Spenser’s adoption of chivalric romance as the form of his epic. Medieval
Arthurianism had enjoyed a new popularity in Italy at the court of Ferrara, in
Ariosto’s Orlando furioso(1532) and Tasso’s Rinaldo(1562). The Puritan Spenser
wanted to ‘overgo’ these poems, to build a national myth: the Tudors were descended
from British kings, of whom Arthur was the greatest.
Spenser’s first three books are prefaced by a letter to Ralegh: ‘Sir: knowing how
doubtfully all allegories may be construed, and this book of mine (which I have
entitled The Faerie Queene), being a continued allegory or dark conceit, I have
thought good ... to discover unto you the general intention ... to fashion a gentle-
man or noble person ...’. This was the aim of Sidney’s Defence. Spenser uses the
‘historical fiction ... of King Arthur’, following ‘the antique poets historical: first
Homer, who in the persons of Agamemnon and Ulysses hath exampled a good
governor and a virtuous man ... ; Virgil ... Aeneas; Ariosto ... in his Orlando;
and lately, Tasso .... By example of which excellent poets, I labour to portrait in
Arthur, before he was king, the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve
private moral virtues, as Aristotle had devised – the which is the purpose of these
first twelve books ...’. [If accepted, he plans a further twelve on the pollitique
vertues.] Arthur, he goes on,I conceive to have seen in a dream or vision the Faerie Queene, and ... went to seek her
forth in Fairyland. In that Faerie Queene, I mean ‘glory’ in my general intention; but in
my particular, I conceive the most excellent and glorious person of our sovereign Queen,
and her kingdom in Fairyland .... She beareth two persons (the one of a most royal
Queen or Empress, the other of a most virtuous and beautiful lady), this latter part in
some places I do express in Belphoebe: fashioning her name according to your own
excellent conceit of Cynthia – Phoebe and Cynthia being both names of Diana .... In the
person of Prince Arthur, I set forth magnificence.This last princely virtue contains the twelve moral virtues, of which ‘I make twelve
other knights the patro ns,fo r the more variety of the history, of which these three
books contain three: the first, of the knight of the Red Cross, in whom I express
Holiness; the second, of Sir Guyon, in whom I set forth Temperance; the third, of
Britomartis,a lady knight, in whom I picture Chastity ....’
The complexity of the project is apparent. Elizabeth’s other name in the poem, as
‘most royal Queen and Empress’, is Gloriana; the twelfth book was to have described
the twelve days of Gloriana’s annual feast. Spenser wrote three further books, of
Friendship, Justice and Courtesy. Two Cantos of Mutability from the Seventh Book
appeared posthumously. There are six books of twelve cantos, each of about fifty
nine-line stanzas; the poem runs to about 33,000 lines: shorter than Arcadia or
Byron’s Don Juan or Dickens’s David Copperfield, but longer than the Iliad and three
times as long as Milton’s Paradise Lost. Spenser wrote only half of ‘these first twelve
books’, one quarter of the grand plan, but he died in 1599.
The Faerie Queene and the Arcadia, both printed in 1590, are the first major works
in English literature since Le Morte Darthur.Hugely ambitious, their scale and
accomplishment give them an importance which posterity has confirmed in differ-
ent ways. Spenser’s complex long poem, imitative of early Chaucer, was drawn on by
Milton, Wordsworth and Keats. But the popularity ofArcadia ended with the 18th
century; its prose was too artful for the democratic Hazlitt. In these two works,
which have the megalomania of the Elizabethan great house, scholars have recently
found rich intellectual schemes.98 3 · TUDOR LITERATURE: 1500–1603