55 pages • 1 hour read
Edmund SpenserThe Faerie Queene
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | AdultA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
Paradise Lost by John Milton (1667)
Edmund Spenser inspired John Milton, and his epic poem, Paradise Lost, has much in common with The Faerie Queene. Milton, too, wishes to instruct and educate readers. Milton’s main subject is God, so he turns God, Satan, Adam, and Eve into a story or adversarial journey. As with Spenser’s speaker, Milton’s speaker is prominent and vocal. Both poems glorify years past, with Milton opting to use blank verse to join his poem to classical epics. Similar to Spenser, Milton alludes to historical events of his time, like the English Civil War he witnessed. Later readers—particularly William Blake and other Romantic poets—declared the most visceral parts involved Milton’s multidimensional depiction of Satan. Like Spenser, Milton may have been glorifying the devil or inimical figures unaware.
“The Anniad“ by Gwendolyn Brooks (1949)
Like Edmund Spenser, Gwendolyn Brooks, a Black poet from Chicago, took inspiration from classic epics. In “The Anniad,” Brooks takes Virgil’s The Aeneid and Homer’s The Iliad and adopts them to fit a working-class woman, Annie, in a 20th-century American city. Spenser’s epic has moments of humor, and Brooks’s mock epic, as the genre implies, has quite a bit of playfulness. It also has adventure, love, and a melody. With “The Anniad,” Brooks demonstrates how an ostensibly everyday woman can rise to the level of Aeneas, Ulysses, Redcrosse, or Britomart.
“Her Kind“ by Anne Sexton (1960)
In “Her Kind,” Anne Sexton’s speaker allies herself with the witches and women Spenser casts as wicked in The Faerie Queene. What Spenser might have done incidentally, Sexton does on purpose: She showcases the thrill and excitement of identifying with supposedly transgressive or deviant elements. Placed in conversation with Spenser’s epic, it’s possible to read the witches and antagonistic women as misunderstood or unfairly marginalized. They are not bad women but women who don’t follow norms and thus embrace a bold kind of freedom.
Further Literary Resources
The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan (1678)
Almost 90 years after Edmund Spenser published the first three books of his epic allegory, John Bunyan published an allegory in prose that would become as famous, if not more famous, than Spenser’s poem. As with Spenser, Bunyan is clear about what he’s allegorizing: The main character, Christian, is a Christian, so Bunyan uses his story to show readers how to behave like a good Christian and reach heaven. In Part 2, Bunyan focuses on the journey of Christian’s wife, Christiana. As with the virtuous Christians in Spenser’s poem, the true Christians in Bunyan’s story face a great deal of adversity. They even confront similar monsters: Redcrosse has to endure Despair, and so does Christian. Gender differences exist in both works. The knights look after the women in The Faerie Queene, and, in Part 2, Mr. Great-heart plays the part of the knight by providing special protection to Christiana and her female friend Mercie.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1847)
The eponymous hero Jane Eyre goes on a quest with considerable conflict. She has to overcome an abusive family life, a cruel school, and Mr. Rochester’s personal life. He wants to marry Jane, and Jane wants to marry him, but he’s already married to the tempestuous Bertha. Later, critics viewed Bertha as Jane’s double. What Jane represses, Bertha unleashes. The reader provides another way to see the women in The Faerie Queene: Whether it’s Una and Duessa or Radigund and Britomart—they’re not opposites but doubles. The witches and wayward women enact what the pure and innocent women hold back.
Stories from the Faerie Queene by Mary Macleod (1905)
Mary Macleod rewrote many of the stories in The Faerie Queene for children. With its direct and clear diction, Macleod’s book provides a less daunting introduction to Spenser’s world and the many characters that populate it. The book helps familiarize readers with the lay of the land, so when they start the epic, it’s not so strange.
Listen to Poem
Listen to an English person read all six books of Spenser’s epic poem and the three cantos from the unfinished Book 7. This is a playlist, and the YouTube user AudioBooks divided LibriVox’s reading by cantos to make it easier to stop and start.
Related Titles
By Edmund Spenser
