"The generall end... of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline."

An illustrated edition of The Faerie Queene, published in 1715.

So there are no explanations, no "seven steps to virtue." There is adventure upon adventure, with a few escapades and exploits mixed in. Like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Faerie Queen is a romantic epic. But unlike that 14th-century thriller, Spenser's masterpiece is also an ambitious allegory.

Allegory: Abstraction Embodied

Eric Klingelhofer

Edmund Spenser wrote portions of The Faerie Queene while living in Kilcolman Castle, County Cork, Ireland.

Put simply: 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 (self-control in the face of all temptations, not just drinking), Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy. Spenser intended 12 books, or sections, in all but finished only those six (leaving a fragment of a seventh, on Mutability).

Redcrosse Knight, for example, represents Holiness. Lady Una represents the one faith and the Church of England, which Redcrosse serves and defends. Errours, the half-serpent monster they meet, stands for the primal error mankind was to have committed in the Garden of Eden. The other creatures, demons and sinister humans that crowd the poem, represent various other evils and vices. In this arch allegory, even animals and buildings stand for abstract virtues or vices.

Everything functions on two levels — as part of the story and as part of the allegory, or symbolic meaning.

Edmund Spenser was born into a family of modest means, but he eventually came to be regarded as "the prince of poets" by his contemporaries.

This can be seen in Book I, which epitomizes the whole poem and is sometimes studied alone. Read as a Romantic Adventure, this is the story of the Redcrosse Knight and Lady Una searching for her parents, who are trapped by a dragon. The knight kills the dragon and so wins the right to be the lady's husband. Read 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.

Also thrown into the pot are a political allegory and many allusions to classical writers, especially Homer, Ovid, and Virgil. Reading The Faerie Queen is no stroll in the park: the text demands a thorough knowledge of Greek and Roman mythology.

Passing Down Influence

Spenser was very influenced by Puritanism, Renaissance Neoclassicism, and English nationalism. Though a staunch 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 imitated and learned from what he did with stanzas, meter, and rhyme. In The Faerie Queene, he introduces a new kind of stanza, one made up of 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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