ABSTRACT

Modern criticism of The Faerie Queene begins its creed with Hurd’s remark in the Letters on Chivalry and Romance that Arthur was “but an afterthought.” 1 Professor Josephine Bennett’s analysis of the poem opens its discussion of Spenser’s “failure in unity and action” by quoting Hurd’s dictum. 2 Professor W.L.Renwick acknowledges that Arthur’s “place in the epic-romance was never clearly worked out; his appearances are fitful and unrelated.” 3 B.E.C. Davis regards him as a crude device for gathering up the “scattered threads of allegory”—“an abstraction of a personality” and “a false cornerstone” in an “ethical scheme that starts at the wrong end.” 4 With a single important exception, critics agree that Spenser was throwing dust in his readers’ eyes when he wrote to Raleigh in 1590 that “in the person of Prince Arthure” he “sette forth magnificence … according to Aristotle and the rest,” as a virtue containing all other virtues and therefore peculiarly fitting a hero whose role it is to succor the champions of other virtues.