways this stanzaic form in general, and this stanza, in particular, offer a mimesis of both our temporal lives and of the imagination of that life-​in-​time, see Kenneth Gross, ‘The Shapes of Time: On the Spenserian Stanza’, Spenser Studies 19 (2004), 27–​36.

731

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The metaphysics of moral being

137

2 Sir Kenelm Digby, Observations on the 22. Stanza in the 9th. Canto of the 2d. Book of Spencers Faery Queen (1628) (London, 1643). 3 On the renaissance aesthetics of copiousness, see the classic study by Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 4 Spenser’s engagement with the technical vocabulary of ancient metaphysics in this scene has been widely studied for over a c­entury. The foundational modern studies are Josephine Waters Bennett, ‘Spenser’s Gardens of Adonis’, PMLA 41 (1932), 46–​80, which orients the Neoplatonic reading of this episode, and Robert Ellrodt, Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser (Geneva: Folcroft Press, 1969), which argues for a generally Augustinian vision of this ­episode and shifted the interpretive balance away from Bennet’s orthodox Neoplatonism and towards a deeply Christian take on the image’s Neoplatonic investments. More recently, see Jon Quitslund’s defense of the Garden’s essentially Neoplatonic character in Spenser’s Supreme Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). My own account is perhaps a descendent of Brents Stirling, ‘The Philosophy of Spenser’s “Garden of Adonis” ’, PMLA 49.2 (1934), 501–​538, who argues that Spenser is not an orthodox adherent to, or expositor of, particular philosophical creeds and dogmas, but an eclectic appropriator of ideas often mediated through popular, vernacular sources including literary fictions. 5 Lucretius, On the Nature of Things: De Rerum Natura, trans. Anthony Esolen (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). 6 For accounts that put Spenser more firmly in line with Lucretius –​ although in radically different ways from one another –​see Anthony Esolen, ‘Spenserian Chaos: Lucretius in The Faerie Queene’, Spenser Studies 11 (1994), 31–​51; Ayesha Ramachandran, ‘Edmund Spenser, Lucretian Neoplatonist: Cosmology in the Fowre Hymnes’, Spenser Studies 26 (2009), 373–​411; Edwin Greenlaw, ‘Spenser and Lucretius’, Studies in Philology 17 (1920), 439–​64; and Jonathan Goldberg, The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2009). 7 Edmund Spenser, ‘Prothalamion’, lines 157–​ 58, in Edmund Spenser: The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard A. McCabe (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 496. 8 McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment, p. 148. 9 Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation, 1567 (Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, 2000), 1, 495–​524. 10 Spenser, ‘A Letter’, p. 716. 11 George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), pp. 283–​84.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

138

Spenser’s ethics

12 St. Augustine, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans. trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 979–​83 (21.8). 13 William Oram, ‘Looking Backward: The Evolving Genre of The Faerie Queene’, Modern Philology 115.3 (2018), 327–​47. 14 C.S. Lewis, ‘Neoplatonism in Spenser’s Poetry’, in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 149–​63; quote, 155. 15 Joseph Campana, The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2012), p. 23. For his discussion of Venus and Adonis, see pp. 204–​23. 16 Campana, Pain of Reformation, pp. 221–​22. 17 Here, I offer a very different vision of the Spenserian counterfactual than that offered by Colleen Rosenfeld in Indecorous Figures: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2018), pp. 97–​119, who suggests that Spenser, through the figure of simile, dwells on the poetic possibility of imaginatively rendering alternative, better worlds than this we have. 18 Kwame Anthony Appiah, As If: Idealization and Ideals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). Of course, Harry Berger, Jr. has argued that such a mode of hypothetical representation is central to the mimetic project of Renaissance aesthetics in the wide-​ranging essays collected in Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-​Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 19 Campana, Pain of Reformation, p. 223. 20 Goldberg, The Seeds of Things, p. 105.

5

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Civility and government: Virtuous discipline in the mutable world

Just as the Gardens of Adonis offer a myth through which to imagine how political agency manifests itself in the expansive activity of empire-​building, they also lay crucial groundwork for investigating the more localized processes of individual moral self-​ fashioning. How, the scene invites us to ask, might we impose some form of ‘virtuous and gentle discipline’ on the irrational substance from which we ourselves are wrought, a substance whose very irrational energies paradoxically give our lives and actions their necessary definition and purpose? A key part of the answer to this question can be found in the posthumously published fragment with which The Faerie Queene concludes, the ‘Two Cantos of Mutability’, which relocate the metaphysical terrain of the Gardens of Adonis from the mythopoetic realm to the historical and political present of Elizabethan Ireland. Described by its printer, Matthew Lownes, as being ‘both for Forme, and Matter … to be parcell of some following Booke of the Faerie Queene under the legend of Constancie’, this fragmentary book offers The Faerie Queene’s final, and most extravagantly realized, image of the processes of material transformation, rendering a natural law justification for the juridical practices of the Elizabethan colonial state. The cantos tell the story of the Titan, Mutability’s attempt to overthrow Jove as rightful ruler of the physical world and are couched in an allegorical mode that oscillates between densely woven metaphysics and lightly veiled allusions to contemporary politics. The work’s tale of Mutability’s insurgency against the Olympian gods is an account of the ways that tensions between stasis and change animate basic questions of legal right, ownership, and inheritance. Underlying, and largely determining, the work’s

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

140

Spenser’s ethics

more overt political and legal arguments, however, is a basic concern with the nature of virtue and the possibility of flourishing within the constraints of the m ­ utable world. ‘What man’, Spenser asks in the poem’s opening lines, ‘that sees the ever-​whirling wheel /​Of change, the which all mortall things doth sway, /​But that thereby doth find, and plainly feele, /​How Mutability in them doth play /​Her cruell sports, to many mens decay?’ (VII. vi.1, 1–​2). What, then, are the forms of human flourishing available to us in the face of mutability’s manifestation in our lived experience of the world, and in our social and political forms? What are the forms of virtue that, in turn, can achieve such forms of flourishing and render ideal polities? How might our fraught status as mutable beings, with our material substance’s tendencies towards an inchoate lack of rationality, be disciplined towards rationally generative activity? What, likewise, do the metaphysics of the Gardens of Adonis look like when projected into the actual materialized shape of a human life, its modes of conduct, and its ultimate ends? Across the range of his works, and especially in the latter two books of the 1596 Faerie Queene, the View, and the ‘Cantos’, Spenser makes Ireland a metonym for, and condensation of, the moral and political consequences of mutability in the orders of both nature and culture. Spenser’s imagination renders it as a place whose generative potential is ruined by the failure of human institutions; Ireland, as Ireneus notes in the View, is a ‘goodly countrey utterly wasted’ by political crises, yet which nevertheless remains ‘a most beautifull and sweet countrey as any is under heaven’ (27). Inviting as they may be to Spenser’s ‘reformative’ impulses, such paradoxical allurements present the New English settler class with a social, political, and environmental ecosystem persistently threatening to remake English civil order in its own ‘wylde’ image. In both cases, Ireland stands as a fundamental test of English virtue, its cause, its primary motivation, and its greatest threat. Whether bolstering or undermining English virtue, Spenser’s Ireland endlessly tests the will to order and the impulse to instantiate forms of flourishing against a reality of change, resistance, and loss. Ireland, envisioned as a space beset by a perversely realized Mutability, necessitates an upending of the received moral and social norms that have taken root under that ideological shadow: Ne shee the lawes of Nature onely brake, But eke of Iustice, and of Policie;

141

Civility and government

141

And wrong of right, and bad of good did make, And death for life exchanged foolishlie: Since which, all liuing wights haue learn’d to die, And all this world is woxen daily worse. O pittious worke of MVTABILITIE!

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

(VII.vii. 6, 1–​7)

Spenser’s Ireland is a place where the basic sense of order, the normative principles that guide plantation and reformation (or, more precisely, eradication and subjugation), are themselves subject to continual change. This image of order stands not at a safe remove from the world it seeks to reform but is defined and formed within that very dialectical process of testing and resistance. The cantos close with Nature’s final judgment on the conflict between Jove and Mutability: I well consider all that ye haue sayd, And find that all things stedfastnes doe hate And changed be: yet being rightly wayd They are not changed from their first estate; But by their change their being doe dilate: And turning to themselues at length againe, Doe worke their owne perfection so by fate: Then ouer them Change doth not rule and raigne; But they raigne ouer change, and doe their states maintaine. Cease therefore daughter further to aspire, And thee content thus to be rul’d by me: For thy decay thou seekst by thy desire; But time shall come that all shall changed bee, And from thenceforth, none no more change shall see. So was the Titaness put downe and whist, And Ioue confirm’d in his imperiall see. Then was that whole assembly quite dismist, And Natur’s selfe did vanish, whither no man wist. (VII.vii.58–​59)

The lines’ central metaphysical statement revisits the dialectic of form and substance mapped out in the Gardens of Adonis’s pit of chaos. They do so by imagining fading forms that, in their very decay, allegorize and project an immutable substance out into the world, and by this process Jove is ‘confirm’d in his imperiall see’. If Spenser allows nature to maintain the priority of Olympian power, he does so with real qualification, for this power is no longer

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

142

Spenser’s ethics

self-​ sufficient nor is its authority metaphysically pre-​ existent. It stands, rather, in the dilation and expansion of mutable forms. It is a product and reflection, in other words, of the mutable bodies that are the material engines of empire –​both those of the English colonizers and those of the starved, displaced, murdered, and otherwise brutalized Irish made legible as signs of English power. Read as the ‘allegorical core’ of a Legend of Constancy –​presuming, of course, that Lownes is correct in his description –​the ‘Cantos’ are the remaining trace of what would have been Spenser’s most sustained and explicit engagement with an emergent contemporary moral philosophical discourse: Neostoicism.1 A school of thought that emerged out of the confessional and political chaos in the Low Countries in the mid sixteenth century, its leading exponent and founding father was Justus Lipsius, a sometime associate of the Sidney family whose complex biography of displacement and exile, and of shifting political and religious allegiances, is emblematic of the very strife his ethical vision was meant to comprehend. Lipsius’s De Constantia was widely read in its day, and would likely be among the primary conduits of Neostoic ideas into Spenser’s hypothetical Legend of Constancy. In John Stradling’s Elizabethan translation, it opens with ‘a complaint of the troubles of the Lowe-​cuntreyes’. ‘Wee are tossed’, Stradling’s version continues, ‘as you see, these manie yeares with the tempest of civill warres: and like sea-​faring men are we beaten with sundrie blastes of troubles and sedition’.2 The ensuing dialogue between Lipsius’s exiled youth and the older Stoic sage Charles Langius seeks to understand the lurking reasons of divine providence subtending, and strangely explicated by, the ‘public evils [mala publica]’ of an irrational, contingent, and endlessly variable world defining our daily lives. For Lipsius, the perils and catastrophes defining our lives in the fallen, mutable world are enigmatic signs of divine providence at work in the world’s seeming chaos and disorder: That the earth hath opened her mouth and swallowed up some townes, came of Gods providence. That other where the plague hath consumed many thousandes of people, proceedeth of the same cause. That slaughters, war and tyranny rage in Low-​countries, therhence also commeth it to passe. From heaven are all these miseries sent.3

Often dismissed as an aberration in the long sweep of the history of moral philosophy, Neostoicism’s historical importance lies in

341

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Civility and government

143

the fact that it sought to frame a moral subjectivity in relation to the emergent early modern nation-​state. As Lipsius argues in the prefatory address to the readers of the Politicorum (1589), ‘it is my aim, just as in De Constantia I equipped citizens for endurance and obedience, now equip those who rule for governing’.4 For Lipsius, and for Neostoic thought more largely, the networks of obedience and governance across which power takes shape reside in the activities and convergences of transforming and transformable bodies in the mutable world. Gerhardt Oestreich’s foundational reading of early modern Neostoicism argues that this ethical mode thus offered a moral system that could increase the power and efficiency of the state by an acceptance of the central role of force and of the army. At the same time, neo-​Stoicism also demanded self-​ discipline and the extension of the duties of the ruler and the moral education of the army, the officials, and indeed, the whole people, to a life of work, frugality, dutifulness and obedience.5

Such an ethical project is animated by a concern with understanding the nature of virtue in relation to both the shaping imperatives and material practices of political power.6 In this context, the evocations of Neostoic theorizing about the nexus of the moral and the political place Spenser’s writings among that ‘flourishing development of a significant series of treatises’ Michel Foucault describes that reconfigure the older genres of courtesy and conduct books and the mirrors of princes in to ‘arts of government’.7 Indeed, Foucault suggests that ‘the sixteenth century return to Stoicism revolves around this reactualization of the problem of how to govern oneself’.8 This ‘general problem of “government” ’ emerging in the sixteenth century, Foucault argues, raises a series of closely interlinked questions about the implications of selfhood and political power in one another: ‘How to govern oneself, how to be governed, by whom should we accept to be governed, how to be the best possible governor’?9 The concern underlying this convergence of the ethical with a notion of governmentality in the sixteenth century was ‘the manner in which the conduct of an ensemble of individuals becomes implicated to a greater and greater degree in the exercise of state power’.10 In a study of the social and ­confessional conditions in the Low Countries that generated Lipsius’s Neostoicism, Philip Gorski argues that what is ultimately at stake in

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

144

Spenser’s ethics

this emergent notion of governmentality is a basic reorientation of sovereign authority away from a rigidly top-​down model to the kind of fluid, bottom-​up vision –​such, indeed, as the one that Spenser’s Nature describes at the close of ‘Mutability’, when she has Jove ‘confirm’d in his imperiall see’ by a plenitude of mutable bodies’ dilations into the world.11 Civility is the word that Spenser applies to this general vision of governmentality, its activities, and its ends. The concept of civility, as taken up by Spenser, originates among the same political transformations and shifting social imperatives animating Neostoic thought in the Northern Renaissance; its structures of normative behavior and personal comportment are ultimately concerned with marshalling the body, its needs, and its desires to conform to and confirm a social order. As Norbert Elias’s and, recently, Sir Keith Thomas’s histories of civility argue, beginning in the 1530s, the term comes to supplant courtesy as the dominant ideology of regulating social interaction. Whereas the term courtesy articulates a distinctly aristocratic and court-​centered mode of conduct, the emergent concept of civility seeks to render the normative values and practices regulating life in a newly decentered polity, binding societies that are increasingly governed by consent rather than aristocratically authored, divinely sanctioned command.12 Elias suggests that civility’s behavioral codes diffuse the regulatory practices of the state into the individual citizen, its normative practices both internalizing and affirming the ideologies on which those norms are predicated. Civility thus stands at the nexus of two demands. First, its codified activities –​modes of self-​regulation, and its inscription of bodily function and daily habit into affirmations and buttresses of social order –​work towards the internalization of systems of value and thus the structures of power underwriting and sustained by those values. Civility thereby assimilates power’s imperatives into the forms of physical comportment, ranging from the regulation of bodily functions to more complex and mediated ritualizations, customs, and inculcated habits of social interaction, in order to naturalize and assimilate ideological figurations of power into a basic sense of the self. Second, by this naturalized set of habituated practices and their inculcation into new generations –​ the concept’s cornerstone text in the sixteenth century is Erasmus’s

541

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Civility and government

145

1530 treatise on cultivating civility in young boys –​it works to make bodies and their very movements, their organic and material lives in the world, function as the cause, confirmation, and extension of that power across time and place. Through civility, Spenser argues in the View, a populace far removed from an empire’s political and cultural center nevertheless discovers fealty to a monarch’s sovereign authority, exhibiting full ‘acceptance of his soveraignety … [and] of his lawes’.13 Spenser’s vision of civility is explicitly coercive in its intent, a mode of self-​regulation by which subjects ‘bound them selves to his lawes and obedience’. Extending ‘government’ into the subject themselves, and making obedience to sovereign power ‘agreeable therunto’, subjects are thereby ‘reduced to perpetuall civillity and contayned in continuall duty’. It is, however, a process that needs ongoing reinforcement: but what boots it to breake a colt, and to let him streight run lose at randome? so were this people at first well handled, and wisely brought to acknowledg allegiance to the King of England: but being straight left unto them selves, and ther owne inordinate life and manners, they eftsones forgot what before they were taught, and so sone as they were out of sight by them selves, shooke of their bridles, and began to colt anew, more licensiously than before.14

At the close of the View, Spenser describes the means by which this reinforcement occurs, describing a utopian future Ireland organized around market towns that will assimilate the Irish into a densely imbricated web of economic, legal, and social curbs on what Spenser describes as ‘ther owne inordinate life and manners’. Chief among these is the process of socialization, for ‘nothinge doth sooner cause civilitye in any countrye then many market townes, by reason that the people repayringe often thither for theire neds, will daylye se and learne civyll manners of the better sorte’.15 Underlying the seemingly innocuous phrase ‘se and learne’ is the fact that the early modern culture of civility on which Spenser builds his account draws explicit links between civil conduct and the experience (or fear) of shame. Under the aspect of shame, modes of self-​regulation shift outwards into both the acute awareness of being observed by others, while simultaneously construing as our own central social obligation observing and remarking on others’ failures of civility.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

146

Spenser’s ethics

On this point, Spenserian civility manifests what may be its most significant political imperative: the integrity and viability of the civil self depends on going out and imposing and reinforcing the regime of civility on others. This kind of self-​extension is both an activity that affirms and renews what civility signifies in us and gives its activities the contour and coherence of a proper telos. Compelling us to move out into the world to confront an uncivil Other who is construed as subject to the transformative powers of our own civil agency, Spenser’s account of civility presents it as an explicitly differential and exclusionary code of conduct and value judgment: you are either civil or uncivil, existing either within our without the purview of government and civility. In establishing boundaries between the civil and uncivil, the notion of civility works not simply to mark out those that are excluded from the social order, but also to define those who are not afforded the protections of that order. Spenser’s metaphor of the horse forgetting its training is not simply one of convenience, for it pointedly aligns this account of civility and self-​government with the broader opposition structuring the View’s argument and authorizing many of its most notorious arguments: the opposition of civility to a less-​than-​human ‘wildness’ or ‘barbarity’. By figuring a subject unwilling to submit to state authority as a wild horse, Spenser argues that civility is fundamentally understood to be an expression of the human. Exclusion from its purview, whether by choice or force, is a difference not simply in culture or practice, but in kind. Indeed, when Spenser describes the Old English families that have adopted Irish customs, mores, and politics, he envisions this not as a simple cultural transformation or a superficial assumption of new habits, but as an ontological decline: Iren:  No, for the most parte of them are degenerated and growen almost meare Irishe, yea, and more malicious to the Englishe then the very Irishe them selves. Eudox:  What heare I? And is it possyble that an Englishman, brought up naturally in such sweet civilitie as England affordes, could fynd such lyking in that barberous rudenes, that he should forgett his owne nature, and foregoe his owne nacon?16 There is an essential precarity defining a selfhood construed within the interpretive mechanisms of civility as Spenser understands it: moral agency is defined in antithetical relation to an Other whose existence simultaneously assures and imperils our own ethical and

741

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Civility and government

147

political viability. Confronting that other, as Spenser argues in the View, exposes us, on the one hand, to ‘delight of licensious barbarisme’, and on the other, to an unmediated image of who we are in a primal state of nature, a vision of the state to which we will necessarily revert without constant and diligent self-​policing. If civility and an underlying sense of humanity are held to be ontological categories, they are in no way fixed or immutable. On the contrary, at the core of Spenser’s doctrine of civility is the notion that human being is itself a fundamentally unstable category. We are mutable in kind and thus subject, on the one hand, to the positive transformations of renewal and reformation, and on the other, to negative transformations of decline and decay. Indeed, Spenser argues that, given the right frameworks for enforcing the practices and habits of conduct, nearly anyone might be ‘reduced to perpetuall civilitie’. For Spenser, and in colonialist discourse more generally, there is a persistent line of argument that a colonized land’s native inhabitants, barbarous and wild as they may be, are susceptible to the reformative processes of civility. For instance, in his 1583 account of the early English attempts to establish footholds in the Americas, Sir George Peckham argues that ‘the people in those partes, are easily reduced to ciuilitie bothe in manners and garments’ which, he notes, is of ‘great benefit to all such persons’ both native and English, for ‘being brought from brutish ignoraunce, to ciuility and knowledge, and made them to vnderstand how the tenth part of their land may be so manured and emploied, as it may yeeld more commodities to the necessary vse of mans life’.17 Not an evasion or escape from mutability, civility is the harnessing and orienting of mutability’s latent energies to productive and generative ends. Of course, the anxiety nearly universally registered in these accounts is the recognition that this mutability is a two-​way street, an ambivalence shaping Spenser’s declaration that [t]‌he wilde Irish, which, beinge very rude at the first, are nowe become somewhat more civill, when as Englyshe are growene to be wilde and mere Irishe …. In truth, Irenyus, this is more that ever I hard, that the English-​Irish there should bee worse then the wild Irishe: O Lord, howe quickly doth that country alter mens natures!18

For whatever privileged value Spenser ascribes to Englishness, his argument throughout the View is rooted in the premise that England is ultimately distinguished from Ireland not by an inherent virtue,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

148

Spenser’s ethics

but by the institutional frameworks –​economic, juridical, political, and educational –​inscribing subjects into, and perpetually reinforcing, the ideological claims of English sovereign power through habituated and endlessly re-​affirmed modes of conduct. Spenser notes that at one point in time it was the English who were the wild and untamed margins of humanity, and in his view, necessarily and rightfully subject to the civilizing claims of Roman imperial conquest. What differentiates those mutable beings are the frameworks of civility that can orient the mutable body’s transformative potential towards productive, civility generating, and affirming ends. The question of civility percolates throughout this poem intended to ‘fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline’, and finds one of its most fraught, and theoretically nuanced, expressions in the Irish landscape of the ‘Mutability Cantos’ with the inset tale of Diana and Faunus. An etiological account of Ireland’s fall into its present state of political crisis, it evokes that long-​ago time ‘when Ireland florished in fame /​Of wealths and goodnesse’ and when the ‘Gods then us’d (for pleasure and for rest) /​Oft to resort there-​to’ (VII.vi.38, 1–​5). Chief among the gods who once made Ireland a pastoral retreat was Cynthia/​Diana, the goddess of chastity and the hunt and, as Spenser reminds us with a pointed enjambment, an icon of Elizabeth ‘that is soveraine Queene profest /​Of woods and forests, which therein abound’ (VII.vi.38, 7–​8). This pastoral-​fabliau is centrally a tale of the relationship between civility and sovereign power. Through the story of Faunus’s illicit and unaccountable desire to see Diana naked, and of the nymph Molanna’s disobedience, it examines the relations between deception and impropriety, shame and uncontrollable urges. The tale’s narrative of disobedience and the subversion of power is structured around the irruption of the uncivil into a carefully modulated and regulated space of civility, and of the radical reassertion of hierarchically organized power across the boundary between civility and wildness. Knowing that ‘Diana vsed oft /​(After her sweatie chace and toilesome play) /​To bathe her selfe’, the ‘foolish’ woodland god, Faunus ‘longed foolishly /​To see her naked mongst her Nymphes in priuity’ (VII.vi.42). However, Diana’s bathing spot is well hidden ‘In couert shade, where none behold her may’. Faunus thus plots ‘to

941

Civility and government

149

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

corrupt Molanna, this her maid, /​Her to discouer for some secret hire’, by taking advantage of her own illicit desires so she may ‘tell what time he might her Lady see /​When she her selfe did bathe, that he might secret bee’ (VII.vi.43). His plan successful, Faunus hides by the secret spring at the appointed time and …saw that pleased much his eye, And made his hart to tickle in his brest, That for great ioy of some-​what he did spy, He could him not containe in silent rest; But breaking forth in laughter, loud profest His foolish thought. O foolish Faune indeed, That couldst not hold thy selfe so hidden blest, But wouldest needs thine owne conceit areed. Babblers vnworthy been of so diuine a meed. (VII.vi.46)

Why does Faunus laugh? What connects Faunus’s wholly involuntary reflex to his various breaches of decorum and social improprieties? The sheer irrationality is the point, for his body’s uncontainable reaction, its losing control to meaningless impulses, dramatizes the mechanisms of civility at their most elemental. In the processes of civility, there is a one-​to-​one correspondence between Faunus’s violation and usurpation of political order and his inability to restrain his body. Likewise, Diana’s response to his intrusion, being ‘all abashed with that noise’ suggests something more than mere embarrassment (VII.vi.47). Rather, in the moral structures of civility, her experience of shame points to her vulnerability, her susceptibility to being drawn down to Faunus’s level. This is one of those moments, to recall Theresa Krier’s arguments about the staging of the male gaze in the poem, that unsettles ‘social and gender relations between beholder and beheld … the problem of agency in will or vision’, in which both normative relations of power and the constitutive divide between self and other come into question.19 It thus reveals the extent to which civility is a social compact, a mutually affirming set of norms whose principle of regulation depends on a tacit acknowledgement of the subject’s basic instability. It expresses the need always to be on guard and always affirm and be affirmed through conspicuous performances of virtue. Indeed, the existential

150

Spenser’s ethics

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

threat that Faunus’s intrusion poses to Diana’s divine being is highlighted by Spenser’s simile comparing this goddess and avatar of Elizabeth to …an huswife, that with busie care Thinks of her Dairie to make wondrous gaine, Finding where-​as some wicked beast vnware That breakes into her Dayr’house, there doth draine Her creaming pannes, and frustrate all her paine (VII.vi.48)

This reordering of high and low, reflecting the fear that we might be mistaken for a laborer or country bumpkin, is among the most common anxieties registered in contemporary civility handbooks. Thus, the series of punishments inflicted on Faunus and Molanna impose civility by reaffirming its underwriting hierarchy: he is publicly shamed by the nymphs and then transformed into a deer, Acteon-​like, to be hunted by his own hounds, while she is buried under stones. Both disgraced figures are constructed as negative signs, their wild bodies radically restrained by, and made affirmations of, Diana’s authority. Read through the lens of this mythic digression, the Cantos’ interrogation of Neostoic constancy’s imperative to governmentality illuminates the ontological foundations and underlying metaphysics of civility. Nature’s arguments throughout the second canto are fundamentally about regulating material life at the instinctual, irrational, unthinking, and organic level, making evidently meaningless material signify and confirm informing systems of value. Shortly after Nature arrives at Arlo hill in order to adjudicate this cosmic dispute, she calls the world to assembly, And thither also came all other creatures, What-​euer life or motion doe retaine, According to their sundry kinds of features; That Arlo scarsly could them all containe; So full they filled euery hill and Plaine: And had not Natures Sergeant (that is Order) Them well disposed by his busie paine, And raunged farre abroad in euery border, They would haue caused much confusion and disorder. (VII.vii.4)

151

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Civility and government

151

Spenser’s key source here, Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, has the assembled animals organizing themselves by that instinctual imperative, ‘kynde’. In Spenser’s vision, however, order is enforced from without and is understood as wholly coercive. Absent ‘Nature’s Sergeant’ governing these creatures with ‘busie paine, /​… confusion and disorder’ would overwhelm and ruin the assembly. The image of a wide-​ranging Order marshalling errant bodies into order as far as the eye can see might be read as an idealized rewriting of Talus running down Artegall’s fleeing enemies in Book V, both flushing them from their hiding places like a falcon (V.ii.54) and, later, eagerly pursuing his enemies ‘into the sea’ (V.xi.65). The mimetic logic of the allegory wants us to imagine the activity of Order as intrinsic to nature, rendering a kind of natural law argument to the movements of the imperial enterprise more generally, and to the forms of coercive power on which that activity depends. Working at Nature’s behest, Order imposes the will of the sanctified center on the margins of a wild world, taking possession of it under the moral auspices of eliminating confusion and disorder, instituting a naturally sanctioned and necessary civility where there was none before, and allowing the emergence of a social order that affirms and sustains the godhead at the center. And yet, as Gordon Teskey reminds us, this revelatory assertion of order is also an act of concealment, obscuring Jove’s implication in the very cthonic, material, irrational, even anti-​rational forces embodied by Mutability. Accepting Jove’s and Nature’s ‘authority … as representatives of the truths hidden in nature’, Teskey argues, ‘depends on our ability to block out the memory of the struggle from which the forms have emerged –​the struggle of the mind to objectify and alienate, as a beautiful spectacle, the pain it endures in the organic substratum.’20 Whil’st she thus spake, the Gods that gave good eare To her bold words, and marked well her grace, Beeing of stature tall as any there Of all the Gods, and beautifull of face, As any of the Goddesses in place, Stood all astonied, like a sort of Steeres; Mongst whom, some beast of strange & forraine race, Unwares is chaunc’t, far straying from his peeres: So did their ghastly gaze bewray their hidden feares. (VII.vi.37)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

152

Spenser’s ethics

There is a distinct precarity defining the mode of subjectivity embodied by the gods and supported by Nature’s civility imposing vision of order. The assembled gods’ hidden fears that they might not, in fact, be so different in kind from Mutability are revealed by their collective ‘ghastly gaze’. The gesture demonstrates the tenuousness attending to a form of moral life whose existence depends on perpetually confronting and containing an Other whose mere existence threatens to undo them from within. Among Spenser’s most challenging forays into the ethical stakes of the English colonial experience in Ireland is the close of Book II’s Legend of Temperance, when Guyon demolishes Acrasia’s sensualist pleasure garden, the Bower of Bliss. He does so, ostensibly, in order to impose a regime of temperance on both her and the land. If the problems of Elizabethan colonial policy are most urgently considered in the 1596 edition and in the ‘Cantos’ first published in 1609, ‘Ireland’, as Stephen Greenblatt argues in his foundational reading of this passage, nevertheless ‘pervades the poem’ as a whole, and it is in the Bower of Bliss that Spenser most fully imagines how ‘civility is won through the exercise of violence over what is deemed barbarous and evil’.21 By imagining civility as the objective rather than the very substance of Guyon’s actions, Greenblatt’s phrasing, like the very title of Spenser’s legend, obscures the formal relation between civility and violence. I would like to suggest that what Spenser imagines he means by temperance in this book is, in fact, better described by the word civility and its implications in violent expressions of political power. Indeed, writing some years later in the View, Spenser clearly comes to see that temperance in the context of Ireland is ultimately rooted in a coercive understanding of civility, arguing that ‘regard and moderation ought to be had in tempering and managing of this stubburn nation of the Irish, to bring them from their delight of licensious barbarisme unto the love of goodnesse and civillity’.22 Temperance, that is, is no longer concerned with Aristotelian notions of the mean, but affords the New English polity an instrumental mode restraint seeking to internalize its regulatory agendas in the subjectivities of colonized subjects under the names of goodness and civility. From the perspective of the schematic definitions Spenser’s book titles impose on his legends, the pivotal interpretive problem raised by this episode is the fact that Guyon’s response to this place

351

Civility and government

153

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

repudiates the very moral code he seeks to instantiate. As he topples the Bower, he is described as succumbing to ‘wrath’, a symmetrical form of the very irrational and intemperate passions that shape and are sustained by this garden space. Spenser imagines Guyon as a force of nature, operating not with rational discrimination, but rather like a tempest levelling all in his path: But all those pleasant bowres and Pallace braue, Guyon broke downe, with rigour pittilesse; Ne ought their goodly workmanship might saue Them from the tempest of his wrathfulnesse, But that their blisse he turn’d to balefulnesse: Their groues he feld, their gardins did deface, Their arbers spoyle, their Cabinets suppresse, Their banket houses burne, their buildings race, And of the fairest late, now made the fowlest place. (II.xii.83)

Reading Guyon’s humanity from a strictly Aristotelian position here, his passion-​driven, irrational, and tempestuous wrath aligns him with Gryll’s ‘hoggish mind’ on the hierarchical spectrum of life-​forms. Rather than discovering a temperate mean and thereby inaugurating a regime of rational moderation, he is deliriously wandering among antithetical extremes: ‘But that their blisse he turn’d to balefulnesse /​… And of the fairest late, now made the fowlest place’. If, however, we read this episode through the lens of civility as the term unfolds in Spenser’s View, the moral vision underlying Guyon’s destruction of the Bower comes into sharper focus. Prior to this moment of extravagant violence, the knight encounters two ‘naked Damzelles’ in a fountain, ‘Which therein bathing, seemed to contend, /​And wrestle wantonly, ne car’d to hyde, /​ Their dainty parts from vew of any, which them eyde’, rendering a tableaux vivant inviting passers-​by to project their sexual desires, and ‘th’amarous sweet spoiles to greedy eyes reuele’ (II.xii.63–​ 64). Guyon stops and stares while the ‘wanton Maidens’ return his gaze, ‘him espying, stood /​Gazing a while at his vnwonted guise’ (II.xii.66, 2). The word ‘unwonted’ registers the singularity of his response, the fact that Guyon is clearly unaccustomed to the feelings he is experiencing at this moment. It is really the only moment in the poem, prior to the book’s final stanzas, where he

154

Spenser’s ethics

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

seems to have a genuine, unmediated affective response to anything. As their ‘wanton’ wrestling intensifies, Withall she laughed, and she blusht withall, That blushing to her laughter gaue more grace, And laughter to her blushing, as did fall: Now when they spide the knight to slacke his pace, Them to behold, and in his sparkling face The secret signes of kindled lust appeare, Their wanton meriments they did encreace, And to him beckned, to approch more neare, And shewd him many sights, that courage cold could reare. (II.xii.68)

The key juxtaposition here is between the maidens’ studied performance of involuntary physical response against Guyon’s actual reaction to this moment. Just as they are performing exposure and concealment, so too is their blushing a performed gesture of shame and modesty targeted directly at Guyon’s deepest and most reflexive sense of erotic attraction. Encoded in the mimesis staged by these wrestling women is the artless art of the Renaissance courtesy book, their chiastically entwined laughter and blushing generating an image of ‘grace’, the affect provoking grazia so central to Castiglione’s account of the way political agency is created and consolidated in the world of the court. Guyon’s ‘sparkling face’, however, simply reflects an unwilled and unreflective ‘kindled lust’. Anticipations of the Faunus and Diana scene, written perhaps a decade or more after these lines, are many: the watching, the naked bathing, the inability to restrain a physical response, the laughter. These scenes converge in their accounts of the ways their characters’ senses of self are fashioned in processes of mutual implication, and in the deep epistemological and ontological threats this poses both to Guyon and Diana. As with Diana’s blush of shame, Guyon’s very act of witnessing what appears to be an unregulated and unrestrained body threatens to pull him into that mode of uncivil behavior. The two maidens’ process of entanglement is described in the way the chiasm linking their laughter and blushing encircles and gives body to the intuition of grace that Guyon cathects onto the scene. Central to Guyon’s vulnerability at this moment, and much like Diana in the ‘Mutability Cantos’, is the fact that he is being observed at the very moment his unregulated, natural body is

551

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Civility and government

155

exposed (whatever form that apparition of ‘secret signs of kindled lust’ may be). Like Diana transformed into a country housewife, or those transformed Englishmen of the View, Guyon discovers that his imagined virtue is not immutable. He learns that it is not only possible to descend from ‘the love of goodnesse and civillity’ into ‘delight of licensious barbarisme’, but also, indeed, to ‘fynd such lyking in that barberous rudenes, that he should forgett his owne nature, and foregoe his owne nacon’.23 Guyon only regains control of the situation by regaining control of his body, as his traveling companion, the Palmer, ‘much rebukt those wandering eyes of his’. His rebuke is notably centered between civility’s two crucial imperatives, disciplining Guyon through both externally compelled shame and the internalized moral reasoning conditioned by our encounters with the experience of shame. In Spenser’s key source for the Bower of Bliss, Torquato Tasso’s epic of the First Crusade, Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), the knight Rinaldo is freed from the garden by a similar encounter with shame, as he is confronted with a mirror whose reflection allows him to see himself just as he is seen by others. We arrive in Tasso’s garden along with the knight, Rinaldo, who has been seduced by the witch Armida and has abandoned the Crusades to join her in an erotic locus amoenus in the Fortunate Isles. Like Achilles to Homer’s Greeks, the Crusaders’ fortunes depend on Rinaldo, and the knights Carlo and Ubaldo are tasked by their commander Goffredo to retrieve him. On finding Rinaldo languishing in the garden, the two rescuers confront him with his own image reflected in a magical diamond shield that reveals the fundamental antithesis between his true nature and what he has become in this pleasure garden: He turned his glance upon the brilliant shield and saw himself for what he was, how tressed with dainty touches, reeking of perfume, his hair in curls and tassels on his vest, his dangling sword effeminate at his side, prettified –​not to mention all the rest, for it’s a dandy’s ornament he bore, not a ferocious instrument of war!24

When the Palmer rebukes Guyon, however, the interpretive dynamics work in the opposite direction. Guyon is not reminded of his perfection or heroism, but rather forced to confront the fact that he

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

156

Spenser’s ethics

has wandering eyes and a vagrant body in general. Furthermore, the Palmer’s correction reminds him that any internalized compulsion to the straight and narrow he may express is learned and subject to perpetual threat and correction, and that only externalized forms of restraint (such as the Palmer himself) might restore him to the proper path. Both Tasso and Spenser are concerned with allowing their heroes to see who they truly are, and thereby to wipe the clouds of self-​deception or a basic lack of self-​awareness away from their eyes. Tasso’s Rinaldo discovers his innate and perfected martial virtue; Spenser’s Guyon discovers his susceptibility to error and his very imperfectibility. What Guyon confronts at the fountain is the fact that his moral integrity depends on his perpetual submission to, and participation in, the mechanisms of civility. The failure we face in attempting to reconcile Guyon’s actions and understanding with an Aristotelian account of virtue is, in a strict sense, a failure to break free from the constraints of a moral ideology invalidated by the realities of the landscape into which this knight finds himself inserted by Spenser. Within the political narrative of The Faerie Queene, the razing of the Bower is a necessary act: there is no place for the challenge it poses to Gloriana’s rule in Spenser’s colonialist landscape, and Guyon fulfills the obligations of his mission about as decisively as any of the other knights in this poem. The act’s specific morality, however, is simply incomprehensible in the terms by which Guyon (and the very title of his legend) ask us to understand it. The political demands and necessities of Ireland, quite simply, have rendered the ancient codes of conduct and reasoning insufficient to the task of colonial reformation (or, in Spenser’s loaded word in the View, ‘reduction’). Such an insight may have been intuitive for Spenser in the mid to late 80s when he wrote these lines, but it was animated by a pervasive aspect of English colonial theory that took root and flourished in Spenser’s own thinking by the time he writes the View roughly a decade later: the utter destruction of standing orders is a basic precondition for the establishment of a new polity and new forms of civil life. Likewise, it reflects (again, I think, largely intuitively), what Ethan Shagan argues was a wholesale transformation of the very concept of moderation in early modern English legal and political thought, one in which the classical virtues became a tool of radical, and often physically violent, forms of coercion and repression. As

751

Civility and government

157

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Shagan suggests, this paradoxical reconfiguration of moderation into a mode of coercive violence offered a perfect synecdoche for the imperial project as a whole. Thus when the English began their quest for overseas colonies, it may be that they did not need or want to untangle the strands of their ideals, however real their sense of disquiet or occasional self-​loathing. Those knots are woven into the cultural fabric of early modern England, and England rode them all the way to empire.25

Spenser notably anticipates this very metaphor in imagining a reconfigured temperance’s formal mechanisms of coercive moderation at the close of the Bower of Bliss episode, when Guyon’s companion, the Palmer, captures Acrasia in a ‘subtile net’: The noble Elfe, and carefull Palmer drew So nigh them, minding nought, but lustfull game, That suddein forth they on them rusht, and threw A subtile net, which onely for the same The skilfull Palmer formally did frame. So held them vnder fast, the whiles the rest Fled all away for feare of fowler shame. The faire Enchauntresse, so vnwares opprest, Tryde all her arts, & all her sleights, thence out to wrest. And eke her louer stroue: but all in vaine; For that same net so cunningly was wound, That neither guile, nor force might it distraine. They tooke them both, & both them strongly bound In captiue bandes, which there they readie found: But her in chaines of adamant he tyde; For nothing else might keepe her safe and sound; (II.xii.81–​82)

From Guyon’s perspective, the Palmer’s net functions much like Wallace Stevens’ account of reading The Faerie Queene, its vision of the enforcement of civility echoing the ways ‘the poem comes to possess the reader and how it naturalizes him in its own imagination and liberates him there’.26 Restrained by physical compulsion, Acrasia is, as Guyon might imagine, liberated into a space of civility, oriented toward its habits of thought, and her very movements conditioned to the limited possibilities it imposes on action. Binding her within the restraints of civility constitutes Acrasia as a subject

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

158

Spenser’s ethics

‘safe and sound’ within Guyon and Gloriana’s regime, a regime itself now made ‘safe and sound’ from the threat she poses from outside its mode of disciplinary governance. The Bower of Bliss here registers its most significant claim about the nature and aims of the virtues in the activities of colonialist expansion. While the narrative logic of this legend certainly invites readers to jump through through ornate interpretive and philological hoops to preserve the poem’s basic commitments to an Aristotelian account of temperance, this final scene of Book II places us far, indeed, from virtue ethics’ basic assumptions about both moral action and the good life. What, then, does it mean to be ‘safe and sound’? How is this a form of eudaimonia, and how, generally, is it brought into being? Simply, the act of capturing Acrasia in a net and binding her in adamant chains to keep everyone ‘safe and sound’ embodies the establishment and preservation of a flourishing social order through governmentality. Spenser’s revised vision of temperance takes shape at the convergence of self-​governance and the coercive acts of imposing government on a recalcitrant populace. Against the backdrop of the threat posed by Acrasia’s garden, Guyon stands as a forceful, single-​minded intervention necessary to create and enforce Gloriana’s sovereign power. What he and the Palmer offer us in this image, however, is not a sustainable or holistic model of the flourishing form of governmentality. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, Guyon leaves not a paradise of renewed temperance, but rather, a wasteland in his wake.27 More to the point, unlike the magical conversion of Armida in Tasso, Acrasia’s newfound state of self-​governance and moderation is not real. Rather, it is a fiction trebly enforced from without by a net, a chain, and the physically overpowering body of Guyon. The Palmer’s net thus embodies the very working of civility, figuring the mechanisms by which forms power and the ideologies subtending them enter and shape the consciousness of the self and the good. It embodies the coercive and repressive strategies, at first compelled from without, but then internalized and deployed from within, by which polities and their fictions of the human good are both reproduced and enforced, and thereby made a material reality and the orienting point of human subjectivity. The distinctions between civility’s external and internal workings prove arbitrary: each partakes of the other’s critical imperatives,

951

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Civility and government

159

just as each depends on and animates the other. However, they nevertheless maintain discrete roles in securing the sense that the society fashioned for us by power is that within which we are most ‘safe and sound’. If external regimes of civility such as shame, the awareness that we are being watched, and our willingness to watch and regulate others, establish these imagined forms of flourishing by force, their gains are largely superficial; the real work is performed after the fact by those internalized processes by which some basic sense of the self and its proper ends is articulated. Of course, both of these sites of ‘gentle discipline’ exist simultaneously, sustaining one another, the one offering the shield of enforcement, the other giving a deep reality to the proceedings. Once the body is restrained within, and naturalized to, the functional mechanisms of civility, well-​regulated activity coordinates specific modes of political organization with an understanding of virtuous selfhood and agency that stands in the capacity to sustain, extend, and participate actively within its imagery. The Bower of Bliss, of course, is one version of this ideology, one dedicated toward sensual pleasure, rest, and a golden age nostalgia defined by the urge to return to Eden, ‘if ought with Eden mought compare’ (II.xii.52, 9). Guyon obliterates this vision, revealing its icons of Paradise as fragile, transient, and false. For many, if not most, readers, however, the ‘safe and sound’ he offers in recompense sorely lacks. Guyon’s inability to offer a persuasive alternative to Acrasia’s garden reflects his singular failure. Here, indeed, we see his inability to recognize the codes of value and judgement of which he is actually an agent, his insistence on conceptualizing his intemperate agency within the frameworks of an Aristotelian ideology of temperance. At the close of A View, when Spenser does turn to an image of colonial flourishing, and of the regulatory and coercive mechanisms by which it extends itself into the self-​understandings and idealisms of colonial subjects and their pursuit of a life that is ‘safe and sound,’ he offers the market town as a far more subtle, complex, and pervasive mode of subject formation than Guyon could ever hope to offer: For there is nothing doth sooner cause civility in any countrie then many market townes, by reason that people repairing often thither for their needes, will daylie see and learnes civil manners of the better sort: Besides, there is nothing doth more stay and strengthen the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

160

Spenser’s ethics

country then such corporate townes, as by proofe in many rebellions hath appeared, in which when all the countreys have swerved, the townes have stood fast, and yeelded good reliefe to the souldiors in all occasions of services. And lastly there is nothing doth more enrich any country or realme then many townes; for to them will all the people drawe and bring the fruites of their trades, aswell to make money of them, as to supply their needefull uses; and the countrymen will also be more industrious in tillage, and rearing of all husbandry commodities, knowing that they shall have ready sale for them at those townes.28

Linking industry and tillage with civility, the space offers as clear a counterpoint as any to the anti-​ industrious, sterile, and uncivil landscape of the Bower of Bliss, with its happy and willing subjects strenuously engaged in the establishment and maintenance of a life that is safe and sound and untouched by the hinterland’s ‘rebellions’. Centering Spenser’s account of moral formation here is the notion that civility is ultimately grounded in material self-​ interest. Such conflation of self-​interest and the ends of the collective imagines a seamless coordination of selfhood and state power. These towns insert their subjects into a mode of self-​governance dependent not on the virtues, but existing in collaborative, interpersonal relations premised on mutual regulation. In these towns, every transaction is simultaneously an act of submission to, and dominance of, whomever one is engaged with, everyone and every interaction a conduit and affirmation of that form of authority ideologically coded as civility. Or, in the language of Spenser’s Nature at the close of ‘Mutabilitie’, the market town allows colonial subjects to fulfill their functional obligations as civil beings by allowing them instrumentally to direct their human ontology –​as mutable bodies that both decay and generate –​into the complex processes of dilation, expansion, transformation, and extension into the realms of commerce, civility, and government. They thus enter into an imaginative space where rebellion is no longer a possibility, and the maintenance and expansion of that civil space becomes the moral subject’s organizing telos. In the marshalling of self-​interest into the service of collective benefit and imperial enlargement at the close of the View, Spenser’s image of the daily existence of these imagined civil subjects shuttling back and forth between their farms and the market town reflects and replicates, in a small-​scale, intensely localized form, the structural mechanisms of imperial conquest. The general argument of the View, indeed,

161

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Civility and government

161

can be read as a contrast between two ways in which self-​interest underwrites social organization. On the one side, there is native Irish and Old English feudal social structure which, as the View persistently argues, is both animated by, and engenders, an ad hoc, chaotic, and ultimately self-​consuming expression of self-​interest. On the other side, is the civility-​breeding market town serving as a corrective answer to this disruptive social force, harnessing that energy towards the production of the common good. As Nature concludes her remarks and settles the dispute between Jove and Mutability, she acknowledges, and speaks directly to, the senses of self-​interest and self-​preservation driving Mutability’s overweening ambitions: Cease therefore daughter further to aspire, And thee content thus to be rul’d by me: For thy decay thou seekst by thy desire (VII.vii.59 1–​3)

Like Acrasia made safe and sound by her binding in the Palmer’s net and adamant chain, Mutability is urged to seek her ends in a contentment defined by her submission to the interpretive and imaginative imperatives of Nature’s regime. To accept this vision is to accept Nature’s account of change, and to project our deepest sense of the self and its ends into a vision of flourishing in which human virtue and its fulfillment are, like those civility-​breeding market towns Spenser imagines in the View, oriented towards a process of endless expansion and self-​extension in the service of confirming ‘Jove in his imperiall see’.

Notes 1 On Lownes’s authority in shaping and mediating the ‘Cantos’ from manuscript into print, see Andrew Zurcher, ‘The Printing of the Cantos of Mutabilitie in 1609’, in Celebrating Mutabilitie: Essays on Edmund Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos, ed. Jane Grogan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 40–​60. In the same volume, Christopher Burlinson offers an essential survey of Neostoic thought’s intersections with the ‘Cantos’, ultimately arguing that Spenser deploys these ideas to model a mode of balanced interpretation that allows us to read, through the figural mechanisms of change, ‘God’s permanence and immanence in the world’ in the chapter, ‘Spenser’s “Legend of Constancie” and the Ethical Reader’, Celebrating Mutabilitie, pp. 201–​19.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

162

Spenser’s ethics

2 Justus Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie, trans. John Stradling (Holborn, 1595) 1.1, p. 2. 3 Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie, 1.14, p.34. 4 Justus Lipsius, Politica: Six Books of Politics or Political Instruction, trans. Jan Waszink (Aasen: Royal Van Gorcum, 2004), p. 231. 5 Gerhard Oestreich, ‘Introduction’, in Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, ed. Brigitta Oestreich and H. G. Konigsberger, and trans. David McLintock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 6. 6 Certainly, Oestreich’s arguments have been challenged –​most significantly by Peter Miller’s analyses of the ways Oestreich’s reliance on Nazi historiography misleadingly construes Neostoic thought, and the birth of the modern nation state itself, as a precursor to fascist ideology. Peter N. Miller, ‘Nazis and Neo-​Stoics: Otto Brunner and Gerhard Oestreich before and after the Second World War’, Past & 86. See also, Christopher Brooke, Present 176 (Aug., 2002), 144–​ Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 12–​36. 7 Michel Foucault, ‘1 February 1978’, in Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–​1978, ed. Michel Sennelart, and trans. Graham Burchell (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 87–​114. 8 Foucault, ‘1 February 1978’, p. 88. 9 Ibid. 10 Foucault, ‘1 February 1978’, p. 87. 11 Philip S. Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 12 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, rev. ed. (Blackwell, 2000); Sir Keith Thomas, In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). 13 Spenser, A View, p. 15. 14 Spenser, A View, pp. 15–​16. 15 Spenser, A View, pp. 156–​57. 16 Spenser, A View, p. 54. 17 Sir George Peckham, A true reporte, of the late discoueries, and possession, taken in the right of the Crowne of Englande, of the new-​found landes (London, 1583). 18 Spenser, A View, p. 143. 19 Theresa Krier, Gazing on Secret Sights: Spenser, Classical Imitation, and the Decorums of Vision (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 10.

361

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Civility and government

163

20 Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 181. 21 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-​ Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 186. 22 Spenser, A View, pp. 20–​21. 23 Spenser, A View, pp. 20–​21, and p. 54. 24 Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered: Gerusalemme Liberata, trans. Anthony Esolen (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 16.30. 25 Ethan Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion, and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 219. 26 Wallace Stevens, ‘The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet’, in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), p. 50. 27 Andrew Wadoski, ‘Spenser, Tasso, and the Ethics of Allegory’, Modern Philology 111.3 (2014), 365–​83. My overall argument about the Bower and the ethical modalities the episode puts into play has, of course, significantly shifted from this early exploration of Spenser’s ethics. 28 Spenser, A View, pp. 156–​57.

6

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Immoderation and necessity: Spenser’s Machiavelli

‘As for the work now published’, Sir James Ware writes in his preface to the first printed edition of Spenser’s A View of the State of Ireland in 1633, ‘although it sufficiently testifieth his learning and deepe judgement, yet we may wish that in some passages it had bin tempered with more moderation’.1 Many of Spenser’s readers have echoed this sentiment in the subsequent centuries, horrified by the poet’s advocacy for the most brutal and violent forms of repression and subjugation, and his participation in what would now be considered war crimes and crimes against humanity. C.S. Lewis, as sympathetic a reader of Spenser as ever there was, found the poet’s entanglements in English colonial policy simply inexcusable. In what may be The Allegory of Love’s most forcefully declarative sentence, he reminds us that ‘Spenser was the instrument of a detestable policy in Ireland, and in his fifth book the wickedness he had shared begins to corrupt his imagination’.2 Ware is doubtless a more forgiving audience than is Lewis, ascribing the work’s immoderation to the ‘troubles and miseries of the time when he wrote it’ which, he suggests, ‘does partly excuse him’. Indeed, Ware continues, ‘if he had lived to see these times’ he may have moderated his arguments to recognize ‘the good effects which the last 30 yeares peace have produced in this land’.3 However, both Ware and Lewis agree that Spenser’s Irish experience constituted a basic challenge to the poet’s morality itself, and to whatever moral claims may have been advanced by his writing when his attention turned directly to problems of Irish policy. The View, like its poetic analogue in Book V of The Faerie Queene, vitiates any notion of either temperate moderation or common human empathy as either the basis or objective of

561

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Immoderation and necessity

165

political action. In form and intention, however, it is also a highly conventional expression of Renaissance civic humanist moral and political philosophy. Read from a strictly formal perspective, it is a humanist dialogue organized around a concluding vision of human flourishing which describes a social space that is developed from rational principles, and whose forms and practices, in turn, inculcate rational forms of life in its inhabitants. Grotesque as they may often be, the arguments leading up to that moment are wholly concerned with the impediments to that eudaimonic vision, and with proposing strategies to remove those impediments. And at the center of this narrative scheme and the various arguments unfolding within it is a pragmatic concern with realizing the basic mimetic and conceptual subject of The Faerie Queene as identified by Spenser in his ‘Letter of the Authours’, described as poem that has ‘followed all the antique poets historicall’ in having ‘ensampled a good governour and a vertuous man’.4 If Spenser’s epic narrative of the convergence of good governance with individual virtue is oriented around the figure of Prince Arthur, the narrative of Irish history’s collisions with English colonial policy unfolding in the View’s civic humanist dialogue is oriented around what it might imagine as its two epic heroes, Arthur, Lord Grey de Wilton, and Robert Devereaux, the Earl of Essex. ‘That good Lord Grey’, as Eudoxus, the View’s inquisitive English interlocutor, describes him, was the Lord Deputy of Ireland from 1580 until 1582, when he was finally recalled for his violent and impolitic excesses; were it not for his recall, Eudoxus continues, ‘Ireland was even made ready for reformation’.5 Assenting to this claim, Ireneus, a mouthpiece both for Spenser himself, and for the New English colonial administration in Ireland more largely, then remarks that whereas courtly gossip back in England ‘blotted’ Grey ‘with the name of a bloody man’, he was by nature ‘gentle, affable, and temperate; but that the neccessitie of that present state of things inforced him to that violence, and almost changed his naturall disposition’.6 For Spenser, as for his editor and publisher, Ware, who was writing some 34 years after the poet’s death, Ireland was a place that challenges the very bases of virtue, exposing its inabilities to cope with ‘the necessitie … of things inforced’ by political circumstances. Yet Spenser suggests that this confrontation with necessity provokes a new kind of virtue, one not rooted in

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

166

Spenser’s ethics

character, the ‘naturall disposition’ standing as the foundation of classical virtue ethics, but in the chameleon-​like capacity either to alter that disposition, or even to ignore its instinctual inclinations, in the face of external necessities. An account of a virtue that is defined and authorized by the encounter with necessity recurs at the mention of the View’s second heroic agent, the Earl of Essex. Near the work’s conclusion, Spenser obliquely points to Essex as colonial Ireland’s ‘last hope’. When Spenser wrote these words, Essex was shifting from being a rising star to a major center of power in Elizabethan politics. In his figure, Spenser argues for a strong local governor whose authority is unchecked by a distant, inflexible, and uninformed Privy Council, and whose decisions are ‘forced oftentimes to follow the necessitie of present actions, and to take the suddaine advantage of time’.7 This phrase’s vocabulary and structure recall that earlier account of Grey, implying that Essex is the one who may complete the work begun by Spenser’s first colonialist hero. Crucially, Spenser here acknowledges the intellectual framework shaping and supporting this new image of heroic virtue, noting that he finds warrant for his claim in ‘Machiavel in his Discourses on Livie’. Machiavelli, he notes, praises Rome for ‘giving absolute power’ to local governors while critiquing Venice and Florence, ‘who use to limite their chiefe officers’.8 In this passage, Spenser draws on the historian of the Florentine and Roman Republics in the View’s most significantly partisan political crux in a way that reflects on the nature, scope, and intention of the very category of virtue as it is both caused and confirmed through the labors of effective political agency. Centering these linked moments of transformative reflection on the idea of virtue itself in the paired nods to Grey and Essex is Machiavelli’s singular transformation of the concept of virtue from an Aristotelian fulfillment of human excellence to the creation of political agency against the incursions of external necessity. It is reflected in that self-​transformation imagined in Spenser’s account of Grey, as it is in his pinning of both figures’ modes of heroic agency on their respective capacities to work effectively amongst, in the first instance, ‘the necessitie … of things inforced’, and in the second, ‘to take the suddaine advantage of time’.9 While this may be the only moment in Spenser’s vast body of work that directly references Machiavelli, the fact that Spenser was

761

Immoderation and necessity

167

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

both widely familiar and generally engaged with his work is not in real doubt. In 1579, Spenser’s early mentor, Gabriel Harvey wrote to a friend describing the present state of intellectual life at Cambridge University, and one imagines similar scenes at Pembroke College in 1570: I warrant you sum good fellowes amongst us begin nowe to be pretely well acquainted with a certayne parlous booke callid, as I remember me, Il Principe di Nicolo Machiavelli, and I can peradventire name you an crewe or tooe that ar as cunninge in his Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Livio, in his Historia Fiorentina, and in his Dialogues della Arte della Guerra tooe, as University men were wont to be in their parva Logicalia and Magna Moralia and Physicalia of both sortes.10

Machiavelli’s writings were not simply student fodder, but were basic intellectual currency among the English political elite in Ireland, as well as those in England directly involved with Irish colonial policy, in the 1580s and 90s. As Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton note, Machiavelli’s writings were a critical nexus linking Gabriel Harvey with those figures at the center of designing and implementing Elizabethan colonial policy in Ireland.11 Machiavelli permeates the writings of figures like William Herbert, Barnaby Rich, Walter Raleigh, and Richard Beacon. Looking, for instance, at the works of Spenser’s Munster neighbors, Beacon and Herbert, we can see Machiavelli being deployed within the context of wide-​ranging debates, variously framing a broad range of divergent and contrasting responses to the crises of their political present. Ireland, as Markku Peltonen suggests, was particularly apt for a flourishing of Machiavellian reception among its Elizabethan conquerors, for the ‘inherent stability of’ England which sustained ‘the traditional frame of reference’ in moral and political philosophy was irrelevant to the ‘unsettled frontier society of Ireland’.12 More specifically, as Ciaran Brady suggests, the political failures of the viceroyships of John Perrot and Sir William Fitzwilliam in the decade after Grey’s recall ‘raised a fundamental challenge to humanist assumptions concerning the reformability of mankind’, challenges which found their answer in Machiavelli, whose writings both ‘explained the failure of English law in Ireland’ while rationalizing and justifying ‘more ruthless alternatives’ to mere policy reform.13 It is thus not surprising that Spenser would be thinking about Machiavelli, and the Discourses on Livy in particular, at this moment in the View.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

168

Spenser’s ethics

David Wootton argues that Spenser’s ‘thinking with the text of Machiavelli in hand went beyond mere recycling’; rather, the encounter fundamentally changed the poet’s basic ways of thinking about, and being an agent of, imperial power.14 As Wootton suggests, Machiavelli authorized Spenser not merely to justify, but to find explicit moral value in a campaign of violent extremism. While it may register as a simple, unthinking, and brute ‘ends-​justify-​the-​means’ utilitarianism, the thinking towards which Machiavelli directs Spenser is rooted in a set of foundational theoretical questions about the historically embedded and conditioned nature of human agency in the world. The first of these is the sense that (in Machiavelli’s word) virtú is not about excellence of character but about the capacity to establish effective forms of political agency against the inevitable incursions of worldly realities. The second and third have to do with what J.G.A. Pocock illuminates as the pivotal conceptual shifts in Machiavelli’s political theory away from earlier classical, medieval, and Renaissance models.15 On the one hand is an awareness of the historicity of all political orders and of the historically determined nature of the actions and agents that bring those orders into being. On the other is the sense that civil life is about the confrontation with, and effacement of, social corruption, and that effective forms of agency are driven by a reformative imperative within a cyclical pattern of decline and renewal shaping all societies. There would have been no comparable contemporary authority who addressed questions of political agency, of the creation and consolidation of states, and of the governance of resistant subjects more fully, nor one who interrogated these problems more directly in the context of the emergent early modern nation-​state than did Machiavelli. Likewise, the specific reference to the Discourses makes particular sense given the fact that this text opens with an extended meditation on the relationship between virtuous agency and reformative governance in the context of colonial occupations. In book 1, ­chapter 1 of the Discourses, Machiavelli discusses Moses’s and Aeneas’s conquests of their respective promised lands,  upholding them as instances of what he terms virtuoso agents. I give a more extended analysis of this passage at the end of this chapter, but for present purposes, I will simply note that these two exemplary figures from the Christian and humanist traditions

961

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Immoderation and necessity

169

that shaped both Machiavelli and Spenser could perfectly gloss Spenser’s own images of Grey and Essex in the View as builders of civic structures that stand against the incursions of necessity, and whose individual virtues are generated by this encounter with forms of violent constraint on their civilization-​building imperatives. And just as Machiavelli’s images of Moses and Aeneas do not traffic in the allegorized pieties of commentators like Landino, so Spenser’s half-​admittedly ‘bloody’ Grey and his freelancing Essex conspicuously refute the political naivete of those courtiers safely ensconced in London. The scholarly attention devoted to Spenser’s engagement with Machiavelli tends to crystallize into a binary. Either, as Edwin Greenlaw argued over a century ago, Spenser is a doctrinaire Machiavellian, or, in Richard McCabe’s words, ‘although there are many points of contact between [them], their final outlooks are radically different’.16 As is so often the case with Spenser’s handling of sources, this dichotomy is misleading. For instance, just as Spenser, in the proem to Book IV, unequivocally condemns those ‘Stoicke censors’ who reject his poetry’s pleasures, so various Stoic and Neostoic ideas and imperatives, drawn variously from Seneca, Cicero, and the contemporary Dutch Neo-​Stoic Justus Lipsius, are foundational to his moral thought. Unlike Dante with Sts. Aquinas, Bonaventure, and Augustine, or Milton’s monism, Spenser is rarely, if ever, consistently doctrinaire or orthodox in his appropriations of sources and ideas. Spenser’s approach to sources in general tends to eclecticism and opportunism. It is often impressionistic, and occasionally prone to decontextualization and misstatement. It is, in short, a commonplace-​book approach, with free-​floating extracts organized in often ad hoc or improvisatory ways around general principles.17 Reading Spenser as either pro or anti-​Machiavellian is thus a red herring and making these principles central to one’s own thinking does not a Machiavellian make. Indeed, the Florentine occupies but a small portion of Spenser’s work, a facet of a broader reconfiguration of humanist critical practice in early modern political life that increasingly regarded the studia humanitas not as a storehouse of normative moral exemplars but as a stockpile of case studies (to recall Gabriel Harvey) ‘stored and studied for action’, and in shifting, improvisatory ways addressed to the vagaries and contingencies of political life and action. As Andrew Hadfield

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

170

Spenser’s ethics

argues, Spenser’s View is shaped by a broad synthesis of early modern political theory that draws from thinkers often at direct odds with one another –​Machiavelli, Bodin, Lipsius, and Erasmus, among them.18 The Florentine’s influence permeates his writing from numerous directions. Some are direct, while most are highly mediated; they are invariably, however, pointedly and decisively deployed. Not expressions of doctrinaire allegiance to principles, they reflect, rather, an embrace of a method that shapes a range of early modern historiographers, legal and political theorists, and moral philosophers. What unites them, in Spenser, is a broader concern with understanding a form of virtue, and a paradigm of virtuoso citizenship, contoured to the particular and emerging necessities of life in the early modern English empire. Machiavelli’s virtuoso agent abandons the false promise of the middle way as a path of weakness and thus peril. After describing a Guyon-​esque strategy of tearing down old political regimes in order to establish the security of the new, Machiavelli, in book 1 of the Discourses reminds his readers that ‘for though many Princes take a middle way betwixt [good and bad], yet they find it extream difficult and dangerous; for being neither good nor bad, they are neither fear’d nor belov’d, and so unlikely to prosper’.19 When Sir James Ware pointed to the lack of moderation, the intemperance of the View, he did so, in part to remind his readers that Ireland in 1633 was no longer the Ireland of the Desmond and Tyrone rebellions informing Spenser’s work. His remark, however, points to something crucial in the formation of Spenser’s ethical thought: Ireland forced in his writing and thinking a wholesale reconfiguration of the very notion of virtue. The View, indeed, could be read as an extended meditation on the irreconcilability of humanist theory and governmental practice within the New English polity in Ireland, and in its Machiavelli-​inflected account of the virtues of Grey and Essex, of the ultimate impossibility of effectively coordinating a broadly Aristotelian ethical framework with the Elizabethan colonial project. Above all, it interrogates both the possibility of a coherent philosophical foundation for political action and the transformative pressures exerted by the exercise of political power on those philosophical precepts, revealing the complex ways a figure on the violent front lines of Elizabethan imperial power sought to mediate

171

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Immoderation and necessity

171

inherited theories of civil life and human flourishing with the daily exigencies of establishing and maintaining the early modern colonial state. Within this broader context of the transformational crucible of Elizabethan Ireland, the passing references, both implicit and explicit, to Machiavelli can be seen as registering the tension between what Spenser regards as the self-​evident virtues of Grey’s and Essex’s modes of agency, and of the era’s received conceptual vocabulary of moral understanding. If he could pose a counterargument to Ware’s invocation of the language of moderation, Spenser might note that this is a world where the temperate mean, and the normative principles by which it holds, are empty fictions easily destroyed by the force of necessity. The virtues, that is, are simply insufficient to the political demands of the colonial enterprise. Returning to a moment briefly examined in my introduction, Spenser’s representation of the ancient virtues’ political insufficiency in the face of necessity comes to a head in The Faerie Queene with Radegund’s defeat of Artegall in V.v. Until Radegund falls to the ground, the fight has proceeded according to a pattern that would have been familiar to the heroes of ancient epics and medieval romances: the two combatants exemplify figures for whom action is an expression of essential being, whose combats pursue the restoration of a temperate mean, and whose victories affirm a divinely ordained social order. At this moment, however, Artegall is stunned and disarmed by the pathos of a fallen Radegund, when as he discouered had her face, He saw his senses straunge astonishment, A miracle of natures goodly grace, In her faire visage voide of ornament, (V.v.12, 1–​4)

At this, the chivalric hero suddenly transforms into a Petrarchan lover: At sight thereof his cruell minded hart Empierced was with pittifull regard, That his sharpe sword he threw from him apart, Cursing his hand that had that visage mard: No hand so cruell, nor no hart so hard, But ruth of beautie will it mollifie. By this vpstarting from her swoune, she star’d

172

Spenser’s ethics

A while about her with confused eye; Like one that from his dreame is waked suddenlye.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

(V.v.13)

It makes a good story, but bad politics. Indeed, Artegall’s capacity, as an adherent of a virtue-​centric moral code, to moderate and ‘mollifie’ his rage ‘with ruth of beauty’ towards that temperate mean, is the proximate cause of his defeat. Likewise, Spenser pointedly emphasizes the seeming irony that Radegund is most deceptive and potent at the moment she seems most visible and most vulnerable. Recalling an earlier point, Artegall fails to recognize that the entire scenario of the fight is a bit of play-​acting and that Radegund herself is a master actor. In an analogy to which he returns several times in After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre famously describes those ancient virtues as working like a game of chess, where the ‘rules which govern both action and evaluative judgment’ depend upon a basic ‘agreement on how to play chess’ and ‘it is only within their framework of rules and precepts that they are able to frame purposes at all’.20 Like chess, the rules of heroic virtue in Homer only make sense if all parties play by them.21 For MacIntyre, the limitation of inhabiting the Homeric moral perspective is failing to recognize that virtuous selves are not actual ontologies, but, rather fictive roles. It is precisely on this ground that Radegund operates; she cleaves apart, and throws into relief, the distinction between reality as it is and the performance of an imagined reality that is subject to manipulation by anyone cagey enough, and who is endowed with enough self-​reflexivity, to work from outside the confines of the heroic ‘world-​ view’, an imaginative space whose blissfully unaware inhabitants ‘have no doubt that reality is as they represent it to themselves’.22 If Artegall is still playing by the rules of the chivalric game, Radegund not only refuses those rules, but takes advantage of Artegall’s unwillingness or inability to see beyond the confines of his chivalric fantasy world. Thus, she quickly and easily subdues the knight ‘by guile’ and imprisons him in female garb to weave and spin in her dungeon. Pressing on MacIntyre’s chess analogy, we could say that at the very moment Artegall is about to declare checkmate, Radegund leaps across the table, snatches away his chess pieces, and declares victory for herself. It is a situation with

371

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Immoderation and necessity

173

which Artegall’s decidedly non-​ self-​ reflexive perspective on the inherent fictionality of the duel is simply unable to cope in any meaningful way. With her performance carefully developed to ensnare a beguiled Artegall through his biggest blind spots, Radegund is, in simplest terms, a Machiavellian –​at least in the pejorative and popular sense that predominated in his cultural reception and assimilation in sixteenth-​ century England. Spenser’s contemporary Alberico Gentili (on whom more later) notes in his 1585 treatise on international diplomacy, De Legibationis Libri Tres, that even though ‘Machiavelli … deserves our commiseration in the highest degree’, most regard the Florentine as ‘a man of no learning and of criminal tendencies.’23 This, of course, is the Machiavelli that informs Harvey’s squint remark about Cambridge students reading the ‘­parlous book’ and to whom Spenser himself turns in drawing his portrait of the guileful Fox in Mother Hubberd’s Tale. Bearing in mind the overt theatricality of Radegund’s device, it is worth considering her as an echo of the ways this version of Machiavelli was taken up on the contemporary stage, in figures like Marlowe’s Barabas and Shakespeare’s Gloucester who were surely known to Spenser from his own returns to London and likely detours to the theaters. Not just cartoonish villains who practice arbitrary cruelty or violence for its own sake –​although this is a crucial part of their allure as subjects of our spectatorship –​the stage Machiavel, of which Radegund is a version, levies significant claims about the structural mechanisms by which effective political agency is created and its forms of power enforced on others. When, at the opening of Shakespeare’s Richard III, Gloucester urges himself ­ forward with the command, ‘Dive, thoughts, down to my soul’ (1.1. 41), he is making a basic claim about the paradigmatic structures of effective agency, a mode of action predicated on the carefully regulated differentiation of his inner and outer lives, and, as he turns to the newly arrived (and arrested Clarence), the careful construction and manipulation of fictions that others view as reality. Machiavels like Richard or Radegund conspicuously, and with utter self-​reflexivity, inhabit world as theater, commandeering a conventional Renaissance topos and reorienting the questions of agency, volition, and determinism the figure raises from the m ­ etaphysical into the secular realm of political power.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

174

Spenser’s ethics

Such is the basic question of agency and action raised by Radegund’s performance, and by Artegall’s inability to recognize it as such. At the center of this scene of role-​playing along the tensed boundary between the fictive and the real are the parallel performances of supplicatory surrender staged by Radegund and Artegall. Even at the moment Radegund reveals her ruse, Artegall sustains his naïve adherence to an outmoded code of conduct, and her mastery of both Artegall and of the conceptual foundations of this moment is only heightened by his beguiled submission to her ironic performance of the knightly ceremony of surrender, as he is ‘damned by the doome /​Of his own mouth’. And euermore he gently did desyre, To stay her stroks, and he himselfe would yield: Yet nould she hearke, ne let him once respyre, Till he to her deliuered had his shield, And to her mercie him submitted in plaine field. So was he ouercome, not ouercome, But to her yeelded of his owne accord; Yet was he iustly damned by the doome Of his owne mouth, that spake so warelesse word, To be her thrall, and seruice her afford. For though that he first victorie obtayned, Yet after by abandoning his sword, He wilfull lost, that he before attayned. No fayrer conquest, then that with goodwill is gayned. Tho with her sword on him she flatling strooke, In signe of true subiection to her powre, And as her vassall him to thraldome tooke. (V.v.16–​18)

In her study of the epic topos of supplication, Leah Whittington argues that these gestures of submission seek to negotiate reciprocal obligations among asymmetrical power relations.24 Artegall’s defeat reveals such decorums as social, political, and ethical fictions that Ragedund simply obliterates by refusing to buy into them. Power is simply power. The concluding gesture by which she dubs him as her servant offers an ironic parody of knightly ceremony. The reimagined ritual mockingly points to Artegall’s foolish assumption that, thanks to their common appearance in knightly attire, they shared the beliefs and values conventionally signified by that attire.

571

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Immoderation and necessity

175

While Spenser certainly does not want our sympathies to lie with Radegund, he nevertheless uses her to make a valuable point at Artegall’s expense: in this ‘stony world’, a different form of virtue is needed, one defined not by moderation or disposition, but rather by a willingness and ability to take advantage of the opportunities afforded it by chance, fortune, and the necessities of circumstance. It is no simple mark of Radegund’s villainy that Artegall is consigned to his effeminized imprisonment in ‘a long large chamber, which was sield /​With moniments of many knights decay’ (V.v.21, 3–​4). Radegund embodies the very forces against which a conventionally imagined knightly virtue inevitably decays. The entire episode is centered in Spenser’s Irish experience, illuminating his encounter with a land, and with a set of political and practical circumstances, that forced a wholesale reconsideration of the very notion of virtue and of the idea of heroic action that moral ideology presumed. Indeed, there may be no point in the poem whose account of virtue’s ‘decay’ is more politically charged than this account of the supplicatory defeat of Artegall and its fascinating echoes of a very real moment of military defeat and supplication, and of the contravention of established codes of chivalric virtue, to which Spenser was a party, and which he memorably recalls in the View: the massacre at Smerwick in November, 1580, shortly after arriving at his posting in Ireland as Lord Grey’s secretary. A letter from Lord Grey to Queen Elizabeth, written in Spenser’s secretary hand, describes the events surrounding the massacre shortly after they happened, recalling how the enemy ‘Coronell’ sought terms of surrender, after which ‘He then embraced my knees, simply putting himself to my mercy’. After terms are agreed to, Grey dispassionately reneges on his word: ‘then I put in certayne bandes, who fell straight to execution. There were 600 slayne’.25 When Spenser returns to this episode nearly two decades later in the View, he significantly expands on the matter-​of-​fact account given in that earlier, official description, now offering a formal justification for what was, and remained, a significant diplomatic and political crisis: and afterwards their Coronell named Don Sebastian, came forth to intreate that they might part with their armes like souldiers, at least with their lyves, accordinge to the custome of warre, and lawe

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

176

Spenser’s ethics

of Nations, it was strongly denyed him, and tolde him by the Lord Deputie him selfe, that they coulde not iustly pleade either customme of warr, of lawe of Nations, for that they were not any lawfull enemyes; and if they were, willed them to shewe by what commission they came thither into another Prices domynions to warre, whether from the Pope or the Kinge of Spayne, or any other. Then when they saide they had not, but were onely adventurers that came to seeke fortune abroade, and serve in warrs amongst the Irishe, who desired to entertayne them, it was then tolde them, that the Irishe them selves, as the Earle and John of Desmonde with the rest, were no lawfull enemyes, but Rebells and traytors; and therefore they that came to succor them no better than rogues and runnagates, specially comminge with no licence, nor commission from their owne Kinge: so as it shoulde be dishonorable for him in the name of his Queene to condicon or make any tearmes with suche rascalls, but left them to their choyce, to yiedle and submitt themselves, or no. Wherupon the said Coronell did absolutely yeild him selfe and the fort, with all therein, and craved onely mercy, which it being thought good not to shew them, both for daiunger of themselves yf, being saved, they should afterwardes joyne with the Irishe, and also for terror of the Irish, who were muche imboldned by those forreyne succours, and also put in hope of more ere longe; there was no other way but to make that short ende of them which was made. Therefore most untruly and maliciously doe theis evill tongues backbite and sclaunder the sacred ashes of that most just and honorable personage, whose leaste vertue, of many most exceleent which abounded in his heroicke spirit, they were never able to aspire unto.26

While Willy Maley has influentially argued that Spenser’s reframing of this scene works to condemn Grey and, implicitly, praise Raleigh, I propose that Spenser intends this moment to praise and uphold Grey.27 The nature and intention of this praise reveals itself in the four points with which he justifies the act. First, Spenser argues, these were mercenaries and were thus not subject to the laws and customs regulating warfare. Second, these were rebels fighting against a legal, sovereign authority and thus stood beyond the normative bounds guaranteeing their legal protection. Third, there is the basic strategic problem of marching 600 captured troops through enemy territory back to Dublin. Fourth, Grey sought to terrorize both Desmond and potential future foes into submission with this act. Collectively, Spenser argues, Grey’s acting decisively

771

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Immoderation and necessity

177

and without hesitation on these reasons was not dishonorable, but the very mark of a ‘most just and honorable personage, whose leaste vertue, of many most exceleent which abounded in his heroicke spirit’ few can ‘aspire unto’.28 We are far, indeed, from Artegall’s uncritical embrace of the chivalric and heroic ethical imaginary that is his ultimate undoing. Spenser’s analogous images of Grey and Artegall standing over seemingly defeated, but still very dangerous, supplicants present counterfactual versions of what is, both formally and conceptually, the same basic event. Rendering opposed responses to the same political choice, these scenes converge around, and find their meaning for Spenser in, a key literary-​historical exemplar: Aeneas’s slaughter of the suppliant Turnus in Book XII of Virgil’s own epic of empire and imperialist virtue, the Aeneid. In the closing lines of the Aeneid, Aeneas stands over the suppliant Turnus who, in Fitzgerald’s translation ‘lifted his eyes /​An held his right hand out to make a plea’, Clearly I earned this and I ask no quarter. Make the most of your good fortune here. If you can feel a father’s grief –​and you, too, Had such a father in Anchises –​then Let me bespeak your mercy for old age In Daunus, and return me, or my body, Stripped, if you will, of life, to my kin. You have defeated me. The Ausonians Have seen me in defeat, spreading my hands. Lavinia is your bride. But go no further Out of hatred.29

If Fitzgerald is, perhaps, more faithful in his rendering of Virgil’s Latin, ‘tua est Lavinia coniunx, /​ulterius ne tende odiis’, Dryden’s translation better renders the political and ethical stakes of this moment: ‘Thine is the conquest, thine the royal wife /​Against a yeilded man ‘tis mean ignoble strife’. Aeneas, like Artegall, is momentarily struck by the pathos of the moment. Again, in Dryden’s looser, but more politically astute rendering: In deep suspense the Trojan seem’d to stand, And, just prepar’d to strike, repress’d his hand. He roll’d his eyes, and ev’ry moment felt His manly soul with more compassion melt.30

178

Spenser’s ethics

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

However, Aeneas refuses to yield either to compassion, to sympathy, or, most importantly, to any sort of unwritten heroic code when he looks down and sees Turnus decked with the belt plundered from his friend, Pallas: When, casting down a casual glance, he spied The golden belt that glitter’d on his side, The fatal spoils which haughty Turnus tore From dying Pallas, and in triumph wore. Then, rous’d anew to wrath, he loudly cries (Flames, while he spoke, came flashing from his eyes): ‘Traitor, dost thou, dost thou to grace pretend, Clad, as thou art, in trophies of my friend? To his sad soul a grateful off’ring go! ’Tis Pallas, Pallas gives this deadly blow’. He rais’d his arm aloft, and, at the word, Deep in his bosom drove the shining sword. The streaming blood distain’d his arms around, And the disdainful soul came rushing thro’ the wound. (XII. 1664–​77)

And so the Aeneid ends. Like Spenser’s own poem, it ends mid-​stream; yet, also like Spenser’s poem, it ends with a perfectly fitting conclusion. Not only the deed itself, but the wrath with which it is carried out seem to fly in the face of everything we think we know about Pius Aeneas, a paragon of virtuous moderation. And yet this is the doubtless summation of Aeneas’s quest, clearing space for him to fulfill his obligations both to prophecy and to providence. This episode constrained many of many of Virgil’s most careful Renaissance readers into interpretive knots attempting to square the circle of this intemperate and uncivil act with a reflexively conditioned sense of Aeneas’s moral and political perfection. Likewise, as Craig Kallendorf demonstrates, it also underwrote a widespread strain of pessimistic readings of the Roman poet among Renaissance humanists.31 However, the Aeneid’s image of the exercise of colonial power and conquest must have found special purchase in the critical imaginations of Spenser and his peers. For any moral ambiguity with which it may have confronted its readers, they would have found a sympathetic warrant for their own actions in its celebration of a dominionist endeavor underwritten by a providentialist ideology which ultimately overthrows the sovereign claims of standing,

971

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Immoderation and necessity

179

inherited ownership. If, as the allegorists who sought to gloss over Aeneas’s actions would have it, Turnus’s execution is simply an accident of providence’s mysterious workings, those readers inclined to a more pragmatic approach to literary and historical exemplarity (one ‘studied for action,’ as it were) might read the episode as an object lesson in strategic pragmatism –​the very kinds of pragmatism that, I believe, Spenser sees in Grey and which Artegall abjures. And if Virgil’s account of Aeneas’s response to the suppliant Turnus is not explicitly mentioned in Spenser’s analysis of Grey’s actions, it was surely close at hand in his reflections on Smerwick some fifteen years later when he was writing the View. Spenser’s own justifications of Grey’s actions not only closely track but, in their overarching invocations of international law, seem fairly explicitly to gesture towards one key contemporary critical analysis of the closing lines of the Aeneid: Alberico Gentili’s 1589 reading in his treatise on the laws of war, De Jure Belli, which forcefully sets out to defend Aeneas against charges of impiety for killing a defenseless enemy. While there is not much more than circumstantial evidence to suggest a link between these texts, it is likely that Spenser would have had at least a passing familiarity with Gentili’s work. In addition to the fact that Gentili and Spenser operated in often overlapping social and intellectual circles, Spenser, as a chancery clerk, was required to have a working knowledge of the law. Andrew Zurcher and Bradin Cormack both demonstrate that Spenser’s knowledge of legal matters was, in fact, not only adequate to his employment, but fairly comprehensive, and, furthermore, that it played a significant role in shaping both his poetic vocabulary and political thinking.32 It is likely that anyone with these interests and critical commitments, and who was in the position that Spenser occupied in the social, intellectual, and political worlds of Elizabethan England and Ireland would have been familiar, either directly or by close report, with Gentili’s writings. Gentili’s overarching analysis of the episode is embedded in the question at the heart of all colonial enterprises: understanding how Aeneas’s actions ‘were lawful’, despite the fact that ‘he was trying to get possession of what belonged to another’.33 Throughout his reading of the Aeneid’s final lines, Gentili’s points closely align with Spenser’s: Turnus deserved death, even while supplicating himself, because 1) earlier in the poem, he broke a treaty made by kings,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

180

Spenser’s ethics

thus excluding himself from negotiated or customary protections; 2) Turnus was not a lawful enemy, but one who did unjustified violence to Aeneas’s friends; and 3) laws of mercy governing supplication can only stand when victory is assured, and when its symbolic status (to recall Whittington) as the affirmation of hierarchy is unambiguous. Christopher Warren demonstrates that Gentili’s arguments reflect the same networks of thought that nurtured Spenser’s writing, including contemporary continental writers such as Tasso and Scaliger, and also key players in the Elizabethan literary scene such as Sidney and Harvey.34 And when these writers turn to Turnus’s death, their analyses converge on the same themes that concern Spenser in the View and in Book V of The Faerie Queene. In particular, as Warren notes, Tasso and Sidney adapted the closing lines of the Aeneid to explore the points at which the conventional mores of chivalric practice no longer constitute a reasonable form of political action –​Tasso in the Gerusalemme Liberata’s story of Raimondo and Tancredi’s duels with Argante, and Sidney’s conclusion to the Arcadia in which a suppliant Lycurgus pleads before Pyrocles (who notably anticipates Artegall by being dressed in female guise as Zelmane). Each work echoes and expands on the Aeneid, emphasizing in particular the affective pull of pathos when confronting a suppliant, the danger of this empathic response, and the turn to a kind of clarifying, space-​clearing violence. Within this complex web of influence, Gentili’s analysis, however, highlights a crucial strand of thought that is also central to Spenser’s image of Grey in the View, and one subordinated both by Tasso and Sidney in their broader commitments to the basic claims of a metaphysically oriented and virtue-​centric ethics: the privileging of a mode of action whose normative bases are wholly situational and whose broader teleological ambitions are oriented towards the achievement of what Spenser might call ‘policy’.35 Whereas Tasso, for instance, positions his own elaboration of the Turnus episode in a broader narrative framework that emphasizes modes of action directed towards Christian mercy, a renewed sense of a chivalric code, and the telos of universal conversion shaping the Liberata’s narrative arc, Gentili has no interest in what is at stake in these lines much beyond pragmatic political concerns.36 In general, Gentili is less concerned with Aeneas’s conformity to excellence than he is with understanding what this moment tells us about Aeneas’s ability

181

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Immoderation and necessity

181

to carry out his political agenda and efficiently remove impediments to that agenda. Diego Panizza suggests that the broad political orders Gentili describes are ultimately a reflection of a ‘ “cunning of reason” built into the constitution of nature’, the human nature, that is, of the individual subjects out of which those collective political orders are constituted, ‘by virtue of which men are led by self-​interest, or “utility” broadly understood, to pursue and bring about an order of “justice” ’.37 It is here we see one of the through lines in the dense web of evolving networks of political and moral theory in early modernity, a direct link that moves through Gentili directly from Machiavelli at the dawn of the early modern era to Grotius –​himself a deep student of Gentili as he developed his theories of international law –​in its flourishing. On this point, I return to the line of inquiry with which this chapter began: the lurking undercurrent of Machiavellian ethical and political theory that orients a broader, and often very diffuse, reconfiguration of the concept of virtue in late humanist political writing. Gentili’s more overt interests in just war, international law, and diplomacy persistently turn on the question of individual agency, and on a concern with the ways the actions of individual agents both reflect and sustain a broader vision of a social order. For instance, the narrative trajectory of his 1585 treatise on diplomacy, De Legationibus Libri Tres, moves inexorably toward an account of ‘the pattern of the excellent ambassador’, a figure Gentili sees most fully instantiated in the person of Sir Philip Sidney. Gentili’s ‘perfect ambassador is one who can accomplish efficiently the business and duties which have been assigned to him or which he himself has recognized the necessity of undertaking’.38 Such an account of agency assumes a crucial claim about the scope and intention of political virtue: it exists in the capacity effectively to inhabit, respond to, and find advantage within the restraints of external necessity. Earlier in this work, Gentili notes that Machiavelli instructs us in the practice of deploying ‘useful practical experience’ in the service of gaining political advantage against less shrewd opponents. At its core, this is not simply a Machiavellian sentiment, but is, in fact, the very essence of Machiavelli’s reconfiguration of Aristotelian virtue into his concept, virtú, the capacity to mediate a self-​interested political agency against the inevitable incursions of external forces that challenge that agency.39 Indeed, as Peter Schröder argues,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

182

Spenser’s ethics

‘the influence of Machiavelli … is crucial to appreciate this transformation’ in Gentili’s thought away from the orthodoxies of the theologians –​and, more broadly, the Aristotelian traditions shaping their thought –​and towards the kinds of conceptions about virtuous action that we see not only in Genitili’s image of Aeneas, but also in Spenser’s image of Lord Grey at Smerwick.40 In both cases, we see figures represented as virtuous by dint of their specific capacity to make decisions amidst uncertainty and unknowability; by taking decisive actions without standing precepts as a normative or proscriptive guide; and furthermore, by making decisions which self-​evidently flout the dictates of normative precepts but which must be done in the face of larger sets of challenges or constraints. In both instances, the seeming refutation of virtuous norms is represented as a prudent recognition of the ways reality, often as not, cannot be made to conform to ideals, and of the awareness that pursuing ideals while ignoring the realities with which a given situation confront those figures would most like be self-​defeating. Such, for instance, is what is at stake in Artegall’s fight with Radegund. Both Gentili’s Aeneas and Spenser’s Grey, finally, are figures who create heroic and political agency in circumstances where the scope and possibility of their actions are limited by the constraints of external necessity, and in which what counts as permissible action is ultimately defined by the demands of instantiating and sustaining the sovereign order. In short, both Gentili’s Aeneas and Spenser’s Grey are embodiments of the paradigmatic Machiavellian virtuoso. These figures’ virtues are not only amplified, but are ultimately defined by their respective encounters with existential crises. The Machiavellian virtuoso’s response to external constraints is neither fatalistic or reactive, but instead establishes a new kind of mean: discovering and taking advantage of the forms of agency left available by the ever-​narrowing constraints of external necessity by, on the one hand, rejecting the fatalistic paralysis of a bad situation and, on the other, refusing the irrational, aimless, and agency-​abandoning violence of simple reactivity. If Grey’s virtue at this moment does not seem particularly chivalric, it does seem distinctly Machiavellian in its capacity to operate efficiently within the reality of multiple bad options, and to find certain forms of advantage in those options –​in this case, inflicting terror on future enemies.

381

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Immoderation and necessity

183

Somewhat surprisingly, given its applicability as a means of reflecting on the moral claims of authority, self-​interest, utility, and necessity –​on its capacity to exemplify and complicate notions of virtuoso agency in the service of state-​formation –​Machiavelli does not offer his thoughts on the Aeneid’s final scene. His overarching account of Virgil’s narrative, however, is telling. When Machiavelli considers Aeneas in book 1, ­chapter 1 of the Discourses, he thinks more broadly about the Trojan’s deeds in ways that surely would have resonated with Spenser, for Machiavelli’s Aeneas is, above all else, a colonialist builder of cities and civic institutions. Henry Neville’s seventeenth century translation reads as follows: The Founders of Cities are free, when by themselves, or the Command of their Soveraign they are constrained upon occasion of sickness, famine, or war, to abandon their own, inquest of new Countries: and these do either possess themselves of such Towns as they find ready built in their Conquests, (as Moses did), or they build them de novo, as Aeneas. In this case the power of the builder, and the fortune of the building is conspicuous and honourable, according as the cause from whence it derives its Original is more or less eminent. His virtue and prudence is discernible two ways, by the election of the Seat, and institution of the Laws; and because men build as often by necessity as choice, and the judgment and wisdom of the builder is greater where there is less room and latitude for his election; it is worthy our consideration whether it is more advantagious building in barren and unfruitful places, to the end that the people being constrained to be industrious, and less obnoxious to idleness, might live in more unity, the poverty of the soil giving them less opportunity of dissention. Thus it fell out in Raugia and several other Cities built in such places; and that kind of election would doubtless be most prudent and profitable, if men could be content to live quietly of what they had, without an ambitious desire of Command.41

Machiavelli’s Aeneas embodies a vision of moral agency specifically positioned within, and shaped by, the ambitions of colonial occupation and empire-​building. In the act of choosing a site on which to establish a city, the constraints imposed by external necessity serve as the very ground on which virtue stands in general. The harder the soil, the truer, more substantive, and more secure the virtue generated thereon. Virtue itself is at risk in a world without peril, for easy living that readily accommodates our ambitions invites

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

184

Spenser’s ethics

sloth and indolence. Machiavelli, however, also recognizes the difficulty not only of maintaining, but also of extending, political power in ‘a sterile country’, acknowledging that ‘a city should be placed rather in a region where the fertility of the soil affords the means of becoming great’. Pointing to Aeneas’s Rome as the prime example, Machiavelli argues that effective laws and civic institutions serve as a bulwark against any threats to virtue and valor that a fertile country may provoke: as to that idleness to which the richness of the situation disposes, it may be provided against by Laws and convenient exercise enjoyn’d …. For these reasons I conceive best to build in a fruitful place, if the ill consequences of that fertility be averted by convenient Laws.42

The Discourses’ opening passage does not simply offer a concise summation of the governing ideology of colonial occupation. Rather, it establishes the foundation for a moral justification for colonialism itself. Its image of the colonialist hero is echoed by Spenser’s friend Lodowick Bryskett, who, in his Discourse of Civill Life, presents an image of Arthur, Lord Grey’s violent suppression of the Desmond rebellion as an act of the paradigmatic Protestant farmer that ‘hath plowed and harrowed the rough ground to his hand’.43 Robert Dillon, one of the interlocutors Bryskett’s dialogue continues to describe Grey’s labors by noting, you know that he that soweth the seede, whereby we hope for harvest according to the goodnesse of that which is cast into the earth, and the seasonableness of the times, deserveth no lesse praise then he that manureth the land. God of his goodnesse graunt, that when he hath also finished his worke, he may be pleased to send us such another Bayly to oversee and preserve their labours, that this poore countrey may by a wel-​ordered and setled forme of governement, and by due and equall administration of justice beginne to flourish as other Common-​weales do. To which all saying Amen, we directed our course to walke up the hill … in the greene way, talking still of the great hope was conceived of the quiet of the countrey.44

In this description, fallow ground is not a failure of the land, but of those who occupy it. Bryskett’s account of Grey’s agrarian labors depicts colonial power’s reformative project, like Machiavelli’s Aeneas, in distinctly virtuoso terms. It imagines agents whose ‘harvest’ of politic deeds not only reflects, but even causes and confirms

581

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Immoderation and necessity

185

‘the goodnesse of that which is cast into the earth’ and ‘he that manureth the land’.45 In more pointed ways, Spenser’s View persistently juxtaposes the harshness, sterility, and the general inhospitable nature of Ireland against the actual lush fertility of the Irish landscape. Indeed, he opens this work by praising Ireland’s ‘goodly and commodious … soyl’.46 Later, the lead role in this dialogue, Irenius, a fictional embodiment of Spenser himself, describes Ireland to his interlocutor, Eudoxus, as a place now ‘utterly wasted’ yet whose landscape is nevertheless ‘yet a most beautifull and sweet countrey as any is under heaven’.47 Eudoxus responds by mourning ‘the lamentable desolation therof’, and pitying ‘that sweet land, to be subject to so many evills, as I see to be more and more layde upon her’, lamenting ‘her fatall misfortune above all countries that I knowe to be thus miserably tossed and turmoyled with these variable stormes of afflictions’.48 And the cause of these afflictions, according to Ireneus, is misgovernance. As an orienting topos of Elizabethan colonialist ideology, the idea of misgovernance represents the Irish political and juridical present as a failure that demands, and can only be rectified by, the establishment of a new society with new civil orders and institutions. As Spenser argues in his single reference to Machiavelli near the close of the View, such reparation can only occur under the guidance of a governor who is not simply able to function when his decisions are ‘forced oftentimes to follow the necessitie of present actions, and to take the suddaine advantage of time’, but whose virtues are, in fact, magnified by that confrontation with necessity. Through the figures of Grey and Essex, Spenser’s View articulates a larger moral vision of colonial occupation that constellates around Machiavelli, yet which moves more broadly through the early modern transformation of the underlying mores and assumptions of the classical virtue ethics tradition writ large. Spenser’s broader understanding of what Grey had already done, and what he presumes Essex will do, in Ireland, and why he calls on the authority of Machiavelli’s Discourses at this moment, renders a highly specified vision of what it means ‘to fashion a gentleman in vertuous and gentle discipline’. If Spenser’s moral vocabulary gestures towards a basically Aristotelian understanding of character as the core of virtuous action, his deployment of Machiavelli significantly redirects the Aristotelian account of the scope, aims, and ambitions of that

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

186

Spenser’s ethics

character, and of the orienting mean by which that character is shaped. Returning to that passage in the View in which Spenser recounts Grey’s recall from Ireland for a campaign of what was regarded in London as excessive, imprudent, and impolitic violence –​ and, presumably, that Spenser regards as a blueprint for a future program of ‘reformation’ –​Spenser’s New English colonist persona, Ireneus argues that Grey was in no inherent way the bloody and violent man his detractors and critics made him out to be. Whereas Grey’s critics, he argues, have ‘blotted’ him ‘with the name of a bloody man’, his basic character was in fact ‘gentle, affable, and temperate; but that the neccessitie of that present state of things inforced him to that violence, and almost changed his naturall disposition’. Spenser argues that Grey had assumed a new persona, and with it, instantiated a new mode of virtue; this new virtue was not rooted in his essential character, but, in a radical departure from the precepts of classical virtue ethics, in his capacity to perform, at will and in response to external contingencies, a wholly different character. If this assumed character was at basic odds with who Grey inherently was, it was necessary for what Spenser regarded as an effective policy that –​had Grey not been recalled and his policies halted –​ would have permanently ‘reformed’ and pacified Ireland. As an icon of virtuous subjectivity, Grey’s privileged state of character rests on his capacity to transform himself away from himself in a studied, instrumentalized, and resolutely teleological way. As the organizing principle of effective political agency, and the mechanism by which that agency is discovered and established in a metaphysically fallen world and its corrupted institutions, such self-​transformations shape a mode of virtue far removed indeed from Aristotelian excellence.

Notes 1 Sir James Ware, ‘The Preface’, in Spenser, A View, p. 6. 2 C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), pp. 348–​49. 3 Sir James Ware, ‘The Preface’, in Spenser, A View, p. 6. 4 Spenser, ‘A Letter’, p. 715. 5 Spenser, A View, p. 103. 6 Ibid.

781

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Immoderation and necessity

187

7 Spenser, A View, pp. 159–​60. On Essex’s rising fortunes in the mid 1590s, see P.E.J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–​1597 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 8 Spenser, A View, p. 160. 9 Ibid. 10 Harvey, Letter Book, p. 79. 11 On Machiavelli’s centrality to Harvey’s critical practices, see Jardine and Grafton, ‘ “Studied for action” ’. 12 Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–​ 1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 74. 13 Brady, The Chief Governors, p. 297. 14 Wootton, Power, Pleasure, and Profit, p. 65. 15 J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). 16 E.A. Greenlaw, ‘The Influence of Machiavelli on Spenser’, Modern Philology 7.2 (1909), 187–​ 202; Richard McCabe, ‘The Fate of Irena: Spenser and Political Violence’, in Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, ed. Patricia Coughlan (Cork: Cork University Press, 1989), p. 109. 17 Nicholas Canny’s analysis of the View’s source material lends some credence to this commonplacing method, arguing (against Andrew Hadfield’s claims that Spenser had an amply stocked library at his Irish estate) that ‘Spenser had to hand for consultation at Kilcolman at most a trunkful, rather than a library, of books’. Nicholas Canny, ‘Irish Sources for Spenser’s View’, Spenser Studies 31/​32 (2017/​2018), 495–​510, quote, p. 497. 18 Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience, pp. 51–​84, esp. 72 ff. 19 Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses, 1:26, in The Works of the Famous Nicholas Machiavel, trans. H. Neville (London, 1675), p. 297. 20 MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 118. 21 Of course, the Iliad and the Odyssey are fully aware of the limits of this game. The truest test of individual virtue, the duel between warriors of equal standing on which this scene in Spenser draws, necessarily ends in a stalemate. And for whatever roles either genealogical determinism, innate character, or the interventions of the gods may play in individual combats, the course of the war as a whole only shifts at moments where human agents deviate from the norms of the game in ways that have nothing to do with the precepts, rules, and assumptions of the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

188

Spenser’s ethics

heroic virtues. Most notably, of course, are the midnight raiding party in book 10 of the Iliad and the subterfuge of the Trojan Horse. In both cases, these acts have Odysseus at their center. Linked to polytropos (πολυτρόπως; much turned /​variable /​wandering) and mētis (Μῆτις; cunning, guileful, deceitful), Odysseus embodies an alternate, and ultimately far more successful, account of virtue within the broader heroic moral framework of this poem. It is one that, I think, may significantly inflect Spenser’s sense of how and why Odysseus is a prime exemplar of ‘a vertuous man’. 22 MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 121. 23 Alberico Gentili, De Legationibus Libri Tres, 2 vols., trans. Gordon Laing (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1927), vol. 2, pp. 155–​56. 24 Leah Whittington, Renaissance Suppliants: Poetry, Antiquity, Recon­ ciliation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 25 Selected Letters and Other Papers, ed. Christopher Burlinson and Andrew Zurcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 19. 26 Spenser, A View, p. 105. 27 Willy Maley, Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism and Cultural Identity (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). 28 Spenser, A View, p. 105 29 Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage Classics, 1990), 12, pp. 1264–​75. 30 Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. John Dryden, and ed. Frederick M. Keener (London: Penguin, 1997), 12, pp. 1360–​63. 31 Craig Kallendorf, The Other Virgil: `Pessimistic’ Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 32 Andrew Zurcher, Spenser’s Legal Language: Law and Poetry in Early Modern England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007); Bradin Cormack, A Power to do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 33 Alberico Gentili, De Jure Belli Libri Tres, 2 vols, ed. John C. Rolfe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), pp. 246–​49 (see pp. 401–​409 in the 1612 Latin edition that is the basis for the translation). 34 Christopher Warren, Literature and the Law of Nations, 1580–​1680 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 44–​48 and ‘Gentili, the Poets, and the Laws of War’, in The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations: Alberico Gentili and the Justice of Empire, ed. Benedict Kingsbury and Benjamin Straumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 146–​62. 35 The dense, and largely uncited, web of allusion and intertext in which Spenser’s Machiavellianism unfolds finds an intriguing analogue in the

981

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Immoderation and necessity

189

pseudo-​ classical dialogue arguing for Ireland’s violent reformation, Solon his Follie (1594) written by his Munster neighbor, Richard Beacon. For a detailed analysis and exposition of these allusions and traces, see Sydney Anglo, ‘A Machiavellian Solution to the Irish Problem: Richard Beacon’s Solon his Follie (1594)’, in England and the Continental Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J.B. Trapp, ed. Edward Chaney and Peter Mack (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1990), pp. 153–​64. 36 On Tasso’s rehearsal of the scene of Turnus’s death, and the poet’s ultimate recuperation of that scenario into the ideological imperatives of a mercy-​ based Christian and chivalric virtue-​ ethic, see Lauren Scancarelli Seem, ‘The Limits of Chivalry: Tasso and the End of the Aeneid’, Comparative Literature 42.2 (1990), 116–​25. 37 Diego Panizza, ‘Alberico Gentili’s De armis Romanis: The Roman Model of the Just Empire’, in The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations: Alberico Gentili and the Justice of Empire, ed. Benedict Kingsbury and Benjamin Straumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 53–​84, quote, p. 82. 38 Gentili, De Legationibus, vol. 2, p. 198. 39 For a useful overview of Machiavelli’s theory of virtú –​albeit contested for its insistent reliance on Greek sources at the expense of Latin ones –​see Erica Benner, Machiavelli’s Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), esp. pp. 135–​68. 40 Peter Schröder, ‘Vitoria, Gentili, Bodin: Sovereignty and the Law of Nations’, in The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations: Alberico Gentili and the Justice of Empire, ed. Benedict Kingsbury and Benjamin Straumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 163–​86. 41 Niccolò Machiavelli, ‘Discourses on Livy’, in The works of the famous Nicholas Machiavel, citizen and secretary of Florence written originally in Italian, and from thence newly and faithfully translated into English, trans. Henry Neville (London, 1680), p. 269. 42 Ibid. 43 Lodowick Bryskett, A Discourse of Civill Life (London, 1606), p. 158. 44 Bryskett, Discourse, pp. 158–​59. 45 Bryskett, Discourse, p. 158. 46 Spenser, A View, p. 11. 47 Spenser, A View, p. 27. 48 Ibid.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Coda

Spenser’s late-​ stage humanism may seem like an idiosyncratic detour in the wider historical development of moral philosophy. However, his interrogations of the virtue ethics tradition’s increasingly evident inutility in the context of early English colonialism notably frame his ethics among concerns that would become pivotal to the transforming discipline of moral philosophy in early modernity: making the status of humanity itself a central speculative problem of moral inquiry, and centering social obligations as both the normative guide to, and ultimate telos of, virtuous agency. Read in this light, Spenser is doubly important to the history of moral philosophy because he also illuminates the ways these questions find a crucial aspect of their historical origin in early modern England’s political emergence as a colonial empire, helping to shape what Priya Satia argues would become central representational and critical problems of British intellectual culture well into the modern era: the challenge of understanding colonialism, and the coercive violence on which it depends, as a moral activity.1 Reading Spenser as a moral theorist, and one whose moral theory is significantly shaped by his experiences in Elizabethan Ireland, thus illuminates at a crucial moment of historical inception that philosophical tradition’s pivotal turn as it evolved alongside early modern England’s wider political and economic transformation into a global nation-​state built on the foundations of colonial expansion. Spenser’s place in this evolution finds an emblem in the opening pages of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. There, a group of men lounging on a boat in the Thames imagine themselves in evocatively Spenserian terms as ‘knights errant of the sea’, who regard themselves as both the descendants and historical fulfillment of the

191

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Coda

191

Elizabethan adventurer, Sir Francis Drake. Described as ‘bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire’, they imagine themselves as fulfilling a divine mandate to pursue the ‘dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires’.2 Here, Conrad positions his novella of English imperialism in the unspoken but omnipresent shadow of Spenser. The poet is not an explicitly acknowledged presence, but the unspoken frame of reference for these men. The Faerie Queene is not quoted, but its imagery more notably offers a fully assimilated representational vocabulary orienting these characters’ most basic senses of self and agency in the word, and directing their overarching sense of an entwined moral and historical purpose. Spenser’s Faerie Queene, which supplied the epitaph on Conrad’s gravestone, was, and would remain well into the twentieth century, foundational to the basic texture of the English imperial imagination. Earlier in this book, I introduced Charles Taylor’s concept of the social imaginary, ‘the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’.3 As Conrad reminds us, The Faerie Queene offers a fully-​built ideological framework with which to do this work in the context of a nation whose material existence and deepest sense of political identity have come wholly to depend on colonialism. As The Faerie Queene lived on in the world as an agent of moral formation, fashioning generations of readers in the image of its ‘vertuous and gentle discipline’, it not only supplied the British colonialist enterprise with an ideological vocabulary, but was also directly instrumentalized towards the production of the colonial empire and its subjects. Ngugi wa Thiong’o reminds us that Spenser’s poetry was central to the political project of ‘colonizing the minds’ of colonial subjects across the British Empire well into the twentieth century. ‘Spenser is important to Africa’, Thiong’o argues, because his works were central to the canon of English national literature. As a student of English in Ibadan, Abiola Irele coined the mellifluous phrase Spenser to Spender to describe the English literature syllabus taught in the overseas colleges of the University of London –​ Achimota in Ghana, Makerere in Uganda, and the University of the

192

Spenser’s ethics

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

West Indies in Mona Jamaica, and so on. All of these colleges were established in the post-​War period, when British colonialism, unable to exist according to the old rules, saw the necessity of creating an African middle class for future partnership.4

If simple coercive force had found its limits, a renewed potency was supposed in the more subtle work of character formation, of fashioning imperial subjects ‘in virtuous and gentle discipline’ through works like The Faerie Queene. These syllabi Thiong’o describes, and their place in imposing sovereign agency on the margins of empire, took shape in nineteenth-​century civil service exams, which by the turn of the twentieth century were seen as central to ‘development of the native civil service’, and were built on reading lists that centered Spenser and his contemporaries.5 In the minds of those architects of colonial policy like Thomas Macaulay, works like The Faerie Queene offer a lesson in England’s assumed cultural –​and thus political –​superiority; the act of reading such works, he imagined, would thus ‘form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’.6 For those eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century Englishmen who took posts in the civil service, Spenser’s poetry was likewise iconic of the very project they were undertaking. The following Spenserian stanzas open a canto titled ‘The City of Palaces: A Fragment’ (1824), written by James Atkinson, a surgeon and Persian scholar who made his career in south Asia: Empires rise from the dust, extend, decay, Slow in their growth, oft rapid in their fall; Babylon, Carthage, Rome; these had their day, Their centuries of glory,-​-​proud to call The conquered world their own, holding in thrall Millions of subjects. But we here behold A Prodigy of power, transcending all The conquests, and the governments, of old, An Empire of the sun, a gorgeous realm of gold. For us, in half a century, India blooms The garden of Hesperides, and we Placed in its porch, CALCUTTA, with its tombs And dazzling splendors, towering peerlessly,

391

Coda

193

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

May taste its sweets, yet bitters too there be Under attaractive seeming. Drink again The frothy draught, and revel joyously; From the gay round of pleasure why refrain! Thou’rt on the brink of death, luxuriate on thy bane. When first I stood upon the landing place, Of the proud city of the gorgeous East, I saw a swarthy turban covered race, Whose noise and tumult momently increased; They looked as if from Bedlam just released; A Babel of strange tongues encompassed me, Fawning for service, so I thought at least, And I, a thing of nought, a worm, to be Thus hailed upon the shore, like knight of high degree.7

The lines’ hyperbolic racism and self-​aggrandizement suffuses them with irony, making Spenser metonymic of an imperial ideology that Atkinson simultaneously critiques and participates in. Atkinson figures the Elizabethan poet as the animating spirit shaping the dream of English empire that stands as an eternal ‘prodigy of power’ outshining all previous imperial agendas. Likewise, the mimetic filter of Spenser’s stanzaic form becomes a way of framing the very ethos of the English colonists surveying this territory in heroic, historical, and providential terms. In these lines, the logic of white supremacy latent in the othering logic of Spenser’s civility has emerged fully formed; the anxieties of Irish plantation are replaced by an unambiguous sense of world-​historical triumphalism; and the threatening regard of the colonized is transformed into an affirmation of a knightly and English magnificence. Indeed, even a man who is a worm-​like ‘thing of nought’ back in England can become a gentleman in this endeavor. This, of course, is Spenser’s thesis in the ‘Letter of the Authours’ taken to its logical, and logically absurd, conclusion. And if Atkinson may not wholly subscribe to the sentiments in these stanzas, his use of Spenser’s paradigmatic form is all the more ­crucial. It emphasizes the extent to which Spenser, and the Spenserian literary tradition, has so suffused the ideologies of English c­olonialism that it becomes a kind of shorthand for them. While the focus of this poem is political critique, Atkinson was nevertheless an active participant in the Anglo-​Indian literary scene for many years.8 This group of writers, journalists, and publishers engaged in a cultural and political activity that recalls –​at least in

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

194

Spenser’s ethics

intention, if not achievement –​the humanist coterie of Londoners that Spenser’s friend, Lodowick Bryskett, depicts gathering at his home near Dublin in the 1580s in The Discourse of Civill Life. Describing that work, Andrew Hadfield suggests, ‘Bryskett’s purpose in recording those present at this debate is to show how lively and varied the intellectual culture of the New English in Dublin’, arguing that the Discourse’s image of humanist debate was meant ‘to illustrate how civilized and sophisticated they were in trying to establish culture in an island best known to an English audience as a violent, savage outpost, and a graveyard for the English forces there’.9 The informal literary project undertaken by Atkinson and his peers in nineteenth-​ century India echoes and extends these same imperatives. For Bryskett and Spenser in the 1580s, and for Atkinson in the 1820s, the intellectual and imaginative acts of literary humanism promised to bridge the world in which they found themselves and the one to which they aspired. Extending the literary canon into new worlds becomes, in short, a way of imagining what territorial conquest’s social, personal, and historical fulfillment might look like. When James Ware prefaced the first printed edition of the View by remarking on the work’s unfortunate immoderation, his argument was couched in the claim that it was symptomatic of Spenser’s life and times, suggesting that Spenser lived at a time when the kinds of flourishing he pursued were unrealizable. Spenser himself never achieved the kind of eudaimonic fulfillment he sought throughout his adult life. While rewarded for his work on The Faerie Queene, the £50 annual stipend he received was not the official declaration of laureate status he pursued; and while the story, reported by Ben Jonson, of Spenser dying in the street for want of bread after he was forced to flee his Kilcolman estate during the Tyrone Rebellion may be apocryphal, it registers the fleeting, nearly Boethian quality of the worldly good that Spenser attained. Indeed, it might plausibly be claimed that Spenser only achieved a true measure of flourishing after death in the posthumous event of his interment in Westminster Abbey. The placement of his body next to Chaucer was an act that not only inaugurated poet’s corner, but figuratively created the communal, political, and trans-​generational activity of creating English literary history. In such an act, Spenser is imaginatively projected

591

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Coda

195

into that paradise of dead poets he imagines in the Gardens of Adonis, figures who in their memorialized afterlives supply and nourish the ‘fruitful soyl of old’ that animates and authorizes yet new generations of poets into the future. Of course, such a history is not wholly innocent –​as Thiong’o reminds us, it is deeply implicated in the historical creation, extension, and activation of the colonialist ethos underpinning centuries of English imperialism. Buried in the symbolic spiritual locus of English power, in a site that has come materially to embody that power’s providentialist ideology, Spenser’s posthumous instantiation as both icon and exemplary agent of English imperial ambition stands as the true achievement of what he conceived as the ethical imperative of The Faerie Queene. Spenser’s words become a crucial agent in the ‘endlesse worke’ of expansion across the face of a world not composed of promised lands, but made sacred only through the act of conquest. Here, in the wider world that is both the cause and confirmation of a moral life, there are no actual dragons or ‘paynim’ knights to defeat. Rather, to recall the poet’s blurring the lines between his imagined Faery and ‘Indian Peru’, the ‘Amazons huge river’, and ‘fruitfullest Virginia’ in the proem to Book II, there are only as-​yet-​unknown places, and unformed subjects, waiting to be ‘fashioned in virtuous and gentle discipline’ by the expansive progress of English power.

Notes 1 Priya Satia, Time’s Monsters: How History Makes History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). 2 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Hampson (London: Penguin Classics, 2007), p. 5. 3 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, p. 23. 4 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (New York, NY: Basic Civitas Books, 2009), pp. 10–​11. 5 Sir George Chesney, Indian Polity: A View of the System of Administration in India, 3rd ed. (London: Longmans, 1894), p. 195. For an account of the syllabus on which prospective civil servants would be examined, see, for instance, The India List and India Office List for 1898 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1898), p. 159.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

196

Spenser’s ethics

6 Thomas Babbington Macaulay, ‘A Minute on India’, in Speeches by Lord Macaulay with his Minute on India, ed. G.M Young (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 359. 7 James Aktinson, ‘The City of Palaces: A Fragment’, The City of Palaces: A Fragment, and Other Poems (Calcutta: Government Gazette Press, 1824), pp. 5–​6 (stanzas 1–​3). 8 For a crucial overview of this culture, see Mary Ellis Gibson, ‘Introduction’, in Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–​1913: A Critical Anthology (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2011), pp. 1–​29. 9 Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 180.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

References

Primary Sources The India List and India Office List for 1898 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1898). Ames, William, Conscience with the Power and Cases thereof (London and Leiden, 1639). Aquinas, Thomas, The Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas 2nd rev. ed. (English Dominican Province, 1920). —​—​—​, Disputed Questions on the Virtues, trans. and ed. E. M. Atkins, and ed. Thomas Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. and ed. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1999). Aktinson, James, ‘The City of Palaces: A Fragment’, The City of Palaces: A Fragment, and Other Poems (Calcutta: Government Gazette Press, 1824). St. Augustine, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 2003). Beacon, Richard, Solon his Follie or a politique discourse, touching the reformation of common-​ weales conquered, declined or corrupted (Oxford, 1594). Bodin, Jean, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds (New York, NY: Octagon Books, 1966). Bryskett, Lodowick, A Discourse of Civill Life (London, 1606). Byfield, Nicholas, A Commentary: or, Sermons Upon the Second Chapter of the First Epistle of Saint Peter (London, 1623). Chesney, Sir George, Indian Polity: A View of the System of Administration in India, 3rd ed. (London: Longmans, 1894).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

198

References

Cinthio, Giovanbattista Giraldi, Dialoghi della Vita Civile (1566). Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Hampson (London: Penguin Classics, 2007). Copland, Robert, Shepardes Kalendar (London, 1570). Digby, Sir Kenelm, Observations on the 22. Stanza in the 9th. Canto of the 2d. Book of Spencers Faery Queen (London, 1643). Donne, John, The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. Charles M. Coffin (New York, NY: Random House, 2001). Dryden, John, Essays, 2 vols., ed. W.P. Ker (New York, NY: Russell and Russell, 1961). Gentili, Alberico, De Legationibus Libri Tres, 2 vols., trans. Gordon Laing (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1927). —​—​—​, De Jure Belli Libri Tres, 2 vols,. ed. John C. Rolfe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933). Golding, Arthur, Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation, 1567 (Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, 2000). Harvey, Gabriel, Letter Book of Gabriel Harvey, A.D. 1573–​1580, ed. Edward John Long Scott (Westminster: Camden Society, 1884). Heffernan, David, ed., ‘Reform’ Treatises on Tudor Ireland (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2016). Lipsius, Justus, Two Bookes of Constancie, trans. John Stradling (Holborn, 1595). —​—​—​, Politica: Six Books of Politics or Political Instruction, trans. and ed. Jan Waszink (Aasen: Royal Van Gorcum, 2004). Lucretius, On the Nature of Things: De Rerum Natura, trans. Anthony Esolen (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Macaulay, Thomas Babbington, ‘A Minute on India’, Speeches by Lord Macaulay with his Minute on India, ed. G.M Young (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935). Machiavelli, Niccolò, ‘Discourses on Livy’, in The works of the famous Nicholas Machiavel, citizen and secretary of Florence written originally in Italian, and from thence newly and faithfully translated into English, trans. Henry Neville (London, 1680). Milton, John, The Complete Poetry of John Milton, revised edition, ed. John T. Shawcross (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1971). —​—​—​, Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1953–​1982). Mulcaster, Richard, Positions wherin those primitiue circumstances be examined, which are necessarie for the training up of children, either for skill in their booke, or health in their bodie. (London, 1581).

991

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

References

199

Painter, William, Delectable demaundes, and pleasaunt questions, with their seuerall aunswers, in matters of loue, naturall causes, with morall and politique deuises (London, 1566). St. Jerome, ‘Commentary on Ezekiel 1.7’, in Conscience in Medieval Philosophy, ed. Timothy C. Potts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 79–​81. Peckham, Sir George, A true reporte, of the late discoueries, and possession, taken in the right of the Crowne of Englande, of the new-​found landes (London, 1583). de La Primaudaye, Pierre, The Seconde Parte of the French Academy (London, 1594). Puttenham, George, The Art of English Poesy by George Puttenham: A Critical Edition, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007). Sharpe, S.J., James, The Triall of the Protestant Private Spirit. Wherein Their Doctrine, making the sayd Spirit the sole ground & meanes of their Beliefe, is confuted (St. Omer, 1630). Sidney, Sir Henry, ‘Letter to Arthur, Lord Grey, 27 September, 1580’, in Letters and Memorials of State, vol. 1, ed. Arthur Collins (London, 1746), pp. 279–​83. Sidney, Sir Philip, The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Smith, Sir Thomas, A letter sent by I.B. Gentleman (London, 1572). —​—​—​, De Republica Anglorum (London, 1583). Spenser, Edmund, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). —​—​—​, Edmund Spenser: The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard A. McCabe (London: Penguin, 1999). —​—​—​, The Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton (Harlow: Longmans, 2001). —​—​—​, Selected Letters and Other Papers, ed. Christopher Burlinson and Andrew Zurcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Tasso, Torquato, Discourses on the Heroic Poem, ed. and trans. Michela Cavalchini and Irene Samuel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). —​—​—​, Jerusalem Delivered: Gerusalemme Liberata, trans. Anthony Esolen (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York, NY: Vintage Classics, 1990). —​—​—​, The Aeneid, trans. John Dryden, and ed. Frederick M. Keener (London: Penguin, 1997). Weemes, John, The portraiture of the image of God in man in his three estates, of creation. Restauration. Glorification. (London, 1636).

200

References

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Secondary Sources Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. trans. Daniel Heller Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). Alpers, Paul, The Poetry of The Faerie Queene (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966). Anglo, Sydney, ‘A Machiavellian Solution to the Irish Problem: Richard Beacon’s Solon his Follie (1594)’, in England and the Continental Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J.B. Trapp, ed. Edward Chaney and Peter Mack (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1990), pp. 153–​64. Annas, Julia, The Morality of Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Appiah, Kwame Anthony, As If: Idealization and Ideals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). Bartsch, Shadi, The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-​Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Basu, Anupam and Loewenstein, Joe, ‘Spenser’s Spell: Archaism Historical Stylometrics’, Spenser Studies 33 (2019), 63–​102. Benner, Erica, Machiavelli’s Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). Bennett, Josephine Waters, ‘Spenser’s Gardens of Adonis’, PMLA 41 (1932), 46–​80. Berger, Jr., Harry, Resisting Allegory: Interpretive Delirium in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, ed. David Lee Miller (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2020). —​—​—​, Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-​Making (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988). —​—​—​, Revisonary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988). —​ —​ —​ , ‘Narrative as Rhetoric in The Faerie Queene’, ELR 21.1 (1991), 3–​48. Brady, Ciaran, ‘Spenser’s Irish Crisis: Humanism and Experience in the 1590s’, Past and Present 111 (May 1986), 17–​49. —​—​—​, The Chief Governors: The Rise and Fall of Reform Government in Tudor Ireland 1536–​ 1588 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Brooke, Christopher, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).

102

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

References

201

Burlinson, Christopher, ‘Spenser’s “Legend of Constancie” and the Ethical Reader’, in Celebrating Mutabilitie: Essays on Edmund Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos, ed. Jane Grogan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 201–​19. —​—​—​, Allegory, Space and the Material World in the Writings of Edmund Spenser (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2006). Campana, Joseph, The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2012). Canny, Nicholas, ‘Edmund Spenser and the Development of an Anglo-​Irish Identity’, Yearbook of English Studies 13 (1983), 1–​19. —​—​—​, Making Ireland British, 1580–​1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). —​—— ​ ,​ ‘Irish Sources for Spenser’s View’, Spenser Studies 31/​32 (2017/​ 2018), 495–​510. Cassirer, Ernst, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1963). Cave, Terence, The Cornucopian Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). Cefalu, Paul, Moral Identity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Chamberlain, Charles, ‘The Meaning of Prohairesis in Aristotle’s Ethics’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 114 (1984), 147–​57. Collinson, Patrick, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, Elizabethan Essays (London: The Hambledon Press, 1994). Copenhaver, Brian and Schmitt, Charles, Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Costello, S.J., William T., The Scholastic Curriculum at Early Seventeenth-​Century Cambridge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958). Cormack, Bradin, A Power to do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Crisp, Roger and Slote, Michael, eds, Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Dolven, Jeff, ‘The Method of Spenser’s Stanza’, Spenser Studies 19 (2004): 17–​25. —​—​—​, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007). —​ —​ —​ , ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900 57.1 (2017), 1–​22.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

202

References

Eggert, Katherine, Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Elias, Norbert, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, rev. ed. (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000). Ellrodt, Robert, Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser (Geneva: Folcroft Press, 1969). Empson, William, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York, NY: New Directions, 1966). Esolen, Anthony, ‘Spenserian Chaos: Lucretius in The Faerie Queen’, Spenser Studies 11 (1994), 31–​51. Feingold, Mordechai, ‘The Humanities’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 4, Seventeenth-​Century Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Fletcher, Angus, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1971). —​—​—​, ‘Complexity and the Spenserian Myth of Mutability’, Literary Imagination 6.1 (2004), 1–​22. —​—​—​, Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Foucault, Michel, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–​1979. ed. Graham Burchell and Arnold Davidson (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008). —​—​—​, ‘1 February 1978’, in Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–​ 1978, ed. Michel Sennelart, and trans. Graham Burchell (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 87–​114. Fowler, Elizabeth, ‘The Failure of Moral Philosophy in the Work of Edmund Spenser’, Representations 51 (1995), 47–​76. Furley, David J., ‘Self-​Movers’, in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amélie Oksenberg-​Rorty (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 55–​68. Frankfurt, Harry G., ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’, The Journal of Philosophy 68.1 (1971), 5–​20. Fraser Jenkins, A.D., ‘Cosimo de’ Medici’s Patronage of Architecture and the Theory of Magnificence’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 33 (1970), 162–​70. Gadja, Alexandra, The Earl of Essex and Late Elizabethan Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Gibson, Mary Ellis, ‘Introduction’, in Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–​1913: A Critical Anthology (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2011), pp. 1–​29.

302

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

References

203

Gill, Christopher, Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy, and Philosophy: The Self in Dialogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). —​—​—​, The Structured Self in Hellenistic and Roman Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Goldberg, Jonathan, The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2009). Gombrich, Sir Ernst, ‘The Early Medici as Patrons of Art’, in Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1966), pp. 35–​57. Gorski, Philip S., The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Fashioning from More to Greenblatt, Stephen, Renaissance Self-​ Shakespeare (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Greene, Thomas M., The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982). Greenlaw, Edwin, ‘The Influence of Machiavelli on Spenser’, Modern Philology 7.2 (1909), 187–​202. —​—​—​, ‘Spenser and Lucretius’, Studies in Philology 17 (1920), 439–​64. Grogan, Jane, Exemplary Spenser: Visual and Poetic Pedagogy in The Faerie Queene (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). Grogan, Jane, ed., Celebrating Mutabilitie: Essays on Edmund Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). Gross, Kenneth, Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, Magic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). Hadfield, Andrew, ‘Spenser, Ireland, and Sixteenth-​ Century Political Theory’, Modern Language Review 89.1 (1994), 1–​18. Hadfield, Andrew, Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Hadfield, Andrew, ‘The Death of the Knight with the Scales and the Question of Justice in The Faerie Queene’, Essays in Criticism 65.1 (2015), 12–​29. Hadot, Pierre, Exercices Spirituels et Philosophie Antique, 2nd ed. (Paris: Revue Augustiennes, 1987). Hammer, P.E.J., The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–​ 1597 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Hathaway, Baxter, Marvels and Commonplaces: Renaissance Literary Criticism (New York, NY: Random House, 1968). Century Heffernan, David, Debating Tudor Policy in Sixteenth-​ Ireland: ‘Reform’ Treatises and Political Discourse (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

204

References

Helgerson, Richard, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Herron, Thomas, Spenser’s Irish Work: Poetry, Plantation and Colonial Reformation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Hoffman, Tobias, ‘Conscience and Synderesis’, in The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas, ed. Brian Davies and Eleonore Stump (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 255–​64. Hogan, Sarah, ‘Utopia, Ireland, and the Tudor Shock Doctrine: Spenser’s Vision of Capitalist Imperialism’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42:2 (2012), 461–​86. Howard, Peter, ‘Preaching Magnificence in Renaissance Florence’, Renaissance Quarterly 61.2 (2008), 325–​69. Howard, Peter, Creating Magnificence in Renaissance Florence (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2012). Huntley, John F., ‘Proairesis, Synteresis, and the Ethical Orientation of Milton’s Of Education’, Philological Quarterly 42.1 (1964), 40–​46. Hursthouse, Rosalind, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Inwood, Brad, Ethics After Aristotle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). Jaeger, Werner, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Volume 2: In Search of the Divine Centre (New York, NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943). James, Heather, ‘The Problem of Poetry in The Faerie Queene, Book V’, Spenser Review 45.1.1 (2015). James, Mervyn, ‘English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485–​1642’, in Society, Politics, and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 308–​415. Jardine, Lisa and Grafton, Anthony, ‘“Studied for action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past and Present 129 (1990), 30–​78. Jordan, Mark D., Teaching Bodies: Moral Formation in the Summa of Thomas Aquinas (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2017). Kaeuper, Richard, Holy Warriors: The Religious Ideology of Chivalry (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). Kahn, Charles, ‘Discovering the Will: From Homer to Augustine’, in The Question of ‘Eclecticism’: Studies in Later Greek Philosophy, ed. John M. Dillon and A.A. Long (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 234–​59. Kallendorf, Craig, The Other Virgil: ‘Pessimistic’ Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Kane, Sean, Spenser’s Moral Allegory (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1989).

502

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

References

205

Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, 2nd ed. (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000). Kingsbury, Benedict and Straumann, Benjamin, eds., The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations: Alberico Gentili and the Justice of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Korsgaard, Christine M., ‘Aristotle’s Function Argument’, in The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reason and Moral Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 129–​50. Kraye, Jill, ‘Moral Philosophy’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. C.B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, E. Kessler, and Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 303–​86. Krier, Theresa, Gazing on Secret Sights: Spenser, Classical Imitation, and the Decorums of Vision (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1990). Lewalski, Barbara K, ‘Milton and the Hartlib Circle: Educational Projects and Epic Paideia’, in Literary Milton: Text, Pretext, Context, ed. Diana Benet and Michael Lieb (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1994), pp. 202–​19. —​—​—​, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2002). Lewis, C.S., The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936). —​—— ​ ,​ ‘Neoplatonism in Spenser’s Poetry’, in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 149–​63. Lewis, Rhodri, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). Lines, David A, ‘Sources and Authorities for Moral Philosophy in the Italian Renaissance: Thomas Aquinas and Jean Buridan on Aristotle’s Ethics’, in Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity, ed. Jill Kraye and Risto Saarinen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), pp. 7–​29. —​ —— ​ ,​ ‘Ethics, Politics and History in Bernardo Segni (1504–​ 1558): Machiavellianism and Anti-​Medicean Sentiment’, in Ethik und Politik des Aristoteles in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Christoph Strosetzki, Walter Mesch, and Christian Pietsch (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2016), pp. 45–​68. Lines, David A. and Ebbersmeyer, Sabrina, eds., Rethinking Virtue, Reforming Society: New Directions in Renaissance Ethics, c. 1350–​1650. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013). Lupton, Julia Reinhard, ‘Mapping Mutability: Or, Spenser’s Irish plot’, in Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–​ 1660, ed. Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield, and Willy Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 93–​115.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

206

References

MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). Mack, Peter, ‘Informal Ethics in the Renaissance’, in Rethinking Virtue, Reforming Society: New Directions in Renaissance Ethics, c. 1350–​1650, ed. David A. Lines and Sabrina Ebbersmeyer (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 189–​214. Maclachlan, Hugh, ‘“In the Person of Prince Arthur”: Spenserian Magnificence and the Ciceronian Tradition’, University of Toronto Quarterly 46.2 (1977), 125–​46. Maley, Willy, Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism and Cultural Identity (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). McCabe, Richard A, ‘The Fate of Irena: Spenser and Political Violence’, in Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, ed. Patricia Coughlan (Cork: Cork University Press, 1989), 109–​25. —​—​—​, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). McCoy, Richard C., The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989). McCrea, Andrew, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Miller, David Lee, ‘Gender, Justice, and the Gods in The Faerie Queene Book 5’, in Reading Renaissance Ethics, ed. Marshall Grossman (New York, NY and London: Routledge, 2007), 19–​37. Miller, Peter N., ‘Nazis and Neo-​ Stoics: Otto Brunner and Gerhard Oestreich before and after the Second World War’, Past & Present 176 (2002), 144–​86. Morgan, Hiram, ‘The Colonial Venture of Sir Thomas Smith in Ulster, 1571–​1575’, The Historical Journal 28.2 (1985), 261–​78. Murphy, Neil, The Tudor Occupation of Boulogne: Conquest, Colonisation and Imperial Monarchy, 1544–​1550 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Nicholson, Catherine, Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene: Spenser and the Making of Literary Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020). Oestreich, Gerhard, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, ed. Brigitta Oestreich and H. G. Konigsberger, trans. David McLintock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Panizza, Diego, ‘Alberico Gentili’s De armis Romanis: The Roman Model of the Just Empire’, in The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations: Alberico Gentili and the Justice of Empire, ed. Benedict Kingsbury and Benjamin Straumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 53–​84.

702

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

References

207

Parker, Patricia, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). Peltonen, Markku, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–​ 1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). —​ —— ​ ,​ ‘Virtues in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Grammar Schools’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42.1 (2012), 157–​79. Pocock, J.G.A., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). Quinn, David Beers, ‘Sir Thomas Smith (1513–​1577) and the Beginnings of English Colonial Theory’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 89.4 (1945), 543–​60. —​ —— ​ ,​ ‘Renaissance Influences in English Colonization: The Prothero Lecture’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 26 (1976), 73–​93. Quint, David, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Quitslund, Jon, Spenser’s Supreme Fiction (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2001). Ramachandran, Ayesha, ‘Edmund Spenser, Lucretian Neoplatonist: Cosmology in the Fowre Hymnes’, Spenser Studies 26 (2009), 373–​411. Rapple, Rory, Martial Power and Elizabethan Political Culture: Military Men in England and Ireland, 1558–​ 1594 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Rosenfeld, Colleen, Indecorous Figures: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2018). Saarinen, Risto, Weakness of Will in Renaissance and Reformation Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Satia, Priya, Time’s Monsters: How History Makes History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). Scancarelli Seem, Lauren, ‘The Limits of Chivalry: Tasso and the End of the Aeneid’, Comparative Literature 42.2 (1990), 116–​25. Schneewind, J.B., ‘The Misfortunes of Virtue’, in Virtue Ethics, ed. Roger Crisp and Michael Slote (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 178–​200. —​—​—​, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). —​—— ​ ,​ ‘The Divine Corporation and the History of Ethics’, in Essays on the History of Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 149–​69. Schröder, Peter, ‘Vitoria, Gentili, Bodin: Sovereignty and the Law of Nations’, in The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations: Alberico

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

208

References

Gentili and the Justice of Empire, ed. Benedict Kingsbury and Benjamin Straumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 163–​86. Scodel, Joshua, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). Shagan, Ethan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion, and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Sharman, J.C., Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). Schmitt, Charles B., John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England (Kingston, ON: McGill-​Queens University Press, 1983). —​—​—​, The Aristotelian Tradition and Renaissance Universities (London: Variorum Reprints, 1984). Silberman, Lauren, Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of The Faerie Queene (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995). Skinner, Quentin, ‘Moral Ambiguity and the Renaissance Art of Eloquence’, Essays in Criticism 44.4 (1994), 267–​91. Stevens, Wallace, ‘The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet’, in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951). Stirling, Brents, ‘The Philosophy of Spenser’s ‘Garden of Adonis’, PMLA 49.2 (1934), 501–​38. Stoll, Abraham, Conscience in Early Modern English Literature, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 1641 (Oxford: Stone, Lawrence, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–​ Clarendon, 1965). Strier, Richard, The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Taylor, Charles, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). Teskey, Gordon, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). —​—​—​, Spenserian Moments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). Thiong’o, Ngugi wa, Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (New York, NY: Basic Civitas Books, 2009). Thomas, Sir Keith, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). —​—​—​, In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018).

902

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

References

209

Turner, Henry S., The Corporate Commonwealth: Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516–​1651 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016). van Es, Bart, Spenser’s Forms of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Warren, Christopher, ‘Gentili, the Poets, and the Laws of War’, in The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations: Alberico Gentili and the Justice of Empire, ed. Benedict Kingsbury and Benjamin Straumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 146–​62. Warren, Christopher, Literature and the Law of Nations, 1580–​ 1680 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York, NY: Scribner & Sons, 1958). Weinberg, Bernard, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1961). Werth, Tiffany Jo, ‘“Degendered”: Spenser’s “yron man” in a “stonie” age”’, Spenser Studies 30 (2015), 393–​413. Whittington, Leah, Renaissance Suppliants: Poetry, Antiquity, Reconciliation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Withington, Phil, ‘Plantation and Civil Society’, in The Plantation of Ulster: Ideology and Practice, ed. Éamonn Ó Ciardha and Micheál Ó Siochrú (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), pp. 55–​77. Williams, Bernard, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Woodhouse, A.S.P., ‘Nature and Grace in The Faerie Queene’, ELH 16.3 (1949), 194–​228. Wootton, David, Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 2018). Zurcher, Andrew, Spenser’s Legal Language: Law and Poetry in Early Modern England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007). —​—— ​ ,​ ‘The Printing of the Cantos of Mutabilitie in 1609’, in Celebrating Mutabilitie: Essays on Edmund Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos, ed. Jane Grogan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 40–​60.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index

Aeneid (Virgil) Aeneas’s shield 109 Camilla 71 Diana 71 killing of Turnus 177–82 Machiavelli on Rome’s founding in 183–4 Africa 191 allegory 29, 33, 54, 71, 127, 129, 151 Ames, William 49 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 131 Aquinas, St. Thomas 94, 96, 99, 128 magnificence 94–5 moral reasoning 48, 85 Summa Theologica 45, 48, 95 archaicism 4 Areopagitica (Milton) 41–6, 51, 53, 54–5, 61–2 arete (excellence) 45, 48, 49, 53, 58 Aristotelianism 1, 2, 5, 21–2, 24, 26, 27, 32, 43, 45, 50, 52, 54, 72, 86, 88, 94, 96, 120, 122, 133, 152, 153, 156, 158, 166, 170, 181, 185, 186 naturalism 86–7

Aristotle function argument 75, 83–7 Metaphysics 120, 121 Nicomachean Ethics 45, 51, 53, 60, 87 Physics 88 askesis (self-​restraint) 45 Atkinson, James 194 Augustine, St. 57, 121, 128 Balderson, John 5 Beacon, Richard 9–10, 167 Berger, Jr., Harry 4, 14, 29–30 Bodin, Jean Golden age 16 Boethius 107, 194 Bonaventure St. 128 Brady, Ciaran 8, 167 Bruni, Leonardo 96 Bryskett, Lodowick 9, 32, 184–5, 194 Buridan, John 32 Burlinson, Christopher 71 Byfield, Nicholas 50 Calvin, Jean 6, 47, 55, 57 Campana, Joseph 130 Canny, Nicholas 8, 77, 187

112

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index Cefalu, Paul 30 chastity 71 Chaucer, Geoffrey 194 Parliament of Fowls 151 chivalry 17, 19, 25–8, 72, 75–8, 86, 87, 99, 102, 131, 171, 172, 175, 177, 180, 182, 190 Cicero 94, 169 Cinthio, Giraldi 32 civility 60, 78, 144–61, 193 Palmer’s net as icon of 158–9 Colin Clouts Come Home Again (Spenser) 130 Collinson, Patrick 80, 107, 111 complexio 126 concordia discors 18 Conrad, Joseph 10, 190 conscience 18, 48 as synderesis 48–50 Cormack, Bradin 179 counterfactuals 117, 130 defamiliarization 129 Desmond (Second) and Tyrone rebellions 7, 170 Devereux, Robert, Earl of Essex 76, 123, 165, 169, 170, 185 As paragon of virtue 166 Digby, Sir Kenelm 119 Donne, John 2 will 57, 58 Elias, Norbert 144 Elizabeth I, queen of England 68, 73, 74, 77, 78, 79, 148, 150, 175 enkrateia (self-​control) 45, 46, 47, 53, 59, 64 Epithalamion (Spenser) 75 Erasmus, Desiderius 145

211

ethics history of 2, 4–6, 32, 80, 83, 86, 167, 190 eudaimonia (flourishing) 42, 55, 60, 83, 86, 111, 117, 158, 165, 194 evolution (biological) 16 The Faerie Queene (Spenser) Acrasia 18, 31, 157–9 Adonis 128–30, 131, 134, 136 Alma’s castle 15, 109–12 Archimago 101 Arlo Hill 150–2 Artegall 16–21, 24–9, 43, 68, 73, 131, 151, 171–5, 177, 179 Arthur 109–13, 165 Arthur’s dream 112–13 Astrea 20–2 Bower of Bliss 6, 43, 111, 131, 152–9 Britomart 68–72, 74–5 Contemplation 95, 101 Despair 101 Diana 148–50, 154 Duessa 101 Envy and Detraction 26–8 Error 43, 128 Faunus 148–50 Gardens of Adonis 6, 73, 112, 116–19, 126, 128–32, 139, 140, 141 Glauce 75 Gloriana 28, 77, 90, 101, 102, 103, 112, 156, 158 Grantorto 24 Gryll 153 Guyon 6, 18, 23, 31, 43, 56, 58–9, 63, 72, 131, 152–9, 170 Isis Church 71 Jove 139, 141–2, 144, 151, 161 Mammon 31, 55, 123

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

212

Index

The Faerie Queene (Spenser) (continued) Marriage of Medway and Thames 89 Merlin 75 Merlin’s mirror 70, 71, 73, 75 Munera 16–18 Mutabilitie 139–42, 151, 161 Nature 135, 141, 144, 150–2, 161 Order 151 Orgoglio 101 Palmer 18, 55–9, 61, 155, 157–9 Pit of Chaos (Gardens of Adonis) 118–28, 141 Pollente 18 Proserpina 112 Radegund 17, 19, 20, 171–5 Redcrosse 77, 78, 95, 100–4, 106, 128 Talus 16, 19–21, 25–8, 131, 151 Time 6, 117–18 Una 101, 112 Venus 88, 118, 128–9, 134, 135, 136 Fitzwilliam, Sir William 167 form (Metaphysics) 116, 119–23, 126, 127, 129, 132, 135 Aristotle 121, 122 Lucretius 122, 123 Mythography 128 Neoplatonism 128 Plato 121 Foucault, Michel 91, 143 Frankfurt, Harry 60 Garden of Eden 53, 103, 112, 159 Gentili, Alberico 173, 179–82 De Jure Belli 179–82 De Legibationis Libri Tres 173, 181 Goldberg, Jonathan 133 golden age 12, 15, 21, 159 Gorski, Philip 143

governmentality 142–4, 145, 146, 150, 158, 160 Greenblatt, Stephen 152 Grey, Arthur, Lord Grey de Wilton 8, 26, 131, 165, 166, 167, 169 Smerwick 186 Grogan, Jane 2, 70 Gross, Kenneth 20 Grotius, Hugo 44, 181 Hadfield, Andrew 21, 170, 187, 194 Harvey, Gabriel 15, 32, 105, 167, 169, 173, 180 Heffernan, David 7 Helgerson, Richard 76 Herbert, William 167 Herodotus 124 Hesiod. See golden age historiography Herodotus 124 Jean Bodin 15–16 Niccolò Machiavelli 183–4 Sir Thomas Smith 104–9 Edmund Spenser 11–14, 109–12 Howard, Peter 96 humanism 2, 9, 15, 44, 96, 194 critique of 21, 30, 32, 105, 167, 169, 170, 181 imperialism 8, 33, 63, 71, 74, 75, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 90, 98, 111, 123, 131, 133, 136, 139, 142, 170, 177, 183, 190–5 India English imperialism 192–4 international law 179 Inwood, Brad 86 Ireland as paradigm of mutable world 21, 142, 148 C.S. Lewis on English policy in 164

312

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index Elizabethan debates about 7–10, 165–6 English colonization 78–83, 85, 165–6, 186 influence on Spenser’s ethics 7–11, 12, 16, 21–4, 76, 130, 145, 147, 152, 156, 164, 165, 170, 185, 190 Ulster plantation 79

213

Legenda Aurea 104 ‘Letter of the Authours’ (Spenser) 12, 31, 41, 69, 72, 77, 87, 93, 106, 109, 121, 129, 165, 193 Lewis, C.S. 129, 164 Lines, David 31 Lipsius, Justus 142–4, 169 Lombard, Peter 48 London 123, 169, 173, 186, 194 Lownes, Matthew 139, 142 Lucretius 88, 123, 125 Luther, Martin 47, 101

Spenser’s reception of 169–70 Virtú 166, 168, 170, 182, 186 MacIntyre, Alasdair 5, 172–3 Mack, Peter 96 magnanimity 93, 94, 95 magnificence Copland, Robert 100 Mulcaster, Richard 99 Painter, William 98 Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter 97 Magnus, Albertus 31 marriage 72, 123 masculinity 130 McCabe, Richard 16, 124, 169 McCoy, Richard 76 Medici, Cosimo de 96 microcosm 68–9 Milton, John critique of scholasticism 44–5, 51 ethical terminology 51 reader of Spenser 41, 42, 53, 55, 62, 63 moderation 24–9, 152, 153, 156– 8, 164–5, 171, 172, 175, 178, 194 Morgan, Hiram 78 Moses 168 Mother Hubberd’s Tale (Spenser) 173 Mulcaster, Richard 9, 98, 100 mutability (ontology) 3, 21, 47, 63, 72, 104, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 116, 123, 127, 131, 135, 140, 147 mythography 128–30

Macauley, Thomas 192 Machiavelli, Niccolò Discourses on Livy 166, 183–4, 185 Elizabethan reception 166–7, 173, 182 political theory 168

necessity 10, 16, 26, 165–6, 169, 171, 175, 181, 182–6 Neoplatonism 137 metaphysics 74 seminal reasons 127 Neostoicism 142–4, 150

James, Mervyn 107 Jenkins, A.D. Frasier 96 Jerome, St. 48–9 Jonson, Ben 194 Jordan, Mark D. 46 justice (virtue) 18, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 27, 32 relation to magnificence 99 transformation of 26, 28 Kaeuper, Richard 102 Kane, Sean 30 Kant, Immanuel 6, 80, 133

214

Index

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Nicholson, Catherine 10 Nile 124–6 Noah’s flood 125 Oestreich, Gerhardt 143 Of Education, 51 Of Education (Milton) 51–2, 56 Oram, William 128 ousia (substance) 121 Ovid 111, 124–6, 136, See Golden age Paradise Lost (Milton) 56 Peckham, Sir George 147 Peltonen, Markku 8, 167 permissibility 26–9, 182 Perrot, John 167 Plato 67, 69, 105 Pocock, J.G.A. 168 Precarity 146, 152 Primaudaye, Pierre de la 49 procreation 67, 74, 84, 88–9, 112, 113, 118, 130, 133, 136 prohairesis 51–4, 55, 56, 59–60 Prothalamion 123 Puttenham, George 126 Quinn, David Beers 78 Raleigh, Sir Walter 76, 78, 167, 176 The Readie and Easie Way (Milton) 62 Rich, Barnaby 167 romance (narrative form) 11, 27, 47, 62, 63, 68, 76, 82, 86, 87, 99 The Ruines of Rome (Spener) 111 The Ruins of Time (Spenser) 111 Schneewind, J.B. 6, 11, 43–4, 80 Scotus, John Duns 43, 44

Segni, Bernardo 32 Shakespeare, William 2 Machiavel (character type) 173–4 Shame 145, 148, 149, 150, 154, 155, 159 Sharpe, James 50 The Shepheardes Calender (Spenser) 14, 75, 105, 120 Sidney, Sir Henry 8, 76 Sidney, Sir Philip 69, 70, 76, 180, 181 Arcadia 180 Silberman, Lauren 68 Skinner, Quentin 14 Smerwick 175–86 Smith, Adam 79 Smith, Sir Thomas 76 A Letter Sent by I.B. 78–86 De Republica Anglorum 104–9 Spenser, Edmund 110 as chancery clerk 179 eclecticism 3, 29, 120, 121, 137, 169 ethics 4–6, 42, 43, 45, 47, 72, 73, 90, 93, 100, 104, 112, 113, 139, 148, 165, 170, 171, 179 ethics (and colonialism) 68, 158, 164, 175, 190 ethics (and poetry) 41 ethics (civility in) 144, 145, 146, 152 ethics (flourishing in) 64, 111 ethics (marriage in) 72 ethics (materialism in) 88, 130, 131, 133–6 ethics (metaphysics of) 63, 109 ethics (Neostoicism) 142 ethics (reception of) 190–5 ethics (teleology) 86 poetics 4, 30, 33, 41, 42, 47, 67, 69, 70, 71, 74, 76, 77, 87, 113, 116, 127, 129

512

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index Spenserian stanza 117, 127, 193 St. George 104 St. Paul 1 Cor. 9 45–6 Romans 7 57 Stevens, Wallace 157 Stoicism 94, 169 metaphysics 127, 133 moral reasoning 60, 107 Stone, Lawrence 107 substance (metaphysics) 118–30 Aristotle 120, 121 diversity 122 Ovid 125 supplication 174–5 Turnus 177–82 sustainability 134–5 synteresis (conscience) 48–51, 52, 54, 58, 65 Tasso, Torquato 12, 19, 69, 180 Gerusalemme Liberata 155–6, 158, 180 Taylor, Charles 83 social imaginary 6, 82, 191 teleology 13, 16, 48, 63, 70, 71, 84, 86, 87, 96, 98, 127, 132, 133, 135, 180, 186 temperance (virtue) 47, 56, 72, 134, 170 as mode of civility 152, 157

215

transformation of 158–9 Teskey, Gordon 10, 151 Thames 89, 123–4, 190 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa 191–2 Thomas, Keith 86, 144 Turner, Henry S. 80 Van Es, Bart 14, 110 View of the Present State of Ireland, A (Spenser) 8, 10, 26, 62, 81, 130, 131, 140, 156, 169, 194 civility 145–8, 152, 153 flourishing 159–61, 164–5 humanism 165, 170 political theory 170 reduce 22, 23–4, 145–7 Smerwick 175–7, 179–86 virtue 165–6 Virgil 111 virtue insufficiency of 19, 22, 35, 156, 171 Ware, James 164, 165, 170, 171, 194 Werth, Tiffany Jo 21 Withington, Phil 79, 85 Wootton, David 5, 168 Zurcher, Andrew 179

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document