Like other literary texts examined in this book (including Donne's ‘Satyre V’ and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and The Winter's Tale), Spenser's ‘Legend of Artegall, or of Justice’, Book V of The Faerie Queene, has historically suffered from critical disapproval and even neglect. The poetry has been found deficient on various formal grounds and excessive in its representation of violence. The brutal and mass violence depicted within Book V's historical allegories, especially those that represent the sixteenth-century English colonisation of Ireland, are frequently read as doing irrevocable harm to Artegall's claim to the title, Knight of Justice. It creates an ethical paradox for the national epic, which self-consciously proclaims its intention to represent and instill virtue, and ultimately implicates the author himself. C. S. Lewis famously identified Spenser's personal ethical failure – he was an agent, apologist and benefiter of colonialism – as the root cause of Book V's aesthetic failures: ‘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.’ More recently, criticism has probed the ways in which literary forms and traditions enabled Spenser's support for and representations of colonial oppression in Book V and in his political treatise, A View of The Present State of Ireland, that was composed in the same period. In A View, Irenaeus presents a ‘sharpe course … for the bringing under of those rebells of Ulster and Connaught’ that would ‘prepar[e] a way for their perpetuall reformation’. Ciaran Brady argues that the treatise's ‘dialogue form, like the metaphors, the antiquarian discussions and the superficial logistical proposals … [were] exploited to allow Spenser to retain the mantle of the conscientious humanist scholar while he urged a brutal and desperate policy.’ ‘The Legend … of Justice’ shares a number of tensions with A View. Through poetry, Book V likewise attempts to ‘provide a moral justification for the relentless use of force and terror in bringing Ireland to order’.

My own reading of the poem foregrounds the representation of governance as a form of ‘perpetuall reformation’ that entails consistent, insistent, endless attention, and that also therefore links political conditions with the strength of legal-historical continuity.