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The Faerie Queene
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Overview
- Author
- Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–1599), poet, Cambridge graduate and English official in Ireland, author of The Shepheardes Calender (1579)
- Published
- Books I–III in 1590 (London: William Ponsonby), with the Letter to Raleigh; Books I–VI in 1596, with a revised ending to Book III; the Mutabilitie Cantos first printed in the folio of 1609
- Plan
- Twelve books, each with a knight who embodies one of twelve private moral virtues; six books and a fragment of a seventh were completed
- Form
- The Spenserian stanza: nine lines rhyming ababbcbcc, eight iambic pentameters closed by an alexandrine of six feet; nearly 3,850 stanzas, about 35,000 lines
- Genre
- Romance epic and allegory, modelled on Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata and Virgil, with Arthurian matter from Malory and Geoffrey of Monmouth
- Language
- Deliberately archaic English, full of Chaucerian words and forms (eke, whilome, ycladd); the edition quoted here keeps the original spelling, with u for v and i for j
- Dedicatee
- Elizabeth I, who appears in the poem as Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, and as Belphoebe, and is figured again in Britomart's line, Mercilla and others
- Hero
- Prince Arthur, in love with Gloriana after seeing her in a dream, who appears in every book to rescue its knight
- Setting
- Faerie land, a world of forests, castles and enchanted gardens; the late books and the Mutabilitie Cantos draw increasingly on Spenser's Ireland
- Quoted text
- Books I–VI and the two and a half Mutabilitie Cantos, cited by book, canto and stanza (FQ 1.1.1); the Letter to Raleigh and the dedicatory sonnets are not included in this edition
Context
Edmund Spenser was born in London around 1552 and educated at the Merchant Taylors' School and at Pembroke College, Cambridge. His first major work, The Shepheardes Calender (1579), announced a new English poet who would follow Virgil's career from pastoral to epic. In 1580 he went to Ireland as secretary to Arthur, Lord Grey de Wilton, the new Lord Deputy, and he spent most of the rest of his life there as an official and a settler, eventually holding the estate of Kilcolman in County Cork. In 1589 Sir Walter Raleigh brought him to London, where he presented the first three books to Elizabeth I; they were printed in 1590, and the queen granted him a pension. Books IV–VI followed in 1596, in a volume that reprinted Books I–III with revisions, including a new ending to Book III. Kilcolman was sacked in the rebellion of 1598, and Spenser died in Westminster in January 1599. He was buried in Westminster Abbey near Chaucer (Hadfield 2012) (McCabe 2010).
The 1590 volume ended with a letter to Raleigh, dated 23 January 1589 (1590 in modern reckoning), in which Spenser explained his 'continued Allegory, or darke conceit'. The general end of the poem was 'to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline'. Arthur, before he was king, was to embody magnificence, the virtue that contains all the others, and twelve knights the twelve private moral virtues that Spenser attributed to Aristotle; if the work were well received, a further poem might treat the public or political virtues. The Faerie Queene herself stood for glory in general and for Elizabeth in particular. The occasion of the twelve quests was to be an annual feast of twelve days at her court, described only in a projected final book. The Letter does not always agree with the poem, and readers have argued about how much weight it should bear (Hamilton 2001).
Spenser's models were the Italian romance epics, above all Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1532), with its interlaced plots and wandering knights, and Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), with its more serious Christian purpose; behind them stood Virgil's Aeneid, which the opening stanza imitates. From English tradition he took Chaucer, whom he calls his master, Malory's Arthur, and the Tudor myth that the queen's Welsh ancestors descended from the British kings and through them from Troy. The poem also draws on the Bible (especially the Book of Revelation), on classical mythology, on emblem books and pageants, and on the Protestant polemic of Spenser's own lifetime (King 1990) (Nohrnberg 1976).
The whole poem is written in the stanza Spenser invented for it: nine lines rhyming ababbcbcc, the first eight in iambic pentameter and the last an alexandrine of twelve syllables. The interlocking rhymes slow the narrative and invite the reader to dwell, and the longer final line often sums up, turns or deflates what precedes it. The language is a deliberate archaism. Spenser revives Chaucerian words (eke, whilome, ycladd), coins new ones, and spells in ways that were old-fashioned even in the 1590s; Ben Jonson remarked in his Timber, or Discoveries that Spenser, in affecting the ancients, 'writ no language'. The effect is of a poem set at a distance from the present, in an antique world that is nevertheless always about England (Alpers 1967) (Hamilton 1990).
The allegory works at several levels. Morally, the knights represent virtues in the making, who fail and learn, and the monsters they meet are vices and errors. Historically and politically, the poem is full of reference to Elizabeth's England: Gloriana, Belphoebe and Mercilla figure the queen; Duessa at times represents the Roman Church and in Book V Mary Queen of Scots, whose trial in 1586 and execution in 1587 Spenser retells; Artegall's campaign to free Irena (Ireland) recalls Lord Grey's government. The political allegory was noticed at once: in 1596 James VI of Scotland, Mary's son, complained about Book V. Modern criticism has turned from decoding these references to asking how the poem's praise of the queen, its violence and its uncertainties relate to one another (Montrose 2006) (Hadfield 1997).
Plot overview
Each of the six books follows a knight sent from the court of Gloriana on a quest. In Book I the Redcrosse Knight, the knight of Holiness, escorts Una to free her parents from a dragon; he is separated from her by the enchanter Archimago, deceived by the witch Duessa, imprisoned by the giant Orgoglio, rescued by Prince Arthur, tempted to suicide by Despair, and restored in the House of Holiness before he kills the dragon and is betrothed to Una. In Book II Sir Guyon, the knight of Temperance, guided by a Palmer, resists the Cave of Mammon and other trials and destroys the Bower of Bliss of the enchantress Acrasia.
Books III and IV abandon the single quest for interlaced stories of love. Britomart, a woman knight who has seen her destined husband Artegall in a magic mirror, rides in search of him; around her move Florimell, endlessly pursued, and her snowy double; Belphoebe and Arthur's squire Timias; the twins Belphoebe and Amoret, born of Chrysogone and raised apart, Amoret in the Garden of Adonis; and Amoret's lover Scudamour, whom Britomart helps by freeing Amoret from the enchanter Busirane. Book IV, the legend of Friendship, reconciles the champions Cambell and Triamond, unites Britomart and Artegall, and ends with the marriage of the rivers Thames and Medway and the release of Florimell to her lover Marinell.
In Book V Artegall, the knight of Justice, with his iron servant Talus, judges a series of disputes, is enslaved by the Amazon queen Radigund and freed by Britomart, sees the trial of Duessa at the court of Queen Mercilla, and finally liberates Irena from the tyrant Grantorto before he is recalled. In Book VI Sir Calidore, the knight of Courtesy, pursues the Blatant Beast of slander, abandons the quest for a time among shepherds, where he loves Pastorella and sees the Graces dancing to the pipe of Colin Clout, and at last captures the Beast, which breaks loose again.
The Mutabilitie Cantos, printed after Spenser's death as part of a lost legend of Constancy, tell how the Titaness Mutabilitie challenges the rule of Jove and pleads her case before Nature on Arlo Hill in Ireland. She parades the seasons, months, hours, and Life and Death as proof that all things change; Nature replies that things change only to fulfil themselves, and that a time will come when change shall cease. The poem ends with the poet's prayer for that rest.
Part by part
Part 1: The Knight, the Lady and the Enchanter
Book I, Cantos 1–3
Summary
The Proem to the whole poem presents Spenser as the poet of pastoral now turning to epic, and invokes the Muse, Cupid and the queen. Canto 1 opens with a 'Gentle Knight' in battered armour with a red cross on his shield, riding beside a lady veiled in black on a white ass and leading a lamb, with a dwarf behind. A storm drives them into the Wandering Wood, where the knight strangles Errour, a monster half serpent and half woman, who vomits books and papers. They take shelter with an old hermit, who is really the enchanter Archimago; he sends the knight a lustful dream and then shows him a false Una in bed with a squire.
In Canto 2 the knight flees at dawn, abandoning Una. Archimago disguises himself as the Redcrosse Knight to deceive her. The real knight kills the Saracen Sansfoy and takes up with his companion, a lady in scarlet who calls herself Fidessa but is the witch Duessa. A tree that bleeds when he plucks a branch is Fradubio, a man transformed by Duessa, but the knight does not understand the warning. In Canto 3 Una, searching alone, is protected by a lion; she spends a night in the hut of the blind Corceca and her daughter Abessa, where the church-robber Kirkrapine is killed; she rejoins the false Redcrosse, and when Sansloy attacks and unmasks Archimago, the lion is killed and Una carried off.
Analysis
The opening establishes the double logic of the allegory. The knight is at once Everyman setting out on the Christian life, the virtue of Holiness, and, as we later learn, Saint George, patron of England. Una is truth, single and undivided, as her name says, and also the true Church; Duessa, double by name, is falsehood and the false Church, dressed in the scarlet of the Whore of Babylon in Revelation. The knight's armour is the armour of God from Ephesians 6, which he wears before he has earned it (King 1990).
Errour is the first and easiest monster because she can be seen and strangled; the harder enemy is the hypocrisy of Archimago, who works through images and dreams. The knight's fault is not wickedness but a failure to read: he believes appearances and leaves truth for a likeness of it. The cantos are thus a lesson in interpretation, aimed as much at the reader as at the hero, and the separation of the knight from Una determines the whole book.
Halfe like a serpent horribly displaide, But th’other halfe did womans shape retaine, Most lothsom, filthie, foule, and full of vile disdaine.
Errour is half serpent and half woman, like the figure of sin in many medieval and Renaissance images; her vomit of books and papers is often read as Catholic polemic.
Still flying from his thoughts and gealous feare; Will was his guide, and griefe led him astray.
Once he has left Una, the knight is ruled by will and grief. The personifications are compressed into a single line of moral diagnosis.
Part 2: The House of Pride and the Wild Wood
Book I, Cantos 4–6
Summary
In Canto 4 Duessa brings the knight to the House of Pride, a splendid palace built on a hill of sand. Its queen, Lucifera, rides out in a coach drawn by six beasts, each ridden by one of the deadly sins (Idleness, Gluttony, Lechery, Avarice, Envy and Wrath), with Satan as coachman. Sansjoy, brother of Sansfoy, arrives to claim his brother's shield and challenges the knight. In Canto 5 the knight wins, but Duessa saves Sansjoy in a dark cloud and travels with Night to the underworld so that Aesculapius may heal him. The dwarf discovers the dungeons beneath the palace, full of the proud of all ages, and the knight escapes.
Canto 6 returns to Una. Sansloy tries to rape her, but she is rescued by a band of satyrs, who worship her, and when she teaches them they try to worship her ass instead. The knight Satyrane, son of a satyr and a woman, befriends her and helps her escape. Archimago, disguised as a pilgrim, tells them that the Redcrosse Knight is dead, and Satyrane fights Sansloy while Una flees.
Analysis
The House of Pride is the first of the poem's great allegorical houses. Its splendour is a facade: the walls are of brick laid without mortar, and the foundation is sand, recalling the house built on sand in the Gospels. The pageant of the sins is drawn from medieval tradition, but each sin is described as a creature of body and habit, and the procession is both moral and social satire on the court (Lewis 1936).
The canto of the satyrs shows Una among creatures of untutored nature. They can recognise goodness and honour it, but they cannot understand it, and their worship slides into idolatry. Read in Protestant terms, the episode shows the danger of worship directed to images and outward signs rather than to truth itself, and it shows truth's patience with those who cannot yet receive her (King 1990).
A stately Pallace built of squared bricke, Which cunningly was without morter laid, Whose wals were high, but nothing strong, nor thick,
The House of Pride looks magnificent but has no binding mortar, a precise image of display without substance.
And with greene braunches strowing all the ground, Do worship her, as Queene, with oliue girlond cround.
The satyrs crown Una with olive, the tree of peace, and treat her as a queen; the scene recalls Christ's entry into Jerusalem.
Part 3: Orgoglio, Arthur and Despair
Book I, Cantos 7–9
Summary
In Canto 7 the knight, resting with Duessa, takes off his armour and drinks from an enfeebling fountain; the giant Orgoglio overcomes him and throws him into a dungeon, and Duessa becomes Orgoglio's mistress, mounted on a seven-headed beast. The dwarf brings the news to Una, who meets Prince Arthur in dazzling armour. In Canto 8 Arthur kills Orgoglio, who collapses like an emptied bladder, wounds the beast and frees the knight, wasted almost to death. Duessa is stripped and revealed as a hideous old hag.
In Canto 9 Arthur tells how he was raised by Merlin without knowing his parentage, and how he fell in love with the Faerie Queene, who visited him in a dream; he has sought her ever since. The knights exchange gifts and part. Redcrosse and Una then meet Sir Trevisan, fleeing in terror from Despair, and Redcrosse insists on seeing him. In Despair's cave the old man argues so persuasively that death is better than a life of sin that the knight raises a dagger against himself; Una snatches it from his hand and reminds him of grace.
Analysis
Orgoglio, whose name is Italian for pride, is the fleshly and spiritual pride into which the knight falls once he lays aside his armour. In the historical allegory the giant and Duessa's beast, taken from Revelation 17, suggest the power of Rome over England in the reign of Mary Tudor. Arthur, who appears in each book at its moment of crisis, here acts as the grace of God that rescues the helpless; his shield, made of a single diamond, blinds or overthrows whatever looks on it.
The Cave of Despair is one of the poem's most admired passages. Despair's arguments are made of scripture used without mercy: the wages of sin are death, God's justice demands punishment, and every day lived adds to the debt. The verse becomes seductive, especially in the famous alexandrine about sleep after toil, and the reader is drawn in as the knight is. Una's reply is short and theological: the knight forgets that 'in heauenly mercies' he too has a part, and only grace can break the logic of the law (King 1990) (Alpers 1967).
His glitterand armour shined farre away, Like glauncing light of Phœbus brightest ray;
The first sight of Arthur. His armour shines like the sun, an image of divine grace and of the magnificence the Letter attributes to him.
As she to me deliuered all that night; And at her parting said, She Queene of Faeries hight.
Arthur's dream of Gloriana. He has seen glory only once, in a vision he cannot be sure was real, and his quest is a search for what he loves but does not possess.
And to him said, Fie, fie, faint harted knight, What meanest thou by this reprochfull strife?
Una's rescue of the knight from suicide; her rebuke breaks the spell of Despair's eloquence.
Part 4: The House of Holiness and the Dragon
Book I, Cantos 10–12
Summary
In Canto 10 Una brings the knight to the House of Holiness, ruled by Dame Caelia and her daughters Fidelia (faith), Speranza (hope) and Charissa (charity). He is taught, purged by Penance, Remorse and Repentance, and shown works of mercy by seven Beadmen. On a high mountain the old hermit Contemplation shows him the New Jerusalem, tells him that he will be Saint George, patron of England, and reveals that he was a changeling of Saxon blood, raised by a ploughman. In Canto 11 he fights the dragon that besieges Una's parents for three days. He falls twice, and is restored first by the Well of Life and then by the balm of the Tree of Life; on the third day he kills it.
In Canto 12 the people of the liberated kingdom celebrate. The king offers Una in marriage, and she appears unveiled for the first time. A messenger brings a letter from Duessa claiming that the knight is betrothed to her; the messenger is Archimago, who is unmasked and imprisoned. The knight and Una are betrothed, but he must first return to serve the Faerie Queene for six years, and the book ends with Una left to mourn.
Analysis
The House of Holiness corresponds to the House of Pride, and the knight's education there reverses his earlier errors. The process is painful, with Penance whipping him and Remorse pricking his heart, and has a strongly Protestant structure in which faith comes first; yet its rituals and its hermit also recall older devotional traditions, a mixture that has made the canto central to arguments about Spenser's religion (King 1990). From Contemplation's mountain, compared to Sinai and to the Mount of Olives, the knight sees that the city of God outshines even Cleopolis, the city of the Faerie Queene.
The three-day fight echoes the harrowing of hell and the three days between Christ's death and resurrection, and the dragon's defeat restores Eden, since Una's parents are Adam and Eve and their kingdom is the whole of fallen humanity. Yet the book does not end in completion. The marriage is postponed, the deceiver is imprisoned but not destroyed, and the knight must return to the world of quests; holiness in this life remains a betrothal, not a union.
And Patrone: thou Saint George shalt called bee, Saint George of mery England, the signe of victoree.
Contemplation names the knight's destiny, joining the moral allegory of Holiness to England's national saint.
Vnto his Faerie Queene backe to returne: The which he shortly did, and Vna left to mourne.
The book closes not on joy but on separation; the knight's duty to Gloriana defers his union with truth.
Part 5: The Bloody Babe and the Mean
Book II, Cantos 1–3
Summary
Book II begins with Archimago, escaped from prison, trying to set Sir Guyon, the knight of Temperance, against the Redcrosse Knight; Guyon recognises the cross in time and the knights part as friends. Guyon and his guide the Palmer then find Amavia, dying by her own hand beside the body of her husband Mortdant, who was poisoned by the enchantress Acrasia; her baby plays in her blood. Guyon buries them and vows revenge. In Canto 2 the baby's bloody hands cannot be washed clean in a nearby fountain. Guyon comes to the castle of Medina, who lives between her two sisters, the sullen Elissa and the riotous Perissa, and their lovers Huddibras and Sansloy.
At Medina's table Guyon explains his quest, given at the Faerie Queene's annual feast. In Canto 3 the braggart Braggadocchio steals Guyon's horse and finds a servant, Trompart. The two meet the huntress Belphoebe, described at great length in the poem's most elaborate portrait of beauty; when Braggadocchio tries to embrace her she threatens him with her spear and leaves.
Analysis
Temperance, in the tradition of Aristotle's Ethics, is a mean between two extremes, and Medina's castle presents the idea almost diagrammatically: the moderate sister stands between excess and defect. But the book also draws on the Christian idea of temperance as restraint of the passions after the Fall. The bloody hands of the baby, called Ruddymane, figure the stain of original sin, which no ordinary washing can remove (Berger 1988).
Guyon differs from Redcrosse. He travels on foot after losing his horse, with a Palmer who represents reason or prudence, and he rarely receives the help of grace; his book is about the natural virtue that human beings can achieve. Belphoebe, the virgin huntress, is one of the poem's figures of Elizabeth, and her appearance among comic figures like Braggadocchio shows that the poem's praise of the queen is often surrounded by satire on her courtiers (Montrose 2006).
When raging passion with fierce tyrannie Robs reason of her due regalitie, And makes it seruant to her basest part:
Guyon's lament over Amavia states the theme of the book: passion usurps the kingship that belongs to reason.
Her face so faire as flesh it seemed not, But heauenly pourtraict of bright Angels hew,
The portrait of Belphoebe begins by doubting that she is flesh at all; the catalogue of her beauties draws on the Song of Songs and Petrarchan convention.
Part 6: Furor, Phaedria and the Idle Lake
Book II, Cantos 4–6
Summary
In Canto 4 Guyon finds a madman, Furor, dragging a young squire by the hair, urged on by his mother Occasion, a hag who is bald behind. Guyon binds them both after the Palmer tells him that Occasion must be seized first. The squire, Phedon, tells how jealousy, encouraged by a false friend, led him to murder his beloved. Atin, servant of the passionate Pyrochles, arrives to provoke a fight. In Canto 5 Guyon defeats Pyrochles but spares him; Pyrochles insists on releasing Furor, who turns on him. Atin hurries to Pyrochles' brother Cymochles, who lies among wanton women in Acrasia's bower.
In Canto 6 Cymochles is carried across the Idle Lake in the little boat of Phaedria, a laughing girl who sings of the flowers that neither toil nor spin. Guyon, separated from the Palmer, is ferried to her island too, and fights Cymochles until Phaedria parts them. Pyrochles, burning with an inner fire, throws himself into the lake and is saved by Archimago.
Analysis
The brothers Pyrochles ('fire-troubled') and Cymochles ('wave-troubled') represent the two kinds of passion of medieval psychology, the irascible and the concupiscible, wrath and desire. Guyon's struggles with them show that temperance is not simply the absence of feeling but the government of feeling, and the comic speed with which Pyrochles undoes his own rescue makes the point that passion cannot govern itself.
Phaedria's song is a witty misuse of Christ's words about the lilies of the field, turned into an invitation to idleness. Like Despair in Book I, she uses scripture against its sense. Her island anticipates the Bower of Bliss, but in a lighter key: here temptation takes the form of frivolity, and Guyon's danger is wasted time rather than enchantment.
Grew all afore, and loosely hong vnrold, But all behind was bald, and worne away, That none thereof could euer taken hold,
Occasion has hair only at the front: an emblem that must be seized as it approaches, because once it has passed nothing can be grasped.
Behold, O man, that toilesome paines doest take, The flowres, the fields, and all that pleasant growes,
Phaedria's song turns the lilies of the Sermon on the Mount into an argument for idleness.
Part 7: The Cave of Mammon and the House of Alma
Book II, Cantos 7–9
Summary
In Canto 7 Guyon, alone, finds Mammon, a smoke-blackened figure counting gold in a gloomy glade. Mammon leads him underground to the House of Riches, past Care and Sorrow and the gates of hell, through vaults of treasure and forges, to the throne of his daughter Philotime (love of honour), and into the Garden of Proserpina, where Tantalus and Pilate suffer. Guyon refuses every offer and is led back after three days, but on reaching the open air he faints. In Canto 8 an angel guards him while the Palmer returns. Pyrochles and Cymochles arrive to strip the body, but Prince Arthur fights and kills them both.
In Canto 9 Arthur and Guyon come to the castle of Alma, besieged by a ragged army. Alma shows them her house, which is the human body: its walls, gate and porch, the kitchen of the stomach with its cook Concoction, the parlour of the heart, and the turret of the head, where three sages live. The first, Phantastes, represents imagination; the second, judgment; the third, the old man Eumnestes, memory, sits among books and records.
Analysis
The Cave of Mammon is a descent into the underworld on the model of Aeneas in Book 6 of the Aeneid, but its temptations are those of wealth and worldly ambition. Guyon's refusals have puzzled readers: some find in him the strength of reason, others a rather unattractive coldness, and his faint suggests that natural virtue cannot sustain itself without help. The angel at the opening of Canto 8 brings into Book II the grace that dominated Book I (Alpers 1967) (Berger 1988).
The House of Alma is the body as a temperate building, ordered by the soul. Its famous stanza of geometry, the circle and the triangle joined by a square, unites the mortal and the immortal, and has generated a long tradition of numerological commentary. Alma's house is the model of which the Bower of Bliss will be a perversion: a place where the senses serve the mind, rather than the mind the senses.
And is there care in heauen? and is there loue In heauenly spirits to these creatures bace, That may compassion of their euils moue?
The narrator's question introduces the guardian angel; the answer that follows is one of the poem's clearest statements of providence.
The frame thereof seemd partly circulare, And part triangulare, O worke diuine;
The geometry of Alma's castle, the circle of the soul and the triangle of the body, has been interpreted in many ways since the seventeenth century.
Part 8: Chronicles, Maleger and the Bower of Bliss
Book II, Cantos 10–12
Summary
In Canto 10 Arthur and Guyon read two books in the chamber of memory. Arthur's, Briton moniments, is a chronicle of the British kings from Brutus to Uther, which breaks off just before his own birth; Guyon's, the Antiquitie of Faerie lond, traces the elves to Gloriana. In Canto 11 Arthur defends Alma's castle against its besiegers and their captain Maleger, a cadaverous figure riding a tiger, attended by the hags Impotence and Impatience. Maleger revives each time he touches the earth, and Arthur kills him only by crushing him in the air and throwing him into a lake.
In Canto 12 Guyon and the Palmer sail to Acrasia's island past the Gulf of Greediness, the Rock of Reproach, the Wandering Islands, quicksands, whirlpools, sea monsters and singing mermaids. At the Bower of Bliss they pass the porter Genius and the lady Excess with her cup, a fountain where two naked girls bathe, and a song urging the hearer to gather the rose. They find Acrasia with the young knight Verdant asleep in her lap, his armour hung on a tree. They throw a net over the pair, bind Acrasia, and Guyon destroys the Bower. The beasts around it, transformed lovers, are restored to human form, but one, Grill, prefers to remain a hog.
Analysis
The chronicles give the poem its historical spine. Arthur's book, ending at the moment of his own story, shows that the poem's present lies within British history, and the line that leads to the Tudors is the subject of Merlin's prophecy in Book III. Maleger, whose name means 'badly sick', represents the diseases and disorders that assail the body, perhaps original sin itself; he can be defeated by Arthur, but not by Guyon.
The Bower of Bliss is the climax of Book II and one of the most discussed episodes in English poetry. Its art imitates nature so well that it rivals it, and Spenser's verse gives it a sensuous beauty that the reader is invited to feel. Guyon's destruction of it, with 'rigour pittilesse', is thus disturbing as well as just. C. S. Lewis contrasted the artificial, sterile Bower with the fertile Garden of Adonis in Book III; Stephen Greenblatt read the violence as the means by which Elizabethan identity defined itself against what it destroyed, in Ireland and the New World as in the Bower (Lewis 1936) (Greenblatt 1980).
Whereas the Bowre of Blisse was situate; A place pickt out by choice of best aliue, That natures worke by art can imitate:
From its first description the Bower is a place where art imitates nature, which is the root of its danger.
But all those pleasant bowres and Pallace braue, Guyon broke downe, with rigour pittilesse;
The destruction of the Bower. The word 'pittilesse' has been read both as praise of resolution and as a hint of the poem's unease.
Let Grill be Grill, and haue his hoggish mind,
The Palmer's verdict on the man who wants to remain a pig closes the book on a note of comic resignation.
Part 9: Britomart, Castle Joyous and Merlin
Book III, Cantos 1–3
Summary
The Proem explains that Chastity needs no foreign examples, since the queen embodies it, and offers her two mirrors of herself, Gloriana and Belphoebe. In Canto 1 an unknown knight unhorses Guyon with an enchanted spear; it is Britomart, a woman in armour. A beautiful lady, Florimell, flashes past pursued by a forester, and Arthur and Guyon ride after her. Britomart comes to Castle Joyous, where the lady Malecasta tries to seduce her, believing her a man; in the struggle that follows Britomart is lightly wounded.
In Canto 2 Britomart tells the Redcrosse Knight that she seeks Artegall, pretending that he has wronged her. The narrative goes back to tell how, in her father's magic mirror made by Merlin, she saw the image of a knight and fell sick with love; her old nurse Glauce tried charms in vain. In Canto 3 the two visit Merlin in his cave, and he reveals that she will marry Artegall and found a line of kings that will lead, through the British and Welsh rulers, to a royal virgin who will bring peace. Britomart and Glauce disguise themselves as knight and squire and set out.
Analysis
Book III changes the poem's method. Its knight is a woman, its virtue is chastity understood not as virginity but as faithful love directed towards marriage, and its narrative is no longer a single quest but an interlaced pattern on the model of Ariosto. Thomas Roche argued that Books III and IV form a single study of love in its forms, and Britomart, who carries the poem's dynastic future, is its central figure (Roche 1964).
The episode at Castle Joyous shows desire without restraint, in which the knights of Malecasta serve looks and gazes rather than love; their names (Gardante, Parlante, Jocante and the rest) mark the stages of courtly seduction. The mirror and Merlin's prophecy show the other face of desire: Britomart's love, at first a sickness, is revealed as a providential destiny that will produce Elizabeth. The prophecy is careful, however, to break off when it reaches the queen, whose own lack of a successor it cannot mention.
It falls me here to write of Chastity, That fairest vertue, farre aboue the rest;
The Proem praises chastity as the highest virtue and identifies it with the virgin queen.
Then shall a royall virgin raine, which shall Stretch her white rod ouer the Belgicke shore,
Merlin's prophecy reaches Elizabeth and her intervention in the Netherlands. The prophecy then stops short.
Part 10: The Rich Strond and the Garden of Adonis
Book III, Cantos 4–6
Summary
In Canto 4 Britomart, sitting by the sea, laments her love in a song to the waves. She is challenged by Marinell, son of the sea nymph Cymoent, who has been warned to avoid women; she wounds him, and his mother carries him to the sea. Arthur pursues Florimell through the night, and laments his own hopeless love. In Canto 5 Arthur's squire Timias, wounded by three foresters, is found and healed by Belphoebe, and falls hopelessly in love with her.
Canto 6 tells the miraculous birth of Belphoebe and her twin Amoret: their mother Chrysogone conceived them from the rays of the sun. Venus, searching for her runaway son Cupid, finds Diana, and each goddess takes one of the twins: Diana raises Belphoebe as a virgin huntress, and Venus takes Amoret to the Garden of Adonis. The canto then describes the Garden, the seed-bed of all living things, where forms are clothed in flesh and sent out into the world, return after death, and are planted again. Time mows the flowers with his scythe, but at the Garden's heart Venus enjoys Adonis, who is 'eterne in mutabilitie'.
Analysis
The twins divide two ideals that Elizabeth was meant to combine, and the poem keeps them separate: Belphoebe is virginity, sought and admired from below, as her treatment of Timias shows; Amoret is the love that leads to marriage. Britomart, by the sea, is a third kind of figure, a woman in love who must act, and her lament, built on the Petrarchan image of the lover's ship tossed by storms, shows her suffering what the male lovers of romance usually suffer.
The Garden of Adonis is the philosophical centre of Book III. It joins Neoplatonic ideas about forms and matter, Lucretius' account of perpetual generation, and Christian ideas of the soul's return. Its central figure, Adonis, cannot die because he is the principle of change itself. Scholars have disagreed about how systematic Spenser's philosophy is here, but the garden remains a vision of nature that triumphs over time by renewal rather than by escape (Ellrodt 1960) (Lewis 1936).
Huge sea of sorrow, and tempestuous griefe, Wherein my feeble barke is tossed long,
Britomart's complaint uses the Petrarchan image of the lover as a ship in a storm.
Is wicked Time, who with his scyth addrest, Does mow the flowring herbes and goodly things,
Time is the one enemy of the Garden; the poem's concern with mutability begins here.
Part 11: Florimell and the Snowy Lady
Book III, Cantos 7–9
Summary
In Canto 7 Florimell flees into the hut of a witch, whose loutish son falls in love with her. She escapes, and the witch sends a monstrous beast after her; she reaches the sea and drifts away in a fisherman's boat, leaving her girdle behind. Satyrane binds the beast with the girdle, then meets the giantess Argante and the Squire of Dames, whose tale of searching for chaste women is a comic satire. In Canto 8 the witch makes a false Florimell out of snow, wax and a spirit, who is seized by Braggadocchio. The real Florimell, assaulted by the old fisherman, is rescued by the sea god Proteus, who imprisons her when she refuses him.
In Canto 9 Satyrane, Paridell and Britomart take shelter at the castle of the jealous old miser Malbecco and his young wife Hellenore. When Britomart removes her helmet, her hair falls and her sex is revealed. At dinner Paridell tells the story of Troy and his own descent from Paris, and Britomart tells how Troy's line led to Troynovant, London, while Paridell and Hellenore exchange secret signs.
Analysis
Florimell, whose name means 'honey-flower', is beauty that everyone pursues and no one can keep. Her fear is excessive, and she is in flight even when no one is chasing her. The snowy Florimell, so like her that no one can tell them apart, is beauty's counterfeit, made of cold materials and moved by an evil spirit; the doubling recalls Una and Duessa and introduces a long comedy of mistaken values that runs into Book V.
The episode at Malbecco's castle is a parody of the Trojan story. Paridell is a degenerate Paris, Hellenore a degraded Helen, and Malbecco a Menelaus whose jealousy brings about what he fears. The two histories told at table, Paridell's of a fallen Troy and Britomart's of a Troy renewed in Britain, show the same past read as decadence and as destiny.
So fled faire Florimell from her vaine feare, Long after she from perill was releast:
Florimell's fear continues after the danger has passed, a characteristic of the figure throughout the books of love.
Another Florimell, in shape and looke So liuely and so like, that many it mistooke.
The creation of the false Florimell, a counterfeit so perfect that it shames its original.
Part 12: Malbecco and the House of Busirane
Book III, Cantos 10–12
Summary
In Canto 10 Paridell elopes with Hellenore, who sets fire to the house; Malbecco, torn between his treasure and his wife, saves neither. He finds Hellenore living with the satyrs as their common mistress, but she refuses to return, and he loses his money. Maddened, he throws himself from a cliff but cannot die, and lives on in a cave as Jealousy itself, having forgotten that he was a man. In Canto 11 Britomart meets Scudamour, who laments that his beloved Amoret is held by the enchanter Busirane behind a wall of fire.
Britomart passes through the fire. Inside she sees tapestries of the loves of the gods, a golden idol of Cupid, and inscriptions saying 'Be bold' and 'Be not too bold'. In Canto 12 the Masque of Cupid passes before her: personifications of the experiences of love, and Amoret, her heart drawn out of her breast and carried in a basin. Britomart forces Busirane to reverse his spells and frees Amoret. In the 1590 edition the book ended with Amoret and Scudamour embracing like a hermaphrodite; in 1596, the text quoted here, Scudamour has already gone when they emerge.
Analysis
Malbecco's transformation is the poem's most extreme allegorical metamorphosis: a man so possessed by a passion that he becomes it. It shows how allegory can be a punishment, in which a person is reduced to a single abstraction. Busirane's house presents the opposite danger, love imagined as violence, whether in the gods' rapes woven in the tapestries or in the cruel conventions of Petrarchan poetry, in which the lady's heart is wounded and the lover's pain is displayed as art.
Busirane writes his spells in Amoret's blood, and critics have seen him as a figure of the male poet who makes women suffer in verse. That self-critical reading is strengthened by the change of 1596: by cancelling the hermaphrodite embrace in order to prolong the story into Book IV, Spenser deferred the union of the lovers indefinitely, and in fact never wrote it (Silberman 1995) (Teskey 1996).
Is woxen so deform’d, that he has quight Forgot he was a man, and Gealosie is hight.
Malbecco loses his name and becomes the passion that ruled him.
Ah who can loue the worker of her smart?
The narrator's question about Busirane and Amoret puts in a single line the impossibility of love compelled by force.
Part 13: Ate and the Friends
Book IV, Cantos 1–3
Summary
The Proem defends the poem against a powerful critic, usually identified with Lord Burghley, who disapproves of poetry that praises love. In Canto 1 Britomart travels with Amoret, who still believes her a man. They meet the false knights Blandamour and Paridell, with Duessa and Ate, the goddess of discord, who lives in a house hung with the relics of broken friendships and ruined cities. Ate persuades Scudamour that Amoret has been unfaithful. In Canto 2 the false knights quarrel over the snowy Florimell, and the narrator tells the story of Cambell and Triamond, completing a tale that Chaucer left unfinished in the Squire's Tale.
Cambell had promised his sister Canacee to whichever suitor could defeat him. Three brothers, Priamond, Diamond and Triamond, sons of the fairy Agape, fought him in turn; as each died, his soul passed into the next. In Canto 3 Triamond and Cambell fight to a standstill, until Cambina, Triamond's sister, arrives in a chariot drawn by lions and offers them a drink of Nepenthe that reconciles them. Cambell marries Cambina and Triamond Canacee.
Analysis
Book IV is the legend of Friendship, and it has two titular knights rather than one, which is itself a statement: friendship is a bond between persons. It opens with Ate because friendship is first defined by its opposite, discord, which divides people and kingdoms; Ate's double tongue matches Duessa's double nature. The passage on Chaucer's 'well of English vndefyled' is Spenser's acknowledgement of his master, and the claim to continue Chaucer's tale makes literary friendship part of the theme (Hamilton 2001).
The story of the three brothers whose souls pass into one another is a fantasy of the friend as another self, a classical idea. Cambina's lions and her magic potion show that concord is not the work of combat but of something beyond it: in the poem's cosmology, it is the binding force that holds the elements together, as the Temple of Venus will make clear (Roche 1964).
Her lying tongue was in two parts diuided, And both the parts did speake, and both contended;
Ate, discord personified, is divided in every part of herself.
Nepenthe is a drinck of souerayne grace, Deuized by the Gods, for to asswage Harts grief, and bitter gall away to chace,
Cambina's drink, borrowed from the drug that Helen gives in the Odyssey, turns enemies into friends.
Part 14: The Tournament and the Unhelming
Book IV, Cantos 4–6
Summary
In Canto 4 Satyrane holds a tournament for the girdle of Florimell. On the third day an unknown savage knight carries all before him, until Britomart unhorses him and wins the prize. In Canto 5 the girdle, which will not fasten around an unchaste woman, is tried on the ladies present; only Amoret can wear it, but it is given to the snowy Florimell, who chooses Braggadocchio. Scudamour, tormented by jealousy, spends a sleepless night in the house of the blacksmith Care, whose hammers beat in his head.
In Canto 6 the savage knight, who is Artegall, attacks Britomart, and Scudamour joins him. Artegall's blow shears off her ventail; when he sees her face, his arm falls and he kneels before her. Glauce explains, and the two acknowledge their love. Britomart learns that Amoret has disappeared, and Artegall leaves on his quest, promising to return.
Analysis
The meeting of Britomart and Artegall is one of the poem's great reversals: the woman knight, fighting as a man, defeats the man, and their love begins when he is disarmed by her face. Spenser handles it with comic and tender detail, as Artegall's sword drops 'as if the steele had sence'. Britomart's victory and her love together prepare for Book V, where Artegall will be enslaved by a woman of a very different kind.
The girdle test is a comedy about appearances and value. The true virtue of chastity, embodied in Amoret, can wear the girdle; the false beauty of the snowy Florimell cannot, yet she receives it, because the knights judge by beauty. The house of Care, in which the blacksmith's hammers become the beating of anxious thoughts, is a fine example of Spenser's allegorical psychology, the passion made into a place and a trade.
But to small purpose yron wedges made; Those be vnquiet thoughts, that carefull minds inuade.
The house of Care. The final alexandrine explains the allegory openly, a characteristic Spenserian move.
And cruell sword out of his fingers slacke Fell downe to ground, as if the steele had sence,
Artegall's sword falls when he sees Britomart's face; the image gives the weapon itself a share in his reverence.
Part 15: Lust, Slander and the Three Kinds of Love
Book IV, Cantos 7–9
Summary
In Canto 7 Amoret is seized by Lust, a monstrous wild man who carries her to his cave, where she finds Aemylia, another captive. Amoret escapes, and Timias fights the monster; Belphoebe kills it. When she sees Timias tenderly tending the wounded Amoret, she turns away in anger, and Timias retires to the woods in grief, unrecognisable. In Canto 8 a turtle dove brings about his reconciliation with Belphoebe. Arthur finds Amoret and Aemylia, and they spend a night in the house of Slander, an old hag who reviles them.
Arthur hears of the giant Corflambo and his daughter Poeana, who imprison the lover of Aemylia, Amyas; his friend Placidas, who looks exactly like him, tells the story. In Canto 9 Arthur kills Corflambo and arranges two marriages, of Amyas and Aemylia and of Placidas and Poeana. He then stops a fight among several knights who have attacked Britomart and Scudamour, and Scudamour begins to tell his story.
Analysis
The episode of Timias and Belphoebe was read in Spenser's own time as an allegory of the queen's anger at Sir Walter Raleigh for his secret marriage to one of her ladies, Elizabeth Throckmorton, in 1592. The poem thus bends its own fiction to comment on a living courtier, and the reconciliation through the dove is a plea for Raleigh's return to favour (Montrose 2006).
The opening stanza of Canto 9 sets out three kinds of love, for kin, for a lover and for friends, and gives first place to friendship based on virtue. The story of Amyas and Placidas, two identical friends, illustrates it. Yet the canto is full of loose ends: Amoret is in Arthur's company when Scudamour arrives, and the poem never reunites them. The interlaced form has become so complex that the narrative seems to resist its own conclusions (Goldberg 1981).
Whom she with leasings lewdly did miscall, And wickedly backbite: Her name men Sclaunder call.
Slander, who 'backbites' the virtuous, anticipates the Blatant Beast of Book VI.
But of them all the band of vertuous mind Me seemes the gentle hart should most assured bind.
The narrator ranks the three kinds of love and puts friendship of virtuous minds above kin and desire.
Part 16: The Temple of Venus and the Marriage of Rivers
Book IV, Cantos 10–12
Summary
In Canto 10 Scudamour tells how he won Amoret. Carrying the shield of Love, he fought his way to the island Temple of Venus, past the porter Doubt, Delay and Danger, and the gate guarded by Concord, who holds Love and Hate together. Inside stood the veiled statue of Venus, who unites both sexes in herself. A lover's hymn in her praise rose from the worshippers. Amoret sat among Womanhood, Shamefastness, Modesty and other virtues, and Scudamour led her away despite her pleas.
Canto 11 describes the marriage of the Thames and the Medway, held in the house of Proteus, where Florimell is still imprisoned. The wedding is a catalogue of rivers, from the sea gods and the great rivers of the world to the rivers of England and Ireland. Marinell, half-mortal, attends; in Canto 12 he hears Florimell's lament, falls in love and sickens. His mother Cymoent pleads with Neptune, who orders Proteus to release Florimell, and Marinell recovers.
Analysis
The Temple of Venus is the Book's centre, as the Garden of Adonis is Book III's. Concord holding Love and Hate together is the cosmic principle of friendship, drawn from the philosopher Empedocles; the hermaphrodite Venus, veiled because she contains both sexes, is an image of the generative unity that marriage imitates. Scudamour's capture of Amoret, against her own will, is nevertheless troubling, and it explains why Amoret later falls into Busirane's power (Roche 1964) (Silberman 1995).
The marriage of the rivers is a triumph of friendship in a cosmic and national key. Spenser's catalogue joins the waters of England and Ireland in a single feast, a geography of union that can be read as a wish for the peaceful incorporation of Ireland. It also joins two plots that had been divided since Book III, as Florimell and Marinell are united at last.
But for, they say, she hath both kinds in one, Both male and female, both vnder one name:
The veiled Venus is hermaphrodite, an image of the two sexes joined, which echoes the cancelled ending of Book III.
In honour of the spousalls, which then were Betwixt the Medway and the Thames agreed.
The river marriage turns the book's theme of concord into a pageant of geography.
Part 17: Artegall, Talus and the Giant
Book V, Cantos 1–3
Summary
The Proem laments that the world has declined from the golden age and is 'runne quite out of square'. Canto 1 tells how Artegall was raised by Astraea, goddess of justice, who left the earth but gave him her iron servant Talus, armed with a flail. Artegall's first case is that of Sir Sanglier, who has killed a lady and stolen another; Artegall settles a dispute over the living lady by a test like the judgment of Solomon. In Canto 2 he and Talus overthrow the Saracen Pollente, who robs travellers at a bridge, and his daughter Munera, whose golden hands and silver feet Talus cuts off before drowning her.
Artegall then meets a giant with a huge pair of scales, who proposes to weigh the earth and redistribute all things equally, and who is applauded by a crowd. Artegall argues that God has set everything in its place; when the giant tries to weigh truth and falsehood, Talus throws him over a cliff and scatters the mob. In Canto 3, at the tournament for the wedding of Florimell and Marinell, Artegall wins the third day fighting under Braggadocchio’s shield, and Braggadocchio claims both the victory and the false Florimell; the false Florimell, set beside the true, melts away, Guyon recovers his stolen horse, and Braggadocchio is publicly disgraced.
Analysis
Book V is the most openly political book of the poem, and its justice is severe. Talus, the iron man who cannot be argued with or wounded, embodies the force on which justice depends, and his treatment of Munera, which turns punishment into spectacle, sets the tone. The Proem's complaint about the decline of the world frames justice as the remedy of a fallen and disordered age.
The debate with the egalitarian giant is the most argued-over passage in the book. The giant's case for redistribution, using the image of the sea wearing away the land, is given real force, and Artegall's answer, that the order of the world is God's, is followed not by persuasion but by Talus' violence. Some readers see Spenser's conservative politics here, others the poem's own discomfort with an argument it can answer only by force (Teskey 1996) (Hadfield 1997).
Who in his hand an yron flale did hould, With which he thresht out falshood, and did truth vnfould.
Talus, the iron enforcer, threshes truth from falsehood as grain is threshed from chaff.
And all things would reduce vnto equality.
The giant's programme, which Artegall rejects; the episode has been read in relation to the radical sects of the period.
Part 18: Radigund and the Distaff
Book V, Cantos 4–6
Summary
In Canto 4 Artegall settles a dispute between two brothers, Amidas and Bracidas, whose islands have been reshaped by the sea, and over a treasure chest washed ashore, ruling that what the sea gives belongs to the one who receives it. He then rescues Sir Terpine from a crowd of women about to hang him. They are the Amazons of Radigund, who humiliates the knights she conquers by dressing them as women. In Canto 5 Artegall fights Radigund and beats her down, but when he unlaces her helmet and sees her beautiful face, he throws away his sword; she recovers, defeats him, and sets him to spin among other captive knights in women's clothes.
Radigund falls in love with Artegall and sends her maid Clarinda to persuade him, but Clarinda falls in love with him too. In Canto 6 Talus brings the news to Britomart, who suffers jealousy before setting out to rescue him. On the way she shelters with Dolon, a deceiver whose house has a trapdoor bed; she stays awake and escapes, killing his sons at a bridge.
Analysis
The Radigund episode reverses the meeting of Britomart and Artegall in Book IV. Once again Artegall is disarmed by a woman's face, but this time the pity that stays his hand puts him in bondage. The narrator's comment that women are born to humility unless the heavens raise them 'to lawfull soueraintie' is the poem's most explicit statement on women's rule: it condemns Radigund's tyranny while making room for Elizabeth's (Silberman 1995).
The image of the knight spinning in women's clothes recalls Hercules enslaved by Omphale. Its humiliation depends on a fixed idea of masculine and feminine roles, but it also shows how fragile those roles are: Artegall, the champion of justice, is made a woman's slave by a single moment of misplaced mercy. Britomart, who will free him, combines the two in herself, which is why she can resolve the confusion that Radigund creates (Montrose 2006).
A sordid office for a mind so braue. So hard it is to be a womans slaue.
Artegall spinning among Radigund's captives. The narrator's sympathy is with him, and his shame is the shame of reversed roles.
But vertuous women wisely vnderstand, That they were borne to base humilitie, Vnlesse the heauens them lift to lawfull soueraintie.
The exception in the alexandrine allows for Elizabeth, the lawful female sovereign, while denying the rule of women in general.
Part 19: Isis Church and the Court of Mercilla
Book V, Cantos 7–9
Summary
In Canto 7 Britomart spends a night in the Temple of Isis, where a crocodile sleeps beneath the goddess's statue. She dreams that she is a priestess, that the crocodile threatens her, and that it then becomes her lover and she bears a lion; the priests explain that the crocodile is Artegall and the dream foretells her marriage and her royal descendants. She fights Radigund and cuts off her head, frees Artegall, and rules the Amazons until she has restored the rule of men. In Canto 8 Artegall, setting out again, joins Prince Arthur in rescuing the damsel Samient; together they defeat the Souldan, who drives a chariot with scythed wheels, and his wife Adicia, who becomes a tiger.
In Canto 9 Artegall and Arthur capture Malengin, a shape-changing deceiver, and come to the palace of Queen Mercilla. At the gate a poet's tongue is nailed to a post for slandering the queen. Mercilla sits enthroned in majesty, and the knights see a trial: Duessa is accused of plotting against the queen by Zeal, and the cause is argued before the court. Arthur is moved by pity until the evidence is brought, and the court condemns her.
Analysis
Isis Church gives Book V its most sustained image of equity, the principle that tempers strict law with mercy. The crocodile Osiris sleeps under the feet of Isis, as force must lie under clemency. Britomart, as Isis' priestess, joins justice and mercy, and her rule over the Amazons reasserts the gender order that Radigund overturned, a passage in which feminist critics have found the poem's limits most visible (Silberman 1995).
The trial of Duessa allegorises the trial of Mary Queen of Scots in 1586 and her execution in 1587; Mercilla is Elizabeth, merciful and reluctant. Spenser makes the trial a debate between personified forces, Zeal, Kingdom's Care, Authority, Religion and Justice against Pity and Regard of Womanhead, and so presents a state decision as a struggle within the conscience. The poet with the nailed tongue is a striking image of the dangers of writing about the monarch, which Spenser himself would experience when James VI protested against this episode (Montrose 2006) (Hadfield 2012).
To shew that clemence oft in things amis, Restraines those sterne behests, and cruell doomes of his.
The crocodile under the feet of Isis: the priest's explanation states the doctrine of equity.
There as they entred at the Scriene, they saw Some one, whose tongue was for his trespasse vyle Nayld to a post, adiudged so by law:
The punished poet at Mercilla's gate. His name has been changed from Bonfont to Malfont, 'good fount' to 'bad fount'.
Part 20: Belge, Burbon and Irena
Book V, Cantos 10–12
Summary
Canto 10 opens with Mercilla's grief at Duessa's execution. Two youths arrive from Belge, a widow most of whose seventeen sons have been devoured by the tyrant Geryoneo, and Arthur goes to her aid. In Canto 11 he kills Geryoneo, a three-bodied giant, and the monster that lives under the tyrant's altar. Artegall, on his way to rescue Irena, meets Sir Burbon, who has thrown away his shield to win back his lady Flourdelis; Artegall rebukes him but helps him.
In Canto 12 Artegall lands in Irena's kingdom and kills the tyrant Grantorto in single combat. He begins to reform the land, using Talus to punish rebels, but he is recalled to the Faerie court before he can finish. On his way back he is assailed by two hags, Envy and Detraction, and by the Blatant Beast, which they set on him; he forbids Talus to strike them and continues on his way.
Analysis
The last cantos of Book V give a compressed history of Elizabeth's foreign policy. Belge is the Netherlands, oppressed by Spain (Geryoneo); Arthur's intervention recalls the expedition of the Earl of Leicester in 1585. Burbon is Henry IV of France, whose conversion to Catholicism in 1593 Spenser presents as throwing away his shield, and Flourdelis is France itself. The allegory is close to the news, and less transformed than in earlier books.
Irena is Ireland and Grantorto ('great wrong') the Catholic and Spanish power behind Irish resistance. Artegall's campaign recalls Lord Grey's government (1580–1582), including the massacre of the surrendered garrison at Smerwick, and his recall echoes Grey's. Spenser, Grey's former secretary, defended him in A View of the Present State of Ireland, and the bitter ending of Book V, in which the reformer is defamed by Envy and Detraction, is generally read as his comment on Grey's treatment (Hadfield 1997) (Spenser 1997).
And yet euen then ruing her wilfull fall, With more then needfull naturall remorse,
Mercilla's grief over Duessa's death, an apologetic version of Elizabeth's reluctance to execute Mary.
But enuies cloud still dimmeth vertues ray.
Artegall is recalled before his reform is complete; the line generalises from Grey's case to a political law.
Part 21: Calidore and the Code of Courtesy
Book VI, Cantos 1–3
Summary
The Proem begins with the poet refreshed by the delightful land of Faerie, and praises courtesy as a flower that grows on a lowly stalk, now often counterfeit. In Canto 1 Sir Calidore, the knight of Courtesy, meets Artegall returning from his quest and takes up the pursuit of the Blatant Beast. He frees a squire from the custom of Briana, who demands the hair and beards of passers-by to make a mantle for her lover Crudor; Calidore defeats Crudor, spares him on condition of courteous behaviour, and reconciles the lovers.
In Canto 2 Calidore meets Tristram, a young forester of royal birth, who has killed a discourteous knight; Calidore makes him a squire. In Canto 3 he takes the wounded Aladine and his lady Priscilla to her father, and guards her reputation with a small deception. Calidore surprises the lovers Calepine and Serena; Serena is bitten by the Blatant Beast, and Calepine, refused help at a castle by the discourteous Turpine, is forced to defend her.
Analysis
Courtesy for Spenser is more than politeness. It is the virtue of social life, the grace of conduct that makes community possible, and the opening of Canto 1 derives its name from the court while hinting that the court is not where it is always found. The Proem's contrast between true courtesy and its 'fayned showes' looks back to an antique past and forward to the book's doubts about courtly life (Hamilton 2001).
The book also asks where courtesy comes from. Tristram, raised in the forest, shows noble manners because he is noble by blood, and the stanza on 'gentle minde' and 'gentle deeds' links behaviour to birth. Yet the book's own examples, including the Salvage Man and the shepherds, complicate any simple equation of rank and virtue.
Of Court it seemes, men Courtesie doe call, For that it there most vseth to abound;
The etymology of courtesy from court. The qualifying 'it seemes' leaves room for the irony that follows.
True is, that whilome that good Poet sayd, The gentle minde by gentle deeds is knowne.
The 'good Poet' is Chaucer; the maxim, from the Wife of Bath's Tale, makes manners the sign of nobility.
Part 22: The Salvage Man and the Hermit
Book VI, Cantos 4–6
Summary
In Canto 4 Calepine and Serena are rescued from Turpine by a Salvage Man, a wild man of the woods who cannot speak but tends their wounds with herbs. Calepine saves a baby from a bear and gives it to Matilda, a childless lady, to raise as her heir. In Canto 5 the Salvage Man looks after Serena; Prince Arthur and his squire Timias, who has also been bitten by the Blatant Beast, arrive, and Arthur takes the wounded to a hermit.
In Canto 6 the hermit, a former knight, cures Serena and Timias, explaining that the wounds of slander can be healed only by discipline of the self: restraint of the will, avoidance of occasions, and patience. Arthur and the Salvage Man then storm Turpine's castle, and Arthur spares the coward's life.
Analysis
The Salvage Man is one of the book's most memorable figures. He has neither speech nor manners, yet shows instinctive pity and nobility; the narrator explains that his gentle blood shows through his wild appearance, which keeps the link between courtesy and birth even in the woods. The episode thus tests the book's opening question and refuses an easy answer.
The hermit's cure is moral rather than magical. Wounds made by slander are internal, and they fester in the mind; they can be healed only by the victim's own self-government. The idea marks a shift in the late books, in which virtue is less a weapon against external enemies than a discipline that protects the self against a hostile world.
O What an easie thing is to descry The gentle bloud, how euer it be wrapt In sad misfortunes foule deformity,
The narrator explains the Salvage Man's courtesy by his hidden noble blood.
Yet will it shew some sparkes of gentle mynd, And at the last breake forth in his owne proper kynd.
Nature, not training, eventually reveals itself, a conviction the book both asserts and tests.
Part 23: Mirabella, the Cannibals and the Shepherds
Book VI, Cantos 7–9
Summary
In Canto 7 Turpine treacherously sets two knights on Arthur; Arthur defeats them and hangs Turpine by the heels. Timias, travelling with Serena, meets the lady Mirabella, who scorned all her lovers and is condemned by Cupid to ride a jade led by Disdain, with Scorn whipping her, until she has saved as many lovers as she destroyed. In Canto 8 Arthur overthrows Disdain and frees Timias, whom Disdain and Scorn had captured, but Mirabella refuses to be released from her penance. Serena, wandering, is captured by a savage nation of cannibals, who strip her and prepare to sacrifice her; Calepine arrives and rescues her, though in the dark he does not recognise her.
In Canto 9 Calidore, pursuing the Beast from court to city, town and farm, comes among shepherds. He falls in love with Pastorella, the foundling daughter of the old shepherd Meliboe, and lays aside his armour to live as a shepherd. Meliboe praises the contented life of the country, and Calidore competes amicably with the shepherd Coridon for Pastorella's favour.
Analysis
Mirabella's punishment is an allegory of cruelty in love, the disdain of the Petrarchan mistress turned into a sentence, and the poem treats it with a mixture of satire and pity. The cannibals, whose desire to devour Serena's naked body is described at disturbing length, have been read in relation to European accounts of the New World and to English descriptions of the Irish; they define courtesy by its most extreme opposite (Hadfield 1997).
Calidore's turn to the pastoral world is the book's great problem. He abandons his quest, and the narrator half blames him; yet in Meliboe's contented life he finds something the court has lost. The pastoral episode thus questions the ideal that the whole poem was built to serve, the fashioning of a gentleman for public service.
She was borne free, not bound to any wight, And so would euer liue, and loue her owne delight.
Mirabella's claim to freedom, presented as pride; the poem condemns it while giving it memorable verse.
It is the mynd, that maketh good or ill, That maketh wretch or happie, rich or poore:
Meliboe's praise of the contented mind, a Stoic commonplace that Calidore almost accepts.
Part 24: Mount Acidale and the Blatant Beast
Book VI, Cantos 10–12
Summary
In Canto 10 Calidore wanders to Mount Acidale and sees a hundred naked maidens dancing in a ring around the three Graces, with a fourth maiden in the centre, while a shepherd pipes. When he steps forward, they all vanish, and the shepherd, Colin Clout, breaks his pipe in grief. Colin explains the meaning of the Graces and identifies the fourth as his own beloved, a country lass. Calidore then saves Pastorella from a tiger and wins her love.
In Canto 11 brigands raid the shepherds' homes, kill Meliboe and carry off Pastorella; their captain loves her, and in a fight among them she is wounded. Calidore, disguised as a shepherd, rescues her and kills the brigands. In Canto 12 Pastorella is recognised by a birthmark as the lost daughter of Sir Bellamour and Lady Claribell. Calidore resumes his quest, finds the Blatant Beast despoiling a monastery, muzzles it and leads it through Faerie land. But it breaks free again and now ranges through the world, sparing neither the learned nor the gentle poet's verse.
Analysis
The vision on Mount Acidale is often read as the poem's most personal moment. Spenser enters his own poem in the figure of Colin Clout, his pastoral persona since The Shepheardes Calender, and places at the centre of the Graces not Gloriana but his own beloved, perhaps his wife Elizabeth Boyle. The vision cannot be seen by the active knight; it disappears when he intrudes. The episode has become central to arguments about the relationship of the poet to the court and of poetry to political power (Montrose 2006) (Hamilton 2001).
The return of the Blatant Beast at the end of Book VI makes the last completed book end without closure. The Beast, with its thousand tongues, stands for slander and detraction, the hostility of a world that misreads and defames, and it attacks poets, including this one. The final stanza, which asks the poem to please and to avoid giving offence to a 'mighty Peres', is a bitter conclusion to a poem that began by praising the queen (Goldberg 1981).
The first of them hight mylde Euphrosyne, Next faire Aglaia, last Thalia merry:
Colin names the three Graces, the classical givers of joy, splendour and festivity.
Therfore do you my rimes keep better measure, And seeke to please, that now is counted wisemens threasure.
The last stanza of the 1596 poem, an ironic instruction to the poet's own rhymes to avoid offence.
Part 25: The Mutabilitie Cantos
Mutabilitie Cantos, Cantos 6–8
Summary
Canto 6 introduces Mutabilitie, daughter of the Titans, who has already corrupted the earth, changing all that Nature first established. She ascends to the sphere of the Moon, tries to drag Cynthia from her throne, and plunges the world into darkness. Jove sends Mercury to question her, and when she claims the rule of heaven by her Titan descent, she appeals to the god of Nature. The case is set for a hearing on Arlo Hill in Ireland. Spenser digresses to tell how Faunus spied on Diana bathing in the river Molanna, and how Diana cursed the region, which is why it is infested with wolves and thieves.
In Canto 7 Nature, veiled and mysterious, presides. Mutabilitie argues that everything changes: the four elements, the seasons, the twelve months, Day and Night, the Hours, Life and Death pass before Nature in a long pageant. Jove replies that the gods govern time, but Mutabilitie points out that the planets themselves change. Nature gives judgment: things change, but only to return to themselves and fulfil their being, so that they rule over change. Mutabilitie is silenced. In the two stanzas of Canto 8 the poet, weary of mutable things, prays for the Sabbath of eternity.
Analysis
The Mutabilitie Cantos were first printed in the folio of 1609 as 'Two Cantos of Mutabilitie', described as parcel of a further book of the poem 'vnder the Legend of Constancie', with two stanzas of a third canto. Whether they are a late fragment of the poem or an independent poem written in its style is uncertain; their numbering as cantos 6–8 suggests they were meant for an unfinished seventh book. Their subject, change and the hope of permanence, has made them a natural ending for a poem that was itself never completed (Hadfield 2012) (Goldberg 1981).
The cantos are set in Ireland, in the country around Kilcolman, and the Faunus digression is a playful aetiology that also gives a dark picture of a cursed land. Nature's verdict is philosophical, drawing on the Garden of Adonis, but it leaves the poet unsatisfied. The final prayer, playing on the double meaning of Sabaoth (hosts) and Sabbath (rest), turns from the world of the poem to eternity, and the poem ends looking beyond itself (Teskey 1996).
For, she the face of earthly things so changed, That all which Nature had establisht first
Mutabilitie's work on earth, described as a corruption of the original order of creation.
That was, to weet, vpon the highest hights Of Arlo-hill (Who knowes not Arlo-hill?)
The trial is set in Ireland, on Galtymore near Spenser's estate; the parenthesis echoes 'who knowes not Colin Clout?' in Book VI.
But time shall come that all shall changed bee, And from thenceforth, none no more change shall see.
Nature's verdict ends with a prophecy of the end of change.
Characters
Arthur and the Faerie court
- Gloriana
- The Faerie Queene, who sends out the knights from her annual feast and never appears in the poem in person. According to the Letter to Raleigh she stands for glory in general and for Elizabeth I in particular; Arthur loves her after seeing her in a dream, and her city, Cleopolis, is the earthly centre of the poem's world.
- Prince Arthur
- The future king, raised by Merlin, who represents magnificence, the virtue that the Letter says contains all the others. He appears in each book to rescue or assist its knight, carries a shield of a single diamond, and seeks Gloriana, whom he has seen only in a dream. His quest was never completed.
Knights
- The Redcrosse Knight
- The knight of Holiness in Book I, who wears the red cross of Saint George. He is deceived by Archimago, abandons Una, falls to Orgoglio and nearly to Despair, and is restored in the House of Holiness before killing the dragon. He is both a Christian everyman and the patron saint of England.
- Sir Guyon
- The knight of Temperance in Book II, guided by the Palmer. He resists the Cave of Mammon, survives with the help of an angel and of Arthur, and destroys the Bower of Bliss. His austerity, and the violence of his final act, have divided readers.
- Britomart
- The woman knight of Chastity in Book III, a British princess who sees Artegall in Merlin's magic mirror and rides in armour to find him. She frees Amoret from Busirane, defeats Artegall in Book IV, and rescues him from Radigund in Book V; Merlin prophesies that her descendants will lead to Elizabeth. She is the poem's most complex central figure.
- Cambell and Triamond
- The paired knights of Friendship in Book IV. Enemies over Cambell's sister Canacee, they are reconciled by Triamond's sister Cambina and her drink of Nepenthe, and each marries the other's sister. Their story continues Chaucer's unfinished Squire's Tale.
- Sir Artegall
- The knight of Justice in Book V, raised by Astraea and served by the iron man Talus. Destined husband of Britomart, he judges disputes, is enslaved by Radigund, and frees Irena from Grantorto before being recalled. He is widely read as a figure of Lord Grey, Lord Deputy of Ireland.
- Sir Calidore
- The knight of Courtesy in Book VI, who pursues the Blatant Beast. He leaves his quest to live among shepherds and love Pastorella, glimpses the Graces on Mount Acidale, and at last binds the Beast, which breaks free again.
- Sir Satyrane
- Son of a satyr and a woman, a wild but noble knight who helps Una in Book I and holds the tournament for Florimell's girdle in Book IV.
- Sir Scudamour
- The lover of Amoret, who won her at the Temple of Venus. Britomart frees Amoret for him, but in the 1596 text the lovers are never reunited.
- Timias
- Arthur's squire, who falls in love with Belphoebe and loses her favour when she finds him tending Amoret. The episode was read as an allegory of Raleigh's disgrace with Elizabeth.
- Braggadocchio
- A comic braggart who steals Guyon's horse and claims the false Florimell, a parody of the knight who is all show. He is unmasked and disgraced at Florimell's wedding in Book V.
Ladies
- Una
- The lady of Book I, daughter of a king and queen besieged by a dragon. Veiled and accompanied by a lamb, she represents truth and the true Church; she is abandoned by the knight, protected by a lion and by satyrs, and rescues him from Despair.
- Belphoebe
- A virgin huntress, twin sister of Amoret, raised by Diana. The Proem to Book III presents her as a figure of Elizabeth in her private person; she heals Timias and is loved by him from below.
- Amoret
- Belphoebe's twin, raised by Venus in the Garden of Adonis, a figure of married love. Captured by Busirane on her wedding day, she is freed by Britomart, and later seized by Lust.
- Florimell
- A beautiful lady who flees almost everyone she meets and is imprisoned by Proteus, loved by the sea-nymph's son Marinell, and doubled by a false Florimell made of snow. She is finally married to Marinell in Book V.
- Radigund
- The queen of the Amazons in Book V, who defeats Artegall and makes him spin in women's clothes. Britomart kills her and restores the rule of men; the episode is central to arguments about gender and power in the poem.
- Mercilla
- The merciful queen of Book V, at whose court Duessa is tried. She is a figure of Elizabeth in her judicial role.
- Pastorella
- A shepherdess loved by Calidore in Book VI, later revealed as the daughter of Sir Bellamour and Lady Claribell.
Villains and enchanters
- Archimago
- The arch-enchanter of Books I and II, a master of disguise who sends false dreams and images; he stands for hypocrisy and, in the historical allegory, for the deceits of the Roman Church.
- Duessa
- A witch who appears as the lovely Fidessa but is revealed as a hag. She represents falsehood and the Roman Church in Book I, and Mary Queen of Scots when she is tried and executed in Book V.
- Acrasia
- The enchantress of the Bower of Bliss in Book II, who turns her lovers into beasts. Her name means intemperance or 'lack of control'; she is bound by Guyon and the Palmer.
- Busirane
- The enchanter of Book III who imprisons Amoret and writes his charms in her blood. He is often read as a figure of cruel love poetry.
- Mammon
- The god of wealth in Book II, who leads Guyon through his underground realm and offers him treasure and honour.
- Orgoglio
- The giant of Book I who imprisons the Redcrosse Knight; his name means pride. He collapses like an empty bladder when Arthur kills him.
- The Blatant Beast
- A monster with a thousand tongues, the slander and detraction pursued by Calidore in Book VI. It is bound but breaks free and still ranges through the world.
Allegorical figures
- Errour
- The serpent-woman of the Wandering Wood in Book I, the first monster of the poem, who vomits books and papers.
- Despair
- The old man in the cave in Book I who almost persuades the Redcrosse Knight to kill himself, using arguments from scripture.
- The Palmer
- Guyon's guide in Book II, an old pilgrim representing reason or prudence, whose staff turns aside monsters.
- Talus
- Artegall's iron servant in Book V, armed with a flail, who executes justice by force and cannot be persuaded or wounded.
- Merlin
- The magician who raised Arthur and made the mirror in which Britomart sees Artegall. In his cave he prophesies the British and Tudor line.
- Colin Clout
- The shepherd-poet who pipes to the Graces on Mount Acidale, Spenser's own pastoral persona since The Shepheardes Calender.
- Mutabilitie and Nature
- The Titaness who claims the rule of heaven and earth because all things change, and the veiled goddess who judges her case on Arlo Hill and rules that things change only to fulfil their being.
Themes
Truth and deception
The poem begins with a knight who cannot tell a true lady from a false one, and the problem never goes away. Una and Duessa, Florimell and her snowy double, Archimago's dreams and disguises, and the Bower's art that imitates nature all present the same difficulty: the false is often more attractive than the true and looks almost the same. The knights' quests are therefore also lessons in reading, and Spenser makes the reader share them, presenting seductive verse that must be judged as well as enjoyed.
In Book I the distinction is religious: truth is one, and error and hypocrisy multiply. In the later books it becomes social and political, as Florimell's girdle is given to the wrong lady and the Blatant Beast slanders good and bad alike. The poem's confidence that the false can be unmasked weakens as it proceeds (Hamilton 1961).
Virtue as a process of education
The Letter's stated aim is to fashion a gentleman in virtuous discipline, and the poem is in many ways an education. Its knights are not perfect embodiments of their virtues but beginners who learn them through error: Redcrosse becomes holy only after he has fallen, Guyon learns temperance through temptation, Britomart learns love's suffering before she achieves it. The reader is meant to undergo the same discipline.
This makes the allegory dynamic. A virtue is not a fixed quality but an achievement, won against its counterfeits and its extremes, and constantly threatened. Harry Berger and others have emphasised the way the poem tests and revises its own ideals as it goes (Berger 1988).
Love, chastity and marriage
Books III and IV are a long study of love in its forms, from lust and jealousy to the cruelty of the Petrarchan lady and the faithfulness of Britomart. Spenser's chastity is not only virginity, which Belphoebe represents, but faithful love that leads to marriage, embodied in Britomart and Amoret. The poem's great images of generation, the Garden of Adonis and the hermaphrodite Venus, place married love within a cosmic order of fruitfulness.
Spenser's own sonnet sequence Amoretti and marriage poem Epithalamion (1595) celebrate the same ideal. The poem's treatment of love is nevertheless troubled: lovers are rarely united, women are pursued and imprisoned, and the poem knows its own share in the cruel conventions it criticises (Roche 1964) (Silberman 1995).
Justice and force
Book V asks what justice requires in a fallen world, and its answer is uncomfortable. Artegall's judgments are often wise, but they are executed by Talus, an iron man without pity, and the book's political allegory, from the trial of Duessa to the campaign in Ireland, defends the use of force by the English state. The doctrine of equity at Isis Church tempers justice with mercy, but mercy is repeatedly shown to be dangerous.
Many readers find Book V the least attractive of the poem, and its harshness has been tied to Spenser's experience of Ireland. Others argue that the book's discomfort with its own methods is part of its meaning (Hadfield 1997) (Teskey 1996).
Courtesy, nature and nobility
Book VI's virtue is the grace of social life, and it raises questions about where such grace comes from. Some characters show courtesy because of noble birth, like Tristram and the Salvage Man; others, like the shepherds, show its natural roots outside the court. The court itself, which gives courtesy its name, harbours the Blatant Beast.
Calidore's pastoral holiday, and the vision of the Graces that he cannot keep, suggest that the highest forms of courtesy are a gift that cannot be commanded. The book thus questions the poem's original programme of fashioning a courtier.
Mutability and time
From Time's scythe in the Garden of Adonis to the trial of Mutabilitie, the poem is preoccupied with change. Its world is full of decline, as the Proem to Book V laments, and of transformation, as men become beasts and passions. Against this it sets the idea of renewal through generation, in which forms return in new bodies, and the Christian hope of a final rest.
Nature's judgment that things change in order to fulfil themselves is the poem's last philosophical statement, but the poet's own prayer shows that it does not fully console. The unfinished poem ends looking for the Sabbath beyond time (Nohrnberg 1976).
England, empire and the queen
The poem was written to praise Elizabeth and the Protestant nation, and its national myth runs from Brutus and Arthur through the chronicles of Book II and Merlin's prophecy in Book III to Gloriana. It celebrates English religion, history and power. Yet the queen's role is ambivalent: she is idealised, but she has no heir, the poem's virgin queen is set against the poem's own praise of marriage, and the last books show a growing estrangement between the poet and the court (Montrose 2006).
Motifs
Doubles and counterfeits
Una and Duessa, Florimell and the snowy Florimell, the false Redcrosse who is Archimago, Belphoebe and Amoret: the poem multiplies pairs in which one figure is the image, parody or complement of another. The doubling dramatises the problem of telling the true from the false, and it lets virtues be defined by their imitations.
Houses, castles and gardens
Each book has its allegorical buildings: the House of Pride and the House of Holiness, Alma's castle, the Cave of Mammon, the House of Busirane, the Temple of Venus, Isis Church and Mercilla's palace, as well as the Bower of Bliss and the Garden of Adonis. They are the places where the moral meaning of the poem is concentrated and displayed.
Wandering and woods
The poem begins in the Wandering Wood and its knights constantly lose their way. Woods are places of error and of discovery, where the narrative splits and characters meet by chance. The interlaced romance structure itself is a kind of wandering, which the narrator sometimes says he must correct.
Interrupted quests
The knights are repeatedly diverted, captured or delayed, and in the later books the quests are almost lost in other stories. The pattern of deferral culminates in the postponed marriages, the cancelled ending of Book III, the escaped Blatant Beast and the unfinished poem (Goldberg 1981).
Proems and the narrator's voice
Each book opens with a proem addressed to the queen, and the narrator often comments on the action, praises or warns, and speaks of his own weariness. In Book VI and the Mutabilitie Cantos he appears in the poem itself, as Colin Clout and as the poet praying for rest.
Symbols
The red cross and the armour
The Redcrosse Knight's armour is the armour of God described in Ephesians 6: the breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation. Its old dents mark the battles of others who wore it, and the knight must grow into it.
Arthur's diamond shield
Made by Merlin from a single diamond, Arthur's shield is usually kept covered; when revealed it blinds and overthrows enemies. It is often read as an image of divine grace or of faith.
Florimell's girdle
The girdle of Venus, which only a chaste woman can wear, becomes a test and a comedy in Book IV and a symbol of the confusion between beauty and virtue.
Talus' iron flail
The flail with which Talus threshes out falsehood is the image of justice as force, and it makes Book V's hard view of the law visible.
Merlin's mirror
The magic glass in which Britomart sees Artegall shows the future as a desired image. It figures the visionary power of love and the dynastic destiny it serves.
The Blatant Beast
The monster of slander with a thousand tongues, which cannot be finally destroyed, symbolises the hostility of an ungenerous world to virtue and to poetry, including Spenser's own.
The Garden and the Bower
The fertile Garden of Adonis and the artificial Bower of Bliss are the poem's twin gardens, one a true image of nature's generative order, the other a beautiful counterfeit. Since Lewis, the contrast has been the starting point for discussions of art, nature and pleasure in the poem (Lewis 1936).
Critical debates
How to read the allegory
Spenser called his poem 'a continued Allegory', and readers have disagreed about what that means. C. S. Lewis, in The Allegory of Love (1936), placed the poem at the end of a medieval tradition of personification and love allegory and read it as a picture of moral life of extraordinary richness. Northrop Frye found in it a structure of recurring images, cyclical and archetypal, that organises the whole. Angus Fletcher, in a general theory of allegory as a symbolic mode, emphasised its compulsive, almost daemonic agents, characters possessed by a single idea (Lewis 1936) (Frye 1963) (Fletcher 1964).
Other critics have resisted reading the poem as a code. A. C. Hamilton argued that the reader should attend first to the literal images and narrative, from which meaning grows, and Paul Alpers argued that the poem works stanza by stanza on the reader's responses rather than through a consistent narrative or symbolic system. More recently Gordon Teskey has argued that allegory imposes meaning on its material by a kind of violence, visible in Book V and in the House of Busirane (Hamilton 1961) (Alpers 1967) (Teskey 1996).
The Bower of Bliss
Guyon's destruction of the Bower has been the most debated single act in the poem. For Lewis, the Bower is a place of sterile artifice, contrasted with the fertile Garden of Adonis, and its destruction a necessary rejection of false pleasure. Others, beginning with readers in the eighteenth century, have felt that the verse makes the Bower so beautiful that Guyon's 'rigour pittilesse' seems excessive, and that the poem is divided against itself (Lewis 1936) (Alpers 1967).
Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) transformed the debate. He argued that Guyon's violence enacts the way in which Elizabethan identity was formed by attacking what it defined as other: the Bower's sensual excess is linked to the native cultures of Ireland and the Americas, and its destruction to colonial violence. The reading made the episode a classic of New Historicism and opened discussion of the poem's relation to empire (Greenblatt 1980) (Berger 1988).
Book V, Ireland and the View
Spenser lived in Ireland as an English official and settler for most of his adult life, and about 1596 he wrote A View of the Present State of Ireland, a dialogue that argues for military conquest, the suppression of Irish customs and the use of famine to break resistance. It was entered for publication in 1598 but not printed until 1633. Book V's campaign against Grantorto and its defence of Artegall clearly reflect the same views, and the View praises Lord Grey, whom Artegall represents (Spenser 1997).
For much of the twentieth century critics treated the Irish material as a regrettable distraction from the poem. Since the 1980s it has been central. Andrew Hadfield has traced Spenser's Irish experience throughout his writing and argued that it made his vision increasingly bitter and isolated; others have found in the cannibals of Book VI and the cursed land of the Mutabilitie Cantos further signs of Ireland's place in the poem. Whether the poem endorses colonial violence or registers its costs remains a question of interpretation (Hadfield 1997) (Greenblatt 1980).
Elizabeth and the poem's politics
The Faerie Queene is dedicated to Elizabeth and praises her through Gloriana, Belphoebe, Mercilla and Britomart's line. Older criticism read these figures as compliment; since the 1980s, critics such as Louis Montrose have examined the poem as an intervention in the politics of the court, in which praise of the queen is also a way of addressing, advising and sometimes resisting her (Montrose 2006).
Montrose and others have pointed to moments where the poem distances itself from the monarch: the Timias episode, which pleads for Raleigh; the virgin queen's lack of an heir, about which Merlin's prophecy is silent; the poet with the nailed tongue at Mercilla's court; and the vision on Mount Acidale, where Colin's beloved replaces the queen at the centre of the Graces. Jonathan Goldberg read the poem's endless deferrals in relation to the structures of power it serves (Goldberg 1981) (Montrose 2006).
The Garden of Adonis and Neoplatonism
The Garden of Adonis in Book III is the poem's most philosophical passage, and its sources have been disputed since the early twentieth century. It describes forms that take on matter, die and return, and an eternal substance from which all things are drawn. Readers have found in it Platonic and Neoplatonic doctrine of the kind made available by Marsilio Ficino, Lucretius' materialist account of generation, and Christian ideas of creation (Ellrodt 1960).
Robert Ellrodt argued that Spenser's Neoplatonism was less systematic and more eclectic than earlier critics had claimed, and that much of it belonged to his later work. James Nohrnberg placed the Garden within the poem's large system of correspondences and analogies, while Lewis read it as the true image of nature contrasted with the Bower's art. The Garden's place at the centre of the books of love suggests that Spenser's philosophy is put to the service of a vision of fruitful sexuality (Nohrnberg 1976) (Lewis 1936).
Gender, Britomart and Radigund
A poem dedicated to a female monarch and centred in two books on a woman knight raises questions about gender that feminist criticism has explored in detail. Britomart is a powerful figure who acts, fights and rescues, and she is the source of the British dynasty. Yet her story leads to marriage, and in Book V she restores the rule of men among the Amazons after killing Radigund, whose rule the narrator condemns except where the heavens raise a woman 'to lawfull soueraintie' (Silberman 1995).
Thomas Roche read Books III and IV as a celebration of chaste married love; Lauren Silberman explored the books of love as an investigation of erotic knowledge and gender identity; Maureen Quilligan studied Milton's reading of Spenser, including his response to the poem's treatment of gender. Critics also note that the poem's sympathies are complex: Amoret's suffering in the House of Busirane exposes the cruelty of masculine desire, and the poem's attitudes to women's power are shaped by the presence of a queen (Roche 1964) (Silberman 1995) (Quilligan 1983) (Montrose 2006).
The unfinished poem and Mutabilitie
The Letter promised twelve books and perhaps twelve more; Spenser published six and left a fragment of a seventh. Whether the poem was abandoned, interrupted by death, or could never have been finished is uncertain. Some critics see the later books as a progressive disillusionment, ending with the escape of the Blatant Beast and the poet's bitterness; others see the open ending as appropriate to a poem about the endless work of virtue (Goldberg 1981) (Hadfield 2012).
The Mutabilitie Cantos, printed in 1609, offer a kind of ending: a debate about change judged by Nature, followed by a prayer for eternal rest. Their date and place in the design are unknown, but their themes gather up the poem's concern with time and change. Readers have found in Nature's verdict a philosophical resolution and in the poet's prayer a recognition that no resolution within time is possible (Teskey 1996) (Nohrnberg 1976).
Protestantism and Book I
Book I is an allegory of the Christian life and of the English Reformation. Una and Duessa recall the two women of the Book of Revelation, the true Church and the Whore of Babylon, and the dragon, Orgoglio and the seven-headed beast draw on the apocalyptic imagery of Protestant polemic, especially John Foxe and John Bale. John N. King showed in detail how Spenser's images belong to this tradition (King 1990).
How Protestant the book is remains debated. Its account of the knight's despair and rescue by grace has been read in Calvinist terms, with salvation coming from God and not from the knight's own merit. Yet the House of Holiness, with its penance, hermit and works of mercy, uses forms that Protestant reformers had attacked. Critics disagree whether this shows a moderate, inclusive Protestantism, a nostalgia for older forms, or a deliberate reappropriation of Catholic imagery for Protestant purposes (King 1990) (Hamilton 2001).
Key passages
A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine, Y cladd in mightie armes and siluer shielde,
The first lines of the poem proper. 'Pricking' means spurring his horse; the knight is 'gentle' in the sense of noble, and his armour has fought battles before him, though he has not. The archaic forms ('Y cladd') announce the poem's distance from the present.
Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.
The most seductive alexandrine in the poem, with its balanced phrases rocking towards rest. Despair's beauty is the source of its danger; the reader feels the temptation the knight feels.
Gather therefore the Rose, whilest yet is prime, For soone comes age, that will her pride deflowre: Gather the Rose of loue, whilest yet is time,
The song of the rose, adapted from Tasso, is the poem's version of the carpe diem theme. Its beauty and its context, a trap for Guyon, show how pleasure is used to persuade.
All be he subiect to mortalitie, Yet is eterne in mutabilitie, And by succession made perpetuall,
Adonis in his Garden cannot die because he lives on through the cycle of generation. The phrase 'eterne in mutabilitie' anticipates the problem of the Mutabilitie Cantos.
Be bold, be bold, and euery where Be bold,
The inscriptions encourage Britomart's daring and then warn against excess ('Be not too bold'); they are a riddle about the limits of courage that the reader, like Britomart, must interpret.
Dan Chaucer, well of English vndefyled, On Fames eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled.
Spenser's tribute to Chaucer, whose unfinished Squire's Tale he continues. The phrase 'well of English vndefyled' became a standard description of Chaucer's language.
Me seemes the world is runne quite out of square, From the first point of his appointed sourse, And being once amisse growes daily wourse and wourse.
The Proem to the book of Justice laments the decline of the world from its original order. The geometrical image of a world 'out of square' explains the need for the hard justice that follows.
That iolly shepheard, which there piped, was Poore Colin Clout (who knowes not Colin Clout?)
Spenser introduces his own pastoral persona into the poem. The parenthesis is half proud and half self-mocking, and the vision it introduces is the most personal moment in the poem.
Then ouer them Change doth not rule and raigne; But they raigne ouer change, and doe their states maintaine.
Nature's verdict on Mutabilitie: things change only in order to realise themselves, so that they, not change, are the masters.
With Him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight: O that great Sabbaoth God, graunt me that Sabaoths sight.
The last line of the poem as it survives. The play between Sabaoth (hosts) and Sabbath (rest) turns the poem's long story of change into a prayer for the rest of eternity.
Questions for study
Why does Redcrosse leave Una, and what does his error suggest about the reading of appearances?
Consider Archimago's dream and false image, Duessa's disguise as Fidessa, and the book's Protestant concern with images.
Is Guyon's destruction of the Bower of Bliss a moral triumph or an act of excessive violence?
Compare the beauty of the description with the phrase 'rigour pittilesse', and look at the readings of Lewis and Greenblatt.
What does it mean that the knight of Chastity is a woman?
Think about Britomart's armour, her love for Artegall, her defeat of men, and the presence of a female monarch.
How does the Garden of Adonis answer the problem of time and death?
Look at the cycle of forms and matter, the figure of Time with his scythe, and the phrase 'eterne in mutabilitie'.
Why does Book IV have two titular knights, and how does it define friendship?
Consider Ate, the three brothers, Cambina's Nepenthe, the three kinds of love and the Temple of Venus.
Is the justice of Book V just?
Think about Talus, the giant with the scales, Isis Church, the trial of Duessa and the Irish context.
How does the poem represent Elizabeth I, and where does it seem to distance itself from her?
Consider Gloriana, Belphoebe, Mercilla, Timias, Merlin's prophecy and Mount Acidale.
Why does Calidore abandon his quest among the shepherds, and how does the poem judge him?
Look at Meliboe's speech, the vision of the Graces and the return of the Blatant Beast.
What does the Spenserian stanza, and in particular its final alexandrine, contribute to the poem's meaning?
Choose two or three stanzas and see how the last line sums up, slows down or comments on what precedes it.
Does Nature's judgment in the Mutabilitie Cantos settle the debate about change?
Compare the verdict with the poet's own prayer in the two stanzas of Canto 8.
Further reading
- Alpers, Paul J. The Poetry of The Faerie Queene. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967.
- Berger, Harry, Jr. Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
- Ellrodt, Robert. Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Spenser. Geneva: Droz, 1960.
- Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964.
- Frye, Northrop. Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963.
- Goldberg, Jonathan. Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.
- Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
- Hadfield, Andrew. Edmund Spenser's Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
- Hadfield, Andrew. Edmund Spenser: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
- Hamilton, A. C. The Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961.
- Hamilton, A. C., ed. The Faerie Queene, by Edmund Spenser. London: Longman, 1977. 2nd ed., text edited by Hiroshi Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2001.
- Hamilton, A. C., gen. ed. The Spenser Encyclopedia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990.
- King, John N. Spenser's Poetry and the Reformation Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
- Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936.
- McCabe, Richard A., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
- Montrose, Louis. The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
- Nohrnberg, James. The Analogy of The Faerie Queene. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976.
- Quilligan, Maureen. Milton's Spenser: The Politics of Reading. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.
- Roche, Thomas P., Jr. The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of Spenser's Faerie Queene. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964.
- Silberman, Lauren. Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of The Faerie Queene. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
- Spenser, Edmund. A View of the State of Ireland. Edited by Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.
- Teskey, Gordon. Allegory and Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-19.