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This essay considers the long-running debate as to whether, in the person of Guyon, Spenser means to champion or reject a particular conception of temperance, arguing instead that the moral ambivalence of all Guyon’s achievements is itself the point. Guyon’s world does not make available to him an ideal middle course between “forward” and “froward” extremes; rather he has two chief paradigms of virtue on which he can draw, themselves respectively “forward” and “froward” in character, and hence themselves open to the charge of being forms of the very intemperance they are meant to remedy. Whereas Book I establishes a Protestant as against a Catholic basis for morally interpreting the poem’s action, Book II looks to build on that ground by testing against one another two leading Protestant notions of the virtuous life in such a way as to grapple seriously with the difficulties posed by each.
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