Spenser's Unhappy Ends: The Legend of Courtesy and the Pleasure of the Text

This essay explores the perverse role that pleasure plays in Elizabethan writers' attempts to defend the epistemological, ethical, and civic value of poetry. Focusing on romance errancy, I argue that the threat of a futile poetic pleasure not only reveals contradictions within the project of Renaissance humanism, but also constitutes a blind spot for contemporary criticism. Countering a critical tradition that approaches Renaissance texts as useful instruments for addressing social and political anxieties, I analyze how book 6 of The Faerie Queene, the Legend of Courtesy, evinces a tension between the pleasurable means and useful ends of poetry.