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The Faerie Queene

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This page is about the Spenser poem. For the Purcell semi-opera see The Fairy-Queen.
Una and the Lion by Briton Rivière
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Una and the Lion by Briton Rivière

The Faerie Queene is an epic poem by Edmund Spenser, first published in 1590 (the first half) with the more or less complete version being published in 1596.

Contents

A celebration of the virtues

Our best evidence for Spenser's ambitions for his epic--outside the FQ itself--is to be found in his prose letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, which is traditionally published as a preface in most editions of the poem. Unfortunately, there are enough divergences even between this letter and the 1590 FQ (the first 3 books), that there is some question as to its trustworthiness regarding the portions Spenser did not live to complete. According to the Letter to Raleigh, there were to have been twelve books, each of which was to focus on one of the twelve private virtues, or twenty-four books with the last twelve concerning Arthur as king and displaying twelve public virtues. Spenser names Aristotle as his source, but it is more likely that Aquinas and the Thomist tradition (which, of course, derived from the theological reinterpretation of Aristotlean texts, such as the Nichomachean Ethics) dictated the catalogue. Each book would feature one knight, who would be the embodiment of that book's virtue.

Book I: Holiness; Book II: Temperance; Book III: Chastity; Book IV: Friendship; Book V: Justice; Book VI: Courtesy;

In addition to these six virtues, the Letter to Raleigh suggests that Arthur represents the virtues of Magnificence, which ("according to Aristotle and the rest") is "the perfection of all the rest, and conteineth in it them all"; and that the Faerie Queene herself represents Glory (hence her name, Gloriana.)

Politics and the poem

The poem found political favour with Elizabeth I and was consequently very successful, to the extent of far overshadowing Spenser's other poetry. A measure of the favour which the poem found with the monarch is that Spenser was granted a pension for life on account of it (50 pounds a year).

The poem celebrates and memorializes the Tudor dynasty (of which Elizabeth was a part), much in the tradition of the Aeneid's celebration of Augustus Caesar's Rome. The poem is deeply allegorical and allusive: many prominent Elizabethans could have found themselves--or one another--partially representented by one or more of Spenser's figures. Elizabeth herself is the best example: she appears most prominently in her guise as Gloriana, the Faerie Queene herself; but also in Books III and IV as the virgin Belphoebe, daughter of Venus and twin to Amoret, the embodiment of womanly married love; and perhaps also, more critically, in Book I as Lucifera, the "maiden queen" whose brightly-lit Court of Pride masks a dungeon full of prisoners.

Spenser's use of literary history can be seen as politically relevant, and so it deserves some mention alongside the Faerie Queene's relationship to Elizabethan society. Though he may have been familiar with various aspects of the Arthurian textual tradition which culminates in Malory's Morte d'Artur, it's clear that the spirit, the flavor, and even the structure and language of the chivalrous activity in FQ derive from Italian epic, particularly Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered. Though there are brief moments of allegory in both of these epics, neither takes on the project of FQ, which sets out to allegorize the entire action of the poem. When two knights meet in battle in FQ, we aren't simply being asked to enjoy a jousting match, as we are often invited to do in Italian epic; the figures bent on attacking one another might be Holiness and Faithlessness. Our moral and political imagination is therefore often asked by the poem to do work that operates at some distance from our purely spectatorial interests. If Spenser's poem continues to provide any pleasure, it does so because these conflicts persist for us: we continue to find violence morally abhorrent, politically undesirable and extremely entertaining.

Finally, it ought to be mentioned that the fifth Book of FQ is the Book of Justice, and it is here that Spenser meditates most directly on what we now call political theory. That it is in many ways the least appealing of the six books to most readers (with the possible exception of professional Spenserians) only speaks to the difficulty of the subject matter. For example, the very fact that the knight of Chastity, Britomart, and the knight of Justice, Artegall, are betrothed--and furthermore, are understood to be the mythic founders of the Tudor dynasty--is a little hard to digest in the abstract. There is also an unusual difficulty of the narrative technique for this book: it makes sense that, in order to allegorize Chastity, you would run her up against various opposites of examples of Inchastity, and demonstrate your heroine's supremacy; and this indeed occupies the majority of the action of Book III. Book V takes a similar tack in that it runs up the knight of Justice against various examples of Injustice. But of course, Britomart's intervention in the case of Amoret, for example, or Guyon's pursuit of Acrasia in Book II, are also cases in which the concept of injustice plays a role. The major question for Book V, then, is whether Spenser can condated inquiry into the nature of justice in the framework of chivalric epic, even under allegorical auspices. Whether he succeeds or not, it is worth noting that this book's meditation on justice is not only theoretical: it contains Spenser's most explicit meditation in verse on the vexing problem (from his point of view) of Ireland, and culminates with a re-enactment of the trial and sentencing of Mary Queen of Scots, who in the allegory is represented by Duessa (in Book I she represents the False Church: perhaps another distortion of the generic framework necessitated by the discourse of Justice.)

Allegorical characters

Important allegorical figures include Una, who symbolizes the true Protestant religion; the evil Duessa, who represents Roman Catholicism; Britomart and Belphoebe, warrior maidens who symbolize English virtue, and Gloriana the Faerie Queene, a nickname often found to refer to Queen Elizabeth I. The Redcrosse Knight introduced in the first canto of the poem bears the emblem of Saint George, patron saint of England; a red cross still features in the Union Jack as a symbol of England. The Redcross Knight is, in fact, early on declared to be the real Saint George.

Many modern readers find this poem (as much of Spenser's poetry) both difficult to read and even more difficult to comprehend. Its sources are both rich and complex, its language both archaic and arcane. Moreover, the structure of the story is not conventional episodic narrative, but involves fluid and unpredictable transitions in events both forward and backward in time. Nevertheless it is a beautifully crafted epic which richly rewards those patient enough to take it on. The poem becomes much simpler to read once one gets used to the interchangeable nature of some letters and learns to recognize words from their general sound as opposed to strict spelling. The poem contains some terms that are no longer in popular use (such as "whylome" and "wonne"), but these are repeated often enough so that the reader can familiarly read the rest of the poem if he took the time to learn the meaning of these words, which some editions provide definitions of to supplement the poem itself.

Other characters

Allegorical cores

Canto arguments

See also

External links

 

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