The Faerie Queene (Book 3): Spenser
Details
The Faerie Queene (1590) was one of the most influential poems in the English language. Dedicating his work to Elizabeth I, Spenser brilliantly united Arthurian romance and Italian renaissance epic to celebrate the glory of the Virgin Queen. Each book of the poem recounts the quest of a knight to achieve a virtue: the Red Crosse Knight of Holiness, who must slay a dragon and free himself from the witch Duessa; Sir Guyon, Knight of Temperance, who escapes the Cave of Mammon and destroys Acrasia’s Bower of Bliss; and the lady-knight Britomart’s search for her Sir Artegall, revealed to her in an enchanted mirror. Although composed as a moral and political allegory, The Faerie Queene’s magical atmosphere captivated the imaginations of later poets from Milton to the Victorians.
References to The Faerie Queene abide throughout Melville's works (for instance, in the "Extracts" of Moby-Dick and the epigraphs of "The Encantadas"). In addition, Carole Moses notes a number of structural similarities between it and Melville's Mardi: "the climactic meeting between Taji and Hautia echoes" the Bower of Bliss; Yillah "relies heavily on Spenser's Garden of Adonis and Temple of Love" with "details...from Scudamour"; "Spenserian allusion" links Yillah with Una; Media, Yoomy, Babbalanja, and Mohi are delineated ala "Spenser's House of Temperance"; and "Alma seems based on the Spenserian character of the same name."
Book III is centered on the virtue of Chastity as embodied in Britomart, a lady knight who is pursuing Sir Artegall, the one she is destined to marry. The Redcrosse Knight defends Artegall and they meet Merlin, who explains more carefully Britomart's destiny to found the English monarchy.
Faerie Queene (Book 3): ~130pp
- Luminarium
- Google books
- Librivox 6h 30m
Faerie Queen (modernized, annotated, and abridged):
Supplemental:
Extracts:
- "...when Spenser was alive, he was thought of very much as Hawthorne is now—was generally accounted just such a “gentle” harmless man." ("Hawthorne and His Mosses")
- "How to get to fairy-land, by what road, I did not know; nor could any one inform me; not even one Edmund Spenser, who had been there—so he wrote me—" ("The Piazza")
- "The foot-track, so dainty narrow, just like a sheep-track, led through long ferns that lodged. Fairy land at last, thought I; Una and her lamb dwell here." ("The Piazza")
- "This, then, is the fairy-mountain house, and here, the fairy queen sitting at her fairy window." ("The Piazza")
- "The stroke of one shall be the first from yonder bell...that stroke shall fall there, where the hand of Una clasps Dua’s. The stroke of one shall sever that loved clasp." ("The Bell Tower")
- "Not in vain had he spent long summer afternoons in the deep recesses of his father’s fastidiously picked and decorous library; where the Spenserian nymphs had early led him into many a maze of all-bewildering beauty. Thus, with a graceful glow on his limbs, and soft, imaginative flames in his heart, did this Pierre glide toward maturity..." (Pierre, 1.2)
- "Queen Mab" (M-D, 31)
- "And dreaming of his fairy-land, / Nehemiah smooths the ass’s coat." (Clarel, 2.6)
This meetup is part in a series on Muses and Monsters.