Composed as an overt moral and political allegory, The Faerie Queene, with its dramatic episodes of chivalry, pageantry and courtly love, is also a supreme work of atmosphere, colour and sensuous description.

One of my favorite books ever. I love how Spenser crafted his own language. ( )

Epic poem. I really like this. Its overly long and there are so many characters you'll definitely get confused and feel lost at times, however there are so many memorable moments. The action scenes are particularly good which seems weird for poetry. Despite magic and monsters there is also an odd amount of realism to many incidents which i enjoyed.
Plus there is plenty of violence and sex which is strange for something which is a self-confessed christian allegory.
Due to its length there is plenty to dig into and i liked it enough to buy a copy despite reading it for free on my ereader.

2nd Read: Ok, not as good as last time. More sexist, classist and obsequious than i remember, also even more allegorical. I'm also starting to suspect Spencer might be a terrible poet, the things he does to the english language, to make words fit the rhyme, are pretty horrific :P .
Still though enough incident to keep things interesting :) . ( )

Read it completely almost fifty years ago. I recall especially the Book of Courtesy, the Sixth Book, with its hero Calidore. I theorized at the time that Courtesy did not fit with the other allegorically systematized virtues. No wonder Spenser found he was concluding his epic before he'd really caught a head of steam to get through his 12 books, the first HALF.
He dedicates his poem to Sir Walter Raleigh, Lieutenant of Cornewayll, saying this a "continued Allegory, or dark conceit...to fashion a gentleman or noble person," his having followed all the ancients, Homer, Virgil and even Ariosto. He began with a "tall, clownishe [contrified] young man" at the Queene's feast who desires an adventure. The Lady saying he must wear the armor she had, for a Christian knight. He put it on, and appeared the goodliest, took on knighthood and mounted a "strange Courser," "where beginneth the first book, viz, 'A gentle knight was pricking on the playne'"(408).

Calidore, for instance, silences the "monstrous Beast" of the thousand tongues,"some were of dogges, that barked day and night,/...And some of Tygres, that did seem to gren,/But most of them were tongues of mortal men,/ That spake reproachfully, not caring where or when."(VI.xii.27) Sounds like Elizabethan Courtesy runs at odds with modern democracy, which depends on reproaches against people in power.
But Calidore silences this monstrous Beast of cacophony-democracy (?!) and breeds politesse, instead of "venemous despite" which Spenser fully expects even for this his epic poem. Backbiting "Ne spareth he the gentle Poets rime, / But rends without regard of person or of time."

As an undergrad I wrote on this poem's prosody, especially the ottava rima concluded by an alexandrine (hexameter). Northrop Frye calls it, "The most remarkably sustained mastery of verbal opsis...which we have to read with a special attention, the abiliaty to catch visualization through sound." Hazlitt says, "His versification is the most smooth and the most sounding in the language. It is a labyrinth of sweet sounds." In fact, I come up against Spenser's beautiful verses for moral ugliness. Possibly Ben Jonson, a verse moralist, found the same, for "Spenser's stanzas pleased him not, nor his matter" (Drummond's bio).
I don't find Frye's opsis, but rather, the sound pursues its own system, attched to the poem much as in a contrapuntal musical composition (Frye calls allegory as here, a "contrapuntal technique" or canonic imitation.) As for alliteration, Frye finds its overuse by characters marking liars and hypocrites (wow--Spiro Agnew never knew this!), as in "But minds of mortal men are muchell mad..."

In his effective verses, the sensual vividness results in a frozen motion:
When on the ground she groveling saw to rowle,
She ran in hast his ife to have bereft:
But ere she could him reach, the sinful sowle
Having his carrion corse quite senseless left,
Was fled to hell, surcharg'd with spoile and theft.
Yet over him she there long gazing stood,
And oft admired his monstrous shape, and oft
His mighty limbs, whilest all with filthy blood
The place there overflowne, seemd like a sodaine flood. (IV.vi.32)

As for the Mutability Cantoes, on the Comet and perhaps the Supernova, changes in the Heavens, Spenser stands clearly against Galileo (sixteen years later) or Giordano Bruno, Spenser's contemporary, who was publishing his 400 pp Latin poem on the Infinite Universe and Innumerable Worlds in 1592, four years before the Fairie Queene.
By sheer happenstance, Bruno and Spenser died around the same year, 1600 and 1599, Spenser four years younger than Bruno. Spenser's last couple years were terrible, for though Yeats would approve that Spenser was driven from Kilcoman his family holdings in North Cork. (Ben Jonson says Spenser lost a daughter when native Irish troops torched the house.)

Read in Oxford Hardback. ( )

This book has stacked underneath it the most extensive amount of lit crit of anything I've ever read, save Shakespeare (maybe!). If Spenser really intended all that everyone say he did, then he is a friggin genius. There are umpteen-thousand pages in this book, but if you give it a go (especially the A.C. Hamilton-edited annotation, paired with his [b:The Spenser Encyclopedia|6945228|The Spenser Encyclopedia|A.C. Hamilton|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1266968543s/6945228.jpg|7178989], a tome so massive you could probably murder someone with it), you will learn almost everything you need to know about Elizabethan England, the feudal system that preceded it, and then some, not to mention meeting some strange women with odd genitalia, memorizing the honor code among knights and their passion for horses, and running into a few sprites, nymphs, giants, and other creatures. Based on Hamilton and others, pretty much every single stanza is loaded with allusions and things worth cross-referencing - quite a feat considering how many of them there are.

Oh, and for all you [b:Twilight|41865|Twilight (Twilight, #1)|Stephenie Meyer|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1275613536s/41865.jpg|3212258] fans, the Britomart storyline reads like a teen angsty dream, except for the part where her nurse spits on her to cure her of her love-sickness.

Seeing as Spenser intended six more books in addition to the six he wrote here (seriously), I wonder if that wouldn't have ended up like Quentin Tarentino's third Kill Bill which is rumored to bring back the daughter who saw her mother killed by Uma Thurman. I think the bloody-handed baby sucking the from the dead Amavia was meant to reprise a role in the latter six, if Spenser had been so spirited by his mere pittance from Elizabeth to continue writing. Just my two cents. To carry the Kill Bill comparison further than necessary, this story was pretty epic.

The stanzas make it very easy to take a break from reading every five seconds, but I wouldn't recommend it. Just trudge on through. Despite the intended six more books, the ending is quite satisfying - Spenser has his own personal drama that is almost as entertaining as the book, and is worth looking into especially given the poet's closing remarks. The stories are very visual and intricate. Hamilton's version has an indexed list of characters at the end that is thus very handy. It starts out being hard to read but you can probably get accustomed to the linguistic feats by the end of the first book. Also, look up the word 'puissance', since it seems to come up a lot. Some books are more episodic than others, but of course like every other word in this book, there are more than twenty people who will tell you that there is a good reason for that. Along with Hamilton, some good scholars to read in conjunction with this include Kathryn Schwarz, Stephen Greenblatt, Jean Feerick, Louis Montrose, and Mihoko Suzuki.

I read this for a class and by the end of it I think all of us had gone a little wacky. One of my classmates seemed bent on connecting this book to The Final Destination and something about aliens, regardless of what our highly-esteemed professor had to say. Another friend Justin posted the following Facebook status: "Move over 'Exit pursued by a bear' - bear carrying baby in its mouth has arrived. Three months of Spenser and I finally chuckled out loud. Perhaps that just means that I'm sick, perhaps it means that a bear making off with a baby like it's a pic-a-nic basket is actually funny. Thoughts?" By the end of the semester, we as a class found our sense of humor sickened to appreciable levels, to the point where mutilations, beheadings and bears eating babies were pretty darned hilarious. At least we know how to entertain ourselves. ( )