The Faerie Queene as an Aristotelian Inquiry into Ethics

Abstract

Spenser’s The Faerie Queene constitutes an Aristotelian inquiry into ethics because of its continual demand for judgment. For Aristotle, there is no single rule for what constitutes good action; similarly, in The Faerie Queene, there is no single rule for interpreting the poem’s allegories. The agent or reader must evaluate the unique circumstances of each case before she can act or interpret correctly. In The Faerie Queene, this is partly because the significance of individual characters, motifs, and actions changes radically from episode to episode. Spenser’s wide range of literary and philosophical sources likewise means that the poem has no single interpretive key. The variation and diversity of The Faerie Queene offer, not rules to follow or examples to imitate, but rather, case studies to analyze, whose narrative particularity both demands and develops judgment. I analyze key episodes from Books I, II, and V, and show that if we attempted to derive general ethical or interpretive rules from these episodes, these rules would lead us to misread other parts of the poem. To interpret the poem adequately, we must develop and apply an informed judgment to each individual case—the same process required of an Aristotelian ethical agent.