ABSTRACT
The Legend of Justice has been for many modern readers the least-liked book of The Faerie Queene. Partly because of its subject matter and partly because it comes closest to Spenser’s own political experience in Ireland, the book is hard-edged and uncompromising. Justice is a virtue that demands decisions of right and wrong, guilty and not guilty, even in areas of human experience variously shaded in gray. The operations of justice, or at least of the law, are most often negative: it must punish and correct the failures of people to live together in civilized harmony. Spenser spent most of his adult life as a colonial official in a country where these failures were impressive. Justice to such an official, as he clearly tells us through Irenius in the Vewe of Ireland, meant the imposition of English law on the recalcitrant Irish population. And justice, being so narrowly conceived, failed utterly in Spenser’s experience of Ireland. C.S.Lewis expressed this relation between the life and the poem most strongly: ‘Spenser was the instrument of a detestable policy in Ireland, and in his fifth book the wickedness he had shared begins to corrupt his imagination’ (1936:349).
