The Faerie Queene

...Spenser had the look as well as the sound of his poetry in mind. But he seems in general to have gone to some trouble to spell rhyme-words so as to rhyme to the eye as well as the ear, and did not use spelling simply as a means of covering up 'bad' rhyme.

Another reason for his neglect is almost exactly the opposite to the one which dismissed him for being superficial, unreal, remote from life. It is that he is so much involved in the life of his time, actual and physical as well as imaginative, that he is exceedingly difficult, and demands great knowledge of his century, that fascinating century mid-way between the Middle Ages and Renaissance. There is truth in this. There is no more central Elizabethan figure than Edmund Spenser: the grammar school boy and university graduate employed by the State and rising in social rank through public service but even more through the success of his creative writing; the classically educated boy, deeply versed in the work of Homer, Virgil, Plato, Aristotle, Ovid; the late medieval man saturated in Romance, Chaucer, Malory, the Bible, the homiletic tradition and in popular taste and tradition; the Renaissance man intimate with the work of Dante, Boccaccio, Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, and seeking to write for his own country a romantic epic like those of Italy; patriot, anti-Papist, allegorist, sonnetteer, epic poet, satirist, pastoralist, prose chronicler, public servant. No one else quite blends so many sources, so many cultural traditions, makes so original if eclectic a new form, and is so profoundly concerned with man's life on earth, however remote the world he seems to picture forth.

A weakness of the book is that, unlike the Red Cross Knight, the hero of Book I, Sir Guyon is not himself tempted, and even less often in danger of submitting. He encounters wrong passions, wrong desires, wrong behavior, wherever he goes, but he is not often involved himself, and perhaps we as readers are ourselves rather less involved in Book II than in some other books of The Faerie Queene.

The Shepheardes Calendar provided the proof of something the English had reason to doubt: that their language was indeed fit for verse. Chaucer was the last great poet to write English, but the language had changed so much since his day that only a few could read him with full comprehension, and virtually none could scan his poetry, with its long forgotten stresses and pronunciations. The periods between Chaucer's death in 1400 and 1579 had been largely fallow in terms of poetic production.

A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine,
Y cladd in mightie armes and siluer shielde,
Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine,
The cruell markes of many' a bloudy fielde;
Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield:
His angry steed did chide his foming big,
As much disdayning to the curbe to yield:
Full iolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt,
As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt.

This stanza sets up a series of contrasts between what appears to be and what is. In it Spenser establishes, then violates, our expectations about this young knight. The first four lines seem to establish an unequivocally heroic figure: a "Gentle Knight" with "mightie armes and siluer shielde," a man tested in battle, as we can see by the "old dints of deepe wounds" on his shield and armor. He has been, we would assume from this description, in "many' a bloudy fielde." But line five makes clear that he is not at all what he seems: "Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield". He may be wearing the armor of an experienced and glamorous knight, carrying a battle-scarred shield, but he is himself full inexperienced, an untested, untried amateur.

The message in this opening stanza should be clear: things are not what they seem.

Through which aduantage, in his strength he rose,
And smote the other with so wondrous might,
That through the seame, which did his hauberk close,
Into his throate and life it pierced quight,
That downe he fell as dead in all mens sight;
Yet dead he was not, yet sure he did die,
As all men do, that lose the liuing spright:
So did one soule out of his bodie flie
Vnto her natiue home from mortall miserie.

But nathlesse whilst all the lookers on
Him dead behight, as he to all appeard,
All vnawares he started vp anon,
As one that out of a dreame bene reard,
And fresh assayld his foe, who halfe affeard
Of th'vncouth sight, as he some ghost had seene,
Stood still amaz'd, holding his idle sweard;
Till hauing often by him stricken beene,
He forced was to strike, and saue him selfe from teene.

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne . . .

• Spouse: check
• Multiple miniature dependents leaving obstacles to be found on stairs at night: check
• Daily occupational destination for which the only purpose served is in keeping said miniature dependents off the streets and fed: check
• Aging automobile, paid for, but requiring ever more trips to the automobile shaman to keep the "mobile" part of the term attached to the "auto" part of the term: check
• Upside-down mortgage with impending foreclosure accompanied by daily friendly calls from the caring employees of _____________ reminding us that they will hunt us down and crap on our beds if we do not pay them soon: check
• Dangerously haphazard mound of mail from other entities threatening to hunt us down and crap on our beds: check
• Average hours of sleep totaling less than 6 at a frequency greater than twice per week: check
• Real life: NA

It seems clear that Spenser found his original plan—a single hero for each book—to be unsatisfactory for this book dealing with the first three public or community virtues. Friendship, unlike holiness, temperance, and chastity, cannot be achieved alone. In fact, the very movement of the entire Faerie Queene has been to this point (and will continue to be in Books V and VI) from the internal toward increasingly external virtues. Holiness, the virtue of Book I, is an entirely internal virtue. ...

Temperance moves internal virtues toward the world outside the self. It requires an internalization of values, but it is manifested in how one adapts that internalization to an attitude toward the external world. ... Chastity turns still more outward, for it is concerned primarily (although not exclusively) with what me might call attitudinal sexuality ...

Friendship, finally, requires a broader social view. One may be holy, temperate, chaste entirely on one's own, but to be one's own best friend is to miss entirely the point about friendship and degenerate into narcissism. ...

And, as we shall see, the externalization increases from friendship, the relationship of the individual to other specified individuals, through justice, the relationship of the individual to the codified rules of behavior in society, to courtesy, the relationship of the individual to the inherent, uncodified, unstated expectations of social behavior. We move, that is, from the individual's relationship with God (Holiness), to the self (Temperance), to a significant and specified other (Chastity, particularly married chastity), to a broader range of others (Friendship), to the structures of society (Justice, particularly law and equity), and finally, to the very basis of human society (Courtesy). Further more, as Roche has pointed out, the first six books of The Faerie Queene are like a diptych: chastity is a private virtue of which friendship is the public counterpart; temperance (private) corresponds to justice (public); and holiness (private) corresponds to courtesy (public). The relationship among virtues in the six books, in other words, is more than just a progression; it is also a unifying device as well

If we cannot go quite as far as Percy Long in thinking Spenser's archaism largely an appearance , a manner of spelling only, we can observe that, apart from unique rhymes, Spenser's verbs are as regular as Shakespeare's, that the total number of archaisms is quite small, and that, in short, his vocabulary is that of his contemporaries. The archaism of the Cantos* affects vocabulary, spelling, inflection, and syntax in order of decreasing importance. Inevitably Spenser's diction must seem more archaic to our century than to his, and it is not always possible to distinguish among deliberate archaisms, obsolescent words whose frequency in Spenser imparted in the early 1600s only the suggestion of a patina, and words which only subsequently acquired their archaic flavour. Though 'eke' as 'also' is used four times in the Cantos and only three in all Shakespeare, it was current in 1580. 'Sith', referring to time, was a deliberate archaism. Yet, in Shakespeare one finds twenty examples of it in reference to cause. 'Eft' and 'eftsoons' (two and four appearances respectively in the Cantos, and the latter only once in Shakespeare), were not archaic, yet their frequency in Spenser must have seemed old-fashioned at least....

Among the deliberate archaisms of the Cantos are 'behight', 'bowre', 'breem', 'doom' (as 'judgement'), 'emprise' (a favorite of Chaucer), 'hight', 'inly', 'nathlesse', 'nathemore', 'whilere', 'whilom', 'yfere' (which would have been recognized as a common rhyming-tag of medieval verse), and 'yode' (an instance of archaic inflection)....in all there are probably fewer than eighteen words in the Cantos—apart from inflected forms—that can be called deliberate archaisms.