The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser (Books 1 and 2)

*contains spoilers*


There are several reasons why I have opted to blog (for the mean time, anyway) on only the first two Books of Edmund Spenser’s remarkable epic poem, The Faerie Queene, but the easiest to admit is that there is just so much to talk about that I feel the one, all-inclusive blog wouldn’t give the text sufficient justice to speak of its various qualities. This poem deserves the adjective ‘epic’ in all respects: for starters, it is a substantial work, consisting of seven books (in my Everyman edition, anyway – it depends which one you manage to find), each book made up of twelve cantos, the cantos themselves each having approximately 40-60 stanzas within; it is also an allegorical work, much like The Divine Comedy or Piers Plowman that came before it, which hopes to imbue an already weighty narrative with important social, political, cultural and religious messages. Boiling down to the make up of the stanzas, we see something quite unique, which makes this whole experience an absolute joy: we are given eight lines of what appears to be a rather typical iambic pentameter in the rhyme scheme ababbcbc, but these lines are rounded off by a beautifully resolute Alexandrine iambic hexameter following on from the rhyme of the pervious line – c. This final Alexandrine line not only rhythmically leads you on to the following stanza, making the act of reading this archaic text actually quite a comfortable and immersive journey, it also adds to the consistent intertextuality of the piece.


Spenser draws from an array of classical texts at his disposal: Hellenistic, Latin, Christian, Mesopotamian – they’re all here, and the allusions only make for a more rewarding journey for the experienced reader along the way. Consider, for example, Spenser’s use of characterisation of abstract notions of evil from Book 1; “Of grisly Pluto she the daughter was, / And sad Proserpina the queen of hell…/ And proud ‘Lucifera’ men did her call / That made herself a queen, and crowned to bed - / Yet rightful kingdom she had none at all…” There is a wealth of established classical mythology to create particular impressions on the reader here. Lucifera, a pretender to royalty and leadership, the daughter of a god, is by name inherently a thinly veiled cipher for Lucifer, challenger of the heavenly realm, who had also made himself king of a false kingdom built on supposedly unstable foundations. Her parents, named in their Latin form, but borne from Hellenistic mythology, are king and queen of Hades. The interpretation comes by means of the classics, and the reader can go from there.


We disappear further into the depths of the underworld as Spenser attempts to lay down the layers of allegory, intimating Queen Elizabeth I’s rightful position as Queen of England against the tyranny of the papacy of Europe, much like Virgil fawned at the feet of Augustus in legitimising his heavenly lineage and royal status against the undermining presence of the republic of Rome in The Aeneid. The swipes at the Catholic Church can be seen, as they are in Langland’s Piers Plowman, as Spenser condemns the acquisition of money in the name of religion against the pursuit of the purity of spirit; “He [Mammon] brought him [Sir Guyon] through a darksome, narrow strait / To a broad gate all built of beaten gold.” This passage from Book 2 is particularly Dante-esque in his intent, as Sir Guyon, a paragon of Temperance, must fight the urge to load his packs with Mammon’s stores of gold. The difficulty of the journey is made apparent in the medial rhyme of “strait” and “gate”, so wonderfully rendered under the tyranny of the meter. Indeed, the syntax is possibly the most difficult aspect of the verse to penetrate because of these very constraints of rhyme and meter, but the modern reader cannot help but be drawn into the archaic quality of the text because of this. The world of knights, elves, dragons, giants, sorcerers and witches becomes more palatable on the tongue; of course, our impressions of these faery-land worlds are set by the long-standing influence of texts such as The Faerie Queene – but in the eyes of the modern reader it becomes a means of picturing this world in the past with an element of authenticity. I shall leave you with an early example of the syntax. Let me know how it makes you feel:


His reverend hairs and holy gravity

The Knight much honoured, as beseemed well,

And gently asked, where all the people be,

Which in that stately building wont to dwell;

Who answered him full soft, he could not tell.

Again he asked, where that same knight was laid

Whom great Orgoglio in his puissance fell

Had made his caitiff thrall. Again he said

He could not tell, ne ever other answer made. (Book 1, Canto 8, Stanza 32)

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