Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Preface
- Part I ‘Allegorical Devices’
- Part II Self-Interpretation in the Legend of Holiness
- Part III The problem of Self-interpretation in Later Books
- Introduction
- 8 The Legend of Temperance: Self-Interpretation from the Ground Up
- 9 Self-Interpretation and Self-Assertion in Books Three and Four
- 10 Self-Interpretation Beyond the Pale in Books Five and Six
- Conclusion: The Mutability Cantos and the Limits of Self-Interpretation
- Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
10 - Self-Interpretation Beyond the Pale in Books Five and Six
from Part III - The problem of Self-interpretation in Later Books
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Preface
- Part I ‘Allegorical Devices’
- Part II Self-Interpretation in the Legend of Holiness
- Part III The problem of Self-interpretation in Later Books
- Introduction
- 8 The Legend of Temperance: Self-Interpretation from the Ground Up
- 9 Self-Interpretation and Self-Assertion in Books Three and Four
- 10 Self-Interpretation Beyond the Pale in Books Five and Six
- Conclusion: The Mutability Cantos and the Limits of Self-Interpretation
- Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
Summary
THE FIFTH AND sixth books of The Faerie Queene seem to represent a return, after the hiatus of the central books, to the narrative and moral structure established in Books One and Two, a structure rooted in the political authority of Gloriana to assign the various heroes' quests and to reward them for their achievements. But it is a return with a significant difference. For it is called to a reader's attention much more obtrusively than before that the appearance of the story's having such a structure is only one possible interpretation of the events that unfold in these books – indeed that it is a questionable self-interpretative construct, imposed after the fact and with dubious success on ambivalent narrative evidence. As a result it can seem that Spenser is questioning more radically than before, in Books Five and Six respectively, the moral grounding of the Elizabethan regime and of his own didactic poetics, implicitly exposing each in turn as an arbitrary fabrication unanchored in metaphysical certainties. But it appears to me that the polemical work thus attributed to the later books has already largely been done in Books Two to Four, and that Books Five and Six constitute rather a recuperative phase, in which the poem searches for a viable basis on which to reconstruct a larger moral order after its atomisation in the central books. Their question, that is, is how it might be possible to rebuild interpretative consensus in a world in which shared metaphysical premises have dissolved or proven chimerical.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Self-Interpretation in 'The Faerie Queene' , pp. 183 - 206Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2006