The Faerie Queene is Edmund Spenser's unfinished 16th century epic poem that uses allegory to explore themes of holiness, temperance, chastity, friendship, justice and courtesy. Each of the poem's six books centers around a knight exemplifying one of these virtues. Though set in a fantastical realm, Spenser drew inspiration from the court of Queen Elizabeth I and sought to promote Protestant ideals through figures like Redcrosse, who comes to represent the virtue of holiness, and his companion Una, who represents truth.

1. THE FAERIE QUEENE (1590)
The Faerie Queene is bigger than
anything Chaucer or Milton wrote; it
is, in fact, enormous. It reveres
Chaucer, Malory, and Skelton for
writing in English; it flaunts its
affiliations with Homer's Odyssey,
with Vergil's Aeneid, with Ovid's
Metamorphoses, and with the
Renaissance Italian epic romances
that Spenser says he wants to
'overgo': in other words, to be bigger,
better, and smarter than.

2. Setting: Faerie Land, aka England
Edmund Spenser's poetry today seems
a description of impossible fantasy
scenes. However, a major
inspiration for these faerie realms
was the glittering splendor he saw
in Elizabeth's court. We might also
think that his emphasis on knights
and jousting is another
manifestation of fantasy; yet these,
too, had their basis in Elizabeth's
court: although gunpowder had put
an end to the era of armored
knights carrying lances on
horseback in real battles, jousting
and tournaments were much alive
as forms of entertainment for
Elizabeth and her aristocracy.

3. The Faerie Queene is an epic poem
(like Paradise Lost), a personification
allegory, and a romance.
A Romance is a long piece
of narrative literature in
either prose or verse,
that tells the story of a
chivalric hero who is on a
long quest filled with
misadventures and
supernatural
disturbances to save a
damsel. It is nearly
always set in a pastoral
setting with pit stops at
many castles.
It has little to do with romantic roses and candles and weddings and
way more to do with slaughtering beasts and raiding castles and
challenging other knights accused of theft or sexual assault or disloyalty.

4. The Chivalric Code was
guidance for knights within the
feudal world of the Middle Ages.
A Christians Duty to God: protecting the innocent, being
faithful to the church, being the champion of good against evil,
& being generous and obeying God above the feudal lord
A Warrior's Duty to Christian Countrymen: mercy, courage,
valour, fairness, protection of the weak and the poor, and the
servant-hood of the knight to his lord
A Courtier's Duty to Women: gentleness,
graciousness, protection, and service to all women

5. The Middle Ages
(aka the Medieval Period)
(no longer known as the Dark Ages)
Between the fall of Rome and
the Renaissance (500-
1500) a time when art and
knowledge was confined to
the Catholic church and
monasteries. Very few
countries or languages we
know today existed. It was
a time when small kings
rewarded fiefs to feudal
lords who ruled over knights
and vassals who protected
peasants and serfs who
worked the land.
[The Faerie Queene (1590) was written during the Renaissance but set in
the Middle Ages and written in language that resembles Middle English]

6. The Faerie Queene claims outright to be moral philosophy, which is
comprised of two parts -- ethics and political philosophy. If the
poem is about philosophical questions, why all the gruesome
violence?
The Genre of the Romance provided Spenser with a medium in which
he could explore the relation of tyranny and violence to social
structures.
Most of The Faerie Queene was written in Renaissance Ireland.
There, the English were engaged in the brutal suppression of a
series of rebellions Irish lords, and the country was in a terrible and
terrified state.
In Spenser's prose tract he tells about an English captain who bragged
about placing the severed heads of recently executed Irish rebels
along the pathway to his tent so that if any local person came to beg
a favor from him, she or he would be suitably undone by seeing the
heads of her relatives or neighbors on the way to her English
governor.
C. S. Lewis wrote that Spenser's involvement in English colonization in
Ireland 'corrupted his imagination,' leading the poet into using
allegory as a kind of moral justification for such gravely immoral
acts as Lord Grey's massacre of some 300 Irish and Spanish
soldiers, women, and children at Smerwick, which we think Spenser

7. An allegory is an extended metaphor.
It is defined as a story, poem, or
picture that can be interpreted (as
a whole extended piece) to reveal
a hidden meaning, typically a
moral, religious, or political one.
An example would be each of the
stories in Aesop's Fables, like
foxes for tricksters, hares for
impatient show-offs and turtles for
seemingly lazy people; or like
Jesus' parables, like his story of
the prodigal son or the beggar
Lazarus; or like Animal Farm
critique of socialism.
The Faerie Queene is called a personification allegory
because each character represents something in
Spenser’s anti-Catholic, pro-Church of England theme.

8. The Plan
Spenser planned for
24 books:
12 based each on a
different knight
who exemplified
one of 12 “private
virtues,” and a
possible 12 more
centered on King
Arthur displaying
twelve “public
virtues.”
He never finished
Book 7.
Book I: Holiness = Red Cross Knight
Book II: Temperance = Sir Guyon
Book III: Chastity = Lady Britomart
Book IV: Friendship = Sir Cambell
Book V: Justice = Sir Artegall
Book VI: Courtesy = Sir Calidore

9. Redcrosse
The Redcrosse Knight is the hero
of Book I; he stands for the
virtue of Holiness. His real name
is discovered to be George, and
he ends up becoming St.
George, the patron saint of
England. On another level,
though, he is the individual
Christian fighting against evil--or
the Protestant fighting the
Catholic Church.Redcrosse
represents the individual
Christian, on the search for
Holiness, who is armed with faith
in Christ, the shield with the
bloody cross.

10. Una
Redcrosse's future wife, and the
other major protagonist in Book
I. She is meek, humble, and
beautiful, but strong when it is
necessary; she represents
Truth, which Redcrosse must
find in order to be a true
Christian. For a Christian to be
holy, he must have true faith,
and so the plot of Book I mostly
concerns the attempts of
evildoers to separate Redcrosse
from Una.