The Faerie Queene

The Faerie Queene is an incomplete allegorical poem by Edmund Spenser. As he explains in a letter to Sir Walter Ralegh accompanying the first edition, the aim of the work is "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline" by setting out twelve moral virtues in the narratives of twelve books. For this purpose, the person who connects the twelve books is Prince Arthur, not yet come to his kingdom, but the virtue of each book is set out in the person of a particular knight. Only six of the books were completed and published. These are:

Book I: The knight of the Red Cross, or Holiness

Book II: Sir Guyon, or Temperance

Book III: Britomartis, or Chastity

Book IV: Cambel and Telamond, or Friendship

Book V: Sir Artegall, or [[Justice}}

Book VI: Sir Calidore, or Courtesy

Each book has twelve cantos, of varying length. In addition, there are two cantos on mutability, presumably intended as part of a book on Constancy.

Character of the poem

The poem is written in the Spenserian stanza.

Book VI begins with

The waies, through which my weary steps I guyde

In this delightfull land of Faery

Are so exceeding spacious and wyde,

And sprinkled with such sweet variety,

Of all that pleasant is to eare or eye,

That I nigh ravisht with rare thoughts delight,

My tedious travell doe forget thereby;

And when I gin to feele decay of might,

It strength to me supplies, and chears my dulled spright.

This expresses one way in which Spenser wishes his work to be seen, and is an apt introduction to the Book on Courtesy, which is largely pastoral in character. But not all the variety to which he refers is "sweet". Some parts are stern, others (notably much of Book V, on Justice) positively brutal, others dogmatic though not necessarily unsubtle, while much is dramatic, carrying the reader forward through the narrative flow.

The stanza quoted also hints at the poet's divergences from the main theme of each book, and the introduction of characters not strictly necessary to the plot.

There are also striking passages of imaginative or natural description.

The allegory

It is generally accepted that the allegory is on more than one level. There is the moral allegory already mentioned, which itself is manifested in more than one way, but there is also a continuing reference to events and persons in recent history, for instance the defeat of the Spanish Armada (book V), and Sir Philip Sidney represented by Sir Calidore.