Faerie Queene the Mutability Cantos and Selections F

The Faerie Queene Books

by Edmund Spenser, Robert H. Kellogg

This remarkable poem, dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I, was Spenser's finest achievement. The first epic poem in modern English, The Faerie Queene combines dramatic narratives of chivalrous adventure with exquisite and picturesque episodes of pageantry. At the same time, Spenser is expounding a deeply-felt allegory of the eternal struggle between Truth and Error]]

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Fantasy, Fiction, Literature, Renaissance, 16th Century

560 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1590

About the author

Edmund Spenser (c. 1552 - 1599) was an important English poet and Poet Laureate best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem celebrating, through fantastical allegory, the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I.

Though he is recognized as one of the premier craftsmen of Modern English verse in its infancy, Spenser is also a controversial figure due to his zeal for the destruction of Irish culture and colonisation of Ireland.

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

To me, this is the great long poem in English, beside which Paradise Lost seems like a clumsy haiku. Where Milton is precise and sententious, Spenser is exuberant, almost mad, and always focused on sheer reading pleasure. His aim is to take you on a crazed sword-and-sorcery epic, and his style combines godlike verbal inventiveness with the sort of eye for lurid details that an HBO commissioning editor would kill for.

It's almost like fan fiction. One imagines Spenser getting high over his copy of Malory one night, and then falling asleep and having a feverish opium dream about it. The Faerie Queene is the result: errant knights, evil witches and dragons, cross-dressing heroes, splenetic deities, and lots of damsels who get tied up in becomingly abbreviated outfits to await rescue. Despite this list of clichés, though, Spenser can also be fascinatingly transgressive, especially when it comes to gender roles: women in the Faerie Queene are by no means all passive weaklings, and there are no fewer than two different ‘warrior maids’ who ride around in full armour kicking the shit out of people who question their sense of agency or look at them funny. Note also the intriguing walk-on parts such as the giantess Argantè, who keeps men locked up ‘to serve her lust’ – a nice inversion of the usual trope of women being carted off as sexual prizes – and who is moreover defeated by the female knight Palladine.

Incidentally, Spenser likes to come up with inventive perversions to characterise his villains: Argantè is accused of prenatal incest, which I have to admit was a new one on me:

These twinnes, men say, (a thing far passing thought)
While in their mothers wombe enclosd they were,
Ere they into the lightsom world were brought,
In fleshly lust were mingled both yfere,
And in that monstrous wise did to the world appere.

I don't think enough has been written about Spenser's language. There is a tendency for modern readers to gloss over the tricky bits, and think: ‘Well, presumably this was an easy read back in the 1590s.’ It really wasn't. Spenser's language was, even to his contemporaries, extremely archaic and convoluted, with a distinct taste for inventive coinages. It's like a kind of Elizabethan Clockwork Orange (A Clockwork Potato?). Some of this is now invisible to modern readers. Words like amazement, amenable, bland, blatant, bouncing, centered, discontent, dismay, elope, formerly, gurgling, horrid, invulnerable, jovial, lawlessness, memorize, newsman, Olympic, pallid, red-handed, sarcasm, transfix, unassailable, violin, warmonger – all of them, and hundreds more, seem uncomplicated now, but that is only because Spenser invented them and we have become used to them in the centuries since. This is not to mention the hundreds of other words he coined that did not catch on and have now become obsolete (there's another).

I particularly like his flair for euphemism. Here's another awesome section, where a hapless husband has tracked down his wife after she was kidnapped by a group of satyrs. He hides nearby in the bushes, only to find out that she's actually having quite a good time:

At night, when all they went to sleepe, he vewd,
Whereas his louely wife emongst them lay,
Embraced of a Satyre rough and rude,
Who all the night did minde his ioyous play:
Nine times he heard him come aloft ere day,
That all his hart with gealosie did swell…

‘Come aloft’ of course meaning something along the lines of ‘mount sexually’. There's a lot of this kind of thing – Spenser not always coming across as the most secure guy in the world. The stanza concludes with another fun figurative flourish:

But yet that nights ensample did bewray,
That not for nought his wife them loued so well,
When one so oft a night did ring his matins bell.

Haha. Love it. This form of stanza – now known as ‘Spenserian’ – was his own creation, and the way each one concludes in a jaunty rhyming couplet makes him very quotable. I actually wrote this bit out in a notebook more than two years ago, which shows how long I've been reading this – it's been a sort of long-term project that I've dipped in and out of in between other books. This makes it hard to review, because I've now long forgotten half the stuff that happened in the first couple of sections. (Indeed when I started reading it, I was using a version on the internet, but I fell in love with the poem so hard that I ended up buying a luxury Folio Society limited edition bound in goatskin, probably the most expensive book in my entire collection – which, as Hannah was not slow to point out, seems hard to justify for a poem that you can read online for free.)

So OK, the paperback looks incredibly dull and imposing, and, yes, the idea of a 1500-page allegorical poem about Queen Elizabeth I does sound like a living nightmare – but The Faerie Queene is the opposite of boring. It's pure incident from start to finish. And if there's a message to the epic, taken as a whole, I think Spenser's closing lines point us in the right direction. He shows us that what matters in this world is not money or power – nor even, in the final analysis, the virtues that he has been exploring for nearly 40,000 lines. What matters is taking the time to find pleasure – in love, in knowledge, and, most of all, in literature:

Therefore do you, my rimes, keep better measure,
And seeke to please; that now is counted wise mens threasure.

[Schuyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved all the reactions from various people as I waded my way through this book. The army veteran who remembered reading The Faerie Queene in highschool. The stylish older lady who rolled her eyes at the bad memories. The howls of laughter from my family every time I read another lofty, unintelligible stanza about virtue's decline in the modern world. The time my brother asked "are you reading that to punish yourself?"

No, actually.

I dog-eared many pages of passages that struck me and rejoiced at the joy, vigor, and consistency with which his characters lived the Christian life.

Favorite Book
Each book had a different virtue. The first book (Holiness) had the tightest story plot, while the second was quite rambling. The first two didn't really resonate with me, but each one got better and more gripping as they went along. I have the most dog-eared pages of things I want to remember in Book 4 (Friendship) and Book 5 (Justice). The combination of justice and chastity, and the illustrations of wise friends, foolish friends, reconciliation and visionary work brought joy to my soul.

Favorite Characters
Artegall and his Tin Man, who went marching through the realm dispensing justice...Triamond and Cambell with their lady loves by their sides...the romance of Florimell and Marinell...King Arthur's squire. There were so many people to know and love. It would be hard to choose a favorite knight, but Artegall (Justice), Triamond (Friendship) and Calidore (Courtesy) were my favorite for the way they lived with purpose, fought as men, and protected women. And the women were pretty special as well. If you want visionary womanhood, this book has lots of examples.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spenser is probably the least read of the 'great' Elizabethan writers, and picking up his Faerie Queen it's easy to see why: it's over a thousand pages of poetry (9 line stanzas) written in a kind of cross-over medieval-renaissance English. Even English graduates tend not to have had to read the whole thing, getting away with selected cantos, a kind of edited highlights. But starting at the beginning and reading it straight through is a completely different experience. While it is overtly a moral and political allegory, Spenser is also a supreme story-teller and frequently very funny (in a literary kind of way).

Full of knights on chivalric quests, dragons, giants, monsters, the evil arch-magus and the sensually-tempting Duessa, this is like every fairy tale and Lord of the Rings copy-cat you've ever read, but put together by a supreme stylist and written in the most flexible, beautiful language. Some of the stories are very moving, others quite bizarre, and there's some very perverse sexuality on display. Since they often unroll simultaneously the narrative is a multi-layered one.

Creating deliberate links with both classical literature (particularly the epics of Homer and Virgil) as well as with medieval (Chaucer, especially) and Spenser's own contemporary Elizabethan age, this is both very different from Sidney and Shakespeare and yet also very close to them at the same time.

The best way to read it is to almost forget the fact that it's 'poetry', ignore the stanzas and simply read as if it were prose. Spenser's own sublime sense of rhythm and rhyme asserts itself and the words align themselves exactly as they need to.

Roche has edited this well but there is no introduction which is a shame, although the notes do extend beyond a simple glossary. But even so, this is a great edition of a magical and really enthralling classic.

[Diamond Cowboy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite epic poems.This epic poem was written by Edmund Spenser in the year of our Lord 1590.
It is very well written, written in a very delibberate arcaic style. It incompasses the stories of knights especially draws on the theme of Arthor and the round table.
I recommend this book to all.

If you like epic poetry come join me at my book club at: "Epic Poems Read Along". We would love to see you there.

[E. G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Note on the Text
Table of Dates
Further Reading

A Letter of the Authors Expounding His Whole Intention in the Course of this Worke: Which For that it Giveth Great Light to the Reader, for the Better Vnderstanding is Hereunto Annexed

Commendatory Verses
Dedicatory Sonnets

--The Faerie Queene

Textual Appendix
Notes
Common Words

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

When it comes to sheer reading pleasure, it is almost impossible to beat "The Faerie Queene". It has nearly everything that a reader could desire; action, romance, deep philosophical and theological meaning, allegory, pitched battles on fields of honor, blood, swords, spears...everything that makes life worth living. And it is all wrapped in some of the most beautiful language ever to be set down in the English tongue. Spenser was a master of English, and you can sense that he wrote for the joy and pleasure of shaping words, molding them, positioning them just so, and we, the readers, can bask in his joy.

More to come...

[Kay Pelham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this in a 9 month course with Kelly Cumbee at House of Humane Letters. I notice that my fellow students in that class have also given it 5 stars, while other GR friends have given it 3. Get thee to a class with Kelly Cumbee! She knows her Medieval/Elizabethan imagery and cosmology, and teaches it with much joy and skill. I also listened to the audio with David Timson as narrator. He was excellent.

[J.G. Keely · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some place Ariosto above Dante because he tempers his ridiculously erratic romanticism with remarkable satire, joie de vivre, and a gently sloping concession to an ending. While both Ariosto's and Spenser's works are long-winded, Spenser never overcomes the need for vindication which gradually grew out of this work. This desperation precluded the light-heartedness that buoyed Ariosto's lengthy tale.

The more one reads The Faerie Queene, the more one begins to respect Liz's desire to keep this man at kingdom's length; like so many naively obsessed stalkers of this latter age, Spenser never develops the external analysis necessary either for receiving signals nor finding wit.

He has certainly learned well his lessons from Milton, Homer, Dante, Ariosto, and the Mantuan Swan, but while he is a good student, he could never stand amongst his teachers. The abruptly unfinished Aeneid is far superior to Spenser's self-obsessed dike-fingering.

He becomes so convinced of the necessity of his own brilliance that he cannot stop until it is proven. He refused to accept that this redemption might not come at all. Perhaps he hoped, like Virgil, to underscore the injustice of his political mistreatment with a great work, but unfortunately could not muster the strength to die upon its proper completion.

Each meandering addendum bears its certain character and excitement. Spenser is not without poetry, allusion, and the other necessary tools. While Virgil's exile may have helped inspire his works, Spenser's exile became the central and driving theme. This book that simply wouldn't end is an apt enough metaphor for the unyielding injustice he labored under to create it.

[Celia T · Rating 5 out of 5]

He held up a book then. “I'm going to read it to you for relax.”
“Does it have any sports in it?”
“Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True Love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest Ladies. Snakes. Spiders... Pain. Death. Brave men. Cowardly men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles.”
“Sounds okay,” I said and I kind of closed my eyes.

Virgina told me to do it and I did it and she was right: it was great!!

I think people make too much of the Extreme Difficulty of this book. It has a reputation for being impenetrable but once you get into the swing of it it actually bounces along. (I have a friend who asserts that this was the book that singlehandedly made them drop their degree in English literature, but then they switched over to Russian literature and learned Russian in order to read Russian novels in Russian, so, uh, chacun a son gout I guess). If you are hoping to tackle it--and you should--my advice is, don't treat it as a Great Work of English Literature. It is--but it also feels like nothing so much as a game of Dungeons and Dragons that got very out of hand. Just jump in and enjoy the poetry and the adventure and the silliness and the lesbian subtext. It really is fun, I promise.

[Werner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Note, April 24, 2019: I edited this just now to insert spoiler tags in a couple of places (I don't think Goodreads provided that option at the time I originally wrote the review).

I read this (in a different edition, without notes and which preserved the Elizabethean spellings) as part of my course preparation for teaching British Literature when we were home schooling our girls, and found it a challenging --though not unrewarding-- read. The quaint spellings and archaic diction and vocabulary require slow and careful reading to mentally translate. Fully enjoying the work as Spenser originally intended is difficult (if not impossible), first because it's only half finished; he completed only six of the projected dozen "books" that make up the whole, which plays havoc with developing a completed storyline. Second, the narrative the poet relates isn't simply an epic story; it's intended as an allegory (his model was the earlier Italian epic Orlando Furioso by Ariosto, which English interpreters of that day misread as an allegory). The various questing knights, for instance, represent assorted cardinal virtues; the title character is easily recognized as a stand-in for Elizabeth I, and so forth (for instance, the Goodreads description above suggests that the Amazon queen, Radigund, who winds up decapitated, represents Mary Queen of Scots). Full-blown allegory usually works well only if the various symbolizations are easily understood, or explained; that wasn't the case for me, so that aspect was largely over my head.

Despite those defects, though, considered as stories in their own right many of the various episodes here prove to be quite fascinating (once you decipher the language :-)). The setting is Arthurian England, but Spenser treats it as a full-blown fantasy world, where high-medieval knights co-exist with figures from classical mythology, and the human world shares a much-crossed border with Faerie. Consequently, it's a fountain-head of the Arthurian fantasy subgenre, and a treasure trove (which later genre writers undoubtedly used as a grab-bag) of fantasy motifs. For me, one of the best parts was the depiction of Sir Artegall's love interest, Britomartis, a "lady knight" whose own lethal combat skills make her perhaps literature's first action heroine --she rescues him, rather than the other way around, when he gets himself into trouble. (Radigund is no slouch at fighting either; and while Spenser views her as villainess rather than heroine, that's undoubtedly not the way she views herself.) Of course, Spenser had a long way to go in his gender attitudes; the approving description of Britomartis returning the defeated Amazons "to men's subjection" and repealing the "liberty of women" had me rolling my eyes big time. :-) But her character nevertheless is somewhat subversive of the ideas of that day about gender roles --and both male and female readers certainly must have picked that up.

[Kristi Siegel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first really read this poem in graduate school with a teacher so superb he made Spenser, Milton, Donne, Herbert, and Marvell exciting. They are still among my favorite poets.

Faerie Queene is Spenser's richly imaginative 16th-century epic poem depicting the education/spiritual growth of the Redcrosse Knight. In Spenser's epic being able to distinguish between good and evil, true and false becomes imperative, but difficult in a landscape that is deceptive and illusory.

Spenser's landscapes metamorphose to slowly reveal the truths behind the illusive exteriors. For example, shortly after defeating the monster Errour, Redcrosse meets an "Aged Sire" whose show of devotion the knight finds completely convincing. His cottage, where Redcrosse and his companions take shelter for the night, similarly appears to be a humble, innocent dwelling:

A little lowly hermitage it was,
Downe in a dale, hard by a forest side...
There was a holy Chappell edifyde,
Wherein the Hermite dewly wont to say
His holy things each morne and eventyde. (I.i.34)

But this is a landscape strewn with traps and snares. A sinister note begins to sound in the resumed description of the hermit who "could file his tongue as smooth as glass" (I.i.35) and scatters a frequent "Ave-Mary" in his speech. The night, ominously "creepeth on them fast" and when the travelers are "drownd in deadly sleeps" (I.i.36), the hermit's true nature emerges. The hermit, revealed to us as the evil Magician, Archimago (Hypocrisy), uses his dark skills to fashion a false dream for Redcrosse wherein Una appears to wantonly seduce him. When Redcrosse rejects Una, Archimago creates another vision, and Redcrosse flees.

And so, Redcrosse's education continues within the intricate world Spenser imagines.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read it completely almost fifty years ago. I recall especially the Book of Courtesy, the Sixth Book, with its hero Calidore. I theorized at the time that Courtesy did not fit with the other allegorically systematized virtues. No wonder Spenser found he was concluding his epic before he'd really caught a head of steam to get through his 12 books, the first HALF.
He dedicates his poem to Sir Walter Raleigh, Lieutenant of Cornewayll, saying this a "continued Allegory, or dark conceit...to fashion a gentleman or noble person," his having followed all the ancients, Homer, Virgil and even Ariosto. He began with a "tall, clownishe [contrified] young man" at the Queene's feast who desires an adventure. The Lady saying he must wear the armor she had, for a Christian knight. He put it on, and appeared the goodliest, took on knighthood and mounted a "strange Courser," "where beginneth the first book, viz, 'A gentle knight was pricking on the playne'"(408).

Calidore, for instance, silences the "monstrous Beast" of the thousand tongues,"some were of dogges, that barked day and night,/...And some of Tygres, that did seem to gren,/But most of them were tongues of mortal men,/ That spake reproachfully, not caring where or when."(VI.xii.27) Sounds like Elizabethan Courtesy runs at odds with modern democracy, which depends on reproaches against people in power.
But Calidore silences this monstrous Beast of cacophony-democracy (?!) and breeds politesse, instead of "venemous despite" which Spenser fully expects even for this his epic poem. Backbiting "Ne spareth he the gentle Poets rime, / But rends without regard of person or of time."

As an undergrad I wrote on this poem's prosody, especially the ottava rima concluded by an alexandrine (hexameter). Northrop Frye calls it, "The most remarkably sustained mastery of verbal opsis...which we have to read with a special attention, the ability to catch visualization through sound." Hazlitt says, "His versification is the most smooth and the most sounding in the language. It is a labyrinth of sweet sounds." In fact, I come up against Spenser's beautiful verses for moral ugliness. Possibly Ben Jonson, a verse moralist, found the same, for "Spenser's stanzas pleased him not, nor his matter" (Drummond's bio).
I don't find Frye's opsis, but rather, the sound pursues its own system, attached to the poem much as in a contrapuntal musical composition (Frye calls allegory as here, a "contrapuntal technique" or canonic imitation.) As for alliteration, Frye finds its overuse by characters marking liars and hypocrites (wow--Spiro Agnew never knew this!), as in "But minds of mortal men are muchell mad..."

In his effective verses, the sensual vividness results in a frozen motion:
When on the ground she groveling saw to rowle,
She ran in hast his ife to have bereft:
But ere she could him reach, the sinful sowle
Having his carrion corse quite senseless left,
Was fled to hell, surcharg'd with spoile and theft.
Yet over him she there long gazing stood,
And oft admired his monstrous shape, and oft
His mighty limbs, whilest all with filthy blood
The place there overflowne, seemd like a sodaine flood. (IV.vi.32)

Note how few of Spenser's lines enjamb to the next, here mainly "and oft / His mighty limbs."
Contrast Donne's precipitous enjambments, speeding the movement forward to his witty conclusions, or Milton's enjambing his first line, "Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree" to a larger proportion later in Paradise Lost, say
"higher Argument
Remains, sufficient in itself to raise
That name, unless an age too late, or cold
Climate, or Years damp my intended wing
Deprest"
--Book IX, lines 42-46.

As for Spenser's Mutability Cantoes, on the Comet and perhaps the Supernova-- changes in the Heavens-- the poet stands clearly against Galileo (sixteen years later) or Giordano Bruno, Spenser's contemporary, who was publishing his 400 pp Latin poem on the Infinite Universe and Innumerable Worlds in 1592, four years before the Fairie Queene.
By sheer happenstance, Bruno and Spenser died around the same year, 1600 and 1599, Spenser four years younger than Bruno. Spenser's last couple years were terrible, for though Irishmen like Yeats would approve that Spenser was driven from Kilcoman, his family holdings in North Cork. (Ben Jonson says Spenser lost a daughter when native Irish troops torched the house.)

[Cindy Rollins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Update: I finally finished the whole book and most especially loved the Book 7 fragment. Diana/Cynthia, the moon. Right up my alley and so beautifully written. A lifelong desire fulfilled.



Now I am starting to enjoy and understand the language much quicker. This section especially reminded me of Monty Python with the cutting off of arms and other flesh wounds. :)

This review is for Book 5 but the edition changed here midstream.

[Tori Samar · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fabulous audiobook. Timson is an excellent narrator of Spenser's poetry. I am quite certain I would not have made it through The Faerie Queene without being able to listen to him while I followed along in my book.

[Jacob Aitken · Rating 5 out of 5]

As Galadriel said in Return of the King, some things which shouldn't have been forgotten were lost. Spenser is one of those things. One of the great tragedies in Western pedagogy has been this ignorance of Spenser. He tells a beautiful story using the vehicle of hypnotic poetry. And there is sex. Lots of it. But even the sexual themes have pedagogical ends. Britomart is not merely chaste. She is told to vigorously pursue chastity. This does not mean merely to avoid all types of sexual encounters. Otherwise, we are left with a boring apophatic ethics. No, she is told to pursue chastity for the goal of a consummated and pure marriage. Sir Guyon combats the sensual Bower of Bliss by a more holy sensuality.

In so doing Spenser has remained thoroughly Aristotelian but has reworked the old medieval Thomism around a "merry Protestantism." C. S. Lewis was correct: Spenser must be read through at least twice to fully appreciate him. Spenser is difficult, to be sure. Because of that we must applaud the noble (if somewhat wacky) attempts by Canon Press to make him accessible. But he is not that hard. His language is no different from his contemporary Shakespeare. If you are reasonably familiar with Shakespeare's language Spenser shouldn't be that challenging. And he rhymes--something which can't always be said of Shakespeare. What makes him really difficult is the archaic spelling, but even this is overcome after about seventy pages (the human brain unconsciously begins tranlsating the "u"s as "v"s, etc.).

To quote Lewis again, To read Spenser is to grow in mental health.

[Grace · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars: Hard to read, but once you understand it, and the allegorical significance, SUPER interesting!

[David Acevedo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alright. So sometimes you read books merely in order to feel good about yourself. I'm a sinner.

Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, deemed one of the most difficult books int he English language, I read as a challenge to myself, which also included David foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Joyce's Ulysses. I read them all and am proud of it.

So The Faerie Queen is epic poetry. It celebrates Queen Gloriana (one of the many dubs of Elizabeth I). I won't go into "plot" details in this review. I'll say, however, that this book geared me towards reading Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, and also served as the basis for my own epic poetry book "Empírea o la Saga de la Nueva Ciudad" (Erizo Editorial).

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I DID ITTTTT WOWOWWOWOW


this book was wild


It also had a lot of death and rape in it

I enjoyed books 2-5 the most .....Britomart is the lady knight of my dreams pretty much. I want her and Artegall to kiss :( I don't think that's too much to ask

I also loved Prince Arthur!!! Aww babe.

I also loved his squire but I got really confused after the fortieth nameless squire showed up TBH

[Mary Cornelius · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whew. Well, that's done.

[Anand · Rating 5 out of 5]

This took several years and a few stops before I finally completed this epic for the first time.

I can't quite bring myself to write a full-fledged review of the poem, except that I found it difficult, strange, wonderful, majestic, engrossing, luxuriant, compelling even in its difficult slowness, complicated and complex in its ethical and aesthetic scheme, erotic and chaste at the same time, sharp with the most dreamy sharpness, vivid in a proto-cinematic fashion, and incompletely complete. Britomart, Guyon, Redcrosse, Artegal, Calidore, and more make up for some of the most inventively allegorical personages in Spenser's canon, and the very free blend of philosophy and Christian and biblical and classical lore and myth makes for one of the wildest and most lovely poetic inventions the English ever did. And the poetry, with its mix of basic storyteller narrative voice and lush poetic ornament, truly makes him a poets' poet. For Spenser to be a poets' poet, as C. S. Lewis once explained somewhere, was for him not so much to have written in a "poetic" style (though that is the case with Spenser and his fellow Renaissance poets) as to have been loved and admired by poets.

Here are choice quotes, then, on the poet and his poem:

"His versification is at once the most smooth and the most sounding in the language. It is a labyrinth of sweet sounds...that would cloy by their very sweetness, but that the ear is constantly relieved and enchanted by their continued variety of modulation. ... It is the perfection of melting harmony, dissolving the soul in pleasure or holding it captive in the chains of suspense."
— William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets

"The poets' poet."
— Charles Lamb, as quoted in The English Poets

The Faerie Queene is the most extended and extensive meditation on sex in the history of poetry. It charts the entire erotic spectrum, a great chain of being rising from matter to spirit, from the coarsest lust to chastity and romantic idealism. The poem’s themes of sex and politics are parallel: the psyche, like society, must be disciplined by good government. Spenser agrees with the classical and Christian philosophers on the primacy of reason over animal appetites. He looks forward to the Romantic poets, however, in the way that he shows the sex impulse as ultimately daemonic and barbaric, breeding witches and sorcerers of evil allure. Like the Odyssey, The Faerie Queene is a heroic epic in which the masculine must evade female traps or delays.
— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae

I am reading The Faery Queen—with delight. [...] I can't think out what I mean about conception: the idea behind F.Q. How to express a kind of natural transition from state to state. And the air of natural beauty.
— Virginia Woolf

The "Faerie Queen," like Dante's "Paradise," is only half estimated, because few persons take the pains to think out its meaning.
— John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Vol. II

"Spenser's poetry is all fairy-land. [...] The poet takes and lays us in the lap of a lovelier nature, by the sound of softer streams, among greener hills and fairer valleys. He paints nature not as we find it, but as we expected to find it, and fulfils the delightful promise of our youth. He waves his wand of enchantment, and at once embodies airy beings, and throws a delicious veil over all actual objects. The two worlds of reality and of fiction are poised on the wings of his imagination."

— William Hazlitt

And several quotes from C. S. Lewis, one of Spenser's best readers:

"The things we read about in [The Faerie Queene] are not like life, but the experience of reading it is like living."

"It is not, perhaps, absolutely necessary to have a large edition in fact; but it is imperative that you should think of The Faerie Queene as a book suitable for reading in a heavy volume, at a table—a book to which limp leather is insulting—a massy, antique story with a blackletter flavour about it—a book for devout, prolonged, and leisurely perusal."

"I never meet a man who says that he used to like the Faerie Queene."

"The Faerie Queene is perhaps the most difficult poem in English. Quite how difficult, I am only now beginning to realize after forty years of reading it."

[Steve]

The Faerie Queene is likely one of the longest poems in the English language, if not the longest, which I listened to as an audiobook, all thirty-two hours, made longer by a tiresome narrator. In six books, Mr. Spenser spins imaginary tales of yore, of battles fought, treachery unfolded, honor upheld, and hearts won. Can we safely skip this detour on our literary road tour? The answer is a comfortable yes, we are safe avoiding this lengthy, tedious work, likely more grist for the graduate school mill than for popular consumption and appreciation. Mindful of an unnecessarily lengthy journey, this review will attempt to compensate in brevity.

The stories that unfold across these pages are largely ones of good versus evil. Sorcery and a collection of monsters make for steady unpredictability. We never meet Gloriana, “The greatest Glorious Queene of Faerie lond,” though we do meet those acting in her service. With a surfeit of characters, Britomart, a formidable female knight, and the villainous Braggadocio are worthy of mental bookmarks. I came to one sliver of humor worth sharing. Remember the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where Arthur encounters the knight “who moves for no man?” That scene popped to mind in Book One when Prince Arthur meets the giant Orgoglio, the giant left the worse for wear, all chopped up.

[John Pistelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Virginia Woolf opens her essay on Edmund Spenser's epic romance, one of the signal literary monuments of the English Renaissance, this way: "The Faery Queen, it is said, has never been read to the end." A recent monograph called Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene gathers many such skeptical remarks from the last four centuries, from Philip Larkin pronouncing Spenser's epic "the most boring poem in English" to Spenser's own rhetoric professor, who, upon being sent the manuscript by his former student, derided it as "Hobgoblin run away with Apollo." The poem's foremost living apologist, the controversial Camille Paglia, not unpersuasively blames its academic stewards for its popular neglect in her own magisterial Sexual Personae—Spenser's critics, she says, "have thrown up a thicket of unreadable commentary around him"—but even she might acknowledge that The Faerie Queene (1590-96) is genuinely difficult, not only for readers today, but going all the way back to Ben Jonson, who complained that Spenser "writ no language."

First, its 1000+ pages are written not only in verse but in a sequence of complex stanzas whose form Spenser himself devised, called Spenserians in his honor. Each stanza has nine lines with an ababbcbcc rhyme scheme; the first eight lines are iambic pentameter, while the last is an alexandrine. Page after page after page of this virtuosic jingling and jangling wears on the readerly nerves, especially when Spenser, who can't always fit his characters' multisyllabic names into the metrical scheme, writes endless battle sequences in which "he" did this to "him," which caused "him" to attack "them" in turn, until you have no idea who is doing what to whom. Milton may have pronounced Spenser a "better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas," but when he prefaces Paradise Lost with a dismissal of rhyme as "the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre; graced indeed since by the use of some famous modern poets, carried away by custom," he might have had Spenser in mind. (Furthermore, the poem's archaic spelling, needlessly preserved in many current editions—don't we modernize Shakespeare and the King James Bible?—may irritate contemporary readers.)

The poem is also both exceedingly long and unfinished, a lengthy journey without a destination. Spenser's plan for the projected 12-book epic, announced in a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh appended to the first edition, promises "a continued Allegorie, or darke conceit" meant "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline" as well as to honor "the most excellent and glorious person of our soveraine the Queene." A brilliant syncretist or synthesizer of diverse traditions, Spenser, following the Continental Renaissance epics, adopts the classical epic as his model, but adds a medieval dimension of Arthurian romance and allegory, all to vindicate not only Christianity in general but English Protestantism particularly in that late-16th-century moment of Elizabethan national and religious consolidation.

While readers may fear the way this allegorical technique lends itself to didacticism, the poem's bigger problem and biggest triumph is that Spenser quickly loses control of his conceit amid his wide-ranging sources—which eventually include Neoplatonic philosophy, Egyptian mythology, and Celtic lore in addition to Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian inspirations—not to mention his burgeoning, complicated plot.

Except for Book I's linear allegory of the Redcrosse Knight's coming to the New Jerusalem, The Faerie Queene defies brief (or even extensive) summary. Convinced he was writing not at the dawn of a renaissance but in a degenerate "stonie" (as opposed to golden) age, Spenser wanted to revive medieval ideals of holiness and courtly virtue, hence his chivalric subject matter. Each of the poem's six books is supposed to narrate the adventures of a particular knight in the fantastic land of Faery to exemplify one Christian virtue. In practice only Books I and II and V and VI obey this rule, themselves not always consistently, while the interconnected narratives of Books III and IV offer a sometimes bewildering panoply of knightly adventures only loosely organized around the formidable female warrior Britomart.

Paglia is correct when she judges Britomart the epic's most impressive character and "one of the sexually most complex women in literature," a "warlike mayd" who travels in armored male guise, winning the love and inspiring the fear of some women, though destined to bear the Tudor line leading to Elizabeth. As an archetype, she progresses, as Paglia observes, from adolescent androgyne to great mother. James Joyce argued that Daniel Defoe invented both English imperialism and feminism in the dual figures of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, but Spenser, in the figure of Britomart, beat Defoe by about 130 years. Spenser chastises men for their skepticism about female capacity:

But by record of antique times I find,
That women wont in warres to beare most sway,
And to all great exploits them selues inclind:
Of which they still the girlond bore away,
Till enuious Men fearing their rules decay,
Gan coyne streight lawes to curb their liberty;
Yet sith they warlike armes haue layd away:
They haue exceld in artes and pollicy,
That now we foolish men that prayse gin eke t'enuy.

Even Britomart draws the gender line, though, when she encounters a rival female warrior, Radigund, who reduces a company of male knights including Britomart's betrothed, Sir Artegall, to women's work (they have to sew and wear aprons) in her dungeon. Britomart kills her and overthrows her female tyranny, leaving Spenser uneasily to explain the difference between legitimate and illegitimate queendoms:

she there as Princess rained,
And changing all that forme of common weale,
The liberty of women did repeale,
Which they had long vsurpt; and them restoring
To mens subiection, did true Iustice deale:
That all they as a Goddesse her adoring,
Her wisedome did admire, and hearkned to her loring.

Yet Paglia invests too much in her theoretical case that Spenser is an Apollonian poet in a tradition extending from Nefertiti's bust to Wilde's plays; in this way, she is no less an allegorizing critic than those specialists she mocks. She sees Spenser's love of armor and all the hieratic individuality it implies—is armor really individualizing, however, when it conceals the face and therefore the identity of the wearer?—but comparatively slights his loving, repeated, scenes of Britomart's and other female warriors' disrobing, his almost fetishistic obsession with tender female flesh and golden hair spilling out of glinting, dinted metal:

And eke that straunger knight emongst the rest;
Was for like need enforst to disaray:
Tho whenas vailed was her loftie crest,
Her golden locks, that were in tramels gay
Vpbounden, did them selues adowne display,
And raught vnto her heeles; like sunny beames,
That in a cloud their light did long time stay,
Their vapour vaded, shew their golden gleames,
And through the persant aire shoote forth their azure streames.

The knightly armor, and the ranked and steely stanzas that are its formal corollary in the poem's design, is everywhere threatened by formlessness and sensuality, often represented by different kinds of women than Britomart (or Elizabeth) with their sovereign martial power. Spenser revels in images of the monstrous feminine, evil creatures with comely faces and grotesque lower halves, from the enchantress Duessa ("Her neather parts, the shame of all her kind, / My chaster Muse for shame doth blush to write") to a sphinx-like prodigy coiled under an altar and representing the evils of the Catholic Church ("For of a Mayd she had the outward face, / To hide the horrour which did lurke behinde").

Also posing a threat to virtue are the shapeless, surging masses. Here the depressing matter of our poet's imperial politics demands our attention. He composed these many lines while serving as secretary to the Lord Deputy of Ireland, at the same time as he wrote memos recommending, in the matter of the Irish rebels, that, to borrow the words of a later imperial ideologue, the English should "exterminate all the brutes." These events leave their bloody trace in the poem, especially Book V, the Legend of Justice. There Sir Artegall gallops through a series of political parables all pointing to Spenser's faith in hierarchy. He is loyally served by his enforcer Talus, a proto-robot,

made of yron mould,
Immoueable, resistlesse, without end.
Who in his hand an yron flale did hould,
With which he thresht out falshood, and did truth vnfould.

While the poem cautions against avarice, most notably in Book II's journey to the filthy Cave of Mammon and its hellish underworld annex, Book V is anxious about the leveling or inversion of hierarchies. The aforementioned episode of Radigund's female tyranny offers only one example; when Radigund is defeated, Talus puts his flail to its customarily brutal work on her collaborators and subjects, astonishing even Britomart:

There then a piteous slaughter did begin:
For all that euer came within his reach,
He with his yron flale did thresh so thin,
That he no worke at all left for the leach:
Like to an hideous storme, which nothing may empeach.

An earlier episode in which Artegall and Talus dispatch a communist giant and the resentful rabble he's roused up with his demagogy, likewise makes the case: "But when at them he with his flaile gan lay, / He like a swarme of flyes them ouerthrew." It's hard to think of an English classic this canonical that is also so saturated in openly genocidal ideology; Spenser makes a more notorious Victorian imperialist like Kipling seem a model of enlightenment. Why is Spenser not always seen in such a light? Two disquieting possibilities come to mind: either the further back in time an atrocity occurred, the less we care about it, or else the Irish have lately been so assimilated into "whiteness" and "Europe" that they lack the morally prestigious otherness imputed to imperialism's later victims. Or maybe he is protected by his general obscurity; as Woolf implies, who makes it to Canto V? Nobody, in any case, will read this poem for its politics.

The epic's most memorable and influential single sequence, the episode of the Bower of Bliss that concludes Book II, draws all these themes together and is the poem's real, if displaced, climax. There Sir Guyon, the knight of temperance, travels to the witch Acrasia's erotic and aesthetic paradise, where "art striuing to compaire / With nature" creates a half organic and half artificial haven of sportive sexuality:

The wanton Maidens him espying, stood
Gazing a while at his vnwonted guise;
Then th'one her selfe low ducked in the flood,
Abasht, that her a straunger did avise:
But th'other rather higher did arise,
And her two lilly paps aloft displayd,
And all, that might his melting hart entise
To her delights, she vnto him bewrayd:
The rest hid vnderneath, him more desirous made.

Yet Sir Guyon, with the help of his holy sidekick, the Palmer, recovers himself and stops acting the voyeur. He marches to the Bower's heart, where he finds a knight disarmed and unmanned in the lap of the sexy witch, "Whilst round about them pleasauntly did sing / Many faire Ladies, and lasciuious boyes." They catch the lovers in "A subtile net, which onely for the same / The skilfull Palmer formally did frame," while Sir Guyon tears the place apart: "But all those pleasant bowres and Pallace braue, / Guyon broke downe, with rigour pittilesse." Protestant and Platonic iconoclasm could have no better monument than the extraordinary mini-epic that is Book II, Canto XII—except that Spenser had to envision it all, all the "shapes of naked boyes" and "naked Damzelles," while his poetry itself vies with nature for command of an elaborate artifice, a subtle net intricating deliriously liquescent sensuality to its ramrod denunciation. As Plato instructs, it is in the end a sin to make art at all, especially art as wild as The Faerie Queene.

Much as Spenser looks back to Homer and Chaucer—and I am intensely moved by his tribute to "old Dan Geffrey (in whose gentle spright / The pure well head of Poesie did dwell)"—his proliferating text anticipates late modern epics like Faust, Ulysses, and Gravity's Rainbow, deliberately written to exceed any one reader's power to hold the whole in mind. The criticism Paglia disparages, as evidenced by the sometimes detailed endnotes in the Penguin Classics edition, strains too hard to make a unity of the Spenserian sprawl, whereas Paglia more wisely refers to Spenser's "quarrel with himself."

A poem that begins in certitude, with the relatively straightforward Christian allegory of its almost self-contained first book narrating the journey toward holiness of the Redcrosse Knight (AKA St. George), breaks off in a fragmentary myth of Spenser's own invention about the goddess Mutabilitie's attempt to overthrow the Olympian gods. The androgynous Dame Nature puts down this coup by assuring the chaotic upstart deity that what looks like change is only the universe's static essence unfolding:

I well consider all that ye haue sayd,
And find that all things stedfastnes doe hate
And changed be: yet being rightly wayd
They are not changed from their first estate;
But by their change their being doe dilate:
And turning to themselues at length againe,
Doe worke their owne perfection so by fate:
Then ouer them Change doth not rule and raigne;
But they raigne ouer change, and doe their states maintaine.

It's a neat philosophical point, prepared earlier in the poem by Book III's sojourn to the Garden of Adonis, where souls grow in preparation for life, and where the ceaseless change of underlying substance creates a paradoxical stability, "eterne in mutabilitie." This mind-twisting concept is the poem's best self-defense: just as its rigidly formal stanza can hold (more or less) a bewildering diversity of content, so does the entire massive structure retain its shape even as its interiors teem and flower.

This justification is even true to a point, but in the end Spenser's merit is not allegory or even narrative—the poem's many stories themselves, whatever their higher significance, are often narrated loosely and confusingly—but rather phantasmagoria. He is at his best describing visionary places. Russell J. Meyer, in his useful Twayne's Masterwork Studies introduction to the poem, goes so far as to recommend that we "follow A. C. Hamilton's advice in his edition of the poem and think of it as analogous to a dream." As with my dreams, I am not left with specific characters or stories—it's all a blur; one person and event dissolves into another—but a memory of having been to a place other than the daytime world, a place not without menace, but where anything seemed possible.

Spenser's first harsh critic, his blunt old professor, got it right when he wrote, "Hobgoblin run off with Apollo." The Mediterranean god of song and measure goes on holiday with a gothic sprite in the dark labyrinth of the Northern woods, there to see monstrous couplings and marvelous changes.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

It really was epic. Thank you to Kelly Cumbee of the House of Humane Letters for guiding me through.

Timson’s narration was fantastic.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2029672.html[return][return][return]This is one of the curiosities of the English language, a long poem written in its own peculiar verse structure in which archetypal figures based on myths of many different origins contend for mastery of spoils, women and virtue in a fantasy landscape which resembles the north of County Cork. Some of the allegory is pretty straightforward, as when Prince Arthur springs to the defence of the cruelly oppressed lady Belge; other parts are more layered and/or obscure.[return][return]It has taken me five months to read this. I found I could not proceed faster than one canto every day, and on many days I did not manage any cantos at all; and there are 74 of them, plus the proems and the two concluding verses. It's not that it is particularly difficult to read, compared even to Shakespeare; the style is generally consistent, and a good edition (mine is the Longman edited by A.C. Hamilton) helps you through the more obscure words or usages. But it's dense and moves both rather slowly and rather fast at the same time.[return][return]I found that one of the biggest barriers to my understanding of the poem was Tolkien. Spenser writes of elves and dwarves in a parallel fantasy world, but these are not Tolkien's separate races; the elves are effectively just a fantasy nationality, and the dwarves just short guys (who tend to appear as servants). I was also subliminally expecting some Big Bad villain, but in fact we have a chain of more or less loosely connected stories, with the main linking character Prince Arthur, who is intended to be King Arthur (and yet didn't fit for me too well into my own vision of Arthurian legend). So I found myself unnecessarily distracted by my attempts to fit it into fantasy genres with which I am more familiar.[return][return]What does come over with extraordinary vigour is Spenser's love of the Irish landscape. Subsequent history shows him as one of the many adventurers who descended on Munster to occupy land confiscated from the Desmonds and their affiliates, who then lost it all in a subsequent rebellion; it's worth being reminded that from Spenser's point of view, he had come to stay, and expected his descendants to live on at Kilcolman for many generations. County Cork was his home and the focus of his imagination. It's not too difficult to believe that he died essentially of a broken heart after losing it all.[return][return]As for the actual meaning of it all: I think it is possible to over-analyze. Sometimes the allusions are pretty obvious, or indeed the description may be pretty much what it appears to be (thinking for instance of the house whose chambers correspond to organs of the human body, or the personified rivers of Britain and Ireland). The only one of the six virtues where Spenser has much interesting to show about the virtue itself, for my money, was Courtesy; I felt he let his pen wander aside from the point as his fancy took him elsewhere. The best character in it is Britomart, who is obviously the model for George R.R. Martin's Brienne of Tarth. [return][return]And there's a robot.

[Collin · Rating 3 out of 5]

First book: Delightful! Many of the scenes got to be a little boring, but overall, I loved this book. Maybe it was because I was forcing my own interpretations of the character dynamics and situations on the story, but I really did enjoy it. Una is great, Redcrosse is very interesting, and the Una/Redcrosse/Arthur teamup was so much fun! The conflicts all worked well, especially the ones toward the end. I liked it.

Second book: Eh... not so much. This book is much more scattered than the first, and /so/ much more didactic. There isn't so much a sense of the story going somewhere organically; it's just Spenser shoving his characters into various moralizing situations. My favorite scene was the one with Braggadochio and the beautiful huntswoman - I firmly believe that any Spenserian woman threatened with rape should attempt to stab her attacker with a spear, rendering him too afraid to chase her when she runs away. Good problem solving, mystery woman. But it was a mystery, and I'm still not really sure why that scene was even in this book, as nothing about it affects anything else in the story. Maybe I need to read it more than once, but it just didn't flow as well as the first book, or with as many interesting characters and conflicts.

Third book: YES. YES. YES. And again, YES. Britomart is amazing. (I just finished the final book, so my reviews will be shorter and less helpful.)

Fourth book: I LOVED THIS BOOK. I'm not sure whether this or Book 3 is my favorite. Probably Book 3, but this one comes close. Britomart rescues her man. I love it (I think the mature thing is to look over what our culture now deems "misogyny" or "patriarchy" because no one getting mad at Spencer's morals are going to actually change his story or make it less fun).

Fifth book: Eh, fine. Artegall is fine. I don't think he's worthy of Brits, but he'll do, I suppose. Even if he does have a metal man to do his dirty work.

Sixth book: Eh. Okay. I liked the Arthur-and-Timias parts best, of course, because I have a huge soft spot for Timias and his love for Belphoebe (who was unfortunately missing). This one got really bogged down in lots of characters and interlaced situations. I just hope Artegall got back to Brits.

Overall: I want to give this three stars and four at once. Three is probably more accurate for a mean score, but I'm still SO in love with Books 1/3/4 that I feel like a four-star rating is more true to my enthusiasm for what I do like. It's a difficult book and it's often not fun at all, even in my favorite books, and gosh knows I went to university summaries more often than not because I could not be bothered to disentangle plotlines for characters I didn't care about.

But it's a classic for a reason. And I DO LOVE ME SOME BRITOMART AND BRITOMART/AMORET FRIENDSHIP. And Arthur/Timias, and Timias/Belphoebe.

I want to write a few retellings. Some of these characters are just so alive!

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don't be scared off by this one. Spenser wrote the greatest poem that emerged from the age of Shakespeare. Surrender yourselve's to his lingo, his rhythm, his abundant humor. There are images in this poem I'll never forget, along with one of the most compelling and admirable female warriors ever realized in a poem, Britomart. What a babe. Seriously

The language may be tough at first for contemporary readers, but as recently as 120 years ago, FQ was pretty standard children's reading--the kids read for the exciting stories (dragons, and Elizabethan robot/golem sort of creature, fantastic gardens, fraught old libraries, action, adventure, and unreliable clergy.) Adults dug it for many of the same reasons, but also because of its improving allegory. Spenser's poem can help you to become a better person. That's why he wrote it.

Anyone who thinks this poem is impenetrable or boring is a person who gives up too easily. Don't belike that. (Spenser will even teach you not to be like thatl)

This edition is superb, with informative and explicative footnotes on which you should not linger too long--drop down to them only when you feel you really have to. The next time you read it, you can make long dives into the notes having already absorbed the epic once. Give it a shot. It's a hoot.

[Jay Kennedy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Faerie Queen is one of my favorite classic English literature pieces. It is a sword and sorcery tale following several knights each embodying a virtue. The allegory between Protestant and Catholic is multi-layered but isn't too vague to decipher. This epic is an adventure in the likes of Chaucer and John Milton, which you won't want to skip if you are well-read in English literature.

[Daniel Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

The experience of reading this book is akin to how I imagine the experience of being charged down by a fully-armoured knight. Six times. It is the last hurrah of the era of the court romance, and, my word, does it shout loudly.

[Diana · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a life-changing book. Having read C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, George MacDonald, and even John Bunyan first and then going up stream to Spenser is quite the experience! No matter what order read, this is the book that pulls all of those ideas together.

[Kate Howe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Worth all the work of reading it!