Righteous Wrath and Personal Resentment: the Education of the Spenserian champion of Justice in "The Faerie Queene"

• Autores: Paola Baseotto
• Localización: On Resentment.: An Interdisciplinary Workshop on The History of Emotions, 26,27, 28 October, 2011 The Louis-Jeantet Auditorium, Geneva / coord. por Dolores Martín Moruno, Javier Moscoso Sarabia, Bernardino Fantini, 2011, pág. 3
• Idioma: español
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• Resumen

  • My article examines views of the difference between righteous wrath and personal resentment in Elizabethan discourses of justice.

    The first section of my essay focuses on an analysis of the Elizabethan understanding of the emotions of "anger" and "resentment" in the light of influential philosophical writings (Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Seneca's De Ira) and theological works (Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae, contemporary popular treatises by Reformed churchmen like William Perkins and Thomas Becon). Texts by professional soldiers (Barnaby Rich, for example) and advocates of the "honour code" derived from the chivalric ethos (the herald William Segar) are also analysed.

    The second section of my article deals with two significant treatments of the theme of resentment in a poem, Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, and in State papers and letters by Queen Elizabeth I.The theme of resentment is at the core of the Spenserian reflection on the ethical and legal boundaries of uses of private and state violence in The Faerie Queene. Distinction between rightful and unrightful violence is in fact a central concern in the Spenserian discourses of justice as it is in contemporary theological, legal and literary documents on the subject. But whereas Spenser's dramatizations of what distinguishes the violence of the righteous from that of the wicked reflects faithfully the legal and theological orthodoxy of his day based on the discrimination between public and private violence, the emphasis in his texts falls on other concerns. While contemporary discussions of the righteousness of violent acts focused very much on the capacity and warrant of actors, Spenser's texts represent these conditions as necessary, but not sufficient and construct the view that the avenger's motives and ends are to be scrutinized as closely as his authorization. Even the Knight of Justice in The Faerie Queene at times fails to distinguish between private vengeance and justified punishment, righteous wrath and personal resentment.

    The theme of resentment is also prominent in Queen Elizabeth's writings in the difficult years preceding and following the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in 1587. In her 1586 speeches to Parliament, her Proclamation of Mary's death sentence and her letters to Mary as well as to her son, James VI of Scotland, Elizabeth repeatedly declares herself free from "malice" and "rancour". I argue that the Queen's appropriation of contemporary discourses of resentment is one of the strategies she uses to separate herself from the judgement and execution of Mary and construct a discourse of innocence in the private eyes of James and in the public eyes of her subjects.