The Faerie Queene, Book 1, Cantos 1-6

The Faerie Queene, Book 1, Cantos 1-6

Christiania Whitehead

Having looked at a variety of small Renaissance poems over the first half of term, we’re now going to move on to something at entirely the opposite end of the spectrum – Spenser’s Faerie Queene: the longest, most ambitious, most gargantuan poem of the sixteenth century; the first epic poem in English, composed around sixty years before Milton’s Paradise Lost. We’re spending two weeks on this, so we can afford to be quite leisurely and quite comprehensive in the way we approach Spenser. I’m going to spend this lecture, first of all, telling you a bit about Spenser himself; then setting out the basic scenario of the poem and trying to place its genre; then talking about its engagement with religion – the denominational controversies of the late sixteenth century; and last, looking at some episodes from the first six cantos and thinking about the various ways the poem invites us to read and understand it.

** The man himself. Spenser’s dates are 1552-1599. He was born in London into a middle-class family, and went to Cambridge as one of a category known as ‘poor scholars’! OK. So, we dealing with a very different background here to the elite aristocracy of someone such as Sir Thomas Wyatt or Sir Philip Sidney – someone with much less obvious access to the corridors of state power. In 1579, he published The Shepheardes Calendar – a set of twelve pastoral poems modelled on Virgil’s Eclogues, and dedicated them to Philip Sidney. He plainly admired Sidney – seems to have had some kind of contact with him. He also probably started work on the Faerie Queene. The next year, he moved to Dublin, where he stayed pretty much for the remainder of his life, and became private secretary to the Lord Deputy of Ireland. OK. So, a part of Elizabeth’s civil service with regard to consolidating and extending English rule in Ireland – part of Elizabeth’s somewhat brutal colonial campaign in Ireland, we might say.

And Spenser was going up in the world by this time – a self-made Tudor civil servant, escaping from his lowly origins. In 1582, he was accorded the rank of landed gentleman – in effect, he bought himself into the gentry classes. He took over a castle in south west Ireland, with 3000 acres; later he purchased a second castle and an abbey. In 1589, he was granted an audience with Queen Elizabeth who was apparently ‘delighted’ by the Faerie Queene, and gave him a life pension of £50 per annum. In 1590, he published the first 3 books of the Faerie Queene, along with the Letter of the Author, addressed to Sir Walter Raleigh. Now, it seems as though Spenser had very high hopes for what the publication of these books would do to his status. The Faerie Queene is a poem in praise of Elizabeth. Basically, Spenser wanted to be a court poet; he hoped for the same kind of proximity to Elizabeth as a Raleigh or a Sidney. But it didn’t work. It didn’t get the acclaim he had hoped for. He remained an obscure civil servant in Ireland. By the time books 4-6 were published in 1596, there’s the sense that slight disillusionment has set in – that the poem is struggling to sustain the initial idealism and ambition that drove its genesis. The Faerie Queene was originally intended to be 12 books long, but Spenser never completed more than these first 6 books. ** In 1598, he was swept up in and driven from Ireland by the Irish rebellion against English rule known as Tyrone’s rebellion. His castle home in south west Ireland was burnt and sacked. There is a dreadful passage in a letter by Ben Jonson that describes what may have happened to Spenser: ‘that the Irish having robbed Spenser’s goods and burnt his house and a little child new born [the poet’s?], he and his wife escaped [to England], and after, he died for lack of bread in King Street.’ Spenser’s circumstances may not have been quite so destitute as Jonson implies, but he was certainly dead in London by January 1599. On the face of it, a broken man. His great poem insufficiently acclaimed; his life’s work of setting himself up as a gentleman via the acquisition of estates – in tatters. Nonetheless, by 1620, he had his own funeral plaque in Westminster Abbey: ‘to the Prince of Poets of his tyme’, and The Faerie Queene has never been out of print since.

Back to Spenser’s high hopes and original intentions in the late 1580s. What is the basic scenario of the poem? What is its overall structure and purpose? And we are going to find his Letter of the Authors very useful here – so please do read it, if you haven’t already. ** First and foremost, and I’ve said this already but I’m going to say it again, this is a poem designed to praise Elizabeth, and to win favour and patronage from her. ** She is the Faerie Queene. Elizabeth underlies and dominates the poem. Yet she is never directly physically present within it. We hear about the Faerie Queene at various junctures. Knights have dreams about her. They ride in search of her. They come from her court. Yet she never physically appears. Spenser is making a comment about both the transcendence and inaccessibility of the Tudor monarch. ** Second, this is a poem designed ‘to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline’. And one might think that Spenser, having just fashioned himself as a gentleman (getting a gentry rank, buying up land), might be very personally fascinated by this. But of course, in the idealised world of the Faerie Queene, one doesn’t become a gentleman, a courtier, by buying up land, ** rather one becomes a gentleman by perfecting oneself in the twelve moral virtues. So each of the twelve books of the Faerie Queene, in the original design, was intended to teach the reader about one of these moral virtues – the first book about holiness, the second book about temperance, the third book about chastity, and so on. Once you had become perfectly educated in all twelve moral virtues – i.e. once you had read all twelve books of the Faerie Queene, and read them properly, you would be a gentleman – i.e. a perfected refined, moral, courtly sort of person. A natural aristocrat, one might say! So, here is Spenser, this self-made civil servant, writing a kind of instruction manual, telling the reader how to achieve perfect courtly refinement based on virtue.

However, The Faerie Queene doesn’t just sit down and tell us about the character of holiness and temperance, does it. It fictionalises these precepts. Redcrosse, in book 1, becomes the knight of holiness, riding off from the court of the Faerie Queene, after Una has arrrived seeking help, on a long quest to kill the dragon who is holding her parents captive. Guyon, in book 2, is the knight of temperance, riding off from the court of the Faerie Queene to capture the wicked enchantress, Acrasia. etc. etc. And Spenser seeks to justify doing things this way by saying in his Letter of the Authors: **

To some I knowe this Methode will seeme displeasaunt, which had rather haue good discipline deliuered plainly in way of precepts, or sermoned at large, as they use, then thus clowdily enwrapped in Allegoricall deuises [Spenser is seeming to presume a disapproving Puritan reader here, who doesn’t approve of fiction]. But such, me seeme, should be satisfide with the use of these dayes, seeing all things accounted by their showes, and nothing esteemed of, that is not delightfull and pleasing to commune sence. For this cause is Xenophon preferred before Plato [that is, an ancient Greek fictional biographer over an ancient Greek philosopher] … So much more profitable and gratious is doctrine by ensample, then by rule.

So, Spenser uses the mechanism of fiction, specifically of allegory, not because his basic purpose in writing is not didactic, instructional, but because one teaches better when one succeeds in delighting, and one delights more by fiction than by setting a list of moral precepts. Sidney says much the same thing in his Defense of Poetry.

So each book entails a knight who embodies a different moral virtue, leaving the court of the Faerie Queene, and pursuing a quest, both to demonstrate that virtue in action, and to grow into it. Redcrosse isn’t all that holy at the beginning of book 1. Cantos 1-6 are largely filled with his mistakes. By canto 12, he is a bit more holy. Two ideas here. One, that all the twelve moral virtues are sourced at the court of the Faerie Queene, i.e. that they originate with her, with Elizabeth. Two, that while Elizabeth may be their transcendent source, it is young men, young male courtiers, who actualise them, who put them into action. Elizabeth’s power (and virtue) is physicalised, played out, through men.

That’s half of the Letter of the Authors. The other half is that confusing bit about Prince Arthur:

I labour to pourtraict in Arthure, before he was king, the image of a braue knight, perfected in the twelue priuate morall vertues … Arthure: whom I conceiue after his long education … to haue seene in a dream or vision the Faery Queen, with whose excellent beauty rauised, he awaking resolued to seeke her out, and so being by Merlin armed, and by Timon throughly instructed, he went to seeke her forth in Faerye land … in the person of Prince Arthure I sette forth magnificence in particular, which vertue for that (according to Aristotle and the rest) it is the perfection of all the rest.

As well as a knight riding out from the court of the Faerie Queene in each book, to kill his dragon and demonstrate holiness or whatever, we also have, in each book, a countrapuntal movement – Prince Arthur (King Arthur-to-be), is riding in search of the Faerie Queene whom he has seen in a vision. The two knights tend to intersect in Canto 7. So you won’t meet Arthur this week, but you will next week. In fact, he appears in every book at Canto 7. He is the one continuous thread running through all the books of the poem. And the implication is that, when he finally finds the Faerie Queene, he will marry her.

What is going on here? King Arthur of ancient British legend is threading through this Renaissance poem, looking for Queen Elizabeth in order to marry her. Well, I think we have to approach this as an instance of Tudor nationalism, Tudor propaganda at work. The Tudor dynasty was relatively recent, relatively insecure. For Catholics, Elizabeth was not a legitimate queen at all – Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon should never have been annulled. How compelling then to show Elizabeth as the sought-after bride of the legendary king of ancient Britain .. to link the Tudors to ancient British greatness. Arthur’s pursuit of Elizabeth vindicates her as the kind of endpoint of the Arthurian golden age. And his anticipated marriage of her suggests a marrying of past national splendour with present glory to create a future golden age. For those of you who study epic, I think Spenser here is doing something not entirely dissimilar to the way Virgil constructs Aeneas and Augustus. Do you remember that he locates Augustus as the kind of anticipated endpoint or fulfilment of Aeneas’s founding endeavours. An invisible line is drawn between legendary past and political present.

So, there’s something very Virgilian going on here. And that ties into the next point I want to make – moving away from the Letter of the Authors now, about the hybrid genres of the poem. ** So, number one, predictably enough, The Faerie Queene is an epic. Quite a lot more like Virgil than like Homer – a poem giving an account of the greatness of the British nation. And Spenser has a very very conscious sense of himself as an English Virgil. Do you remember how I said earlier that he wrote a set of pastoral poems in the late 1570s, The Shepheardes Calendar modelled on Virgil’s Eclogues. Well, its not just that he models a particular set of poems, he models a whole career! In the Dedicatory Epistle to the Shepheardes Calender, an anonymous friend of Spenser writes that ‘our young poete’ follows the example of the best ancient poets, such as Virgil, in writing a pastoral poem to test his abilities ‘as young birdes, that be newly crept out of the nest, by little first to proue theyr tender wyngs, before they make a greater flyght’. And in the very first introductory stanza of Book I of the Faerie Queene, speaking in his own person, Spenser refers to this transition from pastoral to epic again:

Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske,

As time her taught, in lowly Shepheards weeds,

Am now enforst a far unfitter taske,

For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds,

And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds.

Spenser’s Muse used to wear shepherd’s clothes and play the reed pipes of pastoral poetry. Now it blows the stern trumpets appropriate to epic utterance.

So – epic devices! Starting in media res: not at the court of the Faerie Queene, but halfway into the quest. The visit to the Underworld in Canto 4: wicked Duessa and Night go down to Hades to find healing for Sansjoy who has been wounded by Redcrosse. But also notice how Spenser makes revisions and criticisms of epic from the standpoint of Christian belief – very like Milton. In Canto 6, Una, whose name means Oneness, the Oneness of Christian truth contained within the reformed Christian church, is captured by Fauns and Satyrs, simple woodland spirits, straight out of a classical poem or eclogue. And these little classical creatures are kind to Una; they are open to learning from her; they are receptive to the Christian Truth; but they are also very child-like, very primitive, by contrast with her. The religious beliefs of classicism are child-like and primitive by contrast with the radiant refinement of reformed Christianity. A second more critical example. In Canto 4, Redcrosse: fallible British holiness, visits the House of Pride – he becomes proud, in other words, after being separated from Christian Truth. He escapes eventually after his attendant dwarf tells him about the horrors of Pride’s dungeon – the victims of Pride who lie rotting there. ** Amongst the victims of Pride: