Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations and Conventions
- 1 Introduction: Reading Spenser's Language
- 2 ‘Pleasing Analysis’: Renaissance Hermeneutics, Poetry, and the Law
- 3 Results: A Survey of Spenser's Legal Diction
- 4 Property and Contract in the Quests of Florimell and Amoret
- 5 Justice, Equity and Mercy in The Legend of Artegall
- 6 Courtesy and Prerogative in The Legend of Sir Calidore
- 7 The Composition of the World: Managing Power in the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie
- 8 Lyric Opposition in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne
- 9 After Words
- Glossary of Selected Legal Diction in The Faerie Queene
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
6 - Courtesy and Prerogative in The Legend of Sir Calidore
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations and Conventions
- 1 Introduction: Reading Spenser's Language
- 2 ‘Pleasing Analysis’: Renaissance Hermeneutics, Poetry, and the Law
- 3 Results: A Survey of Spenser's Legal Diction
- 4 Property and Contract in the Quests of Florimell and Amoret
- 5 Justice, Equity and Mercy in The Legend of Artegall
- 6 Courtesy and Prerogative in The Legend of Sir Calidore
- 7 The Composition of the World: Managing Power in the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie
- 8 Lyric Opposition in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne
- 9 After Words
- Glossary of Selected Legal Diction in The Faerie Queene
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
Summary
For other orders and other manners of living ought to be ordain'd in a good subject, and others in a bad; nor can the forme be like, where the matter is quite contrarily dispos'd… Touching the innovation of these orders on a sudden when every one knowes they are not good; I say, that this unprofitablenesse, which is easily knowne is hard to correct, for to effect this, ordinary meanes serve not, they being rather hurtfull; but of necessity extraordinary remedies are to be put in practise, as violence and warre…
Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses upon the first Decade of Titus Livius, c. 18THE LEGEND of Artegall shows interventionist equity doing what it does best – intervening – in situations where each of the parties in dispute has a justifiable basis in one or another of the various codes (natural, divine, human) governing civil life. However, this kind of interventionism costs Artegall, like his sometime-antecedent Lord Grey, a good deal of trouble. Prematurely recalled by Gloriana from the ‘saluage Island’, Artegall is harassed by a pair of hags, Envy and Detraction, and set upon by the Blatant Beast. The cause of their onslaught, beyond the inherently malicious disposition of such figures, is not explored in Book V, but we may surmise that something about Artegall's conduct has rendered him vulnerable. His fault may lie in his very interventionism itself – at once the basis of his authority and the means of its subversion.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Spenser's Legal LanguageLaw and Poetry in Early Modern England, pp. 153 - 182Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007