"The Faerie Queene"

Book Review # 101776

"The Faerie Queene"

An analysis of the philosophical and religious observations of Edmund Spenser in his first four books of "The Faerie Queene."

3,295 words () | 1 source | MLA | 2008 United States

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the first four books of Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene." It shows how the books offer insight into the author's philosophical and religious observations of the society of his day, in ways that are sometimes comic. It discusses how his work became a substantial contribution to his time's Protestant propaganda and was a saga of human society, politics and even political science.

Table of Contents:
Introduction
A Very Protestant Allegory
Ireland as Faerie Land?
A Magical Queen
Human Nature
An Allegory without End
Concluding Discussion

From the Paper:

"Spenser received a fine humanist education according to the standards of his day, en route to what is now Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1569. He belonged to a generation raised on stories of the excesses during the short reign of 'Bloody Mary' (1553-1558) in the whole scale persecution of Protestants, as part of her effort to reverse Henry VIII's break from the Church of Rome. As Spenser completed his bachelor's degree in 1573 and a master's degree in 1576, Ireland had become a religious battleground, a charged colonial environment in which Spenser would spend most of his career. Throughout the first four books of The Faerie Queene one finds a great deal of Protestant imagery in terms of kinds of individual virtue, the forces of temptation and human weaknesses to which the greatest of persons can succumb, Book I devoted to the virtue of Holiness, Book II to Temperance, Book III to the virtue of chastity, and IV to friendship. The next book gives way to a long discussion of justice and what is not justice, and the merits of when it is seen to be effected. Spenser carried on to more political themes in the unitary contributions of the Tudors and, of course, the attainments of Queen Elizabeth I who is referred to in Book I as Lucifera, then as Gloriana and in Books III and IV as Belphoebe, too."

Sample of Sources Used:

Maclean, Hugh and Anne Lake Prescott. Eds. "The Faerie Queen" in Edmund Spenser's Poetry: Authoritative Texts, Criticism. 3rd edition. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1993, Books I - IV. Pp. 5-460.