Edmund Spenser

Question 1

Faerie Queene: when was Spenser born

Answer 1

1552/3

Question 2

Faerie Queene: when did Spenser die

Answer 2

1599

Question 3

Faerie Queene: when is the Faerie Queen written

Answer 3

Three versions: 1590, 1596, 1609

Question 4

Faerie Queene: what edition did you use

Answer 4

Roche, from the 1596 copy text in Huntington Library

Question 5

Faerie Queene: history, memory, genealogy

Answer 5

Granting Elizabeth authority through constructed genealogy back to Arthur (she has a questionable genealogical right to the throne)

Question 6

Faerie Queene: pub dates and what gets added in each

Answer 6

1590, 1596 (with added books..), 1609 (w mutability cantos)

Question 7

Faerie Queene: sources Spenser draws on

Answer 7

Ariosto, Tasso, Virgil, Homer

Question 8

Faerie Queene: what happens in 1570

Answer 8

Pope decrees it isn’t a cardinal sin to murder Elizabeth; anti-Catholic sentiment is strong

Question 9

Faerie Queene: Spenser, court ambitions, trajectory of career

Answer 9

Spenser had hopes for the court life when he started out, and did receive a pension from the queen, but even by 96 his hopes for success might have been waning—certainly by the time the mutability cantos emerge.

Question 10

Faerie Queene: talking point, Ariosto, chivalry

Answer 10

The reference to Ariosto in the opening—“And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds”—is supplemented by the assertion that “Fierce warres and faithfull loues shall moralize my song.” In the moralizing we have the suggestion of the “dark conceit” or allegory that runs beneath the ostensible romance.

Question 11

Faerie Queene: allegory, romance

Answer 11

Spenser was far from being the first to fuse allegory to romance, as there’s something fundamentally allegorical about earlier romances—even when Ariosto seems completely caught up in the story, characters tend to be simplified into daemonic agents and objects become cosmic images—still, the romance is content to let the allegorical subtexts remain secondary to the delights, surprises, and mysteries of the story. Even if we decide not to call romance allegorical, it’s hard to deny that the romance lends itself to allegorization, as does the epic.

Question 12

Faerie Queene: genre, innovation of genre

Answer 12

Call romance the allegorization of the legend or tale and epic the allegorization of history. I think allegory is what unites them. So I don’t think Spenser’s genre-mashing is quite as radically new as people seem to think; which isn’t to say that he isn’t being innovative.

Question 13

Faerie Queene: formal innovation

Answer 13

stanza form: Spenserian

Question 14

Faerie Queene: Spenserian stanza

Answer 14

octet of iambic pentameter followed by an alexandrine, or line of iambic hexameter; ababbcbcc; dilation

Question 15

Faerie Queene: talking point, dilation

Answer 15

Spenserian stanza