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Spenser's Redcrosse Knight and His Encounter with Despair: Some Aspects of the ‘Elizabethan Malady’

In canto ix of the first book of The Faerie Queene, Spenser's Redcrosse Knight encounters Despaire. The episode is a perfect case in point with regard to the relationship between contemporary ideas and literature. At a primary level of enquiry, despair requires no special commentary, for is it not the abandonment of hope which leads to despondency and suicide, much as the term would be understood in any age? Of necessity it must be. Yet Tudor thinkers had granted to despair a special significance through their own theological and medical systems, its unique power to threaten both the secular as well as the spiritual life. Their view of the fundamental condition of man included a greater sense of his vulnerability to this temper, a vulnerability confirmed by behaviour. The encounter with Despaire, it could be argued, is both the dramatic turning point of Senser's narrative and the pivotal event in the education of his Christian Warrior, structural decisions predicated upon clear and decisive ideas about the nature of despair and its place in the generic Christian experience.1 Joylessness and despair are, for Spenser, not only simple truths in the range of human emotional responses, but also complex 'ideas' with complex histories. Spenser's challenge was both to body forth those concepts dramatically as they were understood, and to deal with the complex question of causes. He had to reveal, in a fully representative way, the circumstances in the inner life which lead men to despair of God's grace and to pronounce doom upon themselves. He had to demonstrate that continuum of associations accounting for the spiritual decline which begins with boredom and listlessness and passes on to guilt, despondency and suicide. Of those associations and the causal relationships between them, Spenser made narrative virtue. Yet his juxtaposing of ideas entails at least technical violations to the compartmentalized treatments they had received from the Tudor expository book writers, a fact requiring careful examination. Critical to the point is that Spenser approached his subject as an encyclopedist, so that in his