The Faerie Queene

The Faerie Queene
Name	The Faerie Queene
Caption	Title page of the first edition (1590)
Author	Edmund Spenser
Country	England
Language	Early Modern English
Genre	Epic poem, Allegory
Publisher	William Ponsonby (1590, 1596)
Pub date	1590–1596

The Faerie Queene is an epic poem by Edmund Spenser composed in the late 16th century as a celebration of Elizabeth I, chivalric virtue, and Protestant identity within the context of Renaissance politics. Commissioned in part by figures of the Tudor dynasty and shaped by Spenser's life in Ireland, the work weaves mythic quests, courtly romance, and moral exempla into a project of national and theological significance. Its influence stretches across English literature, impacting poets from John Milton to William Blake and shaping debates in Elizabethan drama, Renaissance humanism, and Jacobean reception.

Composition and Structure

Spenser composed the poem during the 1580s and 1590s while under patronage associated with the Court of Elizabeth I and landholdings in County Cork. He planned a twelve-book epic reflecting the classical models of Homer and Virgil, yet structured as a series of moral "holinesse" pursuits after the fashion of Aristotlean virtue ethics and the chivalric code of Sir Thomas Malory. The published work comprises two volumes: the first in 1590 and a second in 1596, completing six books with a fragmentary and planned expansion interrupted by Spenser's death in 1599. Spenser employed a stanzaic invention—now called the Spenserian stanza—building on the precedents of Petrarch, Spenser's contemporaries such as Sir Philip Sidney, and the Italian terza rima debates of Dante Alighieri reception. Patronage networks including Lord Burghley, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester shaped revision, dedicatory epistles, and the poem's public positioning.

Plot and Cantos Summary

The poem organizes its narrative around allegorical knights each embodying a virtue; principal figures include the Redcrosse Knight, Prince Arthur, and Britomart, whose quests intersect with characters drawn from the mythic geographies of Arthurian legend and classical epic. Book I follows the Redcrosse Knight's quest against the dragon and his encounters with Una and Duessa, entwining motifs from Saint George narratives, Christian typology, and hagiographic tropes found in The Golden Legend. Book II pursues Sir Guyon and the temptations of the Bower of Bliss, resonant with moral discourse from Evangelical reformers and the pastoral allegories of Arcadia. Book III centers on Britomart’s search for her knight, blending Camilla-like warrior-maiden traditions from Virgil with chivalric romance tropes popularized by Ariosto and Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando narratives. Subsequent books turn to Artegall, Calidore, and other heroes contending with social injustice, duels, and monstrous antagonists recalling episodes from Ovid, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and continental chanson de geste cycles. Interludes include courtly episodes, prophetic visions, and the allegorical presentation of Gloriana, whose court evokes royal pageantry as staged in Elizabethan court masques.

Themes and Allegory

Central themes include virtue and corruption, national identity, and providential history as read through Protestant providentialism and Tudor political theology. The poem stages the struggle between true holiness and falsehood, linking chivalric virtue to obedience to a monarch modeled on Elizabeth I and to Protestant reformist ideals associated with figures like John Calvin and William Perkins. Allegory operates multifariously: political allegory implicates statesmen and events such as the Spanish Armada context; religious allegory invokes Catholic-Protestant polemic and sacramental controversies; and personal allegory encodes Spenser's relations with patrons including Philip Sidney and Lord Burghley. The poem also negotiates gender and nationality through Britomart’s quest, engaging with ideals articulated by Christine de Pizan and Renaissance debates about female rulership epitomized by Isabella I of Castile and contemporary discussions of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Sources and Influences

Spenser drew from a wide range of sources: Classical Antiquity (chiefly Virgil, Ovid, and Plato), medieval romance (including Malory’s Le Morte d'Arthur), and Italian Renaissance epic and romance such as Ariosto and Tasso. Humanist scholarship—through figures like Desiderius Erasmus and Petrarch—informed Spenser’s intertexts, while English predecessors including Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and contemporaries like Sir Philip Sidney and Christopher Marlowe shaped vernacular diction and poetic ambition. Spenser’s Irish context introduced topographical and political borrowings from Gaelic sources and Anglo-Irish administrative records tied to the Plantations of Ireland and the legal frameworks of the Court of Exchequer (Ireland).

Language, Style, and Form

Spenser’s diction synthesizes archaicisms and innovative coinages within Early Modern English, deploying archaisms recalling Chaucer alongside neologisms that enriched later poetic lexicons used by John Dryden and Alexander Pope. The Spenserian stanza—nine lines of iambic pentameter with an alexandrine close (ababbcbcc)—produces a sonorous and flexible narrative line that accommodates description, epic simile, and sermonic digression. Stylistically, the poem blends courtly blank-verse sensibility present in Elizabethan drama with learned classical allusion, embedding historiographic asides that echo Holinshed's Chronicles and the chronicle tradition exemplified by Raphael Holinshed.

Publication History and Reception

Published in 1590 and 1596 by William Ponsonby with dedications to Elizabeth I's court, the poem quickly acquired fame among readers such as John Milton, Ben Jonson, and later Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It influenced poetic theory in the Restoration and Romantic periods and provoked critical readings from Thomas Warton to T. S. Eliot. Reception varied: contemporaries praised its moral scope while Catholic and royalist critics attacked its polemics; later editors like Edmund Gosse and scholars in the Victorian era produced annotated editions shaping modern canonical status. The poem remains a central object in studies of Renaissance literature, Tudor political culture, and the history of the English epic.

Category:Epic poems Category:16th-century literature Category:Works by Edmund Spenser