The Faerie Queene and last years of Edmund Spenser

In its present form, The Faerie Queene consists of six books and a fragment (known as the “Mutabilitie Cantos”). According to Spenser’s introductory letter in the first edition (1590) of his great poem, it was to contain 12 books, each telling the adventure of one of Gloriana’s knights. Like other poets, Spenser must have modified his general plan many times, yet this letter, inconsistent though it is with various plot details in the books that are extant, is probably a faithful mirror of his thinking at one stage. The stories actually published were those of Holiness (the Red Cross Knight), Temperance (Sir Guyon), Chastity (Britomart, a female knight), Friendship (ostensibly concerning Triamond and Cambello, although these play a small part), Justice (Artegall), and Courtesy (Calidore). As a setting Spenser invented the land of Faerie and its queen, Gloriana. To express himself he invented a nine-line stanza, the first eight of five stresses and the last of six, whose rhyme pattern is ababbcbcc.

What is most characteristic of Spenser in The Faerie Queene is his serious view of the capacity of the romance form to act as a paradigm of human experience: the moral life as quest, pilgrimage, aspiration; as eternal war with an enemy, still to be known; and as encounter, crisis, the moment of illumination—in short, as ethics, with the added dimensions of mystery, terror, love, and victory and with all the generous virtues exalted. Modern readers’ impatience with the obscure allusions in the poem, with its political and ecclesiastical topicalities, is a failure to share the great conflict of Spenser’s time between Protestant England and Roman Catholic Spain; to Spenser, the war between good and evil was here and now. In The Faerie Queene Spenser proves himself a master: picture, music, metre, story—all elements are at one with the deeper significance of his poem, providing a moral heraldry of colours, emblems, legends, folklore, and mythical allusion, all prompting deep, instinctive responses.

The poem was published with the help of Sir Walter Raleigh, who owned large lands to the east of Spenser’s estate. He and the poet came together at Kilcolman in 1589 and became well acquainted with one another’s poetry. Spenser implies that Raleigh persuaded Spenser to accompany him back to England to present the completed portion of The Faerie Queene to Queen Elizabeth herself. The history of this episode is charmingly evoked in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (completed 1595), which is also one of Spenser’s most effective pastoral embodiments of a provincial innocent up against the sophistications of a centre of power, with subsequent reflections on false, superficial love and the true love that finally animates a concordant universe.

Arriving thus in London with the support of the queen’s favourite, Spenser was well received—not least by Elizabeth herself. The first three books of The Faerie Queene were duly published in 1590, together with a dedication to her and commendatory sonnets to notables of the court. Spenser saw the book through the press, made a hurried visit to Ireland, and returned speedily to London—presumably in the hope of preferment. At this time he supervised the printing of certain other of his poems in a collection called Complaints (1591), many of which had probably been written earlier in his career and were now being published so as to profit from the great success of his new heroic poem. It is difficult to believe that the many titles of poems that have not survived but were mentioned earlier in his career were not published in revised form and under other titles in his known work, for Complaints suggests by its miscellaneous and uneven character that Spenser was hastily bringing to the light of day nearly every last shred that he had to offer; early translations, an elegy, and the delightful mock-heroic poem “Muiopotmos” are contained in it. Another item, the beast fable Prosopopoia; or, Mother Hubberd’s Tale, apparently caused the authorities to withdraw unsold copies of the volume (perhaps in 1592) because it contained a covert attack on Lord Burghley, who was one of the most powerful figures of the court. Nevertheless, in 1591 Queen Elizabeth gave Spenser a small pension for life.

Back in Ireland, Spenser pressed on with his writing, in spite of the burdens of his estate. In early 1595 he published Amoretti and Epithalamion, a sonnet sequence and a marriage ode celebrating his marriage to Elizabeth Boyle after what appears to have been an impassioned courtship in 1594. This group of poems is unique among Renaissance sonnet sequences in that it celebrates a successful love affair culminating in marriage. The Epithalamion further idealizes the marriage by building into its structure the symbolic numbers 24 (the number of stanzas) and 365 (the total number of long lines), allowing the poem to allude to the structure of the day and of the year. The marriage is thus connected with the encompassing harmonies of the universe, and the cyclical processes of change and renewal are expressed in the procreation of the two mortal lovers. However, matters are less harmonious in Books IV, V, and VI of The Faerie Queene, which appeared in 1596 and are strikingly more ambiguous and ironic than the first three books. Book V includes much direct allegory of some of the most problematic political events of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, and Book VI’s Sir Calidore is a far less confident and effective fairy knight than his predecessors were. In the only surviving fragment of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609), Spenser represents Elizabeth herself as subject to Mutability, the inexorable processes of aging and change.

This burst of publication was the last of his lifetime. His early death may have been precipitated by the penetration into Munster of the Irish uprising of 1598. The undertakers and other loyalists failed to make headway against this. Kilcolman was burned, and Spenser, probably in despair despite the Privy Council’s having just recommended his appointment to the important post of sheriff of Cork, carried official letters about the desperate state of affairs from the president to London, where he died. He was buried with ceremony in Westminster Abbey close by the grave of Geoffrey Chaucer.

Legacy

Spenser was considered in his day to be the greatest of English poets, who had glorified England and its language by his long allegorical poem The Faerie Queene, just as Virgil had glorified Rome and the Latin tongue by his epic poem the Aeneid. Spenser had a strong influence upon his immediate successors, and the sensuous features of his poetic style, as well as his nine-line stanza form, were later admired and imitated by such poets as Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Romantic period of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He is widely studied today as one of the chief begetters of the English literary Renaissance and as a master who embodied in poetic myth a view of the virtuous life in a Christian universe.