Looking for ethics in Spenser's Faerie queene

pp. 67-98

in: James A. Knapp, Image ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Abstract

As we have seen, Spenser's celebration of Elizabeth in "Aprill" relies on a messianic logic that is marked by a dynamic interplay between the visible and the invisible. The apocalyptic visions of van der Noot's Theatre and the Christian tradition of revelation inform the poet's early exploration of the relationship between what is and is not available to the eye. As Spenser continued to develop as a poet, he would focus even more intently on the relationship between visual experience and invisible truth. His thoroughgoing emphasis on vision led Northrop Frye to the celebrated conclusion "that Spenser, unlike Milton, is a good poet of very limited conceptual powers, and is helpless without some kind of visualization to start him thinking."¹ Although Frye's assessment of Spenser's dependence on visualization is undeniable, I will argue here that it does not account for the philosophical import of Spenser's poetic method. His reliance on visualization—what Frye takes for poor powers of conceptualization—reflects his debt to Aristotle's theory of cognition in De Anima, especially the assertion: "it is necessary that, whenever one is contemplating, it is some image that one is contemplating."² In the present chapter, I argue that Spenser's visual poetics emerged from a lifelong engagement with this theory and its implications for ethical instruction in the context of the Reformation.