The Polliticke Courtier: Spenser’s The Faerie Queene as a Rhetoric of Justice by Michael F.N. Dixon

Abstract

widely applicable, but such models seem unconvincing. Fifteen manuscripts written over 200 years is simply too small a basis for any broad general patterns to emerge. Evans’s descriptions indicate a discouraging number of anomalies and inconsistencies of manuscript features even within his nar­ rowly defined field. What is clear from this “rereading of Middle English romance” is the value of seeing single works in their manuscript context and of analysing the various factors that shaped the manuscript collections in which a text survives. Jo a n n e s , n o r m a n / Bishop’s University Michael F.N. Dixon, The Polliticke Courtier: Spenser’s The Faerie Queene as a Rhetoric of Justice (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996). x, 245. $44.95 cloth. Michael Dixon received an impetus for his rhetorical study of The Faerie Queene from the perception of the editors of the Spenser Encyclopedia that there was a gap in Spenser scholarship: A.C. Hamilton quoted to him a James Murphy letter saying “few Spenserians know rhetoric well, while no rhetoricians know Spenser at all.” Although some attention has been given in Spenser’s time and later to the ornaments of rhetoric, Dixon in this book concentrates on what Aristotle said was more important: “inventio — ... discovery, selection, and organization — rather than ornamentation” (4). Dixon seeks to “discern Spenser’s purpose” by tracing backward from the arrangement and details of style in the finished poem to “apprehend the conceptual resonance,” the inventio, of “justice.” Recognizing the complexity of The Faerie Queene, Dixon aims not to refute various allegorical readings, but to provide “a context [for] com­ mon provenance and at least partial accommodation” (5). In doing so, he adapts classical rhetoric, intended initially for orations, by employing Kenneth Burke’s concept of “courtship” (10), seen on erotic, social, and transcendent levels, each of which can be taken as analogous to the others. Dixon seeks to mediate between New Historical and New Critical extremes (7-9). His rhetorical approach regularly considers speakers (including the poet) and their purpose in speaking, taking into account Spenser’s putative audience (Elizabethan or later). Since rhetoric implies persuasion, Dixon reminds readers that “good rhet­ oric is often fallacious logic,” because most human experience involves “open systems” — unlike geometry, in which proofs can be certain (19-20). Rhetoric may operate through ethos and pathos (ethical and pathetic proofs) or through logos, which is the rhetorical parallel to logic. Logos involves “the 187 shared perception that the exempla chosen are decorous” with respect to the assertion made and “the available reservoir of exempla they purport to represent synecdochically” ; characters “are Spenser’s true exempla” (22-23). Dependent on analogy, rhetorical proof necessarily involves ambiguity, which Dixon sees as also characteristic of “courtship” (25). He further considers proof by narration: stories regularly assume what in logic is considered a fal­ lacy: “post hoc ergo propter hoc” (31). Other rhetorical features of Spenser’s poem Dixon deals with are refutatio and digressio, not to be confused with self-contradiction or careless plot-wandering. Dixon is convinced that Spenser’s aim shifted from that stated in the letter to Raleigh to “demonstrating the coalescence of virtues that ‘fashions’ a polity where private virtues find realization in a ‘polliticke’ order” (13). His book accordingly concentrates on the latter half of Spenser’s poem, but he first examines aspects of Books I to hi, for example treating Redcrosse as a courtier and linking temperance with justice. In fact, one of the satisfying aspects of his study is the degree to which it addresses the poem as a whole. Dixon’s approach to Books IV and V, in particular, should help readers see better how they fit into the total picture. Rather than simply completing ill, Book iv “extends a transitional sequence between the book of chastity and the book of justice” (53) — mainly through Britomart. This character, who is important in all these books, courts “identity with justice” (57) more than with chastity (75); and she does so not only by seeking union with Artegall but also by increasingly subsuming and transcending the virtues exemplified in other protagonists. Dixon makes a strong argument for...