The Faerie Queene

Overview

Six books and two fragmentary cantos, about thirty-five thousand lines, roughly eleven hundred pages. Books I to III were published in 1590, Books IV to VI in 1596, and the Mutabilitie Cantos posthumously in 1609. Spenser died in 1599 with the poem a quarter finished: the prefatory letter to Sir Walter Raleigh announces twelve books on the private virtues, with a possible twelve more on the public ones.

Edmund Spenser spent most of his adult life as a colonial administrator in Ireland, on land confiscated after the Desmond rebellions, and wrote the poem at Kilcolman Castle in County Cork. That fact is not decoration. Book V is about Ireland, his prose View of the Present State of Ireland recommends measures of appalling severity, and the castle was burned in the Nine Years War, after which he died in London, poor, aged forty-six.

The stanza is his invention: eight lines of iambic pentameter and a ninth of six feet, rhyming ababbcbcc. The interlocking rhyme makes it hard to write and gives it a rolling, circling motion, and the long last line closes each stanza like a door. It is called the Spenserian stanza and it has been in use ever since.

The diction was archaic on purpose. Spenser wrote a deliberately old-sounding English, partly in imitation of Chaucer, and Ben Jonson said he writ no language. It takes about twenty stanzas to acclimatise, after which it reads easily.

What happens

The letter to Raleigh. Spenser explains the plan: the poem will fashion a gentleman in virtuous and gentle discipline, Arthur before he was king represents Magnificence, which contains all the virtues, and Gloriana the Faerie Queene is both glory and Elizabeth. Each book’s knight is sent out by Gloriana on a quest, and Arthur appears in each at the point of crisis.

The letter does not describe the poem very accurately, which is the first thing to know about it.

Book I: Holiness. The most self-contained and the one to read first. The Redcrosse Knight escorts Una, a princess whose parents’ kingdom is held by a dragon.

They defeat Error, a monster who vomits books and papers. Then Archimago, a hypocritical magician, separates them with false dreams and a counterfeit Una, and Redcrosse abandons her. He takes up with Duessa, beautiful and false, who is the Roman church. He enters the House of Pride, fights the Saracen Sansjoy, drinks from an enfeebling stream and is captured by the giant Orgoglio.

Una gets help: a lion, a troop of satyrs, and finally Prince Arthur, who kills the giant. Duessa is stripped and revealed as a hideous old woman.

Then the best episode in the poem. Redcrosse meets Despair in a cave among corpses, and Despair argues him toward suicide, not with threats but with gentle reasonableness: he has sinned, he will sin more, death would end it, and rest is sweet. Redcrosse has the dagger in his hand when Una takes it away. He is then taken to the House of Holiness to be taught what he could not learn by fighting, shown the New Jerusalem, and told he is Saint George of England.

The dragon fight takes three days. He is knocked into a well of life and into a stream from the tree of life, and rises from each, and kills it, and is betrothed to Una.

Book II: Temperance. Sir Guyon, with a Palmer who is reason, travels past temptations of anger, wealth and pleasure. Mammon offers him the treasure of the world in a cave underground and he refuses over three days, coming out so exhausted that he faints.

The book ends at the Bower of Bliss, the enchantress Acrasia’s island paradise. Spenser describes it at greater length and with more sensuous beauty than anything else in the poem, notes that everything in it is artificial, imitation ivy of gold, a fountain of carved naked girls, and then has Guyon destroy the whole thing, breaking the bowers, defacing the arbours, burning the buildings. The violence of the destruction is startling and has been argued about ever since.

Book III: Chastity. Britomart, a woman in armour with an enchanted lance that unhorses everyone, is looking for Artegall, whom she saw in Merlin’s mirror and is fated to marry, and from whom the line of British kings and eventually Elizabeth will descend.

This book scatters: it is full of interlaced stories, Florimell fleeing, Marinell, Belphoebe and Amoret raised separately in the Garden of Adonis, which is Spenser’s account of how forms take on bodies. It ends at the House of Busirane, where Amoret is held captive and her heart is carried on a platter, in a masque of Cupid that is the most disturbing sequence in the poem. Britomart walks through fire, passes two inscriptions she cannot interpret, and frees her.

Book IV: Friendship. Continues everything unfinished from Book III, adds Cambell and Triamond, a tournament for the girdle of Florimell, and the marriage of the Thames and the Medway, an enormous catalogue of rivers.

Book V: Justice. Artegall, with an iron man called Talus who beats offenders with a flail and cannot be resisted. The allegory is topical and often crude: a giant with scales who wants to redistribute everything is thrown off a cliff, Mercilla tries Duessa, who is Mary Queen of Scots, and Artegall’s campaign in Irena’s land is the English campaign in Ireland. Talus is a genuinely frightening invention, justice as pure enforcement without mercy or hesitation.

Book VI: Courtesy. The gentlest book. Calidore pursues the Blatant Beast, which is slander, and abandons the quest to live among shepherds and fall in love with Pastorella. He sees a vision of the Graces dancing on Mount Acidale, which Colin Clout, Spenser himself, pipes for, and which vanishes when he interrupts it. The Beast is captured and later breaks loose, and the poem’s final note is that it is still at large and bites poets.

The Mutabilitie Cantos. Two cantos and two stanzas of a third. The Titaness Mutabilitie claims rule over the universe on the grounds that everything changes, and the case is tried before Nature on Arlo Hill, in Ireland. She calls the seasons, the months and the hours as witnesses, and her evidence is overwhelming. Nature rules against her: things change not into nothing but by working out their own perfection, and so they dilate their being rather than losing it. The last stanzas long for the Sabbath of eternal rest.

How to read it

Read Book I entire, and read it first. It is complete, it has a single plot, and it teaches you how the allegory works. Hackett publishes it alone, which is the sensible way to start.

Then read the Bower of Bliss in Book II canto 12, Britomart’s story in Book III cantos 1 to 4 and canto 11 to 12, Mount Acidale in Book VI canto 10, and the Mutabilitie Cantos. That is a coherent selection of the best of it and it is maybe three hundred pages.

Do not try to read it straight through on a first pass. Books IV and V are the hardest going, and the interlaced narrative in the middle books abandons stories for a thousand lines at a time.

Read aloud for the first hour. The archaic spelling looks worse than it sounds, and most of the difficulty dissolves when you hear it. Ignore the spelling and trust the sound.

Do not decode. The temptation with allegory is to translate each figure into its meaning and move on, and Spenser’s figures do not reduce. Duessa is the Roman church and falsehood and a woman Redcrosse desires, and the episode works because she is all three at once.

Read the House of Despair even if you read nothing else in the book. It is a hundred lines, it is the finest thing in the poem, and it makes the case for suicide so persuasively that readers have wondered what Spenser thought he was doing.

And keep Ireland in view, particularly in Book V. The poem’s most beautiful landscapes and its most brutal politics come out of the same colonial estate, and pretending otherwise makes the poem smaller than it is.

Questions it raises

• Redcrosse cannot tell Una from Duessa. What does the poem think makes truth recognisable?
• Guyon destroys the Bower of Bliss after Spenser has spent forty stanzas making it beautiful. Is the violence temperate?
• Chastity is embodied by a woman in armour looking for a husband. What is Spenser arguing against?
• Talus enforces justice mechanically and without mercy. Is he an ideal or a warning?
• Despair’s speech is the most persuasive in the poem. Why is it given to him?
• Mutabilitie’s evidence is unanswerable and she loses. Is Nature’s verdict an argument or an assertion?