I HAVE ARGUED that the early cantos of Book One present to us a hero who idoes not so much fall short of an agreed moral standard, as adhere to a moral standard itself revealed to be erroneous. But it remains to ask what exactly is the significance in the book of the misleading moral code, the ethos of knight-errantry, in whose terms the protagonist misconstrues his own role in the story. What is to be achieved by targeting again an ethos already widely critiqued and parodied, in works as far separated in time as The Quest of the Holy Grail and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso?

There are, in general terms, two kinds of plausible answers to such questions. One is exemplified by a recent reading of Book One by Harry Berger Jr., which treats the chivalric ethical code as directly tied in to the poem's ostensible didactic and panegyrical aims as laid out by the letter to Raleigh, so that Spenser's critique of the former acts as part of an implicit critique of the latter. In this view, the spuriousness of the interpretative system that approves the deeds of Redcross signals the spuriousness of the very values the poem appears superficially to endorse. I shall say more about that possibility in Chapter Six. But there is also a different possibility, for which important precedents exist, namely that the book's critique of the values of knight-errantry might rather be performed in the service of its declared overall moral and political allegiances, with the false ethos that initially leads Redcross astray serving as a foil for a different ethos which the book finally advocates in earnest.