POET

Edmund Spenser (1552 - 1599)

BIOGRAPHY

To understand Edmund Spenser's place in the extraordinary literary renaissance that took place in England during the last two decades of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, it is helpful to begin with the remarks of the foremost literary critic of the age, Sir Philip Sidney. In The Defence of Poetry, (1595), written in the early 1580s, Sidney looked back on the history of English literature and sees little to admire. He mentions the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and a few sonnets by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey; occasional tragedies such as those printed in the 1560s in A Mirror for Magistrates; and one book of contemporary poetry, Spenser's Shepheardes Calender (1579). Although France and Italy and even lesser nations such as Scotland had their notable poets and held them in esteem, England, according to Sidney , had recently brought forth only "bastard poets" and "poet-apes," and, consequently, the art itself had "fallen to be the laughing-stock of children." Though one might quarrel with Sidney over his list of the best native writers, it is certainly true that England could boast of no early poet other than Chaucer comparable in stature to Dante, Petrarch, or Boccaccio. At the time Sidney was writing, moreover, England lacked altogether the sort of thriving literary culture that was so visible across the Channel in France. Sidney himself set out to repair this deficiency, and with him the other most important writer of his generation, Edmund Spenser.

A glimpse of Spenser's audacious plan to help provide England with a great national literature appears in an appendix printed in the 1590 edition of the first three books of his most important work, The Faerie Queene. In a letter addressed to his neighbor Sir Walter Ralegh, Spenser sets out to explain the "general intention and meaning" of his richly elaborated epic. It is "an historicall fiction," written to glorify Queen Elizabeth and "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline." In pursuing this latter aim, the poet explains that he has followed the example of the greatest epic writers of the ancient and the modern worlds: Homer and Virgil, Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso. Now, to set out to depict the queen herself and to "fashion" members of her nobility in virtuous and well-bred discipline was certainly a bold undertaking for the son of a London weaver. For him to compare his work with the most exalted poetry of Italy, the glittering center of European culture in this period, must have seemed to many of his readers mere bravado or self-delusion.

The attempt to write a neoclassical epic in English was without precedent—unless, perhaps, one includes Sidney 's Arcadia (1590), which was begun at about the same time. Among the heroic poets named in Spenser's Letter to Ralegh as worthy practitioners of the form, Virgil was generally regarded as the greatest, and Spenser, like Dante and Petrarch before him, seems to have taken Virgil as his personal mentor and guide. From the Proem to Book I of The Faerie Queene, the reader may infer that Spenser sometimes thought of his entire career as a recapitulation of that of his illustrious Roman counterpart. He began, as Virgil had begun in his Eclogues, with pastoral poetry, which Spenser published in his first major work, The Shepheardes Calender . A decade later, in The Faerie Queene, he graduated to poetry on martial and political subjects, as Virgil had done when he wrote his great epic, the Aeneid, for the court of Caesar Augustus. Spenser's opening lines, which echo verses prefixed to the Aeneid , announce his intention to exchange his "Oaten reeds" (or shepherd's pipes) for "trumpets sterne." Although he transformed the traditional epic introduction to include an invocation to Cupid, god of love, along with the more traditional address to the Muses and although the poem actually resembles the quasi-medieval romance epics of Ariosto and Tasso more closely than it does classical epics, the poet's claim to follow in the great line established by Homer and passed down by Virgil was altogether serious.

Conscious self-fashioning according to the practices of ancient poets, and also of more-recent ones on the Continent, was an essential part of Spenser's project—but only a part. With his eye frequently turned to Chaucer and other English authors, he set out to create poetry that was distinctively English—in religion and politics, in history and custom, in setting and language. For example, he mentions in the Letter to Ralegh that he designed his epic to depict "twelve private morall vertues, as Aristotle hath devised." In reality, however, just three of the six books that he lived to complete revolve around virtues that Aristotle would have recognized, and even those three—temperance, friendship, and justice—were greatly altered by Spenser's Anglo-Protestant form of Christianity and by other elements in his English background. The other three—holiness, chastity, and courtesy—have little to do with Aristotle but much to do with England in the high Middle Ages. In the best sense Spenser's art is syncretistic, drawing together elements from many traditions. Its aim, however, was to enrich the culture of his native land.

The process by which he realized this aim was neither rapid nor predictable. Comparing Spenser with Sidney , C. S. Lewis has written that he was "a more ordinary man, less clever, less easily articulate," and he succeeded by working harder. For that very reason, perhaps—along with his understated humor, his deep understanding of human psychology, and his easy humanity and good sense—Spenser has been closer than Sidney to the hearts of many of his countrymen.

Edmund Spenser was born into the family of an obscure cloth maker named John Spenser, who belonged to the Merchant Taylors' Company and was married to a woman named Elizabeth, about whom almost nothing is known. Since parish records for the area of London where the poet grew up were destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, his birth date is uncertain, though the dates of his schooling and a remark in one of his sonnets ( Amoretti 60) lend credence to the date traditionally assigned, which is around 1552. Just which John Spenser was his father is also uncertain, since there were at least three men of that name working in London as weavers at this time. If the poet took his lineage from John Spenser of Hurstwood, then he derived from a well-established family that had lived in Lancashire since the thirteenth century. If he was the son of the John Spenser mentioned in John Stow's Survey of London (1603), then his father was a man of some prominence who in later years bought a house that had once belonged to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and who was knighted in 1594 by Queen Elizabeth upon his election as Lord mayor of London. In any case, from the poem Prothalamion (1596) reveals that Spenser thought of himself as a descendant of "An house of auncient fame," namely the family of the Despencers. There, is no evidence, however, that he could claim to be a gentleman, and that fact alone made his rise to prominence more difficult in a class-conscious age.

Spenser's parents took what may have been the most important step in advancing their son's fortunes by enrolling him in the Merchant Taylors' school in London. During the early 1560s, when Spenser began his studies there, it was under the able direction of a prominent humanist educator named Richard Mulcaster, who believed in thoroughly grounding his students in the classics and in Protestant Christianity, and who seems to have encouraged such extracurricular activities as musical and dramatic performances. Mulcaster was also important to Spenser's career for purely pragmatic reasons, since he had good connections with the universities and sent students of modest means such as Spenser on to them with some regularity. The poet later expressed his gratitude to Mulcaster by depicting him as "A good olde shephearde, Wrenock" in the December eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender and by naming his first two children, Sylvanus and Katherine, after those of his master."

The only glimpse that survives of the young poet at school comes from financial records indicating that in 1569, when he was in his last year, he was one of six boys given a shilling and a new gown to attend the funeral of Robert Nowell, a prominent lawyer connected with the school. This connection with Nowell was to prove important to Spenser's later development, for the lawyer's estate helped support his subsequent education."

In 1569, at the usual age of sixteen or seventeen, Spenser left the Merchant Taylors' School for Cambridge, where he enrolled at Pembroke Hall. Even before he arrived, however, he was already composing poetry and attracting the attention of other writers. Perhaps with the help of Mulcaster, who had friends in the Dutch immigrant community, he had recently arranged to publish thematically linked sets of epigrams and sonnets entitled The Visions of Petrarch and The Visions of Bellay, which appeared in the collection commonly referred to as A Theatre for Worldlings (1569) by the Dutch poet Jan van der Noot. Even in his maturity Spenser seems to have thought well of these early translations of French and Italian poetry, for he revised and reprinted them among his Complaints in 1591. Although not original, they nonetheless shed light on Spenser's interests at the time which were directed toward poets of the Continent and had already settled on themes that would surface again in his later poetry, namely the tragic precariousness of life and the impermanence of things in the material world."

Such scraps of reliable information as are known about Spenser during his university days suggest that he served as a sizar (a scholar of limited means who does chores in return for room and board) and that he received his B.A. in 1573 and his M.A. in 1576 with no official marks of distinction as a scholar. He regarded the experience as vital to his development, however, as can be seen in his later reference to the university as "my mother Cambridge" in The Faerie Queene (IV.xi.34). Little is known of his friendships at Pembroke. He must have been acquainted with Lancelot Andrewes, two years his junior, who later became a bishop and was well known for his sermons and for his part in translating the King James Version of the Bible. Clearly, Spenser had also gained the confidence of the master of Pembroke, John Young, who later became bishop of Rochester and gave the poet his first post as a personal secretary. Most important for Spenser's literary career, however, was his close friendship with Gabriel Harvey, a professor of rhetoric who served initially as his mentor and ultimately as his literary promoter. Spenser later celebrated their friendship in The Shepheardes Calender, in which he appears as Colin Clout and Harvey is represented as the wise shepherd Hobbinoll."

Though a lackluster poet himself, Harvey seems to have encouraged Spenser in many of the aspirations that later shaped his career. Harvey was characteristically effusive, for example, about the need to ground English poetry on the great models of Greco-Roman antiquity, both by shaping its versification on Latin principles and by undertaking classical genres that had not yet been attempted in English. In the late 1570s he composed a vernacular epic (now lost) and a work on the ancient Muses of poetry that is similar in outline to Spenser's Teares of the Muses (1591). At about the same time, he may have played a part in introducing Spenser to Sidney and in securing for his friend a position in the London household of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth as well as a key figure in the radical Protestant faction at court and one of the most powerful noblemen in the realm. The connections with Leicester and Sidney helped to launch Spenser's career, both as a poet and as a government official. Finally, in 1580, just before circumstances forced a separation between the two friends, Harvey gave Spenser's prominence as a writer a boost by publishing a set of five high-spirited letters that had passed between them, which helped to establish his friend's public image as England's "new poet."

In the letters Spenser and Harvey chat happily about their contacts with great men and their various works in progress, including Spenser's Faerie Queene and a surprising array of his other early works that were later lost--or perhaps silently incorporated into those that were published. These works included ten Latin comedies, several dream visions, an epithalamium celebrating the "marriage" of the rivers of England, and a work of literary criticism entitled The English Poete. The letters are even more interesting for their revelation that Spenser and Harvey had recently become involved in a literary circle gathered around Sidney . The group, which called itself the "Areopagus," was short-lived, and though it may have been formed with playful reference to the great literary academies of France and Italy, it seems to have been better known for its high spirits and good conversation than for its seriousness. The writers involved--including the learned diplomat Daniel Rogers, Sidney 's friends Sir Edward Dyer and Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke, and the academician Thomas Drant--seem to have occupied themselves primarily with experiments in Latin prosody, attempts at various genres of new poetry based on classical models, and the promotion of English as a literary language. Rogers, however, also mentions grand discussions "of the law, of God and of the good," which may have had some effect on the heroic works that occupied Sidney and Spenser in the years that following."

Spenser's direct involvement with Sidney and his circle in 1579-1580 set him on a literary course that he would pursue for the rest of his life. Though the two men never saw one another again, they adopted remarkably similar literary agendas, writing mainly in genres that Sidney had encountered among prominent neoclassical and religious poets on the Continent. Both men, for example, wrote works of literary criticism addressing the current state of poetry in England, and both devoted most of their creative energies to pastoral poetry and romance epic, to sonnets and epithalamiums, and to religious hymns or psalms. Both also wrote political tracts about Ireland, where Sidney 's father served for more than two decades and where Spenser was soon to become a government official. Expressions of admiration for the Sidneys and the Dudleys appear repeatedly in his works, from early poems such as his Stemmata Dudleiana (now lost) to late ones such as The Ruines of Time (1591), Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595), and Astrophel (1595)."

Through his contact with men such as Sidney and Leicester, who were deeply involved in affairs of state, Spenser may have been emboldened to publish his Shepeardes Calender, which was dedicated to Sidney and dealt with sensitive political controversies of the day. Appearing in six editions before the end of the century, it became a milestone in the English literary renaissance because it was the first major published work of new poetry written along the neoclassical lines advocated by nationalistic poets such as those of the Areopagus. With a flair for self-promotion reminiscent of Harvey, Spenser--or perhaps his publisher--arranged to bring out the volume as if it were a venerable and ancient text. The archaic language of the poems, which Sidney impugned in his Defence of Poetry, may have been adopted in part to heighten this effect. Beautifully illustrated with woodcuts, the poems appeared from the outset already encrusted with learned prefatory matter and a running gloss by an unidentified scholar designated only as "E. K." Most likely, this was Spenser's friend Edward Kirke, whom he had known since their days together at Pembroke Hall in the early 1570s. Whoever he was, however, he shared Spenser's views that English poetry was in disarray and that it should be reestablished on "an eternall image of antiquitie"--an argument that is repeated in the eclogue for October. In his prefatory epistle to the volume, E. K. lauds Spenser as "this our new Poete," who will be "beloved of all, embraced of the most, and wondred at of the best." If he had been writing of Virgil or Petrarch, rather than an obscure English poet, he could hardly have said more."

Spenser's skillful literary borrowings contributed to the volume's impressive effect. From the Italian poets Petrarch and Mantuan he adopted a variety of pastoral that conceals beneath its surface biting political allegories and topical allusions to prominent figures in the church and the state. From the more traditional Eclogues of Virgil and from ancient writers such as Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, he took other features, such as the curiously static sense of time characteristic of classical pastoral. His rustics debate and sing, love and despair, but there is no real narrative progression in the Calender and very little action. Variety is introduced in the subjects that the shepherds contemplate and in the poetic forms that they employ, which include amorous complaints, fables, singing matches and debates, an encomium, a funeral elegy, and a hymn to the god Pan."

Spenser also drew upon the visual arts of his day, particularly works known as "emblem books." These typically brought together three disparate elements: a series of pictures of a figurative or symbolic kind, "mottos" or pithy sayings related to the pictures but phrased in enigmatic terms, and explanations in prose or verse that interpret the mottos and pictures and draw a moral. Each of Spenser's twelve eclogues follows a more complicated version of this pattern. First comes a woodcut, which typically depicts the shepherd(s) in the eclogue and something from their songs or their situations, with the sign of the zodiac appropriate to the month in question represented at the top. Then comes the poem itself, preceded by a brief "argument" or summary, which may have been added by E. K. After the eclogue comes one or more verbal "emblems" or mottoes in various languages, which briefly sum up the nature or situation of the speakers and the themes of their songs, but which often tease the imagination with alternative interpretations. And finally there is E. K.'s gloss, serving some of the same functions as the explanation beneath a conventional emblem."

Spenser also added important innovations to the traditional elements in the Calender. One involved poetic technique. In sheer variety of meter and form, his eclogues are without precedent in earlier pastoral poetry and provided an ample showcase for the experiments in prosody that so fascinated the poets of the Areopagus. Another conspicuous innovation is his organization of the poems into a seasonal progression. By following the cycle of the year, Spenser is able to employ the outer world of pasture and sheepfold as a way to depict the inner world of the young shepherd Colin Clout, whose unrequited love of Rosalind provides a thread of unity through the entire volume. In the first poem, "January," Colin despairs, breaking his shepherd's pipe and, with it, the last source of pleasure that remains to him. In his eyes the land, the trees, and the flocks around him have themselves become emblems for the state of his soul. He complains, "Thou barrein ground, whome winters wrath hath wasted, / Art made a myrrhour, to behold my plight." Though not present or even mentioned in several of the eclogues, Colin provides a melancholy bass line over which all the other shepherds sing, setting their higher notes of anger and joy, debate and reflection, in poignant contrast to his listless desolation."

The emotional counterpoint is never more moving than in "April," where his good friend Hobbinoll sings one of Colin's old songs, written to celebrate the shepherdess Eliza in the springtime of an earlier and happier year. The inner world of the song continues to match the outward season in which it is sung, as all the songs in the Calender do; yet it also heightens the reader's sense of the dark winter of the soul in which Colin continues to suffer. At the midpoint of the cycle, in "June," he laments that Rosalind has left him for another shepherd named Menalcas. In the final poem, he sings weary complaints to the god Pan and feels premonitions of his imminent death, thus returning the sequence to a point resembling the one at which it began, though even more desolate."

Besides the revolving of the seasons, other cycles are involved in the work. As E. K.'s headnote to "December" reminds us, the passing of the year has traditionally served as an emblem for the stages of life. From the springtime of childhood to the summer of desire and love to the winter of loneliness and old age, Colin's life becomes an emblem for everyone's experience in this world. Interpreted in this way, the Calender returns to the themes of tragic uncertainty and relentless mutability expressed ten years earlier in Spenser's contributions to A Theatre for Worldlings."

These larger themes are, in turn, related to the political allegory that often lurks just below the surface of the poems. One of the implications of this allegory is that states, too, have their cycles of springtime and autumn. The celebration of "her Majestie" Eliza in "April," which is a thinly veiled encomium addressed to Queen Elizabeth, suggests that England is in the full flower of a new age. "Maye," "Julye," and "September," however, all turn on the controversy between Protestant reformers and Elizabeth's more conservative Catholic subjects, which was the greatest single threat to her ability to rule. The topical allegory in these eclogues suggests that, in 1579, strains in the body politic were a matter of particular concern to Spenser. The cause for his alarm was undoubtedly the marriage negotiations begin carried out between Queen Elizabeth and a French catholic prince, François, Duke of Alençon. The staunchly Protestant faction surrounding Leicester and Sidney took every opportunity to oppose such a marriage as a grave threat to the religious and political independence of England. If, as some critics suppose, Rosalind is a figure for Queen Elizabeth, and Colin for Spenser and his Protestant cause, then Rosalind's rejection of Colin for Menalcas may have to do with Queen Elizabeth's rejection of the Protestant faction in favor of the Catholic Alençon."

If this is so, then Colin's dejection at the end of the Calender may reflect Spenser's low political fortunes in late 1579 and early 1580, when the queen took harsh measures to silence critics of her plan for a French marriage. Sidney , for instance, was dismissed from court, most likely for addressing a letter to her on the subject. Spenser, too, seems to have feared the queen's displeasure, for he published his Calender under the pseudonym "Immeritô" and prefaced it with a poem to Sidney in which he speaks to the Calender itself, saying "when thou art past jeopardee, / Come tell me, what was sayd of mee / And I will send more after thee." It may be that the young poet's representation of delicate affairs of state had left him with few defenders and fewer prospects for advancement at court."

In any case, in July 1580 he accepted a post as a private secretary to Arthur Grey, the new Lord Deputy of Ireland. There is some evidence that when he set out for Dublin, he took with him a new wife named Machabyas Chylde, about whom little is known except that she married one "Edmounde Spenser" on 27 October 1579, that she apparently bore him two children named Sylvanus and Katherine, and that she died sometime before 1594. Most of the next twenty years of the poet's life were spent in Ireland, where he served in various governmental posts, from clerk of the Privy Council in Dublin in the early years to Queen's justice and sheriff-designate for county Cork at the end of his life. His positions allowed him to acquire a considerable list of landholdings, including most prominently Kilcolman Castle with three thousand acres in county Cork, which served as his principal residence from 1588 until the year before his death in 1599. Such holdings were important, for they gave him the status of a landed gentleman, and this eased his way in society, enabling him, for example, to make friends with Sir Walter Ralegh and to marry his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle, who came from an important landed family in Herefordshire."

References to Ireland appear frequently in Spenser's later poetry, and some of them reveal a good deal of gentle affection for the land and its people. Most memorable, perhaps, are the country wedding captured with such rustic beauty in his Epithalamion (1595) and the great judgment scene on Arlo Hill, a mountain near Kilcolman Castle, which occupies much of the Mutability Cantos in Book VI of The Faerie Queene. Most of the poet's descriptions of Ireland, however, are colored by sorrow or disgust at the destitute state of its people or by resolute hostility toward its wily and elusive rebels, who harassed the English occupiers throughout the period. Spenser portrays the darker side of his experiences in Ireland, for example, in the attacks on the House of Alma in Book II of The Faerie Queene and in the savagery of the scurrilous, long-haired rebel Malengin in Book V."

The less submissive among the Irish had not reason to be any fonder of Spenser than he of them. In 1580, as a new official in the colonial administration, he was present when the English slaughtered papal troops at Smerwick, and he also witnessed the terrible famine in Munster that darkened the end of Desmond's rebellion. In fact, he wrote the official report on the battle of Smerwick and later described it and other incidents during the turbulent years of his colonial service in his only prose work. A Vewe of the Present State of Ireland (1633). This was written sometime before 1598 as a dialogue discussing the brutal measures needed to establish a stable colonial regime in the country, and parts of it may have been incorporated into an official report that he presented in London in 1598. In the late 1580s he had been responsible for settling English immigrants at Kilcolman on lands confiscated from the rebel Gerald Fitzgerald, fifteenth Earl of Desmond, and some of Spenser's other landholdings had come from the forced dissolution of Catholic monasteries in Ireland. It is not surprising, then, that his last years in Cork were ones of conflict, tumult, and loss."

Until the late 1590s, however, Ireland provided a living, a place to write, and even literary friends. During his years there, Spenser may have become acquainted with Barnabe Rich and Barnabe Googe, and he knew Sidney 's close friend and occasional fellow poet Lodowick Bryskett, who turned two posts over to him before moving on. Most important, however, was Spenser's friendship with Ralegh, who was his neighbor on the former Desmond estates and who, in the summer and fall of 1589, came to see him at Kilcolman and took a personal interest in his poetry. Spenser later revealed the importance of his relationship with Ralegh by preserving a poetic account of it in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe and by writing the "Letter to Ralegh" and a dedicatory sonnet to him in The Faerie Queene. According to Colin Clout, it was Ralegh who arranged for Spenser to travel to London in 1590 to publish the first three books of his epic and to present them in person to Queen Elizabeth, who was pleased and expressed a desire to hear it read to her "at timely houres." So pleased was she, in fact, that she granted the poet a pension of fifty pounds a year, which was more than the parsimonious queen granted to any other poet of the period. Spenser expressed his gratitude for Ralegh's patronage by writing a sympathetic allegory of the adventurer's often turbulent and romantically tinged relationship with the queen, which appears in the story of Timias and Belphoebe in Books III, IV, and VI of The Faerie Queene."

The best way to begin an examination of Spenser's epic is perhaps to come to it as Ralegh did, with Spenser's prefatory letter in hand--though, admittedly, some of its intentions do not match the poem as the author actually wrote it. As the letter reveals, the six books (and two cantos of a seventh) that were ultimately published represent but a fraction of the plan, which was to extend to the traditional twelve books of an epic, one devoted to each of "the twelve private morall vertues." Another section of the poem, perhaps of equal length but never written, was to cover the public or "polliticke" virtues. Each book in this vast structure was to concentrate on a single habit of character, represented by one or more exemplary knights such as Britomart, the Knight of Chastity in Book III, and Sir Artegall, the Knight of Justice in Book V. It may be that, as time went on and Spenser realized the magnitude of the undertaking, he changed his mind and began to incorporate political virtues among the moral virtues of the first section. Certainly Book V, the Legend of Justice,involves a good deal of political allegory. In any case, the six books that he completed begin with virtues in a person's relations with God and self (holiness and temperance) and proceed to those involving relations with other people (chastity, friendship, justice, and courtesy). The entire scheme accords with the two great commandments of Christian tradition: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and all thy mind" and "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" (Matt. 22: 36-39)."

The first twelve books were to be united by the presence of two dominant characters: Prince Arthur, mythical founder of the Round Table, who was to appear as a wandering knight in each of the books, and Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, who was to frame the action of the poem by holding an annual feast of twelve days, on which she assigned her knights twelve quests, each described in one book of the epic. At the end of the poem, it seems, Prince Arthur was to marry Gloriana, and since the poet postponed the wedding of other heroes in the individual books, there were doubtless to be other marriages in Book XII as well. Since Arthur represents the virtue of Magnificence, which comprehends within itself all the other active virtues, and since the Faerie Queene represents Glory, which was for Spenser the end of all earthly action, there is a tidy philosophy behind the entire structure."

As the poet concedes, the main difficulty for readers lies not in grasping the grand organization of the poem, but in knowing how to interpret its allegory. He offers a clue, however, by calling the work a "continued" allegory or "darke conceit." In his day, the term conceit could have carried at least two senses in this context, both of them helpful. First, it could have meant simply a thought or, in certain philosophical contexts, a form or Idea in something very like the Platonic sense. Second, the term could have denoted an extended metaphor, that is, an implied comparison between the primary subject of the author's thought and something more easily visualized or grasped, which acts as a "figure" for that subject."

In interpreting Book I as such an extended metaphor, one might concentrate on the heroine, Una, the daughter of the "King of Eden," who sets out from her home to save her parents from a great dragon. To this end she travels to the court of the Faerie Queene and gains the help of the Red Crosse Knight, who, after various trials and wanderings, returns with her to her parents' city. There he defeats the dragon, is honored as a victor, and offers to marry Una once he has served his queen for six more years. Taking a clue from the Book of Revelation, which identifies Satan as a dragon that has enslaved human beings (the fallen descendants of Adam and Eve) and is the great enemy of the Church, the reader might take Una as a "conceit" for the universal body of believers as it has acted through history. This, then, would be the metaphor "continued" through the whole of Book I. On this assumption, the reader might conclude that the meaning of the allegory is something like this: the Church, which is descended from sinful human beings, sets out to redeem them by releasing them from bondage to Satan. In this it requires the help of the individual Christian, who may lose his way for a time but, through the aid of the Church, will ultimately find the straight and narrow way again and will go on to defeat the forces of evil around him. Once he lives out his "six days" of life on earth, he will be united with the Church forever on the seventh, at rest on God's Sabbath day in heaven (see VII.viii.2)."

Such a reading, based on the assumption that the poem is a kind of code to be deciphered character by character, has something to be said for it. It reveals a point that is probably central to Spenser's attempt to "fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline," namely that Christians tend to respond to the call of the church enthusiastically enough in the beginning, but often lose their zeal or fall away. Each stage in the wanderings of the Red Crosse Knight--his initial acceptance of lies about Una, his departure from her and his affair with another woman named Duessa, his drifting into the broad path of worldly fame and pleasure represented by the House of Pride, and finally his removal of his Christian armor, his defeat, and his overwhelming sense of failure at the Castle of Orgoglio and the Cave of Despair--represents a stage in the process by which an immature believer might fall away. A period of humility, instruction, and hard discipline (represented in the House of Holiness) is required before a young man like this can be of much use in helping others."

There are, however, problems with attempts to "decode" the poem in such a simplistic fashion. The most invidious, perhaps, is that once one has worked the puzzle, it loses its interest. In an 1831 issue of the Edinburgh Review, Thomas Macaulay, who must have read the poem in something like this way, complains that "even Spencer himself ... could not succeed in the attempt to make allegory interesting.... One unpardonable fault, the fault of tediousness, pervades the whole of the Fairy Queen. We become sick of Cardinal Virtues and Deadly Sins, and long for the society of plain men and women." One wonders whether an attempt to decipher characters merely as clever signs for abstractions may not have been behind the tendency, notable throughout the nineteenth century, to discount Spenser's allegory and to concentrate instead on the beauties of his verse and imagery."

The fault here lies more with Spenser's readers, however, than with the poet himself. There is nothing simple or boring about the allegory, which frequently manages to juggle several different meanings simultaneously. Along with "darke conceits" of a moral, political, and religious kind, Spenser also undertakes at least three other varieties. There are psychological allegories, which probe the faculties of the mind and their working in both normal and abnormal states; there are also topical allegories, which glorify or satirize the actions of rulers and other prominent figures of Spenser's day, and there are historical allegories involving their personal or national pasts. Only by resolutely ignoring crucial details can one read the poem as a "continued" metaphor with a single pat "meaning."

Una, for instance, is not only the one true Church but also (as her name suggests) "oneness" itself. Spenser calls her simply "truth" and seems to have in mind the sense of oneness expounded by Renaissance Neoplatonic philosophers, who saw the world as a sometimes discordant multiplicity that emanates from the perfect unity and simplicity of the divine mind. To depart from Una is to lose sight of the truth apprehended by contemplating the eternal Ideas that inform everything in the material world. To take up with Duessa (duality, duplicity) is to depart from truth and break one's union with the one source of all that is good."

"Una" is also a name applied in this period to Queen Elizabeth, the one supreme governor of the Church of England, and Spenser's maiden lady is clearly one of many figures for her in the poem. Elizabeth lived under constant threat of military attack or assassination by the great Catholic princes on the Continent, who wanted to reverse the Protestant Reformation in England and to return the nation to the Catholic fold. In the historical allegory of the poem Duessa represents Mary, Queen of Scots, who had legal claims to the English crown and who vied with Elizabeth for the allegiance of the English people. In polemics of the day, Mary was sometimes pictured as the "whore of Babylon" mentioned in the Book of Revelation, who rides on a beast with seven heads and is associated with Rome. In Canto viii Spenser employs this imagery when Duessa rides out on a "manyheaded beast" to attack the heroic representative of England, Prince Arthur, who defeats her and forces her to cast away her "golden cup" and "crowned mitre," which are symbols associated with the wealth and priTX Even the three quite different interpretations of Una discussed here may not exhaust the allegorical possibilities. Spenser was a master of compression and deep implication who recognized the multiplicity of meanings inherent in certain primal concepts and images, such as oneness and duality, and it is that multiplicity that lies at the heart of the fascination that The Faerie Queene has exerted over many of its readers. Rather than interpret the poet's "darke conceit" simply as an extended metaphor, one does better, particularly in analyzing the plots of the poem, to take it more broadly as a governing thought or form. Spenser's literary friend Sidney wrote in The Defence of Poetry (1595) that the poet begins with an "Idea, or fore-conceit," which he embodies in the matter of the poem--its stories, characters, and images. The reader then uses that matter as an "imagination ground-plot of a profitable invention," comprehending the author's "conceit" by an act of mental re-creation. The richer the author's initial idea and the clearer the matter of his creation, the richer and more profitable the reader's own act of "invention" will be. So long as one remains true to the details of the matter, the possibilities for meaning are limited only to the extent that the primal forms or ideas are limited in their inherent implications."

In relation to Una, the Red Crosse Knight becomes an extraordinarily rich creation. As one learns in Canto x, he is Saint George, the patron saint of England. In many ways he is also the Everyman of medieval Christian tradition, who, after a fall into sin and a recovery in the House of Holiness, imitates the life of Christ by fighting the dragon, falling in the battle, and being resurrected in victory on the morning of the third day. He also represents the English people at the time of the Protestant Reformation, defending the "one true church" against the late-medieval corruptions of Roman Catholicism. More particularly, he may represent Christian writers and intellectuals in sixteenth-century England who were prone to error and were in need of firmer doctrinal foundations. The knight begins his quest in Canto i with a battle against a lesser dragon named "Errour," which is associated with religious books and pamphlets, and only after he has been rescued form doctrinal error himself, represented in the false philosophy of Despair, can he fulfill his quest. After a period with the hermit Contemplation and other teachers in the House of Holiness, he fights a second and greater dragon, and this time, with God's grace, he prevails."

Even in the passages of Book I devoted to philosophical abstractions, such as the virtues and vices that bored Thomas Macaulay, Spenser invites more from his readers than a dry process of "decoding." His stories and pictorial descriptions are not simply means to convey philosophical insights. They are themselves the ends of the poet's labors, figures capable of transforming barren philosophy into what Sidney 's friend Fulke Greville, first Lord Brooke, once called "pregnant images of life." It is one thing to know the definition of a particular vice, but quite another to know how people afflicted with it might talk or act and to see how their sinful dispositions might harm them over a period of time. It is these latter points that most interested Spenser. In Canto iv of Book I, for example, Queen Lucifera and her "six wisards old" are readily identified as the Seven Deadly Sins of medieval Christian tradition. Yet it is the extraordinary detail with which the poet depicts them that matters, not simply what they represent. In a series of exquisitely painted miniatures, Spenser depicts each of the six counselors on one of the beasts that draw Lucifera's coach: Idleness on an ass, Gluttony on a pig, Lechery on a goat, Avarice on a camel, Envy on a wolf, and Wrath on a lion. Each detail in the imagery of coach and team--from the animals themselves to the clothing and behavior of their riders and the things that they bear in their hands--serves to characterize the six vices and Pride, their queen. Even the order of the riders is significant, for Spenser has dramatically altered the traditional Catholic sequence in order to place Idleness first as the "nourse of sin." Since Idleness is dressed "Like to an holy Monck," the change in order doubtless has to with what is now call the Protestant "work ethic" and with common complaints in the Renaissance that the Catholic monasteries were bastions of laziness and corruption."

It would, of course, be a mistake to suppose that every passage in the poem is as rich in meaning as the description of the House of Pride and its inhabitants, or that readers need understand everything that is lurking under the surface of the poem in order to enjoy it. Much of its appeal lies in plain sight, in its strange and marvelous stories and its colorful pageantry. In probing its deeper implications, however, it helps to begin with what are sometimes called the allegorical "cores" or "shrines" of the poem. In the great temples, palaces, noble houses, gardens and caves that dominate the landscape, Spenser provides the main distinctions needed to comprehend the philosophical concepts that he is exploring, often revealing key points in the names of the characters and in the details of their appearance or their surroundings. Along with the Palace of Pride and the House of Holiness in Book I, major cores include the House of Alma, the Bower of Bliss, and the cave that contains the House of Mammon in Book II; the Garden of Adonis and the House of Busirane in Book III; the Temple of Venus in Book IV; the Temple of Isis and the Palace of Mercilla in Book V; Mount Acidale in Book VI; and Arlo Hill in the fragment of Book VII that Spenser left unpublished at his death. In the narratives that lead the main characters to and from such places of instruction, the poet often provides less concentrated allegories in their actions, as in Una's wanderings after she is separated from the Red Crosse Knight. And finally, in the subsidiary stories and episodes constantly woven into the main lines of plot in each book, Spenser provides moral examples that further illustrate his main themes. An instance of such a tale in Book I is the story of Fraelissa and Fradubio, two lovers who are parted by Duessa in much the same way that the Red Crosse Knight is parted from Una."

In the sequence of allegorical cores within each book, Spenser tends to move from the simple to the complex, arriving only late in the action at a full picture of the virtue required of the hero. In Book II, the first core leaves the impression that temperance is a "natural" virtue, that is, one that can be grasped without the divinely revealed truths of Scripture. Spenser offers portraits of three sisters: Elissa ("excess"), Perissa ("deficiency"), and Medina (the "golden mean"), and the Latin roots of their names call to mind the philosophy of Aristotle. One who is temperate, in Aristotle's view, has formed the habit of taking the mean between extremes, such as squandering and miserliness, foolhardiness and cowardice. The suitors courting Elissa and Perissa illustrate this point in a colorful way. Huddibras represents a "forward" nature that tends to draw back from others in arrogance or anger, and Sansloy represents a "forward" nature that draws toward others in uncontrolled desire. A temperate person would restrain impulses toward either of these extremes."

The House of Medina suggests that in Book II the reader has come into a new region of Spenser's fairyland, one different from the quasi-medieval religious landscape of Book I and more like the plain humanist schoolrooms of the Merchant Taylors' School that Spenser attended as a boy. To take its classical philosophy as his final word on temperance, however, would be a mistake. Guyon's attempt to put into practice the rational ideal embodied in Medina is successful, but only for a time. To be sure, he avoids the corruption inherent in characters such as Pyrochles and Cymochles, who allow themselves to be governed by excesses of the bodily fluids (or "humours") of choler and phlegm. The brothers provide emblems of the two great temptations of the book: irascibility, which is seen in the hotheaded characters of the early cantos, and concupiscence, which appears in lazy and self-indulgent figures later in the book. Guyon avoids both. Yet, as early as Canto iii, he makes a crucial blunder, allowing a buffoon named Braggadocchio to steal his horse and so becoming the only pedestrian hero in the poem. At the midpoint of the book, in Canto vi, he makes a second mistake in parting from his Christian counselor and friend, the Palmer. By accepting a boat ride from a languid and sensuous lady named Phaedria at Idle Lake and allowing the Palmer to go on by foot, Guyon needlessly subjects himself to temptation. He does so again in the next episode by voluntarily undertaking a traditional epic descent into the underworld, where he is tempted with every imaginable form of worldly excess. These are represented in three subterranean chambers: the treasure house of Mammon, god of money and possessions; the temple of Philotime, the goddess of honor and ambition; and the garden of Proserpina, the goddess of worldly pleasure and rest. The very sense of his own self-sufficiency that prompts the hero's needless descent into hell is a sign of danger, for, in Spenser's view, no one can long resist the sinful tendencies inherent in fallen human nature without the grace of God."

This point comes home in Canto vii, where, having emerged from Mammon's cave, Sir Guyon faints from exhaustion, falling prey to several of the enemies that he had earlier avoided, including Pyrochles and Cymochles. An angel is required to save him, and does so by fetching the Palmer, who stays with Guyon until Prince Arthur arrives to beat back the figures of intemperance attempting to despoil the hero of his armor. A stay in the House of Alma, which is the second important locus of instruction in the book, educates Guyon in the limits of his strength, presenting in the very structure of the house an emblem of the human body and the human psyche for his instruction. It is a place besieged by assaults on the senses, which are represented in the attacks of lawless rebels outside the castle. Their leader, Maleger (who represents appetite and passion), has the ability to regain his strength simply by touching his mother, the earth. As Prince Arthur later discovers, Maleger can be defeated only when he is cast into the water."

This last point reveals the very Christian conception of temperance that underlies the entire book. The water in which Maleger drowns is an emblem of baptism, and his defeat is related to the episode that first set Guyon forth on his quest. In Cantos i--ii he and the Palmer had come upon the body of a knight, Sir Mortdant, who had been lured to his destruction by a false enchantress named Acrasia (whose name means both "badly mixed," referring perhaps to the bodily humours, and "incontinent," implying an inability to contain her desires). The knight's wife, Amavia, had stabbed herself in grief at his loss, and their baby, Ruddyman, had stained his hands in her blood. When Guyon had attempted to wash the child's hand in an enchanted spring--one associated with pagan mythology and the goddess Nature--the stain would not wash away. It had remained as an emblem of Original Sin, which can be cleansed only by the Christian sacrament of Holy Baptism. At the time, Guyon had not understood the meaning of this incident, but in the battle against Maleger the point comes home."

With his temperance now "fast setteled / On firme foundation," the hero departs on the last stage of his quest to avenge the death of Ruddymane's parents upon Acrasia. After a sea voyage on which he encounters fresh allegorical representations of the Seven Deadly Sins, he ruthlessly destroys Acrasia's Bower of Bliss, releasing the many men whom she has transformed to beasts and binding the witch herself."

From the analysis of inward psychological states in Book II, Spenser next turns to outward social relations in Book III. At the outset he pauses, as he often does, to show the relation between the central virtues of adjoining books by having their heroes meet briefly in conversation and in feats of strength. Here, the superiority of the social virtue of chastity, represented by the heroine Britomart, over the personal virtue of temperance appears clearly in Britomart's defeat of Guyon in a joust. Other episodes suggest further contrasts between the books. In comparison with Acrasia's Bower of Bliss in Book II, Spenser portrays another garden in Book III that is also concerned with the fulfillment of bodily desires, but in healthier ways. Whereas the Bower had been a false Paradise, apparently natural but actually created by self-indulgent art (see II.xii.58-59), the Garden of Adonis is a true Eden, where "All things, as they created were, doe grow" and obey God's first command "to increase and multiply" (III.vi.34). The two passages are linked by the classical myth of Adonis, presented first in a bad form in Acrasia's Bower and then in a good form in the Garden of Adonis. Though the healthy garden embodies a philosophy of divine generation that is as rich and enigmatic as any other conceptual scheme in the poem, the place of the passage in the unfolding narrative is fairly straightforward. The chaotic inner forces of the psyche explored in Book II are here presented in ordered and temperate manifestations, with particular stress on healthy sexual desire. Whereas Acrasia is governed by an insatiable appetite for young men, the characters Amoret and Belphoebe, who were born and reared in the Garden of Adonis, seek higher goods. Amoret takes as her goals marriage and family, whereas Belphoebe chooses lifelong virginity and an active life outsiTX The classical myths woven into these and other episodes in Book III do much to illuminate the characters. The myth of Cupid and Psyche, which is retold in the episode at the Garden of Adonis, shows the human mind brought into proper and fruitful union with the divine power. Britomart, the heroine of the book, best fulfills this ideal. She is not like the delicately beautiful Florimell, who is timid and inclined to flee from men. She is not like Belphoebe, who seems contemptuous of affairs of the heart. Nor is she like Amoret, who lives for such experiences. Britomart combines the best qualities of all three women, drawing them toward a golden mean. She shares, for example, Florimell's determination to leave the comforts of courtly life and search through the world for the man whom she is destined to marry. She matches Belphoebe in mental prowess, courage, and skill in manly pursuits such as hunting and jousting. Yet she also shares Amoret's capacity for warmth and nurturing."

It is tempting to take Britomart as a figure for Queen Elizabeth, but it seems likely that she is something far more complex. The "Letter to Raleigh," which identifies major figures for the queen in the poem, makes no mention of Britomart in this regard. As the wise magician Merlin reveals in Canto iii, she is actually an ancestor of the English queen, though one who displays a close family resemblance. Britomart is, in fact, a far more glorious figure than either of the other main embodiments of Elizabeth: the noble but somewhat icy Belphoebe, who represents the queen in her private life, and the magnificent but absent Gloriana, who represents Elizabeth in her public role as a ruler but who appears only in the dreams of Prince Arthur (I.vii) and in brief references in the proems and elsewhere, but never in the action itself. Some scholars see Britomart's quest for her future husband, Artegall--which begins with a vision of him in a crystal ball and is destined to end in marriage, joint rule over England, and a long line of glorious offspring--as a reference to Elizabeth's often-stated desire to marry no suitor but England itself. This way of reading the poem makes a good deal of sense of later passages in Book V, where the character Radigund represents Mary, Queen of Scots; Britomart resembles Elizabeth; and Artegall suggests some of Elizabeth's most powerful noblemen at court, who were torn in their allegiances between the two queens. When Britomart rescues Artegall from captivity in Radigund's city of Amazons, there is reason to believe that the incident represents Elizabeth's salvation of England from the threat of Catholic domination under Mary. Yet the potentially fruitful Britomart stands in notable contrast to the virginal and childless Belphoebe, and it may be that one of Spenser's points in the poem was to criticize Elizabeth for not marrying and providing England with a proper heir."

In any case, Britomart stands in glorious contrast to two degraded types of womanhood in Book III, both defined once again with the help of classical mythology. The first is Malecasta in Canto i, who represents the tradition of Courtly Love. She leads men on by the gradual stages of courtship represented in the six knights who fight on her behalf: Gardante ("brief glances"), Parlante ("enticing words"), Iocante ("courtly play"), Basciante ("kissing"), Bacchante ("wine drinking"), and Noctante ("spending the night"). Once Malecasta has conquered a man, she makes him a slave to her whims and desires. She represents woman as predator. The tapestries depicting Venus and Adonis that hang in her castle link her with the more classical figure of Acrasia in Book II. The second example of unchastity in Book III is Hellenore, who represents the tradition of Ovidian love. Like Helen of Troy, she yields to the seductions of a guest (named, appropriately, Paridell) and allows herself to be carried away from her aged and jealous husband Malbecco, only to be discarded by her new lover and left to satisfy the lusts of forest satyrs. She represents woman as prey."

Both she and Malecasta are medieval embodiments of ancient types, and their presence helps to extend the moral allegory of the poem to include glimpses of the history of Western culture. For Spenser, lines of dynastic descent are important, as they had been for earlier epic poets such as those mentioned in his "Letter to Raleigh." Here, he glorified Britain through the ancestry of its representative Britomart. Like Paridell (and Virgil's Aeneas), she traces her ancestry back to the old stock of Troy. Unlike Paridell, however, she descends from the worthy hero Brutus, the founder of Troynovant (or London), not from the lustful and irresponsible Paris (III.ix.32-46). Through passages such as this--along with depictions of legendary English heroes throughout the poem and accounts of early English history, such as those that Arthur reads at Alma's castle and Britomart hears in Merlin's cave--Spenser establishes himself as a writer of "an historicall fiction" on which England may establish a sense of its national heritage."

In the climactic episode of Book III, when Britomart rescues Amoret from the evil enchanter Busirane, Spenser briefly sketches the history of relations between the sexes in Western culture, tying his account to the current difficulties that Amoret has suffered in marrying the aggressive young knight Scudamour. As the reader subsequently learns in Canto i of Book IV, she was kidnapped by Busirane during a ribald entertainment or "masque" performed on the night of her wedding, and clues in various rooms of the enchanter's house suggest that he represents the power of poetry and the visual arts to shape the attitudes of one gender toward the other. At least one of Amoret's problems on that night was a clash of cultural expectations."

In the first room, rich tapestries illustrate the dominance of men over women that characterized the myths of ancient Greece and Rome. In the second room, golden ornaments suggest the dominance of women over men found in the tradition of Courtly Love in the late Middle Ages. In the third room, where Amoret herself appears, the reader find what seems to be a Renaissance confusion of masculine and feminine dominance, fostered by an attempt to combine classical and medieval erotic ideals. As we learn in Book IV, Amoret's husband Scudamour sees himself as a domineering male of the classical sort, who bears the sign of triumphant Cupid on his shield (see III.xi.7 and IV.x). Amoret, however sees herself as a "recluse virgin," whose education at the Temple of Venus has elevated her to a station much like that enjoyed by women in the medieval tradition of Courtly Love (see IV.x). If we may assume that Amoret's mental state following the night of her marriage is represented in the nightmarish procession known as the Masque of Cupid that appears in Busirane's third room, then the lady is not only suffering from a virgin's fears of the bridal night but also from confusion over her proper role as a wife. The allegorical figures surrounding her in the masque represent the course of her relationship with Scudamour. It begins happily enough with Ease, Fancy, and Desire, but eventually graduated to more-turbulent emotions such as Fear and Hope, Grief and Fury, and ends with feelings of Cruelty and Despight. Following these personifications comes the cause of her distress, depicted as Cupid riding on a lion. This figure reminds us of Scudamour's shield and probably represents his aggressive desire to dominate. Although Scudamour has attempted to release his bride from Busirane, only a third party such as Britomart, who understands the problem from a woman's point of view, can subdue the enchanter and dispel Amoret's fears."

In the second edition of the poem, which was printed in 1596, the problem of Scudamour and Amoret is never satisfactorily resolved. In Book IV she transfers her affections to her new friend Britomart, is captured by a lustful giant and rescued by Timias, and passes through a series of painful adventures ending in the Castle of Corflambo (or "burning heart"), from which she can be saved only by the intervention of Prince Arthur himself. Meanwhile, Scudamour mistakes the armed Britomart for a man and, after she goes off with Amoret, suffers a fit of jealousy in the Cave of Care. Not until Canto vi, in which he attacks Britomart, does he discover her gender and his own folly. After these incidents, we hear little more of him or of Amoret. In the first edition of the poem published in 1590, however, Spenser fully resolved the tensions between the newlyweds. Upon Amoret's release from captivity to Busirane, she and Scudamour embrace and fuse with one another in a single hermaphroditic form, which seems to symbolize not only sexual union but also a golden mean between masculine and feminine forms of dominance and the consummation of an ideal Christian marriage."

By now it should be obvious that, as Spenser moves from the inward virtues of holiness and temperance in Books I and II to the more outward ones of chastity and friendship in Books III and IV, he adopts a far more complicated method of plotting. The first two books follow a fairly straightforward and self-contained pattern: the hero sets forth on his quest, suffers a disastrous fall, is rescued by Arthur in Canto viii, joins forces with the prince for a time, undergoes a process of reeducation, and finally completes his quest with a victory in Canto xii. In Books III and IV, however, events are far more chaotic. This may be the case because the god Cupid has come into the picture. Among the epic invocations at the beginning of the poem, Spenser adds something not found in Virgil or Homer, a prayer to the "most dreaded impe of highest Jove, / Faire Venus sonne," and Cupid's enormous power over earthly events is manifested in the social disorder of Books III and IV."

In the opening canto of Book III, for example, Spenser demonstrates love's power by drawing together all the major heroes of the poem so far, only to have Cupid divide and scatter them. Arthur appears with his squire Timias, Guyon with the Palmer, Britomart with her nurse Glauce--and, not far away from them, the women also encounter the Red Crosse Knight. Almost as soon as the heroes meet, however, Florimell rides by, fleeing a forester who intends to rape her, and the men in the party ride off in hot pursuit. Guyon and Arthur pursue the lady more, it seems, for her beauty than for her safety, and they soon become separated and lost. Timias nobly rides off to subdue the forester, but afterward falls in love with Belphoebe, forgetting about Arthur and eventually becoming entangled in a romantic scandal involving Belphoebe and Amoret that drives him to despair and turns him into a hermit. Even the Red Crosse Knight loses his head in Book III, requiring assistance from Britomart in turning back Malecasta's six knights. Thereafter, hardly a male in the poem can guide his own affairs sensibly until a semblance of order has been restored in Book V. The point seems to be that, in matters of love and friendship, women do better than men, and no one does very well. The beauty of a woman such as Florimell is like a comet, an astrological sign that "importunes death and dolefull drerihed" (III.i.16)."

One of the governing aims of Books III and IV is to harmonize love with friendship. In the Renaissance many took from antiquity the view that bonds between two men were nobler than those between a man and a woman or between two women. Spenser undercuts this view by exalting marriage over friendship and also by idealizing amicable relationships between women and between members of the opposite sexes. In the first episode of Book IV, Britomart and Amoret arrive at a castle where no knight may enter without a lady. Britomart's solution is to exploit her disguise as a knight in order to enter as Amoret's champion, thus raising interesting issues of homoerotic attraction between the two ladies but also exalting the importance of their friendship. Later, Prince Arthur saves Amoret at the Castle of Corflambo, acting magnanimously as her male friend rather than as a potential lover."

Spenser's emblem of the social ideal is a foursome of two men and two women, all bound in complex interrelationships of erotic attraction and friendship. This pattern is seen most clearly in the main heroes of the book, Campbell and Triamond, and in the ladies whom they love. Before Campbell will allow anyone to marry his sister Canacee, he requires that they first defeat him in battle. Triamond's two brothers, Priamond and Diamond, try and fail. Because, however, their mother, Agape (or "love"), has made a pact with the Destinies that Triamond should inherit the spirits and the strengths of his brothers, he is able to succeed where they failed. Later, Campbell marries Triamond's sister Cambina, and the four become fast friends."

A second foursome, that of Paridell and Blandamour and their ladies Duessa and Ate, acts as a false parody of the first. Since

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

The Shepheardes Calender Conteyning Twelue Æglogues Proportionable to the Twelue Monethes. Entitled to the Noble and Vertvous Gentleman Most Worthy of All Titles Both of Learning and Cheualrie M. Philip Sidney (London: Printed by Hugh Singleton, 1579).
Three Proper and Wittie Familiar Letters: Lately Passed between Two Vniversity Men: Touching the Earthquake in April Last, and Our English Refourmed Versifying and Two Other Very Commendable Letters of the Same Mens Writing: Both Touching the Foresaid Artificial Versifying, and certain Other Particulars (London: H. Bynneman, 1580).
The Faerie Qveene. Disposed into Twelue Books, Fashioning XII. Morall vertues (London: Printed for William Ponsonby, 1590)--contains Books I-III.
Complaints. Containing Sundrie Small Poemes of the Worlds Vanitie.... By Ed. Sp. (London: Imprinted for William Ponsonby, 1591)--includes The Rvines of Time, The Teares of the Mvses, Virgils Gnat, Prosopopoia: or Mother Hubberds Tale, Rvines of Rome: by Bellay, Mvoipotmos: or The Fate of the Bvtterflie, Visions of the Worlds Vanitie, The Visions of Bellay, and The Visions of Petrarch.
Daphnaïda. An Elegie vpon the Death of the Noble and Vertuous Douglas Howard, Daughter and Heire of Henry Lord Howard, Viscount Byndon, and Wife of Arthure Gorges Esquier. Dedicated to the Right Honorable the Lady Helena, Marquesse of Northampton. By Ed. Sp. (London: Printed for William Ponsonby, 1591).
Colin Clovts Come Home Againe. By Ed. Sp. (London: Printed for William Ponsonby, 1595)--includes Astrophell. A Pastorall Elegie vpon the Death of the Most Noble and Valorovs Knight, Sir Philip Sidney.
Amoretti and Epithalamion. Written not long since by Edmunde Spenser (London: Printed for William Ponsonby, 1595).
The Faerie Qveene. Disposed into Twelue Bookes, Fashioning XII. Morall Vertues [Books I-VI, with revised ending to III] (London: Printed for William Ponsonby, 1596).
Fowre Hymnes, Made by Edm. Spenser (London: Printed for William Ponsonby, 1596).
Prothalamion Or A Spousall Verse Made by Edm. Spenser. In Honovr of the Double Mariage of the Two Honorable & vertuous Ladies, the Ladie Elizabeth and the Ladie Katherine Somerset, Daughters to the Right Honourable the Earle of Worcester and Espoused to the Two Worthie Gentlemen M. Henry Gilford, and M. William Peter Esquyers (London: Printed for William Ponsonby, 1596).
The Faerie Queene, Disposed into XII. Bookes, Fashioning Twelue Morall Vertues, 2 volumes [Books I-VI and Two Cantos of Mutabilitie from Book VII](London: Printed by H[enry] L[ownes] for Mathew Lownes, 1609-1613).
A Vewe of the Present State of Ireland, in The Historie of Ireland, Collected by Three Learned Authors, viz. Meredith Hanmer ... Edmund Campion ... and Edmund Spenser, Esq., edited by Sir James Ware (Dublin: Printed by the Society of Stationers, 1633).

Editions and Collections

Spenser's "Faerie Queene," 2 volumes, edited by J. C. Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909).
Spenser's Minor Poems, edited by Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910).
Spenser: Poetical Works, edited by Smith and de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912).
The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, 11 volumes, edited by Edwin Greenlaw, Charles Grosvenor Osgood, Frederick Morgan Padelford, and Ray Heffner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932-1957).
Books I and II of the Faerie Queene, The Mutability Cantos, and Selections from The Minor Poetry, edited by Robert Kellogg and Oliver Steele (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).
The Mutabilitie Cantos, edited by S. P. Zitner (London: Nelson, 1968).
"The Faerie Queene" (1596), 2 volumes, edited by Graham Hough (Menston, Yorkshire: Scolar, 1976).
The Faerie Queene, edited by A. C. Hamilton (London & New York: Longmans, 1977).
The Faerie Queene, edited by Thomas P. Roche Jr. (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1978).
Edmund Spenser: The Illustrated "Faerie Queene": A Modern Prose Adaptation, edited by Douglas Hill (New York: Newsweek, 1980).
The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, edited by William A. Oram, Elinar Bjorvand, Ronald Bond, Thomas H. Cain, Alexander Dunlop, and Richard Schell (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1989).
Edmund Spenser's Poetry, third edition, Norton Critical Edition Series, edited by Hugh Maclean and Anne Lake Prescott (New York: Norton, 1993).

Other

"The Visions of Bellay" and "The Visions of Petrarch" in A Theatre wherein Be Represented as Wel the Miseries & Calamities That Follow the Voluptuous Worldlings, As Also the Greate Ioyes and Plesures Which the Faithfull Do Enioy.... Deuised by S. Iohn van-der Noodt (London: Imprinted by Henry Bynneman, 1569).

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More than a hundred autograph items by Edmund Spenser survive. Unfortunately, however, none are of his literary or political works. The majority are official letters and documents that he prepared as secretary to Arthur, Lord Grey, and later to Sir John Norris in Ireland, and the rest are addresses, endorsements, receipts, and legal documents relating to his landholdings and other matters. The only literary items are his transcriptions of two Latin poems by Lotichius and a Latin letter on poetry by Erhardus Stibarus. Most of his papers are among the State Papers Ireland in the Public Record Office, the Additional and Cotton Manuscripts in the British Library, and the Cecil Papers at Hatfield House. A complete listing may be found in Anthony G. Petti's article on Spenser's handwriting in The Spenser Encyclopedia.