THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

long account of the historical derivation of Gloriana’s royal title from her ancestor, Brutus. Guyon, ‘quite ravisht with
delight’, ends his study by exclaiming with patriotic fervour, ‘Deare countrey, o how dearely deare | Ought thy
remembraunce, and perpetuall band | Be to thy foster Childe’. As was anciently true of the Aeneid, Spenser implies
that his own poem should be open to interpretation according to a prevalent ideology. Aeneas, the ‘goode governour
and a vertuous man’, had been identified with Augustus; so Elizabeth could be recognized as a Faerie Queene, as a
succession of faerie knights and as the descendant of the peripatetic hero whose adventures run like a thread through
the various narratives, the ‘magnificent’ Arthur.
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More pervasive than Spenser’s debt of honour to Virgil is the influence on The Faerie Queene of Ariosto’s
Orlando Furioso (finished 1532 and impressively translated into English by Sir John Harington in 1591) and Tasso’s
Gerusalemme Liberata (1580, 1581; partially translated into English by Richard Carew in 1594). Spenser imitated
phrases, verbal patterns, and knightly images from both texts (which he knew in Italian), and he directly borrowed
characters, encounters, and incidents, absorptions which would have been taken as laudable examples of
intertextuality by a Renaissance audience. Ariosto’s and Tasso’s lengthy, digressive poems are belated monuments to
the revival, or possibly the reinvention of chivalry in Italy. The subjects of both poets stem from a deep fascination at
the court of the d’Este family in Ferrara with the north-European Arthurian romance tradition and with the related
codes of knightly behaviour. Spenser may have dispensed with Ariosto’s specific references to Charlemagne’s
campaigns against the Saracens and with the setting of Tasso’s epic at the time of the First Crusade, but, despite the
deliberate vagueness of time and place in his own poem, he was to prove himself equally responsive to the themes,
codes, and landscapes of medieval chivalric romance.
Though Spenser looked back on the past from an essentially Renaissance perspective, and with modern Italian
models in mind, his allegory and his language suggest a more immediate response to native literary traditions. As
with the dense literary allegories of the English Middle Ages, the ‘darke conceit’ of Spenser’s poem requires that its
readers be alert to distinct levels of meaning and interpretation, to extended metaphors, to relatively simple
comparisons, and to sophisticated rhetorical parallels. A reading of The Faerie Queene demands a response both to a
literal meaning and to a series of allegorical constructions (historical, moral, mystical, socio-political). Much as his
characters face moral choices and dilemmas, so Spenser’s readers need both to deconstruct his metaphors and to
discriminate between a variety of possible ‘meanings’. It is vital to the adventure of reading the poem that its audience
should participate in the process of evaluation by throwing a various light on the darkness of the conceit.
Spenser’s acknowledgements of a Chaucerian precedent (he not only derives his description of the forest trees in
Book I from a passage in the Parlement of Foules, but also makes direct reference to the poem in the third canto of
Book VI) suggest that he was fully aware of the methods employed by a major medieval allegorist. The Chaucer who
is so appreciatively cited as the ‘well of English undefyled’ and as the ‘pure well head of Poesie’ was also a major
influence on Spenser’s style. Although he was acutely aware of the changes in English since the fifteenth century,
Spenser’s own poetic language was neither a close imitation of the old, nor an assertively modern one. It was an
artificial language which served to draw attention to the very artifice of his poem. It recalled the romance through its
often archaic terminology, its heraldic adjectives, and its stock comparisons, but it also served to alert readers to the
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anti-naturalistic tenor of the narratives. When he describes Chaucer’s English as ‘undefyled’ Spenser is also hinting
at the nature of his own elevated and formal expression, one which eschews glossy modern neologisms as much as it
veers away from the colloquial and the quotidian. The imagined world of Spenser’s poem is at once an unlocated
never-never land ravaged by beasts and giants and a land of lost content, but his language seeks to affirm a historic
sturdiness and a tradition of solid specification. The very stateliness of his lament for the decline of chivalric virtue in
the first canto of Book III, though closely modelled on a stanza of Ariosto’s, completely lacks the ironic twist of the
original:
O goodly usage of those antique times,
In which the sword was servant unto right;
When not for malice and contentious crimes,
But all for praise, and proofe of manly might,
The maniall brood accustomed to fight:
Then honour was the meed of victorie,
And yet the vanquished had no despight:
Let later age that noble use envie,