Dissertation Directions

This dissertation will investigate Spenser’s complex iterations of courtesy, identifying

four discrete embodiments of courtesy represented in The Faerie Queene: the discourteous, the

artful, the unrhetorical, and the courteous. Each chapter contains several focal characters who represent the specific courtesy type presented in each chapter. Chapters also provide critical and historical context to enrich the analysis of the text.

Chapter Two will address the wholly discourteous individuals in The Faerie Queene:

those individuals in whom discourtesy and immorality are, in a sense, balanced. These characters represent the greatest threats to harmoniously functioning courteous society. Being the most direct enemies to courtesy, these antagonists appear solely in Book 6: “The Legend of Courtesy.”

Spenser differs from many courtesy theorists in the Renaissance because he addresses aggressive forces of discourtesy head-on, rather than limiting his discussion of courtesy to courteous

behavior alone. Featured in this chapter are Briana and Crudor, Turpine, the Salvage Nation and the brigands, and the Blatant Beast.

Chapter Three will locate the false courtiers within Spenser’s work—champions of

Castiglione’s concept of sprezzatura. Spenser’s presentation of these individuals as morally

bankrupt artful usurers implicitly delineates between the bad artifice of the tricksters and the good art of the poet. Duessa, Archimago, and Malecasta will be the main foci of this analysis, though other characters are addressed as well.

Chapter Four will track the unrhetorical individuals—those who show an imbalance of rhetoric and truth because they lack the social graces to effectively participate in the social climate. This includes characters who lack experience due to youth, inexperience, or rusticity. Central to the analysis of this chapter is the idea of primitivism, as many of the unrhetorical but still essentially good characters come from outside of civilized society. This chapter begins with the primitive Satyrs and Salvage man, transitions to court with Sir Satyrane, and then ends with the naïvely (rather than primitively) unrhetorical characters Redcrosse and Florimell.

Chapter Five attempts to locate the truly moral (albeit imperfect) courtiers within The

Faerie Queene. The characters who approach true courtesy in the text are Arthur and Britomart. This chapter also connects Spenser’s theory of harmonious moral courtesy to Stefano Guazzo’s

moral theory of courtesy from The Civile Conversation.

The sixth and final chapter of the dissertation analyzes Calidore, the supposed Knight of Courtesy, and his relationship to the aspects of courtesy outlined in the other chapters, asking

whether he is courteous, artful, unrhetorical, or discourteous. This chapter also addresses a broad view of Spenser’s concept of Courtesy.

2 THE DISCOURTEOUS

“the baser mind it selfe displayes, / In cancred malice and reuengefull spight” (6.7.1) 2.1 Introduction

Spenser depicts the whole range of courteous behavior in his work, from nearly exemplary courtesy to the debased discourtesy of unrepentant savage forces of chaos. The wholly discourteous characters who do not try to mask their discourtesy represent the worst affronts to harmonious society, for they threaten the wellbeing of other characters and of society generally. Whereas the following chapters will seek to investigate the place of courtesy and

rhetoric within the entirety of The Faerie Queene, the focal characters of this chapter are found

only in the Legend of Courtesy simply because the worst transgressions against courtesy occur solely in Book 6. The discourteous characters or forces identified in this chapter epitomize discourtesy: they violate essential codes for reasonably harmonious living. They often represent complete perversions of nature or humanity and can be found only outside of civil society. Some of the characters who represent discourtesy may be described as wicked, to use Aristotle’s

terminology. Aristotle identifies the wicked as one who “does a wrong on purpose” (The

Nicomachean Ethics 5.8.25). Cicero refers to those who “fall into error” as “improper,” linking

impropriety to injustice in De Officiis by saying that “all things just are proper; all things unjust,

like all things immoral, are improper” (1.27.94). However, there are many characters in The

distinguishes the following characters is that they both purposefully do wrong and they pose a threat to the societal harmony of others because they reject any code of civility.

Most courtesy theorists only fleetingly address individuals who lack courtesy. Castiglione suggests that “he who associates with the ignorant or the wicked is held to be ignorant or

wicked” (91), and therefore the company of the wicked should be avoided. Likewise, Guazzo explains that the courteous man, “being desirous to understand thorowly which is the civile conversation, to the intent to follow it, must principally seeke to knowe which is the uncivile and blameful conversation, to the intent to flee it” (56). Both advocate merely avoiding discourteous

or unpleasant individuals. In another popular courtesy manual, The Galateo, Giovanni della Casa

insists that the discourteous punish themselves, saying,

Although the law prescribes no penalty for rudeness and bad manners, treating them as slight offences—for, of course, they are not grave crimes—nevertheless we can see that nature herself punishes us for them severely by depriving us on their account of the friendship and company of others. (22)

These Renaissance writers are not alone in their cursory treatment of discourtesy. Though Aristotle addresses both virtue and vice, he focuses his advice on how to achieve virtue, not on how to avoid vice or those who practice vice. Cicero similarly avoids many explicit references to discourtesy or rude behavior. He takes an approach similar to Aristotle’s, focusing instead in the virtuous orator and saying, “all my efforts are always concerned with this goal . . . to do some

good by my speaking, if I can, and if not, at least do no harm” (On the Ideal Orator 2.306).

Cicero does state, “only a wicked and treacherous man could say something that was unsuitable

and that harmed [another]” (On the Ideal Orator 2.297). The connection here between

Chapter 3). None of these influential texts deal with active discourtesy to the extent that Spenser does. Jane Grogan suggests that this reveals the lack of depth to the courtesy manuals: “that courtesy books are, at heart, commercially-oriented routes to social advancement and not works of moral philosophy, can be seen from their dealings with discourtesy” (159). The texts, in fact, avoid dealing widely with discourtesy. If they do mention discourtesy, they do so in the context of violated social conventions, not the more serious violations represented by some of Spenser’s characters. According to these theorists, wicked people should be avoided, but the writers offer no advice for situations in which the wicked cannot be avoided, as when the brigands pillage the

pastoral village. In The Faerie Queene, Spenser, perhaps because he attempts to define courtesy

as a “moral philosophy,” to use Grogan’s phrase, complicates his depiction of courtesy by

directly addressing a spectrum of actively—even aggressively—discourteous characters in The

Faerie Queene.

These discourteous characters attack courteous living from several different angles, with “discourtesy express[ing] itself in various ways in Book VI: in harshness and inhospitality toward strangers, in lack of consideration for women, in treachery and ingratitude, in the pride and cruelty of a heartless flirt, and above all in slander” (Judson 129). By launching this multilateral attack on courtesy, Spenser reveals the far-reaching danger of discourtesy to a courteous world—particularly a courteous world structured by social convention and a contract of civility, rather than one backed by the force of arms. Bruce Danner speculates that by

revealing the vulnerability of courteous discourse in a world of discourtesy, Spenser shows not only how force becomes the authorizing principle of speech, but also how it functions as a preeminent form of that speech. More than just

speaking louder than words, force speaks where words cannot, when ideological barriers render courteous discourse unrecognizable to the discourteous ear. (8) Courtesy in the form of civil conversation, then, remains wholly ineffective in the face of extreme discourtesy and must be paired with the violence of chivalry. Civil conversation only succeeds when multiple parties wish to engage in the “conversation,” and beyond just abstaining from the conversation, discourtesy destroys the ability of others to engage in this type of

harmonious courtesy. Aggressive discourtesy, therefore, creates a necessity for several instances of excessive violence by otherwise courteous characters against the figures of discourtesy in Book 6. This also explains the relative lack of artful rhetoric by either the courteous or

discourteous characters in the book—the discourteous characters neither practice nor succumb to rhetoric as others in the poem do. Spenser leads the reader through varied manifestations of discourtesy from the inhospitable and unchivalric Crudor, Briana, and Turpine, to the violent Salvage Nation and Brigands, and finally to the slanderous Blatant Beast, exploring the threat of discourtesy to both the courteous characters in the book and ultimately to himself as a poet.