An Epic Undertaking

When I told my wife that I was going to write about Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590–6) for Slightly Foxed, she commiserated. She had read Book I at school, with the juicy bits cut out, and had found it boring. I was now embarking on rereading the entire work, all six books of it, plus a fraction of a seventh, amounting to over 36,000 lines of verse. More fool I.

Such is the daunting length of this epic poem that Virginia Woolf famously wrote that the best way of developing a taste for it was not to read it. She eventually took the plunge in her fifties, was delighted, then felt a strong desire to stop. The scale of the task and the vast body of interpretation that surrounds Spenser’s text continue to leave it in danger of deterring the general reader and becoming the preserve of the classroom or lecture hall. Yet I came first to The Faerie Queene with no preconceptions, apart from its length, and was exhilarated by the music and descriptive power of its verse. In giving me a taste for the long poem, it changed my reading habits. It would be a shame if such a work became confined to academia. Don’t be put off by what you may have heard. Let me place the poem in its historical context. Its first important Renaissance predecessor, published in completed form in 1532, was Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, the action of which takes place during the war between Charlemagne and the Moors. Its second, appearing in 1581, was Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, which centres on the capture of Jerusalem during the First Crusade in 1099. In both poems homage is paid to the d’Este family of Ferrara, who were the authors’ patrons. These two works and their classical forerunners, Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Odyssey, were Edmund Spenser’s chief exemplars as he set about creating his immense epic. His purpose, as laid out in a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh in 1589, was ‘to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline’ by means of verse ‘clowdily enwrapped in Allegorical deuises’ which should prove ‘delightfull and pleasing to commune sence’. The figure chosen to personify the gentleman was the legendary King Arthur, although he makes only occasional appearances in the poem. Spenser originally planned to devote twelve books to illustrating Arthur’s moral virtues as a brave knight before he became king, and a further twelve to demonstrating his political virtues after he had been crowned. In the event, only a quarter of this project was completed, with the addition of two and a bit cantos which contrast what is mutable on earth with the unchanging nature of eternity. The first three books appeared in 1590, the second three in 1596. Each is devoted to a virtue: holiness, temperance, chastity, friendship, justice and courtesy. The fragment of the seventh, whose subject is constancy, was published in 1609, ten years after the poet’s death. Where Ariosto and Tasso exalt the d’Este family, Spenser dedicates his poem to Queen Elizabeth I, the Faerie Queene of the title, that ‘most excellent and glorious person’ at whose behest the knights ride out to right wrongs. Each of the six books is divided into 12 cantos comprising around 50 nine-line stanzas. These are made up of eight iambic pentameters followed by an iambic hexameter or alexandrine, with a rhyming pattern ababbcbcc. To give you a flavour of Spenser’s metrical music, here is how he introduces us to Sir Guyon, the Knight of the Red Crosse or of Holinesse, in Canto I of the first book. A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine, Ycladd in mightie armes and siluer shield, Wherein old dints of deep woundes did remaine, The cruel marks of many a bloody fielde; Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield: His angry steede did chide his foming bitt, As much disdayning to the curb to yield: Full iolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt, As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fit. The exuberance of Spenser’s poetic imagination is all encompassing. It includes many depictions of grossness, illustrating the sins which the knights are sent out to combat. In Book I Duessa is revealed as the Scarlet Whore of Babylon or, in Protestant eyes, the corrupt Church of Rome. Gloriously apparelled, she is stripped naked to reveal ‘A loathly, wrinckled hag, ill favoured, old,/ Whose secret filth good manners biddeth not be told’. The poet then goes on to give details, from her scabby head to her dung-laden fox’s tail and her feet, one an eagle’s claw, the other a bear’s paw. In Book IV fair Amoret is snatched by a creature likened to a boar, the usual figure of lust, whose ‘wide, deep poke, downe hanging low’ and ‘huge great nose . . . empurpled all with bloud’ are clear references to male genitalia. There is also beauty, both moral and physical. In Book I Prince Arthur, a paragon of virtue, makes his first appearance: ‘His glitter and armour shined far away,/ Like glauncing light of Phoebus brightest ray;/ From top to toe no place appeared bare,/ That deadly dint of steele endanger may:/ Athwart his brest a bauldrick braue he ware,/ That shind, like twinkling stars, with stones most pretious rare.’ At the beginning of Book IV Britomart, thought to be a male knight, is revealed as a woman by the unlacing of her helmet. ‘Which doft, her golden lockes, that were vp bound/ Still in a knot, vnto her heeles down traced,/ And like a silken veile in compasse round/ About her backe and all her bodie wound.’ The knights are often involved in battles. It takes Sir Guyon three days to overcome a dragon (Book I), an incident where Spenser excels himself in images of horror. Take, for instance, the beast’s jaws:

Three ranckes of yron teeth enraunged were, In which yet trickling blood and gobbets raw Of late deuoured bodies did appeare, That sight thereof bredd cold congealed feare: Which to increase, and all atonce to kill, A cloud of smothering smoke and sulphure seare Out of his stinking gorge forth steemed still, That all the ayre about with smoke and stench did fill.

In Book V Sir Artegall locks arms with a Saracen who demands a toll for crossing a bridge. They fight in the river, the knight unhorsing his opponent, whose mount can swim like a fish. Spenser likens the clash to that between a dolphin and a seal whose writhings make the sea foam. It ends with the beheading of the Saracen. Later in the same book Artegall pursues a cave-dwelling robber who changes himself into a fox, then a bush, then a bird. The bird is brought down by a stone, but it pricks the hand that picks him up by becoming a hedgehog. He reassumes human form but Talus, the knight’s groom, a terrifying henchman armed with an iron flail, ‘Gan driue at him, with so huge might and maine,/ That all his bones, as small as sandy grayle/ He broke, and did his bowels disentrayle.’ Aside from these life-and-death struggles are delightful set pieces. In Book IV the Thames marries the Medway, and the ‘great banquet of the watry Gods’ held to celebrate their union is witnessed by rivers great and small, from the Nile and the Amazon, the Severn and the Humber to the Darent and the Lee, the Welland and the Nene. In Mutabilitie, the fragment of Book VII, at the mighty assembly where Nature rules that things are not changed from their first state, we are treated to a charming procession of the four elements, the seasons and months of the year, day and night, the hours, and life and death. In 1580 Spenser went to Ireland as secretary to Lord Grey de Wilton, the Lord Deputy, and remained there for most of the rest of his life. A colonial bureaucrat and landowner, he wrote a pamphlet arguing that Ireland would not be wholly pacified until its language and customs were suppressed, if necessary by force. In 1598 his house, Kilcolman Castle in County Cork, was destroyed by fire in Tyrone’s Rebellion, the nine-year war between an Irish confederation and Tudor England. Whatever he may have thought of its inhabitants, Spenser reveals a deep love and knowledge of the Irish countryside in The Faerie Queene. Its rivers, from the Liffey, Shannon and Boyne to the Bandon and ‘Mulla mine’, or the Awbeg, which flows near Kilcolman, attend the nuptials of the Thames and the Medway. And it is in Ireland, on the ‘highest hights’ of the fictional Arlo Hill, that the Gods assemble to hear the titanness’s case against Cynthia, or the moon, in Mutabilitie. The poet recalls the time when Ireland far outdid the rest of the British Isles in wealth and goodness.

The Gods then vs’d (for pleasure and for rest) Oft to resort there-to, when seem’d them best: But none of all there-in more pleasure found, Then Cynthia; that is soveraine Queene profest Of woods and forests, which therein abound, Sprinkled with wholesome waters, more then most on ground.

Spenser was well attuned to the power politics of his day. Those to whom dedicatory sonnets are addressed at the end of the poem include Sir Christopher Hatton, Lord High Chancellor; Lord Burleigh, Lord High Treasurer; Sir Francis Walsingham, principal secretary to the Queen; Lord Howard of Effingham, who led the British fleet against the Spanish Armada; and the poet’s old boss, Lord Grey de Wilton. And throughout the poem the fount of authority, the Queen, is hailed for what Sir Guyon calls her ‘so great excellence, and rare perfection in mortalitye’. While still clothed in allegory, Book V has clear allusions to current political events. Artegall has been identified with Lord Grey and Sir Philip Sidney, both champions of the Protestant cause, and the woman whom he rescues, Irena, is the old Gaelic name for Ireland. Her chief enemy, Grantorto, represents the Catholic powers that pose the greatest threat to Britain – the Pope and Spain. There are references in the book to the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots, Spanish oppression of the Low Countries and Henri IV’s conversion to Catholicism. These subtexts of The Faerie Queene are fully elucidated in the two editions of the poem that I have used in rereading it. Penguin Classics, reprinted in 2003, scores on its introductions to the books but is hampered by having its notes, which include modern translations of archaic words, at the back. For ease of use I prefer the Longman Annotated English Poets (revised edition published by Routledge in 2013), whose notes are on the same page as the verse. It also has an index to the huge cast of characters. It is from that version that I have taken my quotes. Each person will read The Faerie Queene at his or her own pace. The first time I went fast, enjoying the stories without further ado. Rereading it, I found it best to proceed more methodically, digesting two cantos, that is, a 100-plus stanzas, at a time. Spenser changed my reading habits. Of long English poems I knew only Milton’s Paradise Lost and Regained and Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, both of which were set books at school. The Faerie Queene I came to of my own accord. Intrigued by the length and reputation of the poem, I was immediately caught up in the music of Spenser’s metre and his prodigious imagination. My enjoyment was such that perseverance was no effort. Rereading lacked the delightful surprise of discovery and was harder work in that I had been commissioned to convey in writing my enthusiasm for the poem to others. But closer consideration meant greater appreciation of the author’s grounding in classical and Renaissance literature and his involvement in the political and moral questions of his time. The multiple layers of a great work repay return visits. After my first reading, marvelling at Spenser’s ability to maintain narrative verve over such a huge distance, I wanted to know if the same stamina pertained to other epic poems in English. Through Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Wordsworth’s Prelude, Scott’s Marmion, Keats’s Endymion, Byron’s Don Juan, Browning’s The Ring and the Book and the Cantos of Ezra Pound I found that it did. The Faerie Queene thus opened up a world previously only glimpsed. For that I am profoundly grateful.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 86 © Simon Scott Plummer 2025