On the Renaissance Epic: Spenser and Slavery

It is not often remembered, but the Renaissance was a time for the renascence of slavery in the economics of many western European powers (if not actually in northern Europe itself). Not often thought of as sharing with antiquity this particular aspect of economic organization, the Renaissance is more usually regarded as a time of the birth of the free and autonomous individual. Yet, if we push some of Fredric Jameson’s arguments about genre to their logical conclusions, we might better understand how the Renaissance was rightly named for a rebirth of some classical forms and that indeed the resurgence of the genre of the epic in the Renaissance speaks to the resurgence of slavery, by which European powers were building their new Atlantic empires. Given Jameson’s understanding of genre, we may be enabled to see how, in two strangely parallel scenes, The Faerie Queene may be aiming to do the work that epic poems usually do, to wit, mediating the contradictions (i.e., the internally irrational elements) of a slave economy, particularly as slavery was just becoming an element in the overseas economy of Renaissance England’s growing imperial interests. By inspecting these two episodes, Guyon’s confrontation of Mammon in book 2 (the Book of Temperance) and Britomart’s slaying of the Amazon queen Radigund in book 5 (the Book of Justice), I hope to show how a properly theorized notion of genre can force us to adopt far more culturally embedded and site-specific reading practices.¹ I can only begin to articulate the range of problems raised by such a global suggestion—about an entire genre in a quickly changing historical period—but it will be useful first to ask how we should read the text to find the relationship of this particular late-sixteenth-century English epic, by a would-be courtier to Queen Elizabeth I, to the activity of pan-Atlantic slavery during the Renaissance. Interestingly, the two episodes in which Edmund Spenser seems most specifically to meditate on the problem of slave and wage labor are cruxes in the only books of his epic to focus on any of the twelve classical Aristotelian virtues, that is, the books of Temperance and Justice (Aristotle, of course, does not mention, for example, “Holiness” or “Chastity”). In such a way the epic appears to insist that in these episodes it deals most specifically with issues that have resonance back to Greek times.

In The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson observes that “genre is essentially a socio-symbolic message”; in other words, “form is immanently and intrinsically an ideology in its own right.” When a form is “reappropriated and refashioned in quite different social and cultural contexts,” Jameson explains, “this message persists.”² In other words, the real contradictions of the first historical moment for which the genre was designed to provide an imaginary solution may continue to supply a shape for ensuing potentialities of the form. Thus, in Jameson’s example, the point of origin for romance as a genre was that moment when maurauding bands of soldiers finally joined forces and formed themselves into a cohesive class, the feudal nobility: romance is thereby the genre that insists that the alien enemy is not “other” but the same as oneself.³ Romance thus takes the older contrast between good and evil in the chanson de geste and shows how two enemies can recognize each other as being part of the same group. The typical plot of romance provides this solution when an unknown hostile knight, often in disguise, is bested in a contest and asks for mercy by telling his name, “at which point,” Jameson argues, the knight is “reinserted into the unity of the social class” and “he becomes one more knight among others and loses all his sinister unfamiliarity.”⁴

From this formal viewpoint, epic might be seen as the diametrical opposite of romance: epic is that genre which...