The Lost Cause of Platonism in The Faerie Queene

Abstract

My question in this paper is whether even a cautious return to a broadly Platonic Spenser is sustainable, or whether there are reasons for regarding that vision of The Faerie Queene as a lost cause. Not that I doubt that the Platonic tradition, in the broadest sense, is a great influence on Spenser’s poetry, but that it is one thing to draw deeply on a tradition, another to produce a work whose worldview is of that tradition. Thus, while The Faerie Queene does propose essentially Platonic accounts of its overall narrative and allegorical structures, and of certain episodes (notably the Garden of Adonis and Mutability Cantos), all those accounts are called radically in doubt within the poem, in most cases by being shown to be rhetorically generated in the service of specific personal or political interests. Moreover, the possibility of an alternative, non-Platonic and anti-metaphysical worldview is repeatedly glimpsed behind those interests and the metaphysical claims they generate—one whose dynamics are most strikingly encountered in the difficulties of interpreting the Garden of Adonis, but whose broader implications are seen in the wider narrative and above all in the careers of Arthur and Britomart. Chief among those implications is that the valid constitution of moral and political authority must be treated as a more urgent and intractable problem than would be so if a secure metaphysical context for moral interpretation were presupposed. Spenser’s grappling with that problem’s intractability culminates in the Mutability Cantos, where nostalgia for medieval Christian-Platonic metaphysical certainty is coupled with recognition that such certainty has been rendered unavailable by the Renaissance state’s appropriation of Christian-Platonic metaphysical claims to a partisan art of power.

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