The Faerie Queene (Books 6 & 7): Spenser

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 VI contains the Legend of Sir Calidore, the Knight of Courtesy. The unfinished Book VII, the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, is among the finest of Spenser's poetic works, explaining the mythical origins of his world, as the gods debate on the hill opposite his Irish house. Written while Queen Elizabeth was failing in health and the Irish situation had become ever more critical, it resolves uncertainly in order or chaos.

Faerie Queene (Books 6 & 7): ~110pp

• PDF
• Luminarium
• Google books
• Librivox 5h 32m

Supplemental:

• Critial Readings podcast
• Stories from the Faerie Queen

Faerie Queen (modernized, annotated, and abridged):

• Amazon

Extracts:

• "Which to secure, no skill of leach's art / Mote him availle, but to returne againe / To his wound's worker, that with lowly dart, / Dinting his breast, had bred his restless paine, / Like as the wounded whale to shore flies thro' the maine." (The Faerie Queene, Book 6, Canto 10, quoted in Moby-Dick, "Extracts")
• "God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!" (Moby-Dick, 32)

This meetup is part in a series on Muses and Monsters.