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This chapter explores the intellectual progression of Edmund Spenser from 1579, when he first came to prominence as a poet, to 1598 when permission was sought by his printer to have the View published. The early Spenser identified himself as an English social critic after the manner of Geoffrey Chaucer or John Skelton, and it was only Spenser's invocation of classical and continental authorities and models that made it clear that he wished to be considered as an English representative of the Renaissance while remaining within the tradition of pastoral criticism. His involvement with Ireland would seem to have placed him in an ideal location from which to criticize the life and politics of the court, and the insights into his thinking that are provided both in the Faerie Queene, and in Spenser's brief appearance as an interlocutor in Bryskett's Discourse, make it clear that he successfully married the roles of pastoral critic in the English tradition and that of Renaissance reformer in the classical sense.

The first part of The Faerie Queene was published in 1590, three years after Philip Sidney's death. Edmund Spenser's heroic poem is the fullest poetic embodiment of the political ideals of Sidney and his circle; and it reveals the complexities and contradictions inherent in those ideals. Like Sidney, Spenser argued that poetry could convey political ideas more memorably than abstract philosophy. Spenser's ‘feigned commonwealth’, Faerie Land, is not, however, a precisely imagined political entity like Sidney's Arcadia; it is a cloudier realm, more romanticized and idealized. Spenser's monarchical figures are presented with more reverence than Sidney's Basilius; the poem reveals the influence of the Italian courtly aesthetic. Spenser's Faerie Queen in The Faerie Queene is presented as a mirror or image of Queen Elizabeth who is in turn imaged by other female figures — Belphoebe, Britomart, Mercilla, Medina — all of whom are emanations of the glory of the Virgin Queen.

Edmund Spenser's local debts to Ovid are well-known, but this chapter goes further than its predecessors in seeing The Faerie Queene as structurally indebted to the Metamorphoses. The problems and opportunities in the theme of change are traced through Spenser's other works to his epic. It is argued that in The Faerie Queene, Ovidian stories are never far away, and they are evident in large-scale imitations, clustered references, unfulfilled gestures, and in surprising non-metamorphoses as well as satisfying metamorphoses. Overall, the Metamorphoses are a constant presence, sometimes enriching the emerging poem, sometimes obstructing it.

This chapter discusses Apuleian influences in The Faerie Queene. It argues that Spenser used different parts of The Golden Ass in various ways and with varying degrees of success. Meroë and Pamphile contributed to the pool of attributes from which Duessa and Acrasia emerged, and the combination of Homeric, Italian, and Apuleian elements was, by and large, an effective one. The account of Psyche's fall supplied a screen behind which Una could be clothed in the human colours that strict allegory would deny her, while Apuleius' description of her exile and her responses to trials and adversity provided a backdrop against which the virtues both of Una and Guyon could be measured. But it is when Spenser — in Muiopotmos as well as in The Faerie Queene — makes explicit reference to ‘Cupid and Psyche’ that the difficulties really begin.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. It is the peculiar and discomfiting genius of The Faerie Queene to call reading into question. Few works have a greater capacity to inspire pleasure, few do more to tax readers' patience, and none, perhaps, has a stronger propensity to fill them with self-doubt. Written at a moment when right reading was at once a stringently regulated ideal and a “complex and protean enterprise,” The Faerie Queene invests the work of interpretation with extraordinary, even existential, power: in the densely coded, relentlessly violent world of Spenser's poem, learning to read in the precise fashion that a particular text or occasion requires is the means to narrative survival. Its intricacy and immensity may be overwhelming, but they yield a fractal-like distribution of interest: famously difficult to comprehend, The Faerie Queene is nonetheless susceptible of interpretation at every scale.

This chapter discusses the question of how to represent the orthography of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene in modern texts. Editions of Spenser's poem nearly always preserve the late sixteenth-century spellings: it is The Faerie Queene, not The Fairy Queen. The reproduction of old spellings communicates a set of seemingly irreproachable editorial commitments: to textual fidelity, to philological precision, to the material and cultural contexts of poetic composition, and, above all, to authorial intent. Ironically, however, the effects of old spelling on Spenser's modern readers are hard to justify in such terms. The chapter argues that although the “old-spelling” Faerie Queene encodes much less of Spenser's meaning than most modern editions of the poem imply, it retains more of what the poem has meant to readers, and to the tradition of literary scholarship.

This chapter examines the character of Una in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Una was at the epicenter of The Faerie Queene, and the poem's ideal reader was one naturally impervious to any moralizing pretensions: a child, usually but not always a boy, old enough to read independently but not so grown as to have lost a taste for imaginary play or developed a sensitivity to allegory. Today, when nearly all readers of The Faerie Queene encounter the poem in the confines of a classroom or a footnoted scholarly edition, it is hard to appreciate the influence such actual and imagined young readers once had on its critical and popular reception. Far from requiring or fostering the hyperliteracy with which Spenser is now associated, The Faerie Queene was characterized by both admirers and detractors as quintessential children's fare: an almost too effective engine of readerly enchantment and a rich repository of adventures and images. Although this approach to The Faerie Queene ignored or occluded much of what scholarly readers now consider essential, it attended with useful closeness to parts of the poem that now get short shrift: its richly detailed fictive landscape and the characters who populate it, without necessarily having much to do with its meaning.

This coda explains that Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene has never been read to the end, for the simple reason that no one can quite say where, or if, it ends at all. This peculiar fact—the joint product of biographical accident, editorial intervention, and what might or might not be poetic ingenuity—has consequences for the poem as a whole. To begin with, it makes it unusually difficult to speak of the poem as a whole. As Barbara Herrnstein Smith has written, poetic closure “is an effect that depends primarily upon the reader's experience of the structure of the entire poem.” Because it is dense, difficult, didactic, and strange; because it is an allegory; because its language is pseudoarchaic and its spelling weird; because it meanders and digresses, shedding characters and entire plotlines as it goes; above all, because it is so extraordinarily long, Spenser's poem tests one's readerly loyalties and often defeats one's instinct to see a story through.

This chapter discusses the use of Petrarchan themes to explore modes of legitimate political resistance by considering the constant collaborative dialogue between Edmund Spenser's sonnet sequence Amoretti and his epic-romance poem The Faerie Queene. It argues that Amoretti's Petrarchism is political, whereas The Faerie Queene's politics are Petrarchan: the two works collaboratively stage contests between lyric and epic that test each genre's strategies of resistance to tyranny. It shows that the sonnets articulate contestation and critique through lyric countersovereignty, while the epic-romance overthrows various Petrarchan Beloveds through its narrative teleology. By delegitimizing their Beloveds' sovereignty, both texts open up the possibility of lyric resistance to tyranny. They also share highly specific imagery in their portrayals of subjection and vulnerability.

Despite the centrality of Spenser’s faery queen for his Faerie Queene and its Platonically idealized mode of mimesis, most studies do not define her symbolic scope or address her transcendental implications, though the poem explicitly evokes them. Elizabeth I was typically represented as God’s image and proxy, and Spenser extrapolates Gloriana from her through Platonic idealization of the beloved (I.pr.4). Just as Gloriana never directly appears in the action and Arthur cannot find her despite his continuing searches, so she is definitively beyond representation. Her role reflects divinity’s paradoxical immanence yet transcendence in Platonic and Judeo-Christian traditions: to some extent mediated, rather as Gloriana’s agents somewhat express her nature; yet still beyond apprehension. Spenser’s engagement with these issues of theology and representation approximates Florentine Platonism’s serio-ludic “poetic theology” involving paradox, wordplay, and riddling fables. By creating this deliberately inconclusive fiction, he audaciously rejected the prevailing requirements of literary narrative so as to adumbrate sublimities beyond the ordinary scope of language.

This chapter investigates the use of native romance in Book I of The Faerie Queene to understand Spenser's strategy in creating a Protestant romance-epic. It examines two aspects of Spenser's ‘reformation’ of native romance: allegory and use of chivalric romance mode. It begins with one instance of Spenser's use of native romance in Book I, the dragon-fight. It then considers the figures of Redcrosse and Una and their intertextual relation to comparable figures from native romance.

This chapter studies the relationship between one of the central preoccupations of educators (the need not just to teach but also somehow to enforce the retention of knowledge) and one of pedagogy's principal anxieties (the fact not only that students forget lessons they have learned, but also that such forgetting is quotidian and unexceptional, a natural property of the mind). Schoolmasters, translators, and commentators were anxious that the schoolboy's experience of reading Virgil's Aeneid brought him into dangerous proximity with what David Quint calls the poem's investigation of ‘the therapeutic effects of forgetting’. This chapter engages with a broad range of materials, from the Aeneid itself and the translations of Books Two and Four executed by the Earl of Surrey, to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century directives for teaching Virgil's epic. It concludes with a reading of several significant Virgilian moments in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. The chapter argues that there is a sense in which the history of epic in early modern England can be read as a history of forgetting epic, and that the poetry of the 1590s manages to dwell not on the consolidating moment of the schoolboy's encounter with ancient epic, but on the seas of smaller texts those schoolboys encountered under the watchful eye of their masters. Counterintuitively, the project of forgetting epic is a form of remembering mastery, and poetic modes such as pastoral draw a significant amount of their power from the poet's dream (unless it is a nightmare) that a master is either watching him or about to re-enter the schoolroom.

This introductory chapter discusses the influence Edmund Spenser had on William Shakespeare, showing how Shakespeare read Spenser and addressing the question of the relations between the them. It explores some distinctions between borrowing and allusion, and also clarifies the definition of the term ‘influence’, furthermore examining the poetry of Spenser and Christopher Marlowe, and identifying the differences between them. The chapter also looks at some of Marlowe's obvious and popular linguistic borrowings, as well as several of Shakespeare's more subtle ones, from Spenser's The Faerie Queene.

Spenser bases his heroic poem The Faerie Queene upon a Platonic concept that he often cites: “hero” derives from “Eros,” so that “hero” means “born of love,” which thus inspires “great work” (Cratylus, 398c–d). For Plato in the Phaedrus and Symposium, genuine love involves a desire for beauty that promotes development of personal character through trial and stimulates heroic achievement by disclosing inspirational ideals. Invoking deities of love and his “dearest” Queen Elizabeth in the first proem, Spenser claims to perceive a sublime ideal personified as faery’s queen, that he considers the poem’s fundamental “argument” and inspiration (I.pr.1–4). He thus follows the Platonizing procedures of early modern idealized mimesis, whereby a poet seeks to imitate Ideas more than nature. Seeking to counter the antipoetic arguments of Plato’s Republic and help dispel society’s illusions with higher vision like that dialogue’s responsible philosopher in the fable of the cave, Spenser innovatively transforms the poetics, conceptual content, and scope of heroic poetry.

This chapter examines Book II of The Faerie Queene where Spenser's incorporation of native romance shifts from the question of salvation to the projected union of history and romance in relation to Britain. The providential scheme for the determination of human lives in Book I is extended into Book II's investigation of British history. This chapter seeks to answer the following questions: How does the Calvinist emphasis on human depravity square with a vision of national redemption, especially in a Book concerned with temperance? How reliable is memory as a guide to one's sense of history as a revelatory of providence? How adaptable are the Arthurian historical materials to a providential historical discourse, particularly in the Tudor era?