Hellish Work in "The Faerie Queene"

Abstract

Anthony Low, in a chapter of The Georgic Revolution entitled "Poet of Work: Spenser and the Courtly Ideal," has elegantly argued that arduous physical labor constitutes a virtue rather than a vice for the knight practitioner of The Faerie Queene, most notably in book 6. 1 Virgil's Aeneid, and especially his Georgics, almost certainly provided Edmund Spenser with memorable models of hard physical labor that could not only refine and dignify the rural or epic laborer but, through the uncoordinated but nevertheless cumulative labor of many persons, create a national destiny as well. 2 Once situated at Kilcolman, Spenser regarded himself as a colonizer like his neighbor Sir Walter Ralegh, as a gentleman planter who was once Lord Grey's secretary, a man with upper-class aspirations. Low judges remarkable for the times the poet's vivid representation of the salutary effects of prolonged labor on both the characters and quests of the principal knights who course through faeryland. 3 Social historians of early modern England have compiled a large record of the shared belief of aristocrats, courtiers, and even gentry that hard physical labor, especially wage labor, belonged to the poorest classes, that it demeaned even tradesmen, and that it would always remain an Adamic curse (Gen. 3:19). 4 Recently, Andrew McRae, in God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500-1660, has asserted that Low's claim about the near singularity of Spenser's praise of the benefits of prolonged physical labor on courtiers and knights requires significant revision. Through quotation, McRae illustrates the various degrees to which Tudor writers such as Hugh Latimer, Robert Crowley, Barnabe Googe, [End Page 91] Thomas Tusser, and Sir John Harington extolled the virtues of daily agrarian labor for the bodies and minds of gentlemen, for the most part long before Spenser wrote The Faerie Queene. 5

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