A History of English Literature

Spenser’s craft is the admiration of poets. Canto I, Book I ofThe Faerie Queene
begins:

A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine, cantering

Y cladd in mightie armes and siluer shielde,

Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine,

The cruell markes of many a bloudy fielde;

The iambic beat is regular, speech accent coinciding with metrical accent; nouns are
accompanied by suitable epithets. Smooth verse and decorous diction are conspicu-
ous features of a style remarkable for its ceremony and harmony, creating the poem’s
unique atmosphere.
‘Fairyland’ is a word first found in Spenser. Book I begins with ‘a faire Ladye in
mourning weedes, riding on a white Asse, with a dwarfe behind her leading a warlike
steed’. This is the world of Ariosto: knights, enchantresses, hermits, dragons, floating
islands, castles of brass. The legacy of Spenser is his style, which enchants us into this
world.His aim was not to lull us to sleep but to allow us to dream. Dreams contain
surprises: the next line is ‘Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield.’ The old armour
worn by this new knight is (as Spenser told Ralegh) ‘the armour of a Christian man
specified by Saint Paul v.Ephes.’(‘Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be
able to stand against the wiles of the devil’ – Ephesians 6:11: the shield of faith and
the helmet of salvation.) Spenser’s dream is the outward sign of inward religious
truths. To chivalric romance he adds medieval allegory; the glamour gilds the pill of
truth.
The ethical tru ths beneath Spenser’s ‘continued allegory or dark conceit’ are
‘d oubtfully construed’. Teachers have used allegory since Plato’s dialogues and Jesus’s
parables. In the Middle Ages, allegory grew elaborate, exposing agreed truths in a
universe of analogy. But a mode of exposition which has a surface story and a deeper
meaning runs the risk – if the reader lacks the assumed mentality – that the ‘true’
meaning may be missed or mistaken; Spenser’s twelve private moral virtues have not
been found in Aristotle. Allegory, like irony, was useful to humanists: a deeper mean-
ing which proved displeasing to authority could be denied. The unified metaphysic
of the medieval order was gone, and there were several new ones. The allegorical
keys to Spenser are therefore ‘doubtful’.
His moral sense, however, is usually clear and often simple. An example is the
episode of Guyon and the Bower of Bliss. Guyon, the hero of Book II, represents
Te mper ance. At the end of the Book he reaches the island of Acrasia (Gk: ‘unruli-
ness’),an earthly paradise of erotic love. At the gates he is tempted by two wanton
girls sporting in a fountain, who ‘shewed him many sights, that courage cold could
reare’. Inside the Bower, he sees Acrasia leaning over a sexually conquered knight,
and hears a voice sing a ‘lovely lay’ encouraging him to pluck the rose of love. Its
second stanza runs:

So passeth, in the passing of a day,

Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre,

Ne more doth flourish after first decay,

That earst was sought to decke both bed and bowre,

Of many a Ladie, and many a Paramowre:

Gather therfore the Rose, whilest yet is prime,

For soone comes age, that will her pride deflowre:

Gather the Rose of loue, whilest yet is time,

ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 99

Red-Crosse Knight and

Dragon: a woodcut from the

first edition of the first three

books of Spenser’s The Faerie

Queene(1590). The shield

bears the cross of St George

of England.