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As for the faithful
loves, Spenser depicts a moving scene in which a girl is deserted by a
knight, and which reveals the poet’s power of writing:
And now it is
empassioned so deepe,
For fairest Vnaes sake, of whom I sing,
That my fraile eyes these lines with teares do steepe,
To thinke how she through guilefull handeling,
Though true as touch, though daughter of a
king,
Though faire as euer liuing wight was
faire,
Though nor in word nor deede ill meriting,
Is from her knight diuorced in despaire
And her due loues deriu'd to that vile witches share.
Yet she most faithfull
Ladie all this while
Forsaken, wofull, solitarie mayd
Farre from all peoples prease, as in exile,
In wildernesse and wastfull deserts strayd,
To seeke her knight; who subtilly betrayd
Through that late vision, which th'Enchaunter
wrought,
Had her abandond. She of nought affrayd,
Through woods and wastnesse wide him daily
sought;
Yet wished tydings none of him vnto her brought.
So there are no explanations, no “seven steps to virtue”.
There is adventure upon adventure, with a few affairs and exploits mixed in.
Like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Faerie Queen is a romantic
epic. Spenser’s masterpiece is also an ambitious allegory.
In the epic each hero or heroine represents a virtue. In the
course of their trials, they come to fully embody that virtue. The virtues
are Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy.
Spenser wanted to write 12 books, or sections, but finished only the six
(leaving a fragment of a seventh, on Mutability).
Redcrosse Knight, for example, represents Holiness and he
serves and defends the Church of England. Lady Una represents the one faith
and the Church of England. Errours, a half-serpent monster, stands for the
earliest mistake that mankind have committed in
the Garden of Eden. The
other creatures, demons and sinister humans in the poem, represent various
other evils and crimes. In this major allegory, even animals and buildings
stand for abstract virtues or badness.
Everything in the story has two levels — as part of the story and as part of
the allegory, or symbolic meaning. This can be seen in Book I, which
summarizes the whole poem. As a Romantic adventure, this is the story of the
Redcrosse Knight and Lady Una searching for Una’s parents, who are trapped
by a dragon. The knight kills the dragon and so wins the right to be the
lady’s husband. As a spiritual allegory, this is the story of a soul’s
encounter with the seven deadly sins, its separation from and reunion with
the one faith, and its final salvation by divine grace.
The story is a political allegory, and many allusions to some classical
writers, especially
Homer,
Ovid, and Virgil. The Faerie Queen
is
very hard to understand: the text needs the readers to have a knowledge of
Greek and
Roman mythology.
Spenser was influenced by Puritanism, Renaissance Neoclassicism, and
English nationalism. Though as a strong-minded Protestant, his ideas of
faith and sin come from Catholic philosophers. Milton, who was a child of
nine when Spenser died, judged Spenser a Christian humanist and a better
teacher than
St. Thomas Aquinas.
Spenser is sometimes called “the poet’s poet” because so many people
imitated and studied his style such as
stanza, meter, and rhyme.
In The Faerie Queene, he introduces a new kind of stanza, a stanza with nine
lines, with the last line containing six beats instead of the usual five.
This came to be known as the Spenserian Stanza. Spenser had a strong
influence on later poets, especially Romantics such as Keats, Shelley,
Byron, and Tennyson.
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