“To Please the Best, and th’Evill to Embase”: Slavery Logic in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book VI

Abstract

This essay argues that Spenser’s depiction of courtesy in Book VI of The Faerie Queene is structured by a Platonic conceptual structure that I am calling “slavery logic.” Slavery logic emerges from Plato’s use of slavery metaphors in political and moral philosophy, influencing Aristotelian theories of slavery and aestheticized Neoplatonic discourse, both of which are relevant to Spenser’s courtesy. This contradictory conceptual structure preserves a space of controlled slippage between opposed models: the metaphysical, unchanging realm of being and the genealogical, often violent process of becoming. It does so for political reasons. This essay demonstrates the role of such a slippage in Spenser’s depiction of courtesy as a virtue, which refuses to clarify the relationship between social and natural forms of grace, that which can be learnt and that which is inherited. Finally, it offers a political reading of the Neoplatonic dance of the Graces on Mount Acidale in canto x, connecting slavery logic and courtesy to whiteness as a racial ideology, via the aporetic figure of the fourth Grace at the center of the dance. [K.A.]