Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Until quite recently, it would have been inconceivable to focus the chapter on Spenser in a companion to the literature and culture of the English Renaissance on the fifth book of The Faerie Queene, the book treating Justice and concluding with efforts to impose an effective political order on England's unruly colony Ireland. By traditional moral and aesthetic standards, the fifth book is deeply flawed: as C. S. Lewis memorably asserted of its morality, ‘Spenser was the instrument of a detestable [colonial] policy in Ireland, and in his fifth book the wickedness he had shared begins to corrupt his imagination’ (p. 349). This book also doubly disappoints readers' normal expectations of structural closure: both the hero Artegall's quest to establish justice and his prophesied union with Britomart, the heroine of a love quest spanning the two preceding books, are summarily aborted, the latter never to be mentioned again in the poem.By comparison, the four earlier books of The Faerie Queene further magnify the shortcomings of Book V. Like this book, the first two – Holiness and Temperance – have a single major hero and a dominantly linear structure; the allegory in them is fairly tight and a moralistic reading, while grossly oversimplified, is possible. Although the linear structure of the fifth book invites comparison with these, comparison highlights not only its problematical ending ... log in or subscribe to read full text