SparkNotes: The Faerie Queene: Context The Faerie Queene Table of Contents Characters Edmund Spenser was born around 1552 in London, England. We know very little about his family, but he received a quality education and graduated with a Masters from Cambridge in 1576. He began writing poetry for publication at this time and was employed as a secretary, first to the Bishop of Kent and then to nobles in Queen Elizabeth's court. His first major work, The Shepheardes Calender, was published in 1579 and met with critical success; within a year he was at work on his greatest and longest work, The Faerie Queene. This poem occupied him for most of his life, though he published other poems in the interim. The first three books of The Faerie Queen were published in 1590 and then republished with Books IV through VI in 1596. By this time, Spenser was already in his second marriage, which took place in Ireland, where he often traveled. Still at work on his voluminous poem, Spenser died on January 13, 1599, at Westminster.

Spenser only completed half of The Faerie Queene he planned. In a letter to Sir John Walter Raleigh, he explained the purpose and structure of the poem. It is an allegory, a story whose characters and events nearly all have a specific symbolic meaning. The poem's setting is a mythical "Faerie land," ruled by the Faerie Queene. Spenser sets forth in the letter that this "Queene" represents his own monarch, Queen Elizabeth. Spenser intended to write 12 books of the Faerie Queene, all in the classical epic style; Spenser notes that his structure follows those of Homer and Virgil. Each Book concerns the story of a knight, representing a particular Christian virtue, as he or she would convey at the court of the Faerie Queene. Because only half of the poem was ever finished, the unifying scene at the Queene's court never occurs; instead, we are left with six books telling an incomplete story. Of these, the first and the third books are most often read and critically acclaimed. Though it takes place in a mythical land, The Faerie Queen was intended to relate to Spenser's England, most importantly in the area of religion.

Spenser lived in post-Reformation England, which had recently replaced Roman Catholicism with Protestantism (specifically, Anglicanism) as the national religion. There were still many Catholics living in England, and, thus, religious protest was a part of Spenser's life. A devout Protestant and a devotee of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth, Spenser was particularly offended by the anti-Elizabethan propaganda that some Catholics circulated. Like most Protestants near the time of the Reformation, Spenser saw a Catholic Church full of corruption, and he determined that it was not only the wrong religion but the anti-religion. This sentiment is an important backdrop for the battles of The Faerie Queene, which often represent the "battles" between London and Rome. More Help Who was the poet who wrote The Faerie Queen? A. Francis Drake B. Sir Walter Raleigh C. Edmund Spenser D. William Shakespeare You have new items in your feed. Click to view. Question and answer Who was the poet who wrote The Faerie Queen? A. Francis Drake B. Sir Walter Raleigh C. Edmund Spenser D. William Shakespeare D. William Shakespeare was one of the greatest playwrights in the world.

Get an answer Who was the poet who wrote The Faerie Queen? A. Francis Drake B. Sir Walter Raleigh C. Edmund Spenser D. William Shakespeare Original conversation User: Who was the poet who wrote The Faerie Queen? A. Francis Drake B. Sir Walter Raleigh C. Edmund Spenser D. William Shakespeare Weegy: D. William Shakespeare was one of the greatest playwrights in the world. cecillereign |Points 553| User: Who was the poet who wrote The Faerie Queen? A. Francis Drake B. Sir Walter Raleigh C. Edmund Spenser D. William Shakespeare Weegy: The poet who wrote The Faerie Queen: C. Edmund Spenser "The Faerie Queene is an incomplete English epic poem by Edmund Spenser. The first half was published in 1590, and a second installment was published in 1596.

[ The Faerie Queene is notable for its form: it was the first work written in Spenserian stanza and is one of the longest poems in the English language." ] Expert answered| matahari |Points 2992| The Faerie Queene Summary - eNotes.com The Faerie Queene Summary Homework Help The Faerie Queene Summary In The Faerie Queene, the tales of various people from Arthurian and Christian legend intertwine in an epic poem about nature and human virtue. Some of the characters are the Red Cross Knight (also known at St. George), Sir Guyon, Arthur, Artegall, Britomart, and the Faerie Queene. The first part of The Faerie Queene focuses on two virtuous Christian warriors: the Red Cross Knight and Guyon. The Red Cross Knight is famous for slaying the dragon, which represents sin. In the second part, Spenser continues the story of Britomart, a female knight introduced in the first part of the poem. Britomart falls in love with Artegall, the knight of justice. Artegall is later attacked by the Blatant Beast, a giant dog with many tongues.

The Mutabilitie Cantos were appended to the poem after Spenser's death. In the first one, the female Mutabilitie rebels against Jove and the order of the heavens. link Link The Faerie Queene is a long epic poem that begins and ends with Christian affirmations. In it, Edmund Spenser draws on both Christian and classical themes, integrating the two traditions with references to contemporary politics and religion. The poem begins with a representation of holiness in book 1, and the Mutabilitie Cantos (first printed with the poem in 1609 after Spenser’s death) conclude with a prayer. Book 1 is identified as the Legend of the Knight of the Red Cross (or Saint George) in canto 2, verses 11-12. Red Cross, as an individual, is the Protestant Everyman, but as Saint George, historically England’s patron saint, he also represents the collective people of England. He is a pilgrim who hopes to achieve the virtue holiness, and for the reader his adventures illustrate the path to holiness.

Red Cross’s overarching quest, as an individual, is to behold a vision of the New Jerusalem, but he also is engaged in a holy quest involving the lady Una, who represents the one true faith. To liberate Una’s parents, the king and queen, Adam and Eve, Red Cross must slay the dragon, who holds them prisoner. The dragon represents sin, the Spanish Armada, and the Beast of the Apocalypse, and when Red Cross defeats the dragon he is in effect restoring Eden. Red Cross is then able to enter the House of Holiness and is deemed worthy to be united with Una. Book 2 depicts Guyon, the knight of temperance, who learns the wisdom of the classical dictum “Nothing too much” (or “Nothing in excess”). Guyon is accompanied in his quest by a holy palmer and, when he faints at one point, is aided by an angel. These Christian elements suggest that in the quest to achieve temperance grace plays a role complementary to that of reason. Guyon is educated in the house of Alma (soul) and then challenges the sorceress Acrasia (lust) in the Bower of Bliss.

Guyon frees the men who have been changed into beasts by Acrasia’s magic, but one of them (Grill) decides to remain a hog, suggesting Spenser’s conviction that there are limits to human perfectibility. Book 3 concerns chastity and concludes the first part of The Faerie Queene. Even though book 4 is the beginning of the second part of The Faerie Queene, it is linked to book 3 because they both focus on Britomart, a female knight who represents Britain and Elizabeth, and a number of other characters whose stories are interlaced. Britomart falls in love with Artegall, the knight of justice, whose name means “equal to Arthur,” and Merlin prophesies their marriage. Elizabeth is also portrayed as Belphoebe, a beautiful virgin with whom Timias (understood as a figure for the real-life Sir Walter Ralegh) falls in love. Amoret, the twin sister of Belphoebe, is allegorized as married love.

She is imprisoned in the House of Busirane, held prisoner perhaps by her own fears of sexuality or perhaps by the perversions of her captor, but it is Britomart who frees her so that she can be united in marriage with her fiancé Scudamour. Book 4 celebrates friendship and concord as social love. In book 3 it is revealed that Britomart, as England, will be united with Artegall. In book 5, Artegall is presented as the knight of justice, and he is accompanied by Talus, an iron man who is pitiless. Spenser illustrates the scope of the common law in five episodes and then turns to Equity, which is not bound by precedent and so can extend mercy when the letter of the law denies it. Britomart frees Artegall from the prison of Radigund, an Amazon queen, who has enslaved him as a housemaid. This domestic aspect of justice is supplemented by an analysis of political justice in relation to foreign affairs. England is shown as victorious over Spain in a number of episodes. For example, Belge, representing the Netherlands (then under Spanish control), is freed by Artegall.

Book 6 appeared in the 1596 edition of The Faerie Queene, and it was the last section of The Faerie Queene to appear during Spenser’s lifetime. At the conclusion of book 5, Artegall is attacked by the Blatant Beast, a fierce dog with many tongues, who slanders innocent people. In book 6 Calidore, the knight of courtesy, pursues the Blatant Beast; he succeeds in restraining him for a while, but the Blatant Beast breaks free again in the closing lines of the book. Spenser juxtaposes the chivalric ideal, associated with the court and power politics, to the idyllic pastoral world of nature, but even the pastoral and natural world can be disrupted by villains. Calidore falls in love with the beautiful Pastorella, daughter of Meliboe, but when he wanders away into a nearby glade to observe the three Graces dancing to the piping of Colin Clout, he returns to find the shepherd community destroyed by the Brigands. Pastorella and Meliboe are led away as captives; Meliboe is killed in a dispute among the Brigands.

Calidore rescues Pastorella, who turns out to be the noble daughter of Sir Bellamour and his lady Claribell, not the simple shepherd girl she seemed. Calepine, a secondary hero in book 6, rescues Serena from the cannibals. The cannibals’ lust for Serena is presented in a literary blazon in which a woman is described from head to toe. Calepine arrives just in time to keep the cannibals from eating her. The literary language of chivalry, pastoral, and love poetry contrasts with the real world of the Blatant Beast, the Brigands, and the cannibals. Book 7, or the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie (the Mutabilitie Cantos), was printed posthumously along with Books 1-6 in the first folio of The Faerie Queene (1609). The printer says that in form and matter the two cantos seem to be a fragment of an unfinished book related to the theme of constancy. The Mutabilitie Cantos contain two distinct narratives and conclude with a Sabbath prayer. The major narrative describes Mutabilitie’s attempt to challenge the divine hierarchy in which Jove rules the heavens.

Her rebellion leads to a trial that is finally judged by Nature, who gives the somewhat ambiguous verdict that change does not cause anything to alter its essential nature. The passing of time is an unfolding in which the fabric of reality realizes its nature. In a comic subplot, Faunus, a Pan-like wood god, promises to help the river nymph Molanna to win the love of Fanchin if she will help him see her mistress, Diana, in her bath. Diana and her nymphs discover Faunus and chase him but do not kill or geld him. Molanna is punished by stoning but is metamorphosed into a stream and joins her lover, the river Behanagh. In the two concluding stanzas of the poem, Spenser prays that he may rest eternally with the great God of Sabbath. More Content: Summary (hide) link Link Spenser’s The Faerie Queene was published in two parts: the first part (books 1 to 3) appeared in 1590; the second part (books 4 to 6), with which the first part was reprinted, appeared in 1596.

The dedication to the 1596 edition is addressed to Elizabeth I, whom Spenser describes as the empress of England, France, Ireland, and Virginia. He adds that he is consecrating “these his labours to live with the eternitie of her fame.” Although The Faerie Queene makes use of romance, as well as epic conventions, Spenser intended the poem to function as an English epic, a celebration of the emerging British empire. In his letter to Sir Walter Ralegh dated January 13, 1589, he states that the “generall end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline.” Spenser also states that he will use the Aristotelian virtues as a means of organizing the themes of his epic, indicating that he will write a twelve-book epic, portraying in Arthur the twelve private moral virtues that he exercised before he was king. If this work is well received, he adds, he may continue by describing how Arthur came to embody the twelve “politick” virtues after he became king.

When the second part appeared in 1596, the title page described the poem as “disposed into twelve bookes, fashioning XII morall vertues,” but no suggestion is given regarding whether the moral virtues are private or public. One of the most distinctive stylistic features of The Faerie Queene involves Spenser’s use of allegory and typology, both of which are unfamiliar to a modern audience and have therefore often been misinterpreted. Renaissance authors inherited a tradition of reading texts allegorically from medieval writers. The method of reading Homer’s works and the Bible in terms of a fourfold allegory derived from Alexandrian exegesis of these texts. According to this method of reading, anything that was not educational or useful in a text should be interpreted figuratively. No level of meaning would be taken literally. A reference to the Temple of Jerusalem, for example, would be interpreted historically as the Temple of Jerusalem, allegorically as the Church on earth, morally as the individual believer, and anagogically or mystically as the final communion of the saints in heaven. Renaissance readers and writers think of allegory somewhat in the way that modern readers think of symbolism; meanings are concealed in the imagery and narrative.

In Spenser’s case, the allegory is not continuous, nor is it consistent. Elizabeth, for example, is represented by the maiden hunter Belphoebe and by Britomart, the female knight, who will marry Artegall (equal to Arthur), the knight of justice. The offspring of Britomart and Artegall will produce the Tudor dynasty culminating in Elizabeth, but in book 5 Elizabeth is also represented in Mercilla, a queenly figure who dispenses both justice and mercy. A character or event frequently is to be interpreted on multiple levels of significance: In book 1, Redcrosse knight is the champion of the virtue holiness, but he is also the embodiment of Saint George, the patron saint of England and the defender of the one true Protestant church. Instead of trying to arrive at a specific interpretation of The Faerie Queene, one needs to be aware of the potential multiplicity of meanings that may be suggested in any one episode. Interpretation of Spenser’s allegory is rendered more difficult because, during the eighteenth century, the significance of the term “allegory” changed, creating confusion about what a Renaissance author intended when he wrote allegory.

Instead of being used to refer to the structure of images and narrative incidents, allegory came to be used as a synonym for personification. Spenser does use personification, for example, in the monsters Error in book 1 and Lust in book 4, but under the rubric of allegory he also includes other genres such as fable, prophecy, and parable and devices such as irony (saying one thing but meaning another), hyperbole, and historical and contemporary allusions. George Puttenham, in his The Arte of English Poesie (1589), makes an interesting distinction between mixed allegory, in which the poet tells the readers what the metaphor means, and full allegory, in which the poet allows the readers to determine the meaning. According to Puttenham’s definition, the play Everyman (1508) would be considered a mixed allegory because the author reveals that Good Deeds means a Christian who follows Christ’s teaching; on the other hand, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (pr. c. 1600-1601, pb.

1603) would be considered a full allegory because the character Hamlet is a specific Danish prince but can also represent Everyman. Most modern handbooks of literature reverse these classifications and would consider Everyman “more allegorical” than Hamlet. The Faerie Queene fits Puttenham’s definition of full allegory. When Spenser refers to his poem as a “dark conceit,” he is alluding to the structure of images and to the narrative and rhetorical techniques in the poem, not to a structure of ideas outside it. In the letter to Ralegh, he comments: “To some, I know, this Methode will seeme displeasaunt, which had rather have good discipline delivered plainly in way of precepts, or sermoned at large, as they use, then thus dowdily enwrapped in Allegoricall devices.” The allegory, for Spenser, consists of “cloudy devices,” not of precepts or sermons. Typology, another device used throughout The Faerie Queene, is even less familiar than allegory to modern readers. The term comes from typos (Greek, “to strike”).

In biblical typology, a type is defined as a detail in the Old Testament that foreshadows its antitype in the New Testament. The detail may be a person (Adam, Moses, and David are all types of Christ); it may be an event (the Passover and the crossing of the Red Sea foreshadow the Redemption); or it may be an institution (the Levitical priesthood and the ritual of the old Temple are figures of the blessings of the spiritual priesthood of Christ). In Nowell’s Catechism, which every sixteenth century reader would have known, the master asks, “Why should not the Decalogue refer to the Israelites alone, because God’s introduction declares: ’Hear, O Israel, I am the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the House of bondage.’” The student is supposed to answer that the pharaoh of Egypt is the figure of the devil ready to oppress the Christian and that Moses’ rescue of the Israelites from bodily bondage is a type of Christ’s delivery of all of His faithful followers from the bondage of sin (antitype).

Spenser’s readers would have interpreted the battle between Redcrosse knight and the dragon in canto 11 of book 1 typologically. The imagery used to describe the three-day battle makes it clear that Redcrosse is triumphing over Satan, but the imagery also summons images of the Passion and of the harrowing of hell. In most of Spenser’s verse, including his justly acclaimed short masterpiece, Epithalamion, one finds him using the techniques of allegory and typology. The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser. Search eText, Read Online, Study, Discuss. VVITH THE ETERNITIE OF HER FAME. Edmund Spenser was born in London, England in 1552. We know relatively little about his family and early life. We know he graduated with masters from Cambridge in 1576, and from there he began writing poetry to publish. Sometime around 1580 Spenser started The Faerie Queene, and though he devoted most of his time to it, he still managed to publish other works in the meanwhile. Originally intended to be a total length of twenty-four books, The Faerie Queene is incomplete.

Notwithstanding its grave incompletion, however, it is still one of the longest poems in the English language. In its day, The Faerie Queene found political favor and was quite successful; it became Spenser’s defining work (and still is), and it found such favor that Spenser was granted a pension for life by the monarch of 50 pounds per year. The poem is a moral allegory, written in praise of Elizabeth I, intending, through each book, to emphasize twenty-four different virtues. The first twelve would follow different knights who epitomized one of the twelve different “private virtues.” We speculate that the last twelve would have centered on King Arthur epitomizing the twelve “public virtues.” Spenser gives Aristotle as his source for these virtues, although the influence of other philosophers, namely Thomas Aquinas, is ostensible. By the time Spenser died, with the first three books published in 1590 and the next three in 1596, he only managed to cover six of the virtues: Holiness, Temperament, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy. The incomplete seventh book appears to represent the virtue of Consistency.

Of the six books completed, the first and third are most often read. Beyond the virtues the themes explored include politics and, perhaps most importantly, religion. In post Lutheran Protestant reformation, there was vehement protest between the still many Roman Catholics and Protestants occupying England. As an extremely devout Protestant, Spenser was especially annoyed by slanderous material against the Queen; moreover, Spenser saw the Roman Catholic Church full of idolatry and corruption. Thus, while his Protestant sensibilities and sentiments towards the Roman Catholic Church color the entire work, they are principally displayed in the “battles” of The Faerie Queene, which often symbolize “battles” between Rome and London. The poem exhibits Spenser’s solid grasp of literature, emulating many themes and ideas presented in other epics. The Faerie Queene celebrates Queen Elizabeth I and the Tudor dynasty, much like Virgil’s Aeneid, which celebrates Augustus Caesar and Rome; where the Aeneid tells that Caesar descended from the sons of Troy, The Faerie Queene proposes that Queen Elizabeth and the Tudor dynasty are descendants of King Arthur.

The poem, while outwardly about King Arthur, also draws much in the way of language and style from Italian poetry, notably Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered.--Submitted by Forum member Cunninglinguist. Fan of this book? Help us introduce it to others by writing a better introduction for it . It's quick and easy, click here . Recent Forum Posts on The Faerie Queene No active discussions on Spenser found. Why not post a question or comment yourself? Just click the link below. Edmund Spenser | English poet | Britannica.com Edmund Spenser John Taylor Edmund Spenser, (born 1552/53, London , England —died January 13, 1599, London), English poet whose long allegorical poem The Faerie Queene is one of the greatest in the English language. It was written in what came to be called the Spenserian stanza . Edmund Spenser, oil painting by an unknown artist; in the collection of Pembroke College, … Courtesy of the Master and Fellows, Pembroke College, Cambridge, Eng. Youth and education Little is certainly known about Spenser.

He was related to a noble Midlands family of Spencer, whose fortunes had been made through sheep raising. His own immediate family was not wealthy. He was entered as a “poor boy” in the Merchant Taylors’ grammar school, where he would have studied mainly Latin, with some Hebrew, Greek, and music. In 1569, when Spenser was about 16 years old, his English versions of poems by the 16th-century French poet Joachim du Bellay and his translation of a French version of a poem by the Italian poet Petrarch appeared at the beginning of an anti-Catholic prose tract, A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings; they were no doubt commissioned by its chief author, the wealthy Flemish expatriate Jan Baptista van der Noot . (Some of these poems Spenser later revised for his Complaints volume.) From May 1569 Spenser was a student in Pembroke Hall (now Pembroke College) of the University of Cambridge , where, along with perhaps a quarter of the students, he was classed as a sizar—a student who, out of financial necessity, performed various menial or semi-menial duties.

He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1573. Because of an epidemic , Spenser left Cambridge in 1574, but he received the Master of Arts degree in 1576. His best-known friend at Cambridge was the slightly older Gabriel Harvey , a fellow of Pembroke, who was learned, witty, and enthusiastic for ancient and modern literature but also pedantic , devious , and ambitious. There is no reason to believe that Spenser shared the most distasteful of these qualities, but, in the atmosphere of social mobility and among the new aristocracy of Tudor England, it is not surprising that he hoped for preferment to higher position. Spenser’s period at the University of Cambridge was undoubtedly important for the acquisition of his wide knowledge not only of the Latin and some of the Greek classics but also of the Italian, French, and English literature of his own and earlier times. His knowledge of the traditional forms and themes of lyrical and narrative poetry provided foundations for him to build his own highly original compositions .

Without the Roman epic poet Virgil ’s Aeneid, the 15th-century Italian Ludovico Ariosto ’s Orlando furioso, and, later, Torquato Tasso ’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581), Spenser could not have written his heroic, or epic, poem The Faerie Queene. Without Virgil’s Bucolics and the later tradition of pastoral poetry in Italy and France, Spenser could not have written The Shepheardes Calender. And without the Latin, Italian, and French examples of the highly traditional marriage ode and the sonnet and canzone forms of Petrarch and succeeding sonneteers, Spenser could not have written his greatest lyric, Epithalamion, and its accompanying sonnets, Amoretti. The patterns of meaning in Spenser’s poetry are frequently woven out of the traditional interpretations—developed through classical times and his own—of pagan myth , divinities, and philosophies and out of an equally strong experience of the faith and doctrines of Christianity; these patterns he further enriched by the use of medieval and contemporary story, legend , and folklore. Britannica Stories Ringling Bros.

Folds Its Tent Spenser’s religious training was a most important part of his education. He could not have avoided some involvement in the bitter struggles that took place in his university over the path the new Church of England was to tread between Roman Catholicism and extreme Puritanism, and his own poetry repeatedly engages with the opposition between Protestantism and Catholicism and the need to protect the national and moral purity of the Elizabethan church. Contrary to a former view, there is little reason to believe that he inclined toward the Puritanical side. His first known appointment (after a blank of several years, when he may have been in the north of England) was in 1578 as secretary to Bishop John Young of Rochester, former master of Spenser’s college at Cambridge. Spenser’s first important publication, The Shepheardes Calender (1579 or 1580), is more concerned with the bishops and affairs of the English church than is any of his later work. Early works Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies The Calender consists of 12 eclogues, one named after each month of the year.

One of the shepherds, Colin Clout, who excels in poetry but is ruined by his hopeless love for one Rosalind, is Spenser himself. The eclogue “Aprill” is in praise of the shepherdess Elisa, really the queen (Elizabeth I) herself. “October” examines the various kinds of verse composition and suggests how discouraging it is for a modern poet to try for success in any of them. Most of the eclogues, however, concern good or bad shepherds—that is to say, pastors—of Christian congregations. The Calender was well received in its day, and it is still a revelation of what could be done poetically in English after a long period of much mediocrity and provinciality. The archaic quality of its language, sometimes deplored, was partly motivated by a desire to continue older English poetic traditions, such as that of Geoffrey Chaucer . Archaic vocabulary is not so marked a feature of Spenser’s later work. The years 1578–80 probably produced more changes in Spenser’s life than did any other corresponding period.

He appears by 1580 to have been serving the fascinating, highly placed, and unscrupulous Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester and to have become a member of the literary circle led by Sir Philip Sidney , Leicester’s nephew, to whom the Calender was dedicated and who praised it in his important critical work The Defence of Poesie (1595). Spenser remained permanently devoted to this brilliant writer and good nobleman, embodied him variously in his own poetry, and mourned his early death in an elegy. By 1580 Spenser had also started work on The Faerie Queene, and in the previous year he had apparently married one Machabyas Chylde. Interesting sidelights on his personal character, of which next to nothing is known, are given in a small collection of letters between Spenser and Gabriel Harvey that was printed in 1580. The ironies in that exchange of letters are so intricate, however, as to make it difficult to draw many conclusions from them about Spenser, except that he was young, ambitious, accomplished, and sincerely interested in the theory and practice of poetry.

In 1580 Spenser was made secretary to the new lord deputy of Ireland , Arthur Lord Grey, who was a friend of the Sidney family. Career in Ireland Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Pinterest Sixteenth-century Ireland and the Irish were looked on by the English as a colony, although the supposed threat of an invasion by Spain and the conflict between an imposed English church and the Roman Catholicism of the Irish were further complicating factors. Irish chieftains and the Anglo-Irish nobility encouraged native resistance to newly arrived English officials and landowners. As Grey’s secretary, Spenser accompanied the lord deputy on risky military campaigns as well as on more routine journeys. He may have witnessed the Smerwick massacre (1580), and his poetry is haunted by nightmare characters who embody a wild lawlessness. The conflict between Grey’s direct, drastic governmental measures and the queen’s characteristic procrastinating and temporizing style soon led to Grey’s frustration and recall. But Spenser, like many others, admired and defended Grey’s methods.

Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland (written 1595–96, published 1633), a later tract, argues lucidly for a typically 16th-century theory of rule: firm measures, ruthlessly applied, with gentleness only for completely submissive subject populations. A discussion of English colonization of the vast estates in Munster, Ireland, that belonged to the … Courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library; CC-BY-SA 4.0 (A Britannica Publishing Partner) For four or five years from roughly 1584, Spenser carried out the duties of a second important official position in Ireland, deputizing for his friend Lodowick Bryskett as clerk of the lords president (governors) of Munster, the southernmost Irish province. The fruits of his service in Ireland are plain. He was given a sinecure post and other favours, including the right to dispose of certain forfeited parcels of land (he no doubt indulged in profitable land speculation). For a time he leased the small property of New Abbey, County Kildare, and on this basis was first designated “gentleman.” Finally, he obtained a much larger estate in Munster.

One of the chief preoccupations of the presidents of this province, scarred as it was by war and starvation, was to repopulate it. To this end, large “plantations” were awarded to English “undertakers,” who undertook to make them self-sustaining by occupying them with Englishmen of various trades. In 1588 or 1589 Spenser took over the 3,000-acre (1,200-hectare) plantation of Kilcolman, about 25 miles (40 km) to the north and a little to the west of Cork. No doubt he took there his son and daughter and his wife, if she was still alive (she is known to have died by 1594, when Spenser married Elizabeth Boyle, a "kinswoman" of the earl of Cork, one of Ireland’s wealthiest men). By acquiring this estate, Spenser made his choice for the future: to rise into the privileged class of what was, to all intents, a colonial land of opportunity rather than to seek power and position on the more crowded ground of the homeland, where he had made his poetic reputation.

In his new situation he, like other undertakers, had much conflict with the local Anglo-Irish aristocracy and had limited success in filling the plantations with English families. Nevertheless, it was under these conditions that Spenser brought his greatest poetry to completion. The Faerie Queene and last years Trending Topics Eyjafjallajökull volcano 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. Title page of the first edition of The Faerie Queene (1590) by Edmund … © Bettmann/Corbis Illustration from an edition of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.

Photos.com/Jupiterimages 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. Assessment 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. The Faerie Queene | Folio Illustrated Book Gilded top edges Printed on watermarked laid paper Presented in a wooden slipcase covered in Toile Vendôme, with a sliding tray in the base for ease of use 1,712 pages in total Book Size: 10¾" x 8½" One of the most beautiful works of the Arts and Crafts Movement – a gorgeous facsimile of a piece of publishing history 'Abroad in armes, at home in studious kynd, Who seekes with painfull toile shall honor soonest find' The sixteenth century was the golden age of English poetry. Edmund Spenser burned to create an English equivalent to Virgil’s Aeneid.

Instead of lauding the Caesars, he would glorify Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen. Where Virgil connected Rome to the heroic past of Troy, Spenser would forge a link between Tudor England and the mythological age of King Arthur. The result was The Faerie Queene, a rich allegory which elevated Protestant virtues through the medium of a romantic, chivalric epic. Today the power of Spenser’s story and the beauty of his verse still live in ‘famous memory’. Rather as Spenser himself looked to ‘antique times’, the Arts and Crafts movement of the late-19th century looked back nostalgically to the Middle Ages. Walter Crane, an illustrator and associate of William Morris, was inspired by Edmund Spenser. He, after all, was a quintessentially English writer, dedicated to the noble aims of justice, honour and chivalry to which Crane himself, a socialist and romantic, was also committed. He illustrated the poem so lavishly that this sumptuous edition became a legend of book production in its own right.

Edmund Spenser: ‘Prince of Poets’ 'And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds; Whose praises having slept in silence long, Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds To blazon broade emongst her learned throng: Fierce warres and faithful loves shall moralize my song.' Born in London around 1552 to a family of modest means, Edmund Spenser was educated as a poor scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He managed to gain work with the government, and served in Ireland, where he met the influential court favourite and poet, Sir Walter Raleigh. His own poetry, including The Faerie Queene, was written in between his official duties and he succeeded in gaining an introduction to read his works to the Queen in 1589. The Queen was so impressed with his epic that she granted Spenser an annual pension of £50. Elizabeth’s chief minister Lord Burghley is supposed to have grumbled, ‘What, all this for a song!’ Spenser’s Irish estate was burned during an attack in 1598. He left Ireland a year later and returned to London, where he died aged 47.

His coffin was interred in Westminster Abbey close to Chaucer, an indication of the immense stature he had acquired. His inscription hails: ‘Prince of Poets in his tyme; whose Divine Spirrit needs noe othir witnesse then the works which he left behinde him.’ A rich, many-layered allegory And thou, O fayrest Princesse under sky! In this fayre mirrhour maist behold thy face, And thine owne realmes in lond of Faery, And in this antique ymage thy great auncestry Spenser drew praise from Milton for his ‘forests, and enchantments drear/Where more is meant than meets the ear’. On one level The Faerie Queene works as a fabulous romance in which dragons, beasts, satyrs, foul enchanters, kind hermits, virtuous maidens and wicked seductresses are all to be found.

On another, it is an allegory that is at once moral, political and biographical, from the many characters who reflect aspects of Elizabeth I (the virtuous Belphoebe, the warrior maid Britomartis, Gloriana and the Faerie Queene herself), to wicked characters who symbolise the Catholic Church, the Pope and Mary Queen of Scots. Some personifications are obvious – Despaire urging suicide, or three sisters called Fidelia, Speranza and Charissa who are healers in the House of Holinesse. Other dramatic allegories present subtle moral conundrums, which the reader, as much as the characters, must learn to decode. The Redcrosse Knight is too easily led to doubt his lady Una because of a trick; Amavia kills herself, splashing her baby with blood – a stain which cannot be washed away; a husband whose wife is unfaithful jumps into the sea, only to discover that he is so consumed by jealousy that he floats safely . . . Spenser’s imagination and inventiveness ensure his characters and situations are too lively and many-layered for any simplistic reading. Each Book tells the adventure of a different knight, representing a virtue.

Prince Arthur, who is searching for the Faerie Queene, acts as a common thread through the Books, assisting the various knights in their quests. Spenser wrote to Sir Walter Raleigh describing an ambitious plan of twelve Books, and perhaps even more. He completed six, which, at a total of 35,000 lines, makes The Faerie Queene the longest poem in the English language. Such is the quality of his poetry and storytelling that it is hard to think of The Faerie Queene as unfinished, rather it presents a series of adventures as timeless as any myth or legend. Described as ‘the poet’s poet’, Spenser was the most widely read and highly regarded poet in English in his lifetime and long afterwards. He influenced not only Milton and Shakespeare, but Shelley, Wordsworth and Keats. Although the language in The Faerie Queene was deliberately archaic, Spenser also coined words still in use today – ‘blatant’ and ‘derring-do’ among them. Perhaps his most famous innovation was the poetic form in which The Faerie Queene is written. The Spenserian stanza is formed of nine lines with a tight, intricate rhyme scheme.

It became an immensely popular form, powerful but distinctively English, unlike the sonnet which was of Italian origin. Many other poets used it successfully – Keats wrote ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ in the form, Wordsworth his lament ‘The Female Vagrant’, and Tennyson ‘The Lotus Eaters’. Walter Crane: pre-eminent artist of the Arts and Crafts movement ‘Great Spenser’s noble rhyme have I essayed To picture, striving still, as faithful squyre, Each faerie knight to serve’ WALTER CRANE Walter Crane was already a well-established illustrator, artist and wood-engraver who had worked with William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and other luminaries of the day when he embarked on his most ambitious project – the illustration and decoration of the longest poem in the English language. It is the most important and impressive work in his large and varied oeuvre. It was also the most demanding, taking him three years to complete and requiring publication in stages. He produced 88 large illustrations and 135 illustrative head and tailpieces, as well as overseeing the production of these large, beautifully printed volumes.

He was undoubtedly influenced by the Kelmscott Chaucer, but his distinctive style – inspired by Japanese art as much as by the pre-Raphaelites – gives a lighter, fresher feel. This Arts and Crafts masterpiece contains the first stirrings of Art Nouveau, especially in its delicate, varied borders. As Crane’s dedicatory poem indicates, this is a powerful, imaginative response to the poem: faithful, and yet highly original. Reviews Rating: 5/5 "This edition of the 'Faerie Queene' is absolutely gorgeous. It consists of three books in a very solid wooden slipcase covered in a shiny cloth (it actually changes its colour depending on the ankle f..." [read more] "This edition of the 'Faerie Queene' is absolutely gorgeous. It consists of three books in a very solid wooden slipcase covered in a shiny cloth (it actually changes its colour depending on the ankle from which you're looking at it). You can pull out a kind of tray, so removing the books is easy. They are bound in creamy leather and blocked in gold, which is beautiful. They are very richly illustrated by Walter Crane; the illustrations are a pure pleasure to look at and full of details.

The text is pleasant to look at / read, but it is several centuries old, and as a rule I think that such texts profit from a commentary that helps the modern reader understand them better. (The Arden editions of the works of Shakespeare are a prime example of just how helpful it can be to have a well-commented edition.) A lot of words have changed their meaning over time, the grammar is different, many references are lost unless an expert explains them. So some kind of commentary would have been a really helpful bonus to this beautiful edition for those who don't just want to enjoy its visual beauty. But that's the only thing that's not perfect about this otherwise gorgeous edition. I definitely don't regret buying it." [hide full review] People who viewed this book also viewed: Edmund Spenser - Wikiquote Edmund Spenser I learned have, not to despise, What ever thing seemes small in common eyes . Edmund Spenser (c.

1552 – January 13 , 1599 ) was an English poet, who wrote such pastorals as The Shepheardes Calendar, Astrophell and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, but is most famous for the multi-layered allegorical romance, The Faerie Queene . Contents For of the soule the bodie forme doth take; For the soule is forme, and doth the bodie make. For all that faire is, is by nature good ; That is a signe to know the gentle blood. I trow that countenance cannot lie, Whose thoughts are legible in the eie. An Elegie, or Friends Passion, for his Astrophill, Line 108 (1586). Death slue not him, but he made death his ladder to the skies. Another [Epitaph] of the Same, line 20 (1586). I learned have, not to despise, What ever thing seemes small in common eyes. Visions of the Worlds Vanitie, line 69 (1591).

For of the soule the bodie forme doth take; For the soule is forme, and doth the bodie make. An Hymne in Honour of Beautie, line 132 (1596). For all that faire is, is by nature good; That is a signe to know the gentle blood. An Hymne in Honour of Beautie, line 139. To kerke the narre from God more farre, Has bene an old-sayd sawe; And he that strives to touche a starre Oft stombles at a strawe. The Shepheardes Calender, July, line 97; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Full little knowest thou that hast not tride, What hell it is in suing long to bide: To loose good dayes, that might be better spent; To wast long nights in pensive discontent; To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow; To feed on hope, to pine with feare and sorrow. . . . . . . . . .

To fret thy soule with crosses and with cares; To eate thy heart through comfortlesse dispaires; 13 To fawne, to crowche, to waite, to ride, to ronne, To spend, to give, to want, to be undonne. Unhappie wight, borne to desastrous end, That doth his life in so long tendance spend! Mother Hubberds Tale, line 895; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). What more felicitie can fall to creature Than to enjoy delight with libertie, And to be lord of all the workes of Nature, To raine in th' aire from earth to highest skie, To feed on flowres and weeds of glorious feature. Muiopotmos: or, The Fate of the Butterflie, line 209; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). I hate the day, because it lendeth light To see all things, but not my love to see. Daphnaida, v.

407; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Tell her the joyous Time will not be staid, Unlesse she doe him by the forelock take. Amoretti, lxx; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). I was promised on a time To have reason for my rhyme; From that time unto this season, I received nor rhyme nor reason. Lines on his Promised Pension; reported in Thomas Fuller , Worthies of England, vol ii, page 379, and in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Behold, whiles she before the altar stands, Hearing the holy priest that to her speakes, And blesseth her with his two happy hands. Epithalamion, line 223; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Calm was the day, and through the trembling air Sweet-breathing Zephyrus did softly play— A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay Hot Titan's beams, which then did glister fair Line 1. Sweete Themmes runne softly, till I end my Song. The last line of each stanza This is often attributed to T. S. Eliot , who does indeed quote it in The Waste Land. With that I saw two swans of goodly hue Come softly swimming down along the Lee: Two fairer birds I yet did never see; The snow which doth the top of Pindus strow Did never whiter show, Nor Jove himself, when he a swan would be For love of Leda, whiter did appear Line 37. Fierce warres and faithfull loves shall moralize my song. Introduction, stanza 1. A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine. Canto 1, stanza 1. But of his cheere did seeme too solemne sad; Yet nothing did he dread, but ever was ydrad. Canto 1, stanza 2. The noblest mind the best contentment has.

Canto 1, stanza 35. A bold bad man, that dar'd to call by name Great Gorgon, Prince of darknesse and dead night. Canto 1, stanza 37. As the great eye of heaven, shyned bright, And made a sunshine in the shady place. Canto 3, stanza 4. Ay me, how many perils doe enfold The righteous man, to make him daily fall! Canto 8, stanza 1. As when in Cymbrian plaine An heard of bulles, whom kindly rage doth sting, Doe for the milky mothers want complaine, And fill the fieldes with troublous bellowing. Canto 8, stanza 11. Entire affection hateth nicer hands. Canto 8, stanza 40. That darksome cave they enter, where they find That cursed man, low sitting on the ground, Musing full sadly in his sullein mind. Canto 9, stanza 35. Is not short paine well borne, that brings long ease, And layes the soul to sleepe in quiet grave?

Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please. Canto 9, stanza 40. Whereon thy innocent feet doe ever tread! Canto 10, stanza 9. No daintie flowre or herbe that growes on grownd, No arborett with painted blossoms drest And smelling sweete, but there it might be fownd To bud out faire, and throwe her sweete smels al arownd. Canto 6, stanza 12. And is there care in Heaven? And is there love In heavenly spirits to these Creatures bace? Canto 8, stanza 1. How oft do they their silver bowers leave To come to succour us that succour want! Canto 8, stanza 2. And all for love, and nothing for reward. Canto 8, stanza 2. Eftsoones they heard a most melodious sound. Canto 12, stanza 70. Through thicke and thin, both over banke and bush In hope her to attaine by hooke or crooke.

Canto 1, stanza 17. Into the woods thenceforth in hast she went, To seeke for hearbes, that mote him remedy; For she of hearbes had great intendiment, Taught of the Nymphe, which from her infancy Her nourced had in trew Nobility: There, whether it divine Tobacco were, Or Panachaea, or Polygony, She found, and brought it to her patient deare Who al this while lay bleeding out his hart-bloud neare. Canto 5, stanza 32. Her berth was of the wombe of morning dew, And her conception of the joyous Prime. Canto 6, stanza 3. Roses red and violets blew, And all the sweetest flowres that in the forrest grew. Canto 6, stanza 6. And as she lookt about, she did behold, How over that same dore was likewise writ, Be bold, be bold, and every where Be bold, That much she muz'd, yet could not construe it By any ridling skill, or commune wit.

At last she spyde at that same roomes upper end, Another yron dore, on which was writ, Be not too bold. Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled, On Fames eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled. Canto 2, stanza 32. For all that Nature by her mother-wit Could frame in earth. As withered weed through cruell winters tine, That feeles the warmth of sunny beames reflection, Liftes up his head, that did before decline And gins to spread his leafe before the faire sunshine. Canto 12, stanza 34. Me seemes the world is runne quite out of square, From the first point of his appointed sourse, And being once amisse growes daily wourse and wourse. Introduction, stanza 1. Who will not mercie unto others show, How can he mercy ever hope to have? Canto 2, stanza 42. Ill can he rule the great, that cannot reach the small. Canto 2, stanza 43. But Justice, though her dome [doom] she doe prolong, Yet at the last she will her owne cause right.

Canto 11, stanza 1. A monster, which the Blatant beast men call, A dreadfull feend of gods and men ydrad. Canto 12, stanza 37. The gentle minde by gentle deeds is knowne. For a man by nothing is so well bewrayd, As by his manners. David Hume , The History of England , Vol. II (1759), Ch. VII, p. 738. I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say "at last", I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do — so much have I enjoyed it. C. S. Lewis , in a letter to Arthur Greeves (7 March 1916), published in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis : Family Letters, 1905-1931 (2004) edited by Walter Hooper, p. 170. The Fairie Queene makes cinema out of the west's primary principle: to see is to know; to know is to control. The Spenserian eye cuts, wounds, rapes.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1990), p. 173. The Faerie Queene is the most extended and extensive meditation on sex in the history of poetry. It charts the entire erotic spectrum, a great chain of being rising from matter to spirit, from the coarsest lust to chastity and romantic idealism. The poem’s themes of sex and politics are parallel: the psyche, like society, must be disciplined by good government. Spenser agrees with the classical and Christian philosophers on the primacy of reason over animal appetites. He looks forward to the Romantic poets, however, in the way that he shows the sex impulse as ultimately daemonic and barbaric, breeding witches and sorcerers of evil allure. Like the Odyssey , The Faerie Queene is a heroic epic in which the masculine must evade female traps or delays. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1990), p. 188.

Encyclopedic article on Edmund Spenser at Wikipedia Works related to Author:Edmund Spenser at Wikisource Media related to Edmund Spenser at Wikimedia Commons SparkNotes: The Faerie Queene The Faerie Queene by touhidsm , May 09, 2014 Read the full answer at >> Answer: There is no matter of doubt that Spencer’s poem, The Faerie Queene, is replete with allegorical significance. Edmund Spenser stands among the greatest writers of the Elizabethan period whose valuable contributions fashioned a new tradition in English literature. Nowadays he is hailed to be one of the chief initiators of the Renaissance movement in English literature. Spenser's rich and ... Read more→

Question: Who wrote the poem The Faerie Queen?
Answer: EDMUND SPENSER