The Faerie Queene
Edmund Spenser
Context
Edmund Spenser was born around 1552
in London, England. We know very little about his
family, but he received a quality education and graduated with a Masters from Cambridge in 1576. He began writing poetry for
publication at this time and was employed as a secretary, first to the Bishop
of Kent and then to nobles in Queen
Elizabeth's court. His first major work, The Shepheardes Calender, was published in 1579 and met with
critical success; within a year he was at work on his greatest and longest
work, The
Faerie Queene.
This poem
occupied him for most of his life, though he published other poems in the
interim.
The first three books of The Faerie Queen were published in 1590 and then
republished with Books IV through VI in 1596. By this time, Spenser was already
in his second marriage, which took place in Ireland, where he often traveled. Still at
work on his voluminous poem, Spenser died on January
13, 1599,
at Westminster.
Spenser only completed half of The Faerie Queene he planned. In a letter to Sir John
Walter Raleigh, he explained the purpose and structure of the poem. It is an
allegory, a story whose characters and events nearly all have a specific symbolic
meaning. The poem's setting is a mythical "Faerie land," ruled by the
Faerie Queene. Spenser sets forth in the letter
that this "Queene" represents his own monarch, Queen Elizabeth.
Spenser intended to write 12 books of
the Faerie
Queene, all in the classical epic style;
Spenser notes that his structure follows those of Homer and Virgil. Each Book
concerns the story of a knight, representing a particular Christian virtue, as
he or she would convey at the court of the Faerie Queene. Because only half of the poem was
ever finished, the unifying scene at the Queene's court never occurs; instead,
we are left with six books telling an incomplete story. Of these, the first and
the third books are most often read and critically acclaimed.
Though it takes place in a mythical
land, The
Faerie Queen
was intended to relate to Spenser's England, most importantly in the area of
religion. Spenser lived in post-Reformation England, which had recently
replaced Roman Catholicism with Protestantism (specifically, Anglicanism) as
the national religion. There were still many Catholics living in England, and, thus, religious protest was a
part of Spenser's life. A devout Protestant and a devotee of the Protestant
Queen Elizabeth, Spenser was particularly offended by the anti-Elizabethan
propaganda that some Catholics circulated. Like most Protestants near the time of
the Reformation, Spenser saw a Catholic Church full of corruption, and he
determined that it was not only the wrong religion but the anti-religion. This
sentiment is an important backdrop for the battles of The Faerie Queene, which often represent the "battles"
between London and Rome.
Book I, Cantos i
& ii
Book I tells the story of the knight
of Holiness, the Redcrosse Knight. This hero gets his name from the blood-red
cross emblazoned on his shield. He has been given a task by Gloriana,
"that greatest Glorious Queen of Faerie lond," to fight a terrible dragon
(I.i.3). He is traveling with a beautiful, innocent young lady and a dwarf as
servant. Just as we join the three travelers, a storm breaks upon them and they
rush to find cover in a nearby forest. When the skies clear, they find that
they are lost, and they end up near a cave, which the lady recognizes as the
den of Error. Ignoring her warnings, Redcrosse enters and is attacked by the
terrible beast, Error, and her young. She wraps him up in her tail, but he
eventually manages to strangle her and chops off her head. Error's young then
drink her blood until they burst and die. Victorious, the knight and his
companions set out again, looking for the right path. As night falls, they meet
an old hermit who offers them lodging in his inn. As the travelers sleep, the
hermit assumes his real identity--he is Archimago, the black sorcerer, and he
conjures up two spirits to trouble Redcrosse.
One of the sprites obtains a false
dream from Morpheus, the god of sleep; the other takes the shape of Una, the
lady accompanying Redcrosse. These sprites go to the knight; one gives him the
dream of love and lust. When Redcrosse wakes up in a passion, the other sprite
(appearing to be Una) is lying beside him, offering a kiss. The knight,
however, resists her temptations and returns to sleep. Archimago then tries a
new deception; he puts the sprite disguised as Una in a bed and turns the other
sprite into a young man, who lies with the false Una. Archimago then wakes
Redcrosse and shows him the two lovers in bed. Redcrosse is furious that
"Una" would spoil her virtue with another man, and so in the morning
he leaves without her. When the real Una wakes, she sees her knight is gone,
and in sorrow rides off to look for him. Archimago, enjoying the fruits of his
scheme, now disguises himself as Redcrosse and follows after Una.
As Redcrosse wanders on, he
approaches another knight--Sansfoy, who is traveling with his lady. He charges
Redcrosse, and they fight fiercely, but the shield with the blood-red cross
protects our hero; eventually, he kills Sansfoy. He takes the woman into his
care--she calls herself Fidessa, saying that she is the daughter of the Emperor
of the West. Redcrosse swears to protect her, attracted to her beauty. They
continue together, but soon the sun becomes so hot that they must rest under
the shade of some trees. Redcrosse breaks a branch off of one tree and is
shocked when blood drips forth from it, and a voice cries out in pain. The tree
speaks and tells its story. It was once a man, named Fradubio, who had a
beautiful lady named Fraelissa--now the tree next to him. One day, Fradubio
happened to defeat a knight and win his lady (just as Redcrosse did)--and that
lady turned out to be Duessa, an evil witch. Duessa turned Fraelissa into a
tree, so that she could have Fradubio for herself. But Fradubio saw the witch
in her true, ugly form while she was bathing, and when he tried to run away,
she turned him into a tree, as well. When Fradubio finishes his story, Fidessa
faints--because she is, in fact, Duessa, and she fears that she will be found
out. She recovers though, and Redcrosse does not make the connection, so they
continue on their way.
Commentary
Redcrosse is the hero of Book I, and
in the beginning of Canto i, he is called the knight of Holinesse. He will go
through great trials and fight fierce monsters throughout the Book, and this in
itself is entertaining, as a story of a heroic "knight errant."
However, the more important purpose of the Faerie Queene is its
allegory, the meaning behind its characters and events. The story's setting, a
fanciful "faerie land," only emphasizes how its allegory is meant for
a land very close to home: Spenser's England. The title character, the Faerie
Queene herself, is meant to represent Queen Elizabeth. Redcrosse represents the
individual Christian, on the search for Holiness, who is armed with faith in
Christ, the shield with the bloody cross. He is traveling with Una, whose name
means "truth." For a Christian to be holy, he must have true faith,
and so the plot of Book I mostly concerns the attempts of evildoers to separate
Redcrosse from Una. Most of these villains are meant by Spenser to represent
one thing in common: the Roman Catholic Church. The poet felt that, in the
English Reformation, the people had defeated "false religion"
(Catholicism) and embraced "true religion"
(Protestantism/Anglicanism). Thus, Redcrosse must defeat villains who mimic the
falsehood of the Roman Church.
The first of these is Error. When
Redcrosse chokes the beast, Spenser writes, "Her vomit full of bookes and
papers was (I.i.20)." These papers represent Roman Catholic propaganda
that was put out in Spenser's time, against Queen Elizabeth and Anglicanism.
The Christian (Redcrosse) may be able to defeat these obvious and disgusting errors,
but before he is united to the truth he is still lost and can be easily
deceived. This deceit is arranged by Archimago, whose name means
"arch-image"--the Protestants accused the Catholics of idolatry
because of their extensive use of images. The sorcerer is able, through
deception and lust, to separate Redcrosse from Una--that is, to separate
Holiness from Truth. Once separated, Holiness is susceptible to the opposite of
truth, or falsehood. Redcrosse may able to defeat the strength of Sansfoy
(literally "without faith" or "faithlessness") through his
own native virtue, but he falls prey to the wiles of Falsehood herself--Duessa.
Duessa also represents the Roman Church, both because she is "false
faith," and because of her rich, purple and gold clothing, which, for
Spenser, displays the greedy wealth and arrogant pomp of Rome. Much of the poet's imagery comes
from a passage in the Book of Revelation, which describes the "whore of Babylon"--many Protestant readers took
this Biblical passage to indicate the Catholic Church.
The Faerie Queene, however, also has many sources
outside of the Bible. Spenser considers himself an epic poet in the classical
tradition and so he borrows heavily from the great epics of antiquity: Homer's Iliad
and Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid. This is most evident at the opening of Book I, in which Spenser
calls on one of the Muses to guide his poetry--Homer and Virgil established
this form as the "proper" opening to an epic poem. The scene with the
"human tree," in which a broken branch drips blood, likewise recalls
a similar episode in the Aeneid. However, while these ancient poets
mainly wrote to tell a story, we have already seen that Spenser has another
purpose in mind. In the letter that introduces the Faerie Queene, he says that he followed Homer and
Virgil and the Italian poets Ariosto and Tasso because they all have
"ensampled a good governour and a vertuous man." Spenser intends to
expand on this example by defining the characteristics of a good, virtuous, Christian
man.
Major Themes
Instruction in Virtue
Spenser intended The Faerie Queene
to be read primarily by young men desiring to learn better what virtues to
cultivate in their lives. As such, the epic makes clear who the heroes and
villains are, whom they represent, and what good behavior looks like. The most
basic reading of The Faerie Queene is an education in proper living for
16th Century England.
The Faerie Queene makes it clear that no single virtue is greater
than the rest. While some are superior to others, they require one another to
strengthen the integrity of the whole person. For example, Redcrosse’s Holiness
requires rescuing by Britomart’s Chastity, while Britomart’s Chastity seeks
Justice to complete it in the social realm.
Spenser chose to set his epic in a romanticized
medieval fantasy world full of knights, monsters, and damsels in distress. He
uses this environment to give power to his allegorical statements, but at the
same time, he includes an undercurrent of criticism for feudal Britain (and the class system his own age had inherited
from it). Along with virtuous knights, Spenser includes noble savages (the
Savage Man), honorable squires (Tristram), and even battle-hardened women
(Britomart and Radigund). The knights, who are supposed to be the ideal of
virtue, are often the most wrong-headed characters in the epic.
While ostensibly constructing an epic
devoted to theological virtues of the Christian faith, Spenser cannot resist
including his beloved classical mythology and legends in the work. Alongside
the Redcrosse knight stands the half-satyr Satyrane; Calidone, the knight of
Courtesy, spends time with rustic shepherds and a magical storyteller; and the
virtuous Queen of England herself is depicted as Gloriana,
Queen of the Faerie. To Spenser, there was no contradiction between classical
aesthetic values and Protestant Christianity.
Although The Faerie Queene can
be read as a simple allegory of virtue, there are too many overt criticisms of
the Catholic Church to keep the work theologically neutral. The monster Errour
vomits Catholic tracts upon Redcrosse in Book 1, and Grantorto stands in for
Catholicism as a whole in Book 6. Throughout the epic, Godliness is equated
with Protestant theology, while falsehood and the destruction of lives are
attributed to Catholic sources.
Chastity
Spenser makes much of female Chastity
in The Faerie Queene, and not just in the book devoted to that virtue
(Book 3). Britomart is the ideal of chastity, yet she does not seek to remain a
maiden; her quest is to find the man she has fallen in love with and marry him.
Belphoebe, the virgin huntress, eventually develops a relationship with
Arthur’s squire Timias. Arthur himself looks forward to the day when he will
woo and win the Faerie Queene herself. Each of these strong female figures
points to the real-life Queen Elizabeth, whose continued celibacy caused great
concern among many of her subjects (who feared she would leave no heir to
continue her glorious reign). In some ways, the entire epic is not just
dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I, but it also aims to change her mind and push
her into accepting a suitor.
The Pervasive Effects of Slander
Through the Blatant Beast in Books 5
and 6, Spenser expounds the effects slander can have upon its victims. The
Blatant Beast bites its prey, leaving them poisoned and dying. Only
self-control, good living, and forthrightness of speech can cure them of their
ills. Spenser uses the poisoning of Serena to show how a woman’s virtue can
suffer even when she has done no wrong; he uses the poisoning of Timias
following Belphoebe’s misperception of his intentions toward Amoretta to show a
similar evil worked upon an upright man. Spenser had real-world counterparts in
mind for these episodes: well-known political figures had been the victims of
slander and could not escape its detrimental effects even after the allegations
were disproved. The Blatant Beast is the one creature left alive by the
questing knight: apparently, Slander is subject to repression (the Beast’s jaws
can be bound for a while) but not complete elimination (the Beast still lives).
Spenserian Stanzas
The Spenserian stanza is a fixed
verse form that Edmund Spenser created specifically for The Faerie Queene.
A Spenserian stanza is nine lines long with a number of special restrictions.
First, the stanza must have a rhyme scheme of "ababbcbcc." Second,
the first eight lines of each stanza are in iambic pentameter, so that the
rhythm of the syllables follows a pattern of unstressed-stressed five times.
For example, in quote 1 from the “Quotes” section, “His Lady sad to see his sore
con-straint” has this pattern, with the stressed syllables bolded.
However, the ninth and last line of
each stanza is an alexandrine, which is a line of twelve syllables that often
has a caesura or audible pause between the sixth and seventh syllables, in
iambic hexameter, which has the pattern of unstressed-stressed six rather than
five times. Thus, there are six iambs of
unstressed-stressed, where the stressed syllables are bolded, and the caesura
occurs at the comma that divides “for virtue is the band” and “that bindeth
harts most sure.”
Within each Book of The Faerie Queene, each stanza is its own
mini-narrative, containing a single, complete idea or description, and several
stanzas are linked together by their common subject matter in order to form the longer
narrative of a canto. Finally, the cantos link together to form Books, and the
six Books form the overall story of The Faerie Queene.
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