Vacant Time in The Faerie Queene

This essay argues that Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene accommodates "vacant" time, a kind of time that is unassigned rather than already determined and designated by obligation and duty. The poem's metatemporal moments privilege potential—what one might do as opposed to what one ought to do. Whether through the allegorical figure of Delay, who steals possibility and registers period anxiety about lost opportunity, through characters who attempt to recalculate the passage of time, or through characters who anticipate temporal excess, Spenser betrays an embrace of contingency that operates outside of established systems of valuation.