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

By Andrew Wadoski

Spenser’s ethics offers a novel account of Edmund Spenser as a moral theorist, situating his ethics at the nexus of moral philosophy’s profound transformation in the early modern era, and the English colonisation of Ireland in the turbulent 1580’s and 90’s. It 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 centre of the contested discipline of moral philosophy as it engaged the social, political, and intellectual upheavals driving classical virtue ethics’ unravelling at the threshold of early modernity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jun 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526165428

Book preview

Spenser’s ethics

THE MANCHESTER SPENSER

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

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 Rémi 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

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.

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

For Shaila

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Emptying the virtuous middle in Elizabethan Ireland

1Milton’s Spenser: An alternative virtue for a fallen world

2Purposeful lives: Romance narrative and the generation of empires

3Magnificence: Fashioning the imperial commonwealth

4The metaphysics of moral being: Time, change, and flourishing in the Gardens of Adonis

5Civility and government: Virtuous discipline in the mutable world

6Immoderation and necessity: Spenser’s Machiavelli

Coda

References

Index

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. 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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