The “Scriene” and the Channel: England and Spain in Book V of The Faerie Queene

Abstract

This essay concerns Edmund Spenser's imaginative encounter, in Book V of The Faerie Queene, with a Europe beyond England, and his reflection on the differences he sees across several international and imperial settings. But it is not only Spenser's encounter that interests me, for in surveying the geopolitical landscape of his time, Spenser introduces and adapts several figures -of language and of geography -that produce virtual encounters for the readers of The Faerie Queene, provoking us to think about the landmarks and processes that give shape to international politics, empire, and the ideal in which Book V is particularly invested: justice. How, he asks, is justice projected from one society into another in an act of empire? 1 By what kinds of imaginative and geopolitical acts do kings challenge one another? How do international politics and empire remake the world for their purposes? The conversation on Book V has been perhaps overly colored by attention to the topical issues Spenser addresses -his stances toward Ireland, Spain, and other crossroads of late sixteenth-century Europe -and not scrupulous enough about accounting for how these issues are domesticated into the epic by means of figures. Here, I will put in the foreground some of those figures.As a habit of thought as well as a discipline, geography is conditioned by figures: a writing about landscape rather than the landscape itself. Spenser's geography in Book V of The Faerie Queene has much to do with the political motives he represents, namely, the Elizabethan program for international politics starting from the conquest of Ireland, and less to do with the familiar landscapes of epic. That is, the context that makes sense of Book V is not limited to fictional instances such as Os Lusíadas and Gerusalemme Liberata, but includes historical and empirical writings of many sorts that develop their own programs for figuring landscape politically. When we put Spenser, the observer of imperial designs, alongside contemporaneous