The Faerie Queene Analysis

While Faerie Land might sound like somewhere out of your favorite childhood picture book, Spenser's allegorical twist on a classic imaginary world makes the land of Faerie much more mysterious and...

Remaining within the tradition of narrating epic poetry, Spenser writes The Faerie Queene with a (mostly) grand and elevated third person omniscient narrator who is clearly meant to evoke the autho...

In the ancient world, which gave us the genre of epic poetry, epic and romance did not go together. In fact, a famous Latin epic, the Aeneid of Virgil, depicts the epic hero rejecting romance...

While we're not going to say the tone of The Faerie Queene is never humorous, outright silly moments are few and far between. And it's (probably) not because Spenser didn't have a sense of humor, i...

Archaic, which is just a fancy word for "old-fashioned," is the number one stylistic quality of Spenser's Faerie Queene. Love it, hate it, or find it perplexing, Spenser was clearly up to something...

Named after the one character we never actually meet, The Faerie Queene's title evokes the mystery and power associated with the ruler of Faerie Land. Since the character of the Faerie Queene is me...

Ne may this homely verse, of many meanest,Hope to escape his venemous despite,More then my former writs, all were they clearestFrom blamefull blot, and free from all that wite,With which some wicke...

You might be skeptical that a poem about knights in shining armor and damsels in distress could really be that tricky, but Spenser's The Faerie Queene is up to a whole lot more than just some good...

Look Out World, It's Redcrosse!Redcrosse is a new knight and he's ready to show the world what he's made of. Help this beautiful maiden slay a dragon that's tormenting her parents? He's the man for...

Called on by the Faerie Queene to assist Una and her parents with their dragon problem, Redcrosse begins his quest with great anticipation for its heroic potential. Although the dragon's threat is...

Redcrosse and Una head out on adventures pretty optimistically, but things immediately start going wrong when monsters attack and characters they meet betray them.First thrown in prison and then al...

Although Spenser makes quite a big fuss about Queen Elizabeth in his poem—both naming it after an image of her and dedicating to her—we have absolutely no evidence that she ever actually read i...

Spenser's Faerie Queene is not your bedtime fairytale for a whole bunch of reason, but the depiction and prominent role sex plays in the poem is one of the big reasons. And it's not just sex that r...

Homer, The Iliad (everywhere)Homer, The Odyssey (everywhere)Virgil, The Aeneid (everywhere)Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (everywhere)The Bible (everywhere)Queen Elizabeth I (everywhere)