초록/요약

Artegall’s anticlimactic failure to impose justice and civilize Irena’s land lies at the heart of Edmund Spenser’s discussion of justice in Book Five of Faerie Queene (1596). Given that Spenser’s allegory of justice concerns English colonization of Ireland, Spenser’s decision to suspend the Knight of Justice’s mission is often juxtaposed with his political views as a colonial administrator. Many argue that the inconclusion represents a poeticization of Spenser’s political criticism towards Queen Elizabeth’s unwillingness to support militant reforms in Ireland. Book Five’s relative unpopularity among readers and critics alike largely derives from such analyses that read it as an overly flat topical allegory of Spenser’s colonial project. We claim, however, that there is a need to distinguish between Spenser the hardline political polemicist of A View of the Present State of Ireland and Spenser the liminal national poet of Book Five. While Spenser’s juridical-political agenda predicates a clear dichotomy between the civil English self and the savage Irish other, his poem depicts savagery within the civilized self. Accordingly, Spenser’s poem is less a straightforward topical allegory than an expression of his ambivalent stance about his political exposition. We argue that Artegall’s failure results from Spenser’s recognition of an undeniable fissure that delegitimized his imperial project: the New English embody the very savagery they must eradicate to establish justice. Hence, Spenser the poet struggles with his paradoxical reality which confounds the viability of Spenserian Justice. His political confidence wavers into poetic ambivalence as the savage within induces the inconclusion of Artegall’s mission.