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Edmund Spenser C1173




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

Interdependence of the Virtues

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

Chivalric Society and Social Classes

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. 

Christian Humanism

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.

Protestantism versus Catholicism

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.

Acknowledgement© Gradesaver

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